Social Class

Varieties of Class Concepts

Many discussions of the concept of class confuse the terminological problem of how the word class is used within social theory with theoretical disputes about the proper definition and elaboration of the concept of class. While all uses of the word class in social theory invoke in one way or another the problem of understanding systems of economic inequality, different uses of the word are imbedded in very different theoretical agendas involving different kinds of questions and thus different sorts of concepts. One way of sorting out these alternative meanings is to examine what might be termed the anchoring questions within different agendas of class analysis. These are the questions that define the theoretical work the concept of class attempts to do. Five such anchoring questions in which the word class figures centrally in the answers are particularly important.

• 1.
  Class as subjective location. First, the word class sometimes figures in the answer to the question: “How do people, individually and collectively, locate themselves and others within a social structure of inequality?” Class is one of the possible answers to this question. In this case, the concept would be defined something like this: “Classes are social categories sharing subjectively salient attributes used by people to rank those categories within a system of economic stratification.” With this definition of class, the actual content of these evaluative attributes will vary considerably across time and place. In some contexts, class-as-subjective-classification revolves around lifestyles, in others around occupations, and in still others around income levels. Sometimes the economic content of the subjective classification system is quite direct, as in income levels; in other contexts, it is more indirect, as in expressions such as “the respectable classes,” the “dangerous classes.” The number of classes also varies contextually depending on how the actors in a social situation themselves define class distinctions. Class is not defined by a set of objective properties of a person's social situation but by the shared subjective understandings of people about rankings within social inequality (e.g., Warner [1949]1960). Class, in this sense of the word, is contrasted to other forms of salient evaluation—religion, ethnicity, gender, occupation, and so on—that may have economic dimensions but that are not centrally defined in economic terms.
• 2.
  Class as objective position within distributions. Second, class is often central to the question, “How are people objectively located in distributions of material inequality.” In this case, class is defined in terms of material [Page 718]standards of living, usually indexed by income or, possibly, wealth. Class, in this agenda, is a gradational concept; the standard image is of rungs on a ladder, and the names for locations are accordingly such things as upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, lower class, underclass. This is the concept of class that figures most prominently in popular discourse, at least in countries like the United States without a strong working-class political tradition. When American politicians call for “middle-class tax cuts” what they characteristically mean is tax cuts for people in the middle of the income distribution. Subjective aspects of the location of people within systems of stratification may still be important in sociological investigations using this concept of class, but the word class itself is being used to capture objective properties of economic inequality, not simply the subjective classifications. Class, in this context, is contrasted with other ways that people are objectively located within social structures—for example, by their citizenship status, their power, or their subjection to institutionalized forms of ascriptive discrimination.
• 3.
  Class as the relational explanation of economic life chance. Third, class may be offered as part of the answer to the question, “What explains inequalities in economically defined life chances and material standards of living of individuals and families?” This is a more complex and demanding question than the first two, for here the issue is not simply descriptively locating people within some kind of system of stratification—either subjectively or objectively—but identifying certain causal mechanisms that help determine salient features of that system. When class is used to explain inequality, typically, the concept is not defined primarily by subjectively salient attributes of a social location but, rather, by the relationship of people to income-generating resources or assets of various sorts. Class thus becomes a relational rather than simply gradational concept. This concept of class is characteristic of both the Weberian and Marxist traditions of social theory. Class, in this usage, is contrasted to the many other determinants of a person's life chances—for example, geographical location, forms of discrimination anchored in ascriptive characteristics like race or gender, or genetic endowments. Location, discrimination, and genetic endowments may, of course, still figure in the analysis of class—they may, for example, play an important role in explaining why different sorts of people end up in different classes—but the definition of class as such centers on how people are linked to those income-generating assets.
• 4.
  Class as a dimension of historical variation in systems of inequality. Fourth, class figures in answers to the question, “How should we characterize and explain the variations across history in the social organization of inequalities?” This question implies the need for a macrolevel concept rather than simply a microlevel concept capturing the causal processes of individual lives, and it requires a concept that allows for macrolevel variations across time and place. This question is also important in both the Marxist and Weberian traditions, but as we will see later, here the two traditions have quite different answers. Within the Marxist tradition, the most salient aspect of historical variation in inequality is the ways in which economic systems vary in the manner in which an economic surplus is produced and appropriated, and classes are therefore defined with respect to the mechanisms of surplus extraction. For Weber, in contrast, the central problem of historical variation is the degree of rationalization (in this context, the extent to which inequalities are organized in such a way that the actors within those inequalities can act in precise, calculable ways) of different dimensions of inequality. This underwrites a conceptual space in which, on one hand, class and status are contrasted as distinct forms of inequality and, on the other hand, class is contrasted with nonrationalized ways through which individual life chances are shaped.
• 5.
  Class as a foundation of economic oppression and exploitation. Finally, class plays a central role in answering the question, “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic oppression and exploitation within capitalist societies?” This is the most contentious question, for it implies not simply an explanatory agenda about the mechanisms that generate economic inequalities but a normative judgment about those inequalities—they are forms of oppression and exploitation—and a normative vision of the transformation of those inequalities. This is the distinctively Marxist question, and it suggests a concept of class laden with normative content. It supports a concept of class that is not simply defined in terms of the social relations to economic resources but that also figures centrally in a political project of emancipatory social change.

Different theoretical approaches to class analysis build their concepts of class to help answer different clusters of these questions. Figure 1 indicates the array of central questions linked to different approaches to class analysis. Weber's work revolves around the third and fourth questions, with the fourth question concerning forms of historical variation in social organization of inequalities providing the anchor for his understanding of class. The narrower question about explaining individual life chances gets its specific meaning from its relationship to this broader historical question. Michael Mann's work on class, especially in his multivolume study of The Sources of Social Power (1993) is, like Weber's, also centered on the fourth question. John Goldthorpe's (1980) class analysis centers firmly on the third question. While his work is often characterized as having a Weberian inflection, his categories are elaborated strictly in terms of the requirements of describing and explaining economic life chances, not long-term historical [Page 719]variations in systems of inequality. For Pierre Bourdieu, class analysis is anchored in a more open-ended version of the third question. Where he differs from Weber and other Weber-inspired class analysts is in expanding the idea of life chances to include a variety of noneconomic aspects of opportunity (e.g., cultural opportunities of various sorts) and expanding the kinds of resources relevant to explaining those life chances from narrowly economic resources to a range of cultural and social resources (called “cultural capital” and “social capital”). “Class” for Bourdieu (1984), therefore, is a much more expansive concept, covering all inequalities in opportunities (life chances) that can be attributed to socially determined inequalities of resources of whatever sort. Finally, class analysis in the Marxist tradition is anchored in the fifth question concerning the challenge to systems of economic oppression and exploitation. The questions about historical variation and individual life chances are also important, but they are posed within the parameters of the problem of emancipatory transformations.

...