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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]

In the 1990s, sociologists engaged in a heated controversy about class voting. Although empirical evidence accumulated, positions remained surprisingly divided. This paper argues that this disagreement is due to two factors. Firstly, it reflects diverging understandings as to the concept of class voting. Secondly, it is explained by the use of class models that do not satisfactorily represent today's social stratification in Western Europe. In consequence, this paper uses a detailed multi-class schema and examines two cleavages running through the social structure: (i) the economic divide separating holders of organizational power from the workingclass, (ii) the cultural divide opposing high-skilled classes engaged in interpersonal work settings (who hold a liberation view of community) from low-skilled classes occupied in object-related tasks (who hold an authoritarian view of community). Based on individual level data, our analyses show that classes continue to systematically differ in their party support. There is strong electoral evidence for the traditional economic cleavage in Britain's and Germany's class structure, while in Switzerland the cultural cleavage seems more salient. Hence, class voting continues but appears to involve more (and different) class-party alliances than just leftvoting by the woking class. Among others, we find salaried professionals in the social and cultural services to rally the libertarian left, while managers support parties on the right. Moreover, where a right-wing populist party alternative exists, it attracts disproportionate support from production workers and small business owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite embracing the rhetoric of transnational flows and networks, comparative research on media content continues to fall prey to methodological nationalism. When it comes to empirical measurement, researchers often, despite their best intentions, fall back on techniques that assume that the discourses circulating within particular nationally bounded communicative spaces are homogenous. In this article, we developed a set of propositions and analytical approaches that should help to overcome this impasse, and used them to examine the newspaper debates on the EU Constitutional Treaty in seven European states: the Czech Republic, Germany, France, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK. We suggested that instead of focusing solely on comparisons between nationally bounded communicative spheres, we should also look at differences between class-related communicative spaces. By adopting such an approach, we can acknowledge both sub-national segmentations of communicative spaces and transnational linkages, while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of the national. The results support our initial contention that the research on European mass communication ought to move beyond comparisons between national units and the levels of their respective Europeanization, and examine how European issues are conveyed in media catering to different social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares class patterns of ‘conformism’ in four Western countries, taking as its point of departure arguments, which suggest that conformism/authoritarianism is more prevalent in the working class than other classes. Data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) are used in order to compare class attitudes towards sexual behaviour and civil rights/liberties, in Britain, Germany, Sweden and the United States. This study finds that class patterns in attitudes differ little between the countries in question, although aggregated levels vary quite substantially. It is also concluded that class differences in attitudes towards civil rights/liberties are almost exclusively a result from different levels of education, while significant class differences in attitudes towards sexual activities remain also after taking education levels into account. The implications of the results for social stratification and political articulation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the way in which social capital resources are incorporated, appropriated and distributed by different social classes in Europe. Its main goal is to produce a conceptual framework by linking the concepts of social capital with the different theoretical assessments made by the sociology of social classes. We use multivariate analysis to work a set of quantitative indicators from the European Social Survey 2008 in order to assess the relationship between these concepts. Our methodological approach combines transnational levels, i.e., it is not an international comparison between European countries but an analysis of individual people and their belonging to social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing body of research which explores the dramatic changes of higher education, following recent policies of widening participation and 'internationalisation', to date much of the research has focused on discrete 'non-traditional' groups. Based on qualitative data gathered from international and widening participation students, we explore the crossovers and parallels of their experiences, which is not to say that both groups are the very same. Indeed, it is the resistance to a 'fixing' positioning that this paper charts, negotiating points of sameness and difference. We suggest that there is failure to consider widening participation and internationalisation as two, intersecting, agendas, (re)producing class and race. Theoretically, such an approach offers an insight into contemporary class analysis in the context of mobility and racism, to comprehend how social divisions are complexly lived, where middle-class 'international' students may risk losing (and gaining) privilege, in (dis)similar ways to their working-class 'home' counterparts. [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]

One of the major contributions of Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction was to illuminate the function of cultural consumption as a marker of status in 1960s' France. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether these findings are applicable in other national contexts, and not least whether other forms of symbolic boundary-drawing might be more relevant. Based on a survey conducted in the Danish municipality of Aalborg in 2004 and by using multiple correspondence analysis, I am able to show that both cultural consumption and politico-moral stances serve as markers of class positions. By introducing a range of qualitative semi-structured interviews, I argue that politico-moral boundaries are at least as important as cultural boundaries, and that both are used to establish symbolic boundaries between social positions, divided by the same principles as those found by Bourdieu in Distinction; that is, by the volume and the composition of economic and cultural capital. One of the distinctions cutting across both the cultural and the politico-moral modes of drawing boundaries is a divide between what I have termed a global and a local mode of orientation. Finally, antipathies towards cultural elites are expressed through aversions against state subsidisation of highbrow culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a review of contributions from labour sociology, gender studies and neighbouring areas, this article starts by describing the recent manners in which domestic work emerged as a topic of interest. Then, key difficulties underlying the subject in hand are discussed. It is argued that analysis should comprehend the link between the position of in-house services at the lower end of work value hierarchies and the political dynamics of knowledge societies, which requires attention to the role of mentality and ideology in mediating everyday interaction. Ethnic change, the singularity of private households as workplaces and the ambiguous bond between skill and emotional labour are central issues. Some particular perspectives of labour studies are bound to offer an improved lens in generating answers as to where the distribution of fatigue and indignity is actually being decided – and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the socio-economic determinants of welfare attitudes in the Czech Republic to those in Sweden, using survey data from the 1996 ISSP survey ‘The Role of Governments’. Many theorists of the transition have claimed that the post-communist countries have a different political dynamic that their west European neighbors. For example, David Ost claims that that citizens of post-communist countries during the 1990s were not sure of which class they would belong to and therefore, were not sure of their class interests. Similarly, Zagorski claims that in post-communist countries educational level becomes one of the most important determinants of welfare and socioeconomic attitudes, because the reform process is very complicated. Those with higher levels of education can better understand the complexities of the reforms and are more willing to accept short-term disadvantages for long-term gains. However, many experts have also claimed that the Czech Republic presents an exception to these trends. It is the one country in which party-competition is based on socioeconomic issues and voting is class-based. This study tests these three hypotheses, to determine whether the Czech Republic really does provide an exception to the general post-communist development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]