Conceptualizing Class and Reconceptualizing Reflexivity

Abstract

The once unflinching stranglehold of Marxism and the Nuffield programme over class analysis is beginning to slacken, allowing room  for a flowering of perspectives envisioning the concept in starkly  contrasting ways (Wright, 2005). Yet, as already seen, there is one  standpoint in this assortment currently enjoying particularly frequent  adoption and discussion: that forwarded by Pierre Bourdieu.  The appeal to Continental concepts, in large part motivated by the  fact that they knit cultural processes into the very definition of class  and thus resonate with the so-called ‘cultural turn’ gripping postmillennium  sociology (see especially Devine and Savage, 2005), has  no doubt been profitable. Theoretically it has laid bare the fallacies of  the utilitarian model of agency employed by Goldthorpe and Wright  by identifying the practical, pre-reflexive and dispositional nature of  action flowing out of differentiated past social experiences and the  inextricability of cultural frameworks and resources in the formation  of ‘choices’ (see especially Devine, 1998; Savage, 2000), succeeded in  reconnecting the analysis of class with broader trends in social and  cultural theory (see, for instance, Skeggs, 2004; Adkins and Skeggs,  2004) and even facilitated reflection on the moral dimension of class,  that is, its invidious role in dictating perceptions of self-worth (Sayer,  2002, 2005). Empirically it has granted a deeper exploration of the relational  sense of identity, difference and similarity articulated by individuals  (Savage, 2000; Savage et al., 2001), the experiential content of  differing positions in the social order and, in particular, the denigration  and dispossession pervading life in the lower sections (Skeggs,  1997; Charlesworth, 2000), the reproduction of inequality through  differential possession of certain forms of capital and its manifestation  in everyday life (Reay, 1998a; Devine, 2004; cf. Lareau, 2003) and  the underlying dispositions and outlooks marking out differences and  orienting action in certain locales (Savage et al., 2005b).