ABSTRACT
This book has considered one general issue - the contemporary relevance of class analysis in social research - in the light of one more specific issue, the general role of the middle classes in understanding various facets of social change in contemporary Britain. Readers will be able to see that, although all contributors to this volume share a commitment to the need for one form or another of class analysis, they show little agreement as to what form this analysis should take. A number of differing conceptual frameworks have been debated in this book, principally Goldthorpe's view of the service class, Marxist approaches to the middle classes, the newer "assetbased" approach, the culturalist approaches of Bourdieu and Eder, along with gender-and race-sensitive approaches to class. However, it is clear that the contributors differ in their assessment of the merits of these various perspectives.
