ABSTRACT
This heading is the title of a book by Daniel Bell (1972) in which he assessed technological and attendant socioeconomic change, to predict the diminishing of social class as a key aspect of social relations. Marxist conceptions of two antagonistic classes - one who controls and owns the means of production, the other whose labour is used and exploited in the pursuit of profit - was deemed to be anachronistic. Twenty years later, researchers at the Henley Forecasting Centre came to similar conclusions by depicting Britain in the 1990s as a mass middle class society whose consumption patterns, levels of disposable income, and personal identities are becoming more homogeneous.
