Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the influence of feminism on the concept of class, while touching on post-Marxism and Bourdieu. The British sociologist Rosemary Crompton, in her book Class and Stratification, reviews all the supposed social changes, especially in the Western world, that lay behind the discussion of class after die Wende, the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the Marxist Erik Olin Wright and the Weberian John Goldthorpe, the goal, as Crompton points out, was to combine the analysis of class as social inequality with analyses of class in terms of consciousness and action. Bourdieu's concern is with people's access to material resources, education and cultural codes, social networks, and the like, and in this way he manages the feat of talking about class in both the economic and the cultural senses, without setting them up as unworkable antitheses.