ABSTRACT
This book results from our collaboration in an international project aiming at the comparative study of class structure and class consciousness. Our objective within the international effort was straightforward and rather modest. As authors of the UK survey we were required simply to produce a ‘class map’ of contemporary Britain in terms of neo-Marxist categories devised by our colleague Erik Wright. We have tried to retain maximum comparability with affiliated projects in other countries and have reproduced the methodology of the original United States survey as accurately as possible in the British context. In due course our detailed results will be compared with those obtained for countries elsewhere, similarities and differences will be explored, and we shall attempt to formulate a clearer picture of the generic characteristics of class structures in the various capitalist societies of late twentieth-century Europe, America, and Australasia.
