Class

Abstract

There is currently a renewed drive within sociology to reposition social class as a category that lies at the heart of the discipline and which ‘continues to count’ (Martin, 2010:1203; see also Crow and Pope, 2008). One striking feature of recent sociological writings on class, however, is that while they often seek to be innovative at the level of method (see, for example, the use of multiple correspondence analysis in Le Roux et al., 2008), they are rarely underpinned by detailed conceptual work. Instead, ready-made concepts of class tend to be taken from existing thinkers, currently the most popular of which is Pierre Bourdieu, and then applied to produce, among other things, an account of lifestyle and habitus (Oliver and O’Reilly, 2010) or class and cultural participation (Le Roux et al., 2008). In contrast to such approaches, the argument of the present chapter is that, in line with the position advanced in Chapter 2, any consideration of class should start with an exploration of the conceptual dynamics of this term. Against this backdrop, the work of Max Weber continues to be of value because it offers a methodological guide to the formation of concepts, and beyond this contains a conceptualisation of class that is radically different to that found within most contemporary approaches.