ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to develop a more integrated and intersectional approach to social stratification, arguing for an approach which differentiates between class and social stratification beyond the classical way of focusing on stratification as relating to an interplay between class and status. It also argues that class and other major categories, like gender, ethnicity and race, are inflected by both the economic and the symbolic which constitute the economic/symbolic or material/cultural nexus in social life. Symbolic struggles for representation are treated as intricately woven with resource struggles. The chapter argues against the separation of the economic and the symbolic/cultural arenas in ways that privilege the former in relation to class and the latter in relation to gender and ethnicity/race. It develops a way of thinking about class places within an intersectional stratification analysis which treats class as a necessary but insufficient condition for the understanding of inequalities, and it argues that gender and ethnicity/race are already inscribed in class places.