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This paper introduces the Great British Class Survey and describes how it came to be, providing an insight into the work that has led to this special issue on the contemporary British elite. We discuss initial work with the BBC Lab UK team, the construction of the web survey and its launch. We also consider the response rate and how an additional face-to-face nationally representative survey was then commissioned to deal with sample skew. The way in which subsequent analysis addresses this challenge is also addressed, along with how this 'problem' has provided rich, granular data on the most privileged and powerful inUKsociety. Wereflect on a piece of research which enjoyed considerable attention, and how we might interpret this in terms of public engagement. We also acknowledge some of the immediate academic responses to this innovative collaborative adventure. Finally, we indicate how the GBCS team will be developing this work in the future, before outlining how the papers in this special issue offer insights into the anatomy of power and privilege in modern Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how understandings of community and belonging have shifted in relation to rapid deindustrialization and subsequent waves of redevelopment in East Manchester. Drawing on ethnographic research, it focuses on two social settings which are under threat of closure - a coffee morning and a market place. In these settings, long-standing residents make community, paradoxically, by sharing narratives about the loss of social ties. Drawing on relational approaches to place, the discussion sheds light on the disruption between place and identity in post-industrial localities which have been reshaped by drastic physical regeneration. The paper argues that in order to understand the apparent contradiction between narratives of social decline and observations of abundant social relations, it is necessary to extend existing sociological and anthropological approaches to community and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the relationship between working-class participation in higher education ( HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working-class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to 'become middle class'. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different 'forms of capital', or symbolic 'mastery' ( Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of 'creditor' to whom the working-class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as 'deficient' and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of 'escape' implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of 'fugitivity', to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a Bourdieusian conception of class and attempts to illustrate the power of such an approach via an analysis of the contemporary Brazilian case. Initially, the paper describes the main dilemmas and disputes in the field of class analysis in Brazilian sociology. Then, the paper presents an empirical investigation on the role of culture in the shaping of class relations in Brazil, based on the analysis of survey data containing information on social agents' cultural participation and uses of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an enduring, indeed increasing awareness of the role of spatial location in defining and reinforcing inequality in this country and beyond. In the UK, much of the debate around these issues has focussed on the established trope of a longstanding 'north-south divide', a divide which appears to have deepened in recent decades with the inexorable de-industrialisation of northern Britain presented in stark counterpoint to the burgeoning concentration of wealth in London and the south-east, driven by the financial and ancillary services sectors. Due to a lack of available data, such debates have tended to focus solely on economic inequalities between places, and until now there was little understanding of how these disparities played out in the social and cultural domains. This paper significantly advances our understanding of the true meaning of spatial inequality in the UK by broadening that definition to encompass not only the economic, but also the social and cultural arenas, using data available from the BBC's Great British Class Survey experiment. We argue that these data shine a light not only on the economic inequalities between different parts of the country which existing debates have already uncovered but to understand how these are both reinforced and mediated across the social and cultural dimensions. Fundamentally, we concur with a great many others in seeing London and the south-east as a vortex for economic accumulation but it is also much more than that; it is a space where the coming together of intense economic, social and cultural resources enables the crystallisation of particular and nuanced forms of elite social class formations, formations in which place is not incidental but integral to their very existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the subjective experience of 'doing' aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class-inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio-political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on domestically violent men typically takes an oppositional logic of gender. While the significance of class in researching domestically violent men is identified, class and gender are often treated as separate entities that do not complicate each other. Drawing upon group observations and in-depth interviews, this paper identifies how intersections of class and gender manifest in the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men. From a Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the authors analyse (1) how class distinctions serve to (re)produce gendered hierarchy; (2) how contradictory experiences of gender reveal a relational understanding of class; and (3) how the gendered nature of domestically violent men is inscribed with a meaning of (working) class specificity for maintaining middle-class 'purity'. In analysing men's multiple and conflicting experiences, this paper contributes to research on domestically violent men by showing how class and gender are actively constructed and not produced in a monolithic/invariant way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which parents talk about choosing secondary schools in three areas of Greater Manchester. It argues that this can be a moment when parents are considering their own attitudes to, and shaping their children's experiences of, multiculture. Multiculture is taken as the everyday experience of living with difference. The paper argues that multiculture needs to be understood as shaped not only by racialized, ethnic or religious difference (as it is commonly understood) but also by other differences which parents may consider important, particularly class and approaches to parenting. We stress the need to examine what parents say about schooling in the context in which they are talking, which is shaped by local areas and the experiences of their children in primary schools. Based on interviews with an ethnically mixed groups of parents from different schools, we show how perceptions of the racialized and class demographics of schools can influence parents' choice of secondary schools. The paper also argues that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which terms such as 'multicultural' and 'mix' are applied uniformly to very different contexts, be they particular schools or local areas, suggesting there is a paucity of language in Britain when talking about multiculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global 'super-rich' on contemporary sociospatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl's classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to 'big data' - in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications - can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the 'super-rich' that extends the 'spatialization of class' thesis further 'up' the class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official representations of transformed landscapes and people's memories of these landscapes are usually set into a contrast. This article analyses the relationship between workers' nostalgic memories and an optimistic official representation of a transformed industrial landscape by considering both as elements of social knowledge. This is achieved by analysing official texts and biographic narratives of workers. All too often class is considered as irrelevant, but this article carves out the relevance of class for workers' memories and their feelings of nostalgia. Against the backdrop of concepts of social knowledge and social memory, this article focuses on the interrelations and demonstrates that official representations leave an imprint on the workers' emotions that are related to class. Correspondingly, this paper clarifies why the retired workers are so nostalgic even if they climbed the social ladder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent ideological shifts, along with budgeting constraints, have made parental involvement in the schooling process necessary. Such expectations have increased the toll on working-class mothers, who now have to assume responsibility in three time-consuming areas: child care at home, school involvement and labour market participation. In analysing how mothers deal with this threefold expectation, research has focused on class-specific maternal ideals and practices, but rarely directed systematic attention to how these concurrent expectations shape the maternal ideals they embrace. Moreover, few studies have examined how mothers' maternal ideals shape their employment interruptions. The current paper considers how working-class mothers rationalize the maternal ideals they embrace with regard to school involvement and examines how they negotiate them vis-à-vis other possible maternal ideals. Interviews of 48 Israeli low-income mothers reveal that educational success is consensually perceived as critical for maximizing life chances and that this understanding evolved from the gradual realization that school involvement through extensive mothering - where women rely on others to meet their children's schooling needs - must be replaced by school involvement through intensive mothering - namely, personal presence-based nurturing. We draw some implications relevant to the debate over class-based maternal ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Savage and his colleagues have shifted intellectual ground and changed the intellectual focus of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) from the provision of 'a comprehensive map of class in Britain' to an examination of what they call the British 'elite'. I argue that this 'elite' is no such thing and that whatever it is, it is not well defined by the procedures that are used to identify it. At the heart of all the papers the GBCS team present in this issue of the journal is an unavoidable incoherence which arises from the bias in responses to the original survey. Despite protestations to the contrary this response bias has not been dealt with properly and the resulting empirical analysis is without much value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of 'excessive' white heterosexual working-class femininity as a 'constitutive limit' of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neo-liberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999-2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the 'counter culture', now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from an Eliasian perspective we examine how an 'advertising subjectivity' became more firmly embedded within the bourgeois habitus. We explain how and why advertising slowly developed and expanded within a commercial organization despite initial opposition, ambivalence and even hostility from some of its bourgeois senior management towards the practice - the very social class sometimes identified with advertising's origins and advance. Our empirical case is based on Arthur Guinness & Sons Ltd, the Irish company which came to be renowned for the alcohol beverage which carried its name - Guinness stout. We explain how the development of advertising was impelled by a series of processes that increasingly interlocked; a widening and intensification of competitive commercial interdependencies; a shift in the power balance between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in favour of the former in Britain; and by a changing consumer habitus in several different nation-states. Central though, as we illustrate, was a process involving the changing power relation between various social classes in Britain - principally the increasing power chances of bourgeoisie in relation to the aristocracy - a process that had advanced considerably by the turn of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In school choice literature, class-based strategies for social reproduction of the middle classes are often the central explanatory framework. While race, ethnicity and other social categories are increasingly included in the analysis, they are often treated as secondary to class. Drawing on interviews from a racially and socio-culturally mixed sample of middle-class parents in Pretoria and Amsterdam, this study aims to contribute to existing theories on school choice and social reproduction through a comparison of contrasting cases. It takes the dominant theoretical framework of middle-class strategizing as a starting point to explain parental practices of school choice. The comparative analysis finds some remarkable homologies of school choice in Pretoria and Amsterdam, but also points to specific local and historical complexity and specificity of parents' motivations. In both contexts, parents call on intersecting aspects of their identity beyond their classed position. While we acknowledge the relevance of social class, we suggest that middle-class parents' school choice should be understood as 'strategies of action' emanating from classed and racial (dis)positions but also cultural and religious repertoires rooted in a multidimensional tool-kit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of working class mothers' talk in explaining their child's 'impoverished' language development and the resulting 'word gap' between social classes is hotly debated. Academic research in this area spans decades, crosses continents, and gathers up a wide range of disciplines and positions, ranging from research seeking to intervene in and optimise mothers' talk, to research that vigorously criticises any attempt to do so. Through an extended analysis of Jacques Donzelot's seminal study The Policing of Families, and Michel Foucault's concept of a 'regime of truth', we explore how motherhood is constructed by academic debate as something to be endlessly optimised. Academic debate functions by (1) reducing expectations concerning the role and remit of experts so as to place the onus on mothers to implement findings which the former will facilitate, (2) complicating the contributing factors to language delay, thus avoiding apportioning blame too directly whilst giving endless cause to do further research, and (3) committing mothers to a permanent labour in which they are expected to better themselves as measured by the manifest language development of their children. Its strongest critics remain within the constraints of this regime of truth to the extent that they argue for humility of expertise, for recognition of broader sociocultural factors, and for the importance of privileging the expertise and agency of mothers. This article considers how all parties are, in effect, obliged to declare the truth of motherhood and will find themselves implicated in its governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local urban greenspaces connect issues close to everyday life, such as recreational value, attachment to place and civic engagements, with broader questions of city planning, economy, climate change and social class. Responding to recent warnings against reductionism in critical studies of cities' new claims to sustainability, the article mobilizes the recent 'moral turn' in the Bourdieusian literature on classed politics to explore these interlacing layers and themes in the politics of the urban green and to relate them to broader sociological questions about morality and politics. Based on a national survey among urban dwellers in Denmark designed specifically for this purpose, the analysis reveals a space of local urban greenspaces issues in two dimensions contrasting, respectively, (a) concerns for nature versus economy and (b) preference for planning versus grassroots modes of governance. Further analysis reveals a homology with social class and with more abstract political attitudes on how to square environmental and economic sustainability. However, the space of issues also displays traits unique to local urban greenspaces, while different positions in the space correlate with different combinations of personal attachment and civic engagement. In mapping the politics of the urban green along these lines, the article suggests new analytical avenues for moral-political sociology more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both 'punching up' and 'managing down' – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical, qualitative research on 'social mixing' in multi-ethnic London schools, this article argues for a conceptualisation of social mixing as an exchange of the self. Through analysis of three working-class, minority ethnic students who attempt to 'cross borders' into White middle-class subcultures, I explore the differing capital value embodied in their raced, classed and gendered identity positions. Friendships across this border are characterised by 'semi-investments' on both sides, and promise only partial possibilities for social mobility via social mixing, through limited access to academic capital and embodied Whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, ‘fear’ in its diverse facets is a topic growing in relevance in the media discourse. However, apart from analyses of individual psychic pathologies or general macro-sociological diagnoses, it has been largely neglected in (empirical) social sciences. The increasingly influential works of Bourdieu are no exception here, even though the concept of habitus inherently transcends positive interests such as lifestyle preferences, as analyzed in La Distinction. This becomes explicitly clear in his late works, above all in La Misère du monde, where the dispositions of agents are described in terms of the fears and worries associated with their positions in the social space and societal transformation processes. In this article the authors show that concerns, fear, and worries are constitutive characteristics of the habitus by investigating the structure of ‘fear manifestations’ in relation to the social space. Following Bourdieu’s conception, they construct a model of the Norwegian social space by applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to survey data. They then investigate how questions on fears and concerns are related to the capital structure of the space. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a reflection of their implications for a sociology of symbolic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents' values and practices are central to theorising the reproduction of inequality across generations. Where researchers have explored how parental values and practices relate to class circumstances and their combined influence on children's outcomes, the focus has been largely on younger families, with limited evidence on parents' perspectives at the point children approach and pass compulsory school leaving age. The trebling of university tuition fees in England, the insecurity which characterises many non-academic routes into the labour market and concerns about economic recession make this a particularly significant historical moment to investigate parental influences on children's pathways through post-compulsory education and training. This article draws on research into parents' perceptions and practices whilst their children were growing up through their teenage years between 2008 and 2014. In particular, it examines classed differences in how parents frame their young adult children's decision making, assess their pathways and accord markedly differing value to academic and vocational pursuit. It evidences temporal dynamics through showing how diverse values and resources underpin young people's evolving biographical pathways. In these ways, the analysis contributes to theorising parents' values and practices and their complex relationship with social class at a time of some significant social structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed analysis of novel forms of class-making in Finland, with special emphasis on emerging threads on 'white trash' in a popular discussion forum. The article is based on an empirical study, the data for which were gathered by making online observations and extracting discussion threads on white trash. There is no consensus in the data on the meaning of the term white trash. While the stereotypes concerning the alleged group of white trash have been linked with tastelessness, poverty or immorality in studies conducted in other countries, popularity and ordinariness are also associated with it, as are expensive and exclusive consumer choices. On the one hand, the term is used to reproduce class stigma, illustrating how class is made through racialisation. On the other, the phrase is used in new and flexible ways. However, the debate greatly focuses on taste and thus grounds itself in struggles over classification in consumer culture, which may further privilege middle-class definitions of class. The article concludes that the examination of taste offers a novel route for the study of privilege, as an investment in keeping one's tastes unreadable to others may be an asset in the struggle over classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to 'A new model of social class?' by Savage et al. (2013), I take issue with their claim of carrying out an inductive, data-driven approach to the construction of a new class scheme. They emphasize that theirs is not just another occupational- or employment-based class schema. Rather, their objective is to illustrate how cultural and social boundaries are drawn up. Their class classification is multi-dimensional, with the combination of economic, social, and cultural capitals to delineate distinctive class boundaries. My main concerns fall into three areas: (1) what are the problems of their proposed inductive approach? Can we draw up class boundaries without going back to a political economy analysis of contemporary capitalism? (2) How successful have they been in introducing new social classes to their classification of class? Do their descriptions of the seven classes in their class scheme add up in ways that present us with a sociologically meaningful analysis of a class structure of contemporary Britain? (3) And, finally, how useful is their framework for conducting comparative class analysis? Drawing upon the case of contemporary China, it is suggested that it is important to recognize that the effects of social and cultural capitals vary, both quantitatively and qualitatively, according to the wider institutional environment. In each of the above areas, the approach suggested by Savage et al. is found short of fully satisfactory answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the Great British Class Survey to examine the association between social background, university attended and social position for over 85,000 graduates. This unique dataset allows us to look beyond the very early labour market experiences of graduates investigated in previous studies and to examine the outcome of attending particular institutions. We find strong evidence of distinct stratification of outcomes by university attended, even within the prestigious Russell Group. There are marked differences in entry to elite positions for graduates of different universities, with sharp gradients in levels of economic capital in particular. The 'golden triangle' of Oxford, Cambridge and certain London institutions emerges as a distinct elite. However, even within that grouping there are striking differences, with Oxford ahead of Cambridge on several measures. These findings underline the importance of a geographically concentrated set of elite universities in channelling access to top positions in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]