ABSTRACT
This book examines the constitution, and violation, of social class forms of ‘being’ towards the market for houses. Conventional understandings of the constitution of social class point to the importance of positionality within the occupational structure. For example, classificatory schemes such as the Registrar General’s Social Classes (RGSC), which has five social class categories, and the Socio-Economic Group (SEG) system, preferred by sociologists, divide the occupational structure into seventeen different groups. The basic point here is that particular forms of work (e.g. ‘blue collar’, manual, unskilled work) are associated with the working class, whereas a large pool of ‘blue collar’ workers is taken to be indicative of the numerical strength of the working class. The corollary of this is the suggestion that high levels of mobility within the occupational structure can be taken to indicate an absence of class division or, at least, an absence of divisions that cannot be transcended. Chapter 1 discusses the claims of social scientists that point to evidence of high levels of occupational mobility out of working-class forms of work, which, apparently, suggests that ‘class is dead’. Although an image of sociologists (of all people) proclaiming ‘the death of class’ might invite incredulity and disbelief among some readers, they will be reassured that Chapter 1 also discusses the counterclaims of social scientists who argue that levels of occupational mobility are not what they seem and that, therefore, the class society is alive and kicking. Indeed some of these social scientists are scathing of those who have proclaimed the ‘death of class’. For example, Beverley Skeggs argues that the recent sociological preoccupation with post-class issues such as individualisation and self-identity (see especially Giddens 1991; Beck 1992, 2000) is a consequence of the way in which
academic agenda setters can be seen to embody . . . a middle class habitus . . . . A
retreat from class is just the expression of the class interests of a group of relatively
powerfully placed professional intelligentsia . . . . The knowledge class’s own inter-
ests are actually based upon representing their own position, their perspective, their
own cultural politics openly and without embarrassment . . . . This exposes Beck’s
and Giddens’ arguments as a particular kind of intellectual manoeuvre, a celebration
of the cosmopolitan intellectual ethic that can only be realised by a small minority
of people. (Skeggs 2004: 54)
Skeggs’s argument bears all the hallmarks of Bourdieusian influence. What she is saying is that academics whose lifestyles are constituted at a distance from economic necessity, and with reference to cultural politics of identity, exhibit endogenous reflexivity within the context of the individualised lifestyles that they are engaged in constructing, yet fail, completely, to exhibit referential reflexivity upon the ontological status of those lifestyles. This absence of referential reflexivity is what has led the middle-class intelligentsia to assume that its devotion to lifestyle is characteristic of the late modern subject per se when, in fact, it is particular to the social and economic circumstances in which such a devotion to lifestyle can be reflexively practised. Put another way, referential reflexivity upon the social and economic circumstances in which ‘lifestyles’ are produced shows how people who occupy quite different social positions are simply unable to devote themselves to lifestyle issues to anything like the same extent if, indeed, at all (Charlesworth 2000). I am referring here to workingclass people although, clearly, this point applies beyond the boundaries of the working class.
