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Social class remains one of the most significant dimensions of identity in British society, shaping not only material life chances but also cultural tastes, values, lifestyles, and sense of self. This lesson examines how class identities are formed, experienced, and contested, drawing on classic and contemporary sociological research. The central debate is whether class identity is declining in significance (as postmodernists and individualisation theorists claim) or merely changing in form while remaining a powerful, if often unspoken, organiser of how people experience the world.
Key Definition: Class identity refers to the ways in which individuals understand, experience, and present themselves in relation to social class — including their sense of belonging to a particular class, the values and lifestyles they associate with their class position, and how class shapes their interactions with others.
This lesson maps to the AQA A-Level Sociology specification (7192), Paper 2: Topics in Sociology, Section A — Culture and Identity, addressing the bullet point on "the relationship of identity to class" within "the relationship of identity to production, consumption and globalisation." Class identity is the first of the major social divisions you study and provides the template — debating essentialist versus constructed, material versus cultural accounts — that recurs for gender, ethnicity and age. Assessment spans AO1 (knowledge of class theories and studies), AO2 (application to the Item and to contemporary Britain), and AO3 (evaluating whether class identity is declining or merely changing). On Paper 2 the discriminating questions are the 10-mark "applying material from the Item, analyse" question and the 20-mark "evaluate" essay (Paper 2 essays are 20 marks, not 30).
Before examining particular class identities, you must be able to compare the three foundational frameworks for defining class, because each implies a different account of class identity.
Marx defined class purely by the relationship to the means of production: the bourgeoisie own productive property and the proletariat must sell their labour. Class identity, for Marx, becomes politically significant only when a class moves from being a "class-in-itself" (an objective economic group) to a "class-for-itself" (a group conscious of its shared interests and willing to act collectively). Strong working-class identity is, in this view, a stepping-stone to revolutionary class consciousness; its decline is therefore politically consequential.
Weber rejected Marx's single economic axis. He distinguished three dimensions of stratification: class (market situation — your bargaining power in the labour and product markets), status (social honour and prestige, expressed through lifestyle and consumption), and party (organised power, e.g. trade unions, political parties). Weber's framework is fertile for studying identity because it separates economic class from status: a person can have modest income but high status, or vice versa, and much of class identity is really about status and lifestyle rather than raw economics.
Bourdieu synthesises and culturalises the debate: class is reproduced not only through economic capital but through cultural capital (knowledge, taste, credentials), social capital (networks) and symbolic capital (recognition and honour). Crucially, class becomes embodied as habitus — durable dispositions, tastes and bodily ways of being that feel natural but are class-specific. Bourdieu thus explains how class identity is reproduced culturally, below the level of conscious choice. This framework underpins both Savage's GBCS and Skeggs's work below.
| Theorist | Class defined by | Implication for identity |
|---|---|---|
| Marx | Ownership of the means of production | Identity as potential class consciousness (in-itself → for-itself) |
| Weber | Market situation; plus status and party | Identity is largely about status and lifestyle, not just economics |
| Bourdieu | Multiple capitals embodied as habitus | Identity reproduced culturally and unconsciously through taste |
graph TD
A["Social class identity"] --> B["Marx: ownership of means of production"]
A --> C["Weber: class + status + party"]
A --> D["Bourdieu: economic + cultural + social capital = habitus"]
B --> E["Class-in-itself vs class-for-itself"]
D --> F["Savage: Great British Class Survey (7 classes)"]
D --> G["Skeggs: respectability & symbolic violence"]
A --> H["Decline thesis: individualisation (Beck, Giddens)"]
The traditional working class — manual workers in industries such as mining, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and dock work — developed strong, distinctive class identities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key features included:
David Lockwood (1966) identified the "traditional proletarian worker" as a distinctive type of working-class identity, characterised by:
Traditional working-class identity has been profoundly affected by economic and social change since the 1970s:
Simon Charlesworth (2000), in A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience, studied working-class life in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and found that despite deindustrialisation, class continued to profoundly shape people's experiences, emotions, and sense of self. Working-class people in Rotherham experienced:
The term "new working class" is sometimes used to describe workers in the post-industrial economy — those employed in service-sector jobs (retail, hospitality, care work, call centres, gig economy) rather than traditional manufacturing.
Evaluation (AO3):
A long-running debate asks whether the working class is becoming middle class in identity and outlook — a process called embourgeoisement. In the affluent post-war decades it was argued that rising living standards were turning manual workers into middle-class consumers. The classic test was the Affluent Worker study by Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1968–69), who studied well-paid car workers in Luton. They found that affluent workers had not simply become middle class: instead they displayed a "privatised instrumentalism" — they worked for money rather than for intrinsic satisfaction or collective solidarity, and their lives were increasingly home- and family-centred ("privatised") rather than community-centred. So while traditional collective working-class identity was weakening, this was not because workers had adopted middle-class values, but because the basis of working-class identity was shifting from solidaristic community to instrumental, privatised consumption. This study is a powerful resource for the "changing rather than disappearing" argument.
The "middle class" is not a single, unified group but encompasses a wide range of occupations, incomes, lifestyles, and identities:
Mike Savage, James Barlow, Peter Dickens, and Tony Fielding (1992) identified three types of middle-class identity based on different forms of capital (drawing on Bourdieu):
| Type | Key Capital | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Professional middle class | Cultural capital (education, knowledge, taste) | Value education, culture, and meritocracy |
| Managerial middle class | Organisational capital (authority within institutions) | Value hierarchy, career progression, and institutional loyalty |
| Entrepreneurial middle class | Economic capital (wealth, business ownership) | Value risk-taking, individualism, and financial success |
Pierre Bourdieu (1984), in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, argued that class identity is maintained not only through economic resources but through cultural capital — the knowledge, tastes, and cultural competences that signal class membership.
Middle-class parents transmit cultural capital to their children through:
When the dominant class treats its own culturally specific tastes as universally "correct," and devalues working-class culture as deficient, Bourdieu calls this symbolic violence — the imposition of cultural meanings that make the existing class order seem legitimate and inevitable.
Beverley Skeggs (1997), in Formations of Class and Gender, conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study of 83 white working-class women on caring courses in the north-west of England. Her central finding was that class identity for these women was organised around the struggle for respectability. Aware that the wider culture coded them as "rough," vulgar or sexually disreputable, the women worked hard — through dress, domestic standards, caring labour and self-presentation — to demonstrate that they were respectable, and frequently disidentified from the label "working class," refusing to claim a class identity they experienced as a source of shame.
Skeggs's work is important for several reasons:
Evaluation (AO3):
The upper class (or ruling class) is characterised by enormous wealth, land ownership, and inherited privilege. Upper-class identity is maintained through:
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