ABSTRACT
Bourdieu’s contribution to stratification analysis is controversial. He offered a subtle and complex analysis in his essay ‘What makes a social class?’ (1987), the significance and coherence of which are lucidly teased out by Elliot Weininger (2005). The analysis entailed the isolation of different types of capital, and the possibilities for their combination, conversion and transmission as they operate across different fields. The essay explicitly rejected the possibility to read off class formation or class identification from distributions of capital. A somewhat different impression is given in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), where the notion of class habitus serves to underpin a fairly simple correspondence between class position and cultural practice and within which actors’ reflections on their class identity have little part to play. The results of this disjuncture may be partly understood in the context of the relationship of Bourdieu and his school to mainstream European stratification theorists. The latter criticized Bourdieu for lack of theoretical and technical rigour and sought to exclude his approach from wider consideration. In turn, Bourdieu, ignored substantive sociological issues upon which that orthodoxy thrived. One such issue was class identity, a phenomenon which had always intrigued positivist approaches to class analysis, because of the lack of correspondence between ‘objective’ characteristics and ‘subjective’ perceptions of class location. Bourdieu, of course, considered one aspect of his general theoretical contribution to be the overcoming of such a distinction and hence probably never recognized it as a relevant problem. However, other scholars inspired by but not aligned with the Bourdieusian programme, of whom there were many in Britain, were concerned to examine the alignment between his work and mainstream class analysis and make connections between them (e.g. Skeggs, 1997; Devine, et al., 2005; Savage, Warde and Devine, 2005; Le Roux, et al., 2008). One topic for such attention became class identity, or more specifically ‘dis-identification’, which concept was used as an orientation to contemporary debates in Britain.
