A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment

Abstract

The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK’s National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This principally distinguishes between people working in routine or semi-routine occupations employed on a ‘labour contract’ on the one hand, and those working in professional or managerial occupations employed on a ‘service contract’ on the other. However, this occupationally based class schema does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating class divisions. We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC’s 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite’, whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of ‘new affluent’ workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a ‘precariat’ characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.

The social life of measurement: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration

“…One useful example here is contemporary class analysis, whether in the form of the Great British Class Survey (Savage et al 2015) or classificatory struggles (Tyler 2015). Class in contemporary Britain is a reflexive set of categories, whereby a social scientific framework used to understand occupational relationships with labour markets (Goldthorpe & McKnight 2004) is also the site for powerful position taking for individual's descriptions of their identities (Savage 2000;Savage et al 2015), and for revanchist exercises of class power and politics (Tyler 2015).…”

“…Class in contemporary Britain is a reflexive set of categories, whereby a social scientific framework used to understand occupational relationships with labour markets (Goldthorpe & McKnight 2004) is also the site for powerful position taking for individual's descriptions of their identities (Savage 2000;Savage et al 2015), and for revanchist exercises of class power and politics (Tyler 2015). Class is, therefore, as much a technical social scientific tool as it is a lived reality of individuals and communities.…”

Research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching

“…The contributions provide a lens through which scholars can examine how language learning and teaching can either reproduce or disrupt economic and social inequities. While recognizing that the emergence of the neoliberal post-industrial work order may render traditional labels of 'middle class' and 'working class' defunct (Savage et al 2013), important investigative tasks remain on the research agenda, including an examination of what Vandrick (2011) has called 'the global elite'. Work on this group of learners and their teachers promises to be significant because it highlights the material conditions of globalization and its structures of inequality, a component of neoliberal ideology.…”

Religion and Social Class: Theory and Method after Bourdieu

“…Distinction has of course been extremely influential, perhaps nowhere more so than in Britain, providing key theoretical tools for the cultural turn in the study of social class (Savage et al 1995;Bennett et al 2009;Savage et al 2013). These discussions have tended to ignore religion's role as social and cultural capital.…”