ABSTRACT
For a long time, research on class and social stratification has been mostly concerned with two concepts: class structure, which includes class location and class relations; and class agency, which incorporates class interests, consciousness, formation, practices and struggle. Those who take the structuralist approach, from classical theorists like Marx and Weber to the more recent Nuffield researchers of Goldthorpe and Marshall, suggest that social relations are rooted in division of labour and employment relations, and recently, occupational locations (Marx 1845; Davis and Moore 1945; Goldthorpe et al. 1969; Marshall 1997; Wright 2005). On the other hand are those who focus on the intentionality, knowledgeability of the self-conscious agents and their ability to construct, negotiate or struggle against the social world they are in, usually in the form of class culture (Bourdieu 1984; Agger 1991; Skeggs 2004; Bennett et al. 2009; Paton 2014). As such, scholars often argued over the class structure/agency duality and its implications of class determinism versus class voluntarism. Gidden’s structuration theory attempted to reconcile this dualism by arguing that structure and agency are intertwined ( Giddens 1981), and indeed a substantial amount of research has illustrated how forms of collective actions can be sustained by drawing on class resources by agents (Lash and Urry 1987) and can be explained by the class capacities that allow them to pursue their interests (Savage 2005).
