Conclusion

Abstract

‘[T]he results of our enquiry’, concluded Goldthorpe and his colleagues (1969: 157) in the closing pages of their final volume, ‘are not at all  what might have been expected had the thesis of embourgeoisement been  a generally valid one.’ Four decades later this succinct statement can  be echoed, with some confidence, regarding the thesis of reflexivity.  Absent is the hypothesized reflexive individual liberated from classed  conditions of existence and dispositions, and little sign has been seen  of the alleged decline of classed tastes, practices and discourse. On the  contrary, whatever the age, no matter the occupational position, and  whether witnessed in the tales of childhood, education, work histories,  lifestyle practices, social identity or linguistic typifications, the firm  grip of class on biographies and perceptual schemes has been shown to  remain unbroken in contemporary Britain. Through theoretical scrutiny  and empirical investigation, individualized reflexivity and its late  modern counterpart have, therefore, been exposed as exaggerated and  ungrounded accounts of human action in the current era. This does not,  as has been repeated throughout the analysis, necessitate a denial of the  broad mutations in economy and society addressed by Beck and the rest  or, accordingly, an assertion that the consequences of class are identical  to those of yesteryear. But even if we admit that elements of what would  be described as the substance of class, its manifestations – that is, the  actual symbols and practices attached to positions, whether educational  pathways, occupational experiences or new lifestyle practices – have  altered with the social context, the system of relations generating and  differentiating them, and ultimately defining class, remains unchanged.  The theories of reflexivity, on the other hand, being exemplars of what  Bourdieu et al., (1991a: 20ff) called ‘spontaneous sociology’, that is,  of sociological knowledge locked within the erroneous substantialist  worldview and hence tantamount to erudite and elaborate prenotions, confuse the shifting signs for their enduring source and thus pronounce dead only what their epistemological short-sightedness prevents them from seeing.