Introduction
The twentieth century saw some significant efforts to redistribute wealth and income throughout most of the century, but over the last 25 years, material inequalities have persisted and in many ways increased. Traditionally, ‘class’ has been a term used to define and analyse identities and relations between groups located at different levels of the national socioeconomic hierarchy. In Britain, for example, class ‘linked together and summarized… many aspects of any individual's life’ (Abercrombie and Warde, 2000, pp. 145–6): family background, main source of income, cultural tastes and political associations. However, in spite of continued inequalities, the analytic utility and the cultural salience of social class have been drawn into question by a number of shifts over the last 30 years: the socioeconomic changes associated with globalisation, the decline of traditional collectivist politics, the emergence of gender, race and ethnicity as political issues and the...
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Rampton, B., Harris, R., Collins, J., Blommaert, J. (2008). Language, Class and Education. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_6
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