ABSTRACT

Interest in social inequality is at the heart of the sociological enterprise and was central to the work of the founding theorists of the nineteenth century, whose analyses of the nature of inequality in industrialised society established the theoretical framework and research agenda for future generations of sociologists. In general, there was agreement between the founding theorists that industrial society marked a qualitative break with the past (Francis, 1987) and that new forms of inequality had emerged. It was around this time that the concept of ‘social class’ started to be used as a description of the patterned nature of inequality in society. Before the late eighteenth century, differences between groups of people were conceived more in terms of a finely-graded hierarchy of ‘ranks’ or ‘orders’ of people (Nisbet, 1966: 174, 176) and the word ‘class’ simply meant ‘group’; we still use it in this way when we speak of a ‘class’ of children in school.