Social Class

Lifespan difference

Upper class man live 7 years longer than lower class men on average

The lower class have a 2x higher infant mortality rate

Private education and high-authority roles

7% of the population are privately educated but they make up 65% of senior judges and 57% of the house of lords

Billionaires vs Poor

6 UK billionaires have a combined wealth of £39.4 billion whilst 4 million live in poverty

1% wealth compared to rest

1% own the same amount of wealth at the bottom 53.2 million

Habitus

• Social and cultural framework

• Subjective ways different classes understand and perceive the world with different lifestyles

• Dominant class has the power to impose their own habitus on things like education

Hidden Rules

How money is spent, the family, food, educational attitudes, language etc. and how it varies on class

Bourdieu

• Equal importance between cultural and economic class aspects

• 4 main causes of capital: Economic, Cultural, Social and Symbolic

• Reproduction of this culture leads to inequality

Government classification

• Higher managerial, admin and professional

• Lower managerial

• Intermediate occupation

• Small employers and own accountant

• Lower supervisory and technical

• Semi Routine

• Routine

• Unemployed

Great British Class Survey (2013)

• Survey done by the BBC

• Elite, Established m/c, Technical m/c, New affluent workers, Trad w/c, emergent service workers, Precariat

Marxism classification

• Proletariat and Bourgeoisie

• Defined by their relation to the means of production

Trad. classification?=

• Used by sociologists

• Classic 4: Upper, Middle, Working and Under classes

Subjective classification

Idea that class is too rigid for it to be based on only a few factors for people to just fit one class

Pakulshi and Waters

Social classes don’t exist, instead people are defined by their consumer lifestyles

Lash and Urry

Class subcultures have weakened as communities aren’t that close and work has less influence over identity. Society is more individualistic

British Social Attitudes Survey

• 95% of people identified with their social class in 2007

• 57% said working class, 38% said middle class

Parker

• Occupation directly links to leisure

• Oppositional, Neutral and Extension stances when it comes on the separation of leisure and work

McIntosh

Parker failed to acknowledge other influences on leisure

Scraton and Braham

Post-modernists ignore that consumer lifestyles are influenced by class as the w/c don’t have as big of a choice

Giddens and Diamond

Social class is no longer the main source of inequality in identity and is more influenced by gender, race, sexuality etc.

Gig Economy?

• More people are self-employed on sites like deliveroo, uber etc.

• 2019, 5 million (15% of the workforce) were self-employed

• This undermines the link of class to job

Post-Modernists

Not that important in current times, more influenced by consumer lifestyles