ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of in this book. The book considers how to analyse one of the intractable issues in contemporary sociology. It argues that there is something distinctive about the middle classes within contemporary capitalism and that it is therefore incorrect to treat the contemporary middle classes as direct descendants of the eighteenth or nineteenth-century variants. The book explains the main occupational changes that are involved within the sphere of 'white-collar work'; and then considers various issues which revolve around both the boundaries between classes, and the fragments within the middle classes. It then summarises the two main theoretical frameworks involved in the investigation of such classes, the Weberian and the Marxist. The sociological issues have mainly revolved around the divisions between such groupings and the capitalist class, on the one hand, and the working class.
