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Analysing data from an original cross-national survey conducted in 2015 in nine European democracies covering five different types of welfare regime and asking individuals a variety of questions on their deprivation during the crisis, this paper shows that there are important cross-national and cross-class inequalities in deprivation as reported by individuals in different social classes. Cross-nationally, deprivation patterns reflected the welfare regimes of the nine countries as well as the severity of the economic crisis. Working class individuals in countries that were not so deeply affected by the crisis were generally found to be worse off than middle class individuals in countries that were more deeply affected. Semi/unskilled manual classes were found to be the most deprived and class differentials were diminished but not accounted for in multilevel models including a series of controls linked to risk factors and socio-demographic position. At the macro-level, higher inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient was associated with higher levels of reported deprivation. However, cross-level interaction tests did not provide evidence that being in semi/unskilled manual occupations has a further heightened effect on reported deprivation in contexts of higher inequality or lower social spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been countless efforts to test and ‘update’ Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that there is a correspondence between the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. The best known of these targeting the UK are the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project and, more recently, the Great British Class Survey, but their conceptual and methodological limitations mean their findings are questionable and hinder closer investigation of an oft-sidelined piece of the puzzle one of the projects specifically highlighted: the significance of gender in structuring taste. Drawing on the 2012 wave of the British Cohort Study, which included a battery of questions on cultural consumption, and deploying a logic and measure of class closer to Bourdieu’s own, I thus seek to offer an alternative examination of not only the nature and degree of correspondence between the social space and lifestyles but its entwinement with masculinity and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social space and Michèle Lamont’s concept of symbolic boundaries can be fruitfully combined in cultural-stratification research. Focusing on the case of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis also shows how Multiple Correspondence Analysis is compatible with other research techniques, such as qualitative in-depth interviews. The approach adopted provides a practical application of Bourdieu’s double reading of social relations. It combines the first, objective moment of situating 46 individuals subjected to qualitative interviews in the local social space (i.e. a system of relations between individuals’ possessions of cultural and economic capital) with the second, subjective moment of mapping the interviewees’ evaluations and classifications of other people’s lifestyles. It is shown how intertwinements of various discursive repertoires of evaluation (cultural-aesthetical, moral-political and socio-economic) work in both contradictive and reinforcing ways to construct symbolic boundaries between classes and class fractions. The findings draw attention to both the capital volume and the capital composition dimensions of social space in that symbolic boundary drawing takes on different forms along these dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s rethinking of social class to investigate the connection between class and politics in contemporary society. We introduce a new class scheme that incorporates an often neglected hallmark of Bourdieu’s approach, namely the distinction between class fractions based on the preponderance of economic or cultural capital possessed. By relating our two-dimensional concept of class to a two-dimensional political space, we will show that the relationship between class and politics is homological - the systems of class divisions and political divisions exhibit a corresponding structure. The hierarchical dimension of class is associated with the divide between liberal and anti-liberal views on what is sometimes dubbed ‘new’ politics, whereas the capital composition dimension is connected with the classical left vs. right divide in terms of issues of redistribution, social spending and government interventions in the economy. We conclude by discussing whether political attitudes should be seen as a form of taste and as such on par with cultural tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]