Sociology

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Volume 43(5): 896–912
DOI: 10.1177/0038038509340718

Rethinking the Work–Class Nexus: Theoretical

Foundations for Recent Trends
■ Will Atkinson
University of Bristol

A B S TR AC T
The sociology of class and the sociology of work have, historically, occupied two
sides of the same coin, sharing foundational studies such as the Affluent Worker
series and Braverman’s vivisection of the labour process. Recently, however, the
partnership has been questioned. Though the seeds of the split were sown by Erik
Wright and John Goldthorpe, the overdue de-hegemonizing of Marx and Weber
in research on class with the growing influence of Pierre Bourdieu and the broader
‘cultural turn’ in sociology has weakened the bond and forged a new alliance
between class and the sociology of culture. This is, by all means, a positive devel-
opment, but the connection between processes in the sphere of work and class
has become less clear. This article therefore seeks to explore the new theoretical
nexus between class and work, demonstrating that a Bourdieusian approach fruit-
fully reverses the connection put in place by Goldthorpe and Wright.

K EY WO R D S
Bourdieu / class analysis / culture / occupation / work–class nexus

nce upon a time, it was taken for granted that the sociology of work shared

O such a bond of union with the sociology of class that they practically dis-
solved into one another. Those setting out to investigate the changing struc-
ture and experience of employment in the early post-war period, when British
sociology was emerging and maturing, could not help but address the question
of social class – what constituted it and how it operated – whilst those with an
interest in the concept of class in relation to, say, social mobility, were drawn
into an examination of the occupational structure and how it was changing.
Foundational texts in one sphere inevitably, therefore, became foundational texts

896
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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 897

in the other. The Affluent Worker trilogy, for example, explored the lives of those
highly paid Luton workers with the express intention of revealing the validity of
the embourgeoisement thesis and, consequently, the salience of class as a shaper
of values and attitudes, but in so doing exposed a gamut of changing orien-
tations toward work – instrumentalism being chief among them (Goldthorpe
et al., 1968a, 1968b, 1969). Likewise, though in a more radical vein,
Braverman’s (1974) renowned investigation of the labour process, that is, the
steady proletarianization of clerical work, was at one and the same time a
description of the changing conditions of employment that continues to enjoy
influence in the sociology of work to this day and an early contribution toward
the debate over the boundaries between classes that rumbled on between Marxists
and others well into the 1980s and 1990s. The reason behind this seemingly
unbreakable nexus of social class and work was fairly patent: from a Weberian
point of view, occupations serve as useful approximations of class situations, whilst
for Marxists they denote the fundamental positions in the production process.
In recent years, however, the sociological winds have changed direction and
blown in fresh thinking on the dynamics of class in contemporary societies. With
the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in sociology, along with mounting dissatisfaction
with the dominant approaches to class and of course the increased specialization
of sociology in which the sociology of work and class have split into distinct
areas of expertise with fewer scholars straddling the division, it seems as if work
is slowly being replaced as the natural bedfellow of class with culture. Feminist
writers such as Beverley Skeggs (1997), Diane Reay (1998) and Stephanie Lawler
(2000), for example, along with Simon Charlesworth’s (2000) poetic examina-
tion of the underemployed in de-industrializing Rotherham, have all made sig-
nificant contributions to the rethinking of class and the multiplex ways in which
it plays out in everyday life, whether amongst peers or within the family, with-
out elaborate reference to processes or features within the world of paid work at
all. Cultural differences, media representations and socialization patterns, and
ultimately the conceptual toolkit of Pierre Bourdieu, are the bread and butter of
these researchers of class, not workplace authority, control or industrial conflict.
There are, of course, exceptions, with Savage’s (2000) work on changing occu-
pational cultures being an example. But even here, as the interest in Bourdieu
grew, the focus on work was steadily supplanted by an interest in cultural dif-
ferentiation which refers to occupations, in a similar way to many of the ‘cul-
tural class analysts’ (Savage, 2003), only as rough and ready, but not always
satisfactory, indicators of class position (e.g. Bennett et al., 2009). Furthermore,
though Hebson (2009) has recently noted this trend, decried it and tried to plug
the gap through empirical example, all of this is done without firm theoretical
groundwork and, therefore, raises more questions than it answers.
So what, exactly, are we to make of all this? If we accept the analytical
superiority of these innovations in class analysis and wish to build on French
foundations, does this mean that employment is of less relevance now for under-
standing the operations of class, and vice versa? If not, then what exactly is the
relationship between work and class now that the latter term has been restyled

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898 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

in a broadly Bourdieusian mould? This article attempts to address these pressing

questions and provide a first tentative effort at solutions. In doing so it pro-
gresses through four stages. First of all, it starts with a reminder of the develop-
ment of the relationship between class and work from classical foundations up
to the heyday of the ‘employment aggregate approach’, as Rosemary Crompton
(1998) famously baptized it, noting the curious way the latter has weakened the
connection between the sociologies of work and class yet intensified the rela-
tionship between class and paid employment, before then, secondly, relaying
some of the core sources of criticism and concern as they bear on this dimension.
After that, it charts the development of recent class theory inspired by Bourdieu
with the intention of suggesting that, whilst offering key advantages over other
class models, it is currently missing a coherent theoretical link between class and
occupation. Finally, and most importantly, the article draws out some general
theoretical points to sketch a rough conceptualization of a new nexus between
class and work that could, ultimately, assist in empirical research and, no doubt,
be put to test by it as well. In so doing, it will be demonstrated that, just as Marx
(1954: 29) stood Hegel ‘right side up again’, Bourdieu reverses the nexus put in
place by John Goldthorpe and Erik Olin Wright.

Development of the Nexus

First to the seeds of contemporary class theory over a century ago. For Marx,
of course, class position was dictated by position within the relations of pro-
duction and, in capitalism, where ‘free wage labour’ had replaced the manorial
ties of feudal Europe, this essentially takes the form of employer versus
employee, or to use the technical terms, bourgeoisie versus proletariat. The
labourers must sell their skills, their labour power, to survive, and in so doing
enter into relations with the owners of the means of production who compen-
sated the workers monetarily at a lower rate than the value they produced.
Thus was born the labour market and the occupational structure of society, and
if someone was within them in some sense, rather than outside as owners and
employers, then they could consider themselves proletarian. Indeed, it was pre-
cisely through work, its degradation and ultimately exploitative character, that
workers would consider themselves to be in the same boat, rally together as a
‘class-for-itself’ and overthrow capitalism.
For Weber, on the other hand, it was the emergence of markets that really
mattered in distinguishing classes, whether goods markets for those owning
property in the form of factories or, more importantly, the labour market.
Amongst the non-propertied, class situations were determined by market situa-
tion, which essentially meant the skills and credentials brought to the labour
market to secure income. The more highly valued skills one had, the more one
was rewarded economically, and the further distinguished one’s market situa-
tion, class situation and therefore life chances were. Again, then, it was differ-
ences in paid employment that differentiated the life chances of the majority of

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 899

the population – a qualified doctor would have better life chances than an
employed plumber, for example. Social classes, in the sense of distinct, perceptible
social groups with shared ways of life, communities and attitudes, then arose
from these economic foundations through the restriction of social mobility – a
process Giddens (1981) later theorized under the label ‘structuration’.
Upon these foundations contemporary class analysis was steadily built.
From the early community studies (e.g. Dennis et al., 1969) through to the
Affluent Worker series, Braverman’s (1974) labour process theory and the ubiq-
uitous ethnographic studies of workplaces (e.g. Beynon, 1984[1973]), it was
assumed that the characteristics of employment, whether revealed through
examination of long-term trends or qualitative description of working life,
defined the key class relations. From a Marxist perspective this was because,
despite the nascent shift to a post-industrial climate, it was still through paid
employment and the degradation of working conditions that the proletariat
were exploited and furnished with common interests. From a broadly Weberian
standpoint, things were slightly more complex: yes, as neatly summed up by
Frank Parkin (1971: 18), the ‘occupational order’ is considered ‘[t]he backbone
of the class structure’ quite simply because it is the primary system through
which economic reward and, for those US sociologists who tended to conflate
class with status (e.g. Blau and Duncan, 1967), prestige is apportioned in west-
ern societies (cf. Mills, 2002[1951]: 71). But for those setting out to explore the
uncharted worlds of certain occupational groups, it seemed obvious that ‘work
situation’, encompassing ‘the set of social relationships in which the individual
is involved at work’ including authority and control, had to be included in the
definition of and research on class as well (Lockwood, 1958: 15).
Out of this era of close interconnection, however, there developed a new,
dominant approach to class bisected according to the founding father followed,
and, with it, a new relationship between class and employment. This was the
attempt to construct, for the first time, a rigorous ‘map’ of the class structure
that could be put to use in statistical research, with Erik Olin Wright (1979)
championing the fusion of Marxism with thereto-derided ‘bourgeois’ scientific
principles and methods and John Goldthorpe (1980) leading the broadly
Weber-inspired Nuffield programme of mobility research. In both cases, the
maps of the class structure were, essentially, comprised of occupational cate-
gories distinguished according to particular theoretical criteria and, in both
cases, there were two consequences for the link between work and class. On the
one hand, the content of work was no longer considered as important as the
objective relationships between occupations in an overall structure. For Wright
(1980: 178), there was to be a clear distinction drawn between technical rela-
tions of production – the system of occupations as defined by ‘the technical con-
tent of their labouring activity’ – and social relations of production – the buying
and selling of labour power. Class is constituted solely through the latter, and
so the focus of class research is less the substance of processes and practices
within the world of work – as explored by, for example, Burawoy (1979) – than
simply the broad quantifiable fissures of exploitation, power and conflict

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900 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

which, because they still occur within the realm of economic production, can be
mapped using proxy categories. Similarly, Goldthorpe, after abandoning his
earlier appeal to ‘work situation’, decisively declared his class scheme to be
based on abstract employment relations, namely whether occupations involve a
service relationship with their employers or a short-term labour contract. It was
not, therefore, ‘work-centred’, that is, based upon ‘the nature of work tasks and
work roles per se, [or] the degree of autonomy, authority etc. that is conferred
on the individuals performing them’ (Goldthorpe, 1995: 315), and, as a conse-
quence, there was no need for a study of workplace relations, policies or con-
flicts. The sociology of work, it seemed, could no longer tell class analysts much
that was of direct relevance to their research agendas.
On the other hand, however, in another way Wright and Goldthorpe actu-
ally intensified the relationship between class and occupation. No matter what
Wright (1980: 178) said about class and occupation inhabiting ‘different theo-
retical spaces’, and through his varying class schemes over the years, the fact
remained that both relied on those infamous ‘employment aggregates’ – that is,
distinct groupings of occupations – as their only measures of the class structure
to the extent that class, as a variable in statistical research, is to all intents and
purposes constituted by occupational categories. A number of issues have
bedevilled them as a result, Goldthorpe in particular. The categories are, for
example, incredibly homogenizing, unable to recognize the internal variation in
resources, experience and therefore orientation within them (cf. Li et al., 2002).
There may well be similarities of income between jobs grouped together, as
Evans (1992) has laboured to prove, but the differences in wealth more broadly
defined – not just in property and shares, but in savings – as well as in educa-
tion, savoir faire and social connections are disregarded. Yet all, as Goldthorpe
(2007: 174–5) himself revealingly recognizes in contradiction to his usual utili-
tarian causal logic, are bound to differentiate life chances within categories and
even, one might postulate, produce considerable overlaps between them.
But undoubtedly the longest-running controversy has been over the con-
ceptualization of those without paid work. If class is composed of occupational
categories, then those without an occupation – the unemployed, the retired or
homemakers – appear to be outside the class system, which, when the charac-
teristics and orientations of the unemployed and homemakers are actually
observed, is demonstrably at odds with the classed practices revealed, however
modified by their particular situation, that can unite and differentiate within
each excluded category (see e.g. Charlesworth, 2000). To remedy this in terms
of homemakers, Goldthorpe (1983) notoriously took the household as the unit
of analysis, arguing that the head of the household (whether male or female)
somehow transmits their views, values and constraints to their partner no mat-
ter what the latter’s own resources and background. But the fact is, views and
choices – such as a tendency to vote left or right, or to value educational suc-
cess – do not logically stem directly from a current partner’s employment type,
but from one’s own biographical history embedded in present and past experi-
ential milieus (for an empirical demonstration of this, see Plutzer and Zipp,

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 901

2001; for the theory see Atkinson, forthcoming). As to the unemployed, they
have either been included as a separate ‘optional’ category or as part of the
working class depending on how many classes one wants to distinguish (which
again over-homogenizes a heterogeneous category, especially in times of flexi-
bilization and recession), or included on the basis of their last occupation,
which could be potentially misleading (see the rather ambiguous advice given
for the Goldthorpe-inspired ONS-SEC classification in Office for National
Statistics, 2005: 13, 15). Wright (1997), for his part, has sought to incorporate
both through what he calls ‘mediated class positions’, but the logic, and the
problems, are essentially the same.

The Nexus Questioned

Meanwhile, the split between the sociologies of work and class has become
wider. For one thing, as Grint’s (2005) popular introductory survey of the field
demonstrates, sociologists of work have developed new interests in work orga-
nization guided by luminaries of social theory with little interest in class, such
as Foucault and Latour, and have begun to examine the impact of alternative
divisions such as ethnicity and gender, with debates over class occupying an
increasingly circumscribed zone of operation centred around industrial disputes
and the labour process, seemingly with little actual connection to dominant
strands of class research. But this is not all, for class analysis has itself searched
for a new direction. The dissatisfactions with Goldthorpe and Wright, over not
just their conceptualization of class but their inability to adequately illuminate
or refine the broad social and cultural changes postulated by the various
‘epochal’ theories (Albrow, 1997) that proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s,
prompted a turn towards theory with a more cultural bent for assistance in
unveiling the contemporary operations of class difference and, in particular, to
the work of Bourdieu (see Devine and Savage, 2005, for an overview).
Drawing in various ways on the French theorist’s notion of a gradational
social space of difference in which people are positioned according to their pos-
session of various types of capital and which furnishes them with a habitus, or
set of dispositions, these ‘cultural class analysts’ have set out to examine the var-
ious ways in which classed differences and denigration are encoded in cultural
patterns (e.g. Charlesworth, 2000; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 1997) and the repro-
duction of inequality through differential possession of certain forms of capital
and its manifestation in everyday life (Devine, 2004; Lawler, 2000; Reay, 1998;
cf. Lareau, 2003). None of these processes, however, necessarily work them-
selves out through the world of paid employment, and indeed a hallmark of cul-
tural class analysis has been the examination of the classed lives of those usually
excluded from class analysis a la Goldthorpe and Wright: mothers, the unem-
ployed, those still within the education system and so on. Given the clear demon-
stration of how class orients the lives of these people, this is undoubtedly a step
forward and flags the limits of previous quantitative approaches to class. But the

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902 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

trouble is, in unlocking the conceptual treasure trove of the sociology of culture,
the relationship between class and work has become tangibly wider and decid-
edly unclear. As Gail Hebson (2009) has already noticed, most of these studies
refer briefly, if at all, to the realm of work, either seeing capital as flowing from
occupation in a straightforward way or else leaving unelaborated how those
without work acquire capital and are positioned in social space, and even self-
styled programmatic statements leave this unexplored and muddy the waters by
focussing only on aspects of Bourdieu’s work (e.g. Savage et al., 2005). To make
matters worse, in instances where cultural class analysts decide to attribute their
respondents to classes or conduct quantitative work, they tend to fall back (for
want of an alternative) on Goldthorpe’s, or the ONS’s, occupational class scheme
(e.g. Ball, 2003; Bennett et al., 2009; Hebson, 2009), despite the fact its categories
are constructed through a completely different logic and cram together many
occupations Bourdieu would distinguish.
There seem to be two reasons for this. First of all, pragmatism dictates that
class analysts use the tools available to them the best they can: it just happens
that Goldthorpe’s categories more or less hold a monopoly in this regard.
Secondly, there is the broader point, rightly picked out by Savage et al. (2005:
42), that because Bourdieu was not a conventional class theorist he never pro-
vided the full methodological and procedural elaboration necessary for repro-
duction in further research standard in Anglo-American class analysis. Yet both
of these stumbling blocks can be overcome, and indeed they must be if we are
to move class analysis forward adequately. The cultural class analysts have
promised a new dawn in class research where the hegemony of Goldthorpe and
Wright can be dismantled and a powerful programme of Bourdieu-inspired
qualitative and quantitative research established, but it still awaits firm foun-
dations. We need to clarify, elaborate and extend where Bourdieu did not, and
that is precisely what the rest of the article intends to do.

A New Nexus

First of all, then, we need to make clear the relationship between social space
and occupations, and we can start with the foundational assertion that, con-
trary to what Weininger (2005: 86ff), in his otherwise commendably lucid and
comprehensive overview of Bourdieu’s theory of class, says, the social space is
not a space of occupations or an occupational structure.1 Rather, as Brubaker
(1985: 761) put it, it concerns the differentiation of ‘social relations in general’,
with ‘classes’ being distinguished not through relations of production or in mar-
kets, but ‘by differing conditions of existence, different systems of dispositions
produced by differential conditioning, and differing endowments of capital or
power’. The space is, to be precise, structured by three axes, with one’s overall
position indicating specific conditions of existence: the overall amount of capi-
tal possessed in all its forms (economic, cultural and social), whether one’s cap-
ital stock is primarily cultural or economic in character, and finally trajectory,

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 903

bringing in shifts over time in capital possessed by individuals and clusters of

individuals. These axes are continuous, so there are no hard and fast bound-
aries between classes, but people do tend to cluster together in the social space
in more or less distinct ‘clouds’.2 Furthermore, this conception of class is rela-
tional in the sense that it defines class on the basis of relations of distance and
direction within the social space rather than, as is the focus of what Bourdieu
called ‘substantialist’ modes of thought, the substantial properties – whether
lifestyle pursuit or occupation – attached to positions.
The result of this subtle shift from production or markets to forms of cap-
ital is that all agents are positioned in the social space, not just those with jobs.
Housewives/husbands, part-time workers, students, the unemployed and so on
can be included and their general conditions of existence and dispositions
understood so long as we have some knowledge of their capital stocks (includ-
ing, crucially, those coming via the social capital of connection and interaction
with one’s spouse) and their trajectory. Hence we could plot, and therefore fully
contextualize the lives and denigrations of, Charlesworth’s (2000) under-
employed Rotherhamites, Skeggs’ (1997) young women and others, even if the
authors themselves did so only loosely or implicitly. Skeggs’ and Charlesworth’s
participants, for example, have little capital because of their backgrounds and
situations and therefore occupy dominated positions in the social and symbolic
spaces and face the symbolic violence – the unyielding vilification and mockery –
of the dominant, even if they are sans travail. Furthermore, because it is indi-
viduals rather than households that are plotted in social space, the whole debate
over the ‘unit of analysis’ is dissolved once and for all: we plot both partners in
social space, but account for the proxy capital granted by cohabitation with one
other.3 On this latter point, Bourdieu (1984: 108–9) himself stressed that:
… it is difficult to characterize an individual without including all the properties
(and property) which are brought to each of the spouses, and not only the wife [sic],
through the other – a name …, goods, an income, ‘connection’, a social status (each
member of the couple being characterized by the spouse’s social position, to differ-
ent degrees according to sex [I would disregard this], position and the gap between
the two positions).

The Continued Connection between Class and Work

Having said this, there is still an obvious nexus between social space and work
which has not been spelled out hitherto. The fact of the matter is, occupation,
as Bourdieu (1987: 4) himself argues, remains a ‘good and economic indictor of
position in social space’, especially in quantitative research, primarily because
it requires and perpetuates a certain amount and structure of capital – certain
occupations require a certain level and type of education, occupations are dif-
ferentially paid and so on. Clouds of individuals, therefore, tend to correspond
roughly with certain types of occupations – intellectual-creative, public sector,
business, manual work, clerical work and so on.4 This is partly why the social

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904 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

space is structured into clouds rather than an even spread: certain occupational
types require and distribute similar capital rewards which are markedly differ-
ent from other occupational types. It is also why a key aspect of the third
dimension of social space, time or trajectory is the rise or fall of whole sections
of social space as particular occupations become credentialized, or start to pay
less, and so on.
But there is more to the nexus than this, however, for on a more qualitative
level work can clearly be seen to impact upon, and therefore complicate, the expe-
riences granted by conditions of existence, and consequently the habitus, through
what Bourdieu (1987: 4) called ‘occupational effects’. We can distinguish three
levels of increasing specificity here. First of all, work could, as Bourdieu (1984:
438) analysed, impress upon agents’ habitus through the generic effects of ‘work-
ing conditions and the occupational milieu’, including the typical spatio-temporal
and organizational structure of forms of work. He uses the broad, and unfortu-
nately unelaborated, examples of the effects of the ‘workshop versus the office’
and larger versus smaller firms in producing certain dispositions, in this case
political ones (Bourdieu, 1984: 438, 447), but we can also draw on a wealth of
studies in the sociology of work to flesh out this link further. The monotony,
drudgery, physical difficulty and lack of authority in routine manual work could
produce, for example, the ‘blanked minds’ that Beynon (1984[1973]) speaks of
at the Ford factory; that is, a propensity to ‘zone out’ when faced with the same
dull, repetitive task, or the attempt to gain informal control by effecting the pace
of production and ‘having a laugh’ through jokes, wind-ups and ‘piss taking’ docu-
mented by Willis (1979). In fact Willis’ ethnographic description of shop floor
culture reveals in vivid detail the manner in which the class habitus of the worker
is compounded by their work environment: the fact that a physically demanding,
‘hard’ environment becomes the ‘natural’ environment (1979: 189), the practical
familiarity with the tools of production, or, to use the language of phenomenol-
ogy, their incorporation in to the corporeal schema as extensions of the body, and
the accumulation of practical skills ‘as if by osmosis from the technical environ-
ment’ (1979: 191), all of which dovetail with and accentuate the general class
disposition to vaunt the practical over the theoretical and produce a vision of
masculinity attuned to the harsh conditions faced.5
Alternative forms of work have analogous processes: office-based employ-
ment, service sector work demanding emotional labour and the professions all
involve familiarization with a whole different set of demands, technological,
interpersonal and spatial accoutrements and differing levels of autonomy,
authority and theory over practice that will, ultimately, sediment into the habi-
tus in some way and strengthen or complicate class dispositions. Office-based
work, for instance, being removed from the physical demands of manual labour
(plus being more feminized than manual work), may contribute to the mind
over hand, culture over barbarism disposition prevalent in the upper sections of
social space (Bourdieu, 1984) and ambivalently splashed amongst the middle,
with men in the expanding latter category perhaps struggling to cohere their
work environment and their sense of masculinity. Furthermore, a key example

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 905

of how differing occupational experiences dovetail with and complicate class

dispositions is through the perception of time: as Willis (1979) showed, the tem-
poral experience of manual workers was structured largely around the weekly
pay-packet, which, coupled with the ‘spot’ contract characterizing their
employment (Goldthorpe, 2007), no doubt reinforces a short-term ‘live for the
moment’ or ‘the here and now’ outlook amongst those experiencing the general
demands of necessity; whereas those paid an annual salary with clear career
prospects are more likely to build long-term projects and defer gratification not
just in terms of their employment but in other areas of life too (savings, healthy
living, family planning, etc.).6
We can, however, go beyond the general distinction between types of work
such as manual and non-manual and recognize the bearing of the ‘cultural and
organizational specificities’ of occupations (Bourdieu, 1987: 4). This could be,
on the one hand, sub-divisions within the broad categories of manual, office-
based, service sector or professional work. Being a police officer, for example,
will bring with it a very different set of cultural traits (i.e. routines, attitudes,
practices) to those of a fire-fighter or other similarly situated occupations, to the
extent that there may be a ‘police officer’s habitus’ as opposed to a ‘fire-fighter’s
habitus’ through which the general class dispositions, such as the primacy of
practice or bodily ‘toughness’ over theory, could play out very differently (on
the specificities of police culture, for example, see Reiner, 2000; cf. Turnbull,
1992, on dockers). On the other hand, at the most ‘micro’ level of all, there are
the effects of the local workplace culture – what interactionist Gary Alan Fine
(2006: 2) calls ‘idioculture’, the specific set of ‘knowledge, beliefs, behaviours,
and customs’ that develop over time within an interactive group sharing expe-
riences, in this case those of a particular workplace. In his research, it was the
sharp differences between the meteorological offices in Chicago, ‘Belvedere’
and ‘Flowerland’, but O’Mahoney (2007) has recently illuminated, from a
Bourdieusian perspective, the unique ‘ethical dispositions’ that arise in the
course of working as an analyst for a specific telecommunications company.
These dispositions, like all those produced by one’s employment, add to, com-
plicate and articulate the general class dispositions built out of greater or lesser
distance from necessity and cultural conditions and an understanding of this
link is crucial to qualitative work aiming to grasp the interplay of the general
and more specific in shaping action and subjectivity.7

The Overriding Separability of Class and Work

There are, then, the theoretical foundations for the dialogue between the sociol-
ogy of work and the sociology of class that the previously dominant approaches
were closing down and which Hebson (2009) has recently urged amongst the
Bourdieusians. Yet the fact remains that occupational experiences and disposi-
tions are separable from those of class per se. It is individuals that are plotted in
social space on the basis of their capital stocks, and which occupations map on

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906 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

to which sector of social space is, ultimately, an empirical question answerable

with the statistical technique of correspondence analysis. Other than their per-
petuation of capital, there is nothing inherent in the occupations themselves that
attaches them intrinsically to a particular class. To think this would be to slip
into the erroneous (yet widespread) substantialist mode of thought which,
because it does differentiate class on the basis of distinct characteristics of
employment, struggles to cope with social and occupational change adequately,
as witnessed by attempts to rethink extant schemes in light of the rise of the ser-
vice sector (Esping-Anderson, 1993). Furthermore, occupations are not the sole
means through which capital is distributed – property ownership, share owner-
ship, wealth, education, familiarity with certain cultural forms, ownership of
certain cultural goods, social connections and particular titles or names are also
key and can not only plot people without occupations in the social space (e.g.
the aristocracy, the unemployed and homemakers) but give a fuller picture where
occupation alone is misleading.
Take, for instance, a respondent in my own ongoing research. Diane, a
woman in her forties, describes herself as a struggling self-employed entrepreneur,
or what class analysts would label lower petite bourgeoisie, and has previously
worked as a barmaid and warehouse worker, yet her dispositions and actions
seem to be somewhat at odds with this: she has a broad knowledge and inter-
est in art, has even patronized and exhibited an artist’s work, enjoys
Shakespeare’s plays and Umberto Eco’s books and travels the world frequently
whilst, on the other hand, disapproving of ‘rubbish’ popular culture as repre-
sented by the glamour model Jordan – all practices more expectable in higher
reaches of social space. Yet when we reveal the fact that she frequently relies on
her affluent harbourmaster father for money, that, again thanks to her father,
she owns a large, renovated period house in the most desirable area of Bristol
which she lets out to lodgers or fully when she wants to go travelling, and that
she attended an exclusive private school, suddenly her dispositions make more
sense as we can place her higher in social space than if occupation alone were
considered. Not only that, but we can make sense of her occupational history
too: taking on bar work and the like was simply a means (along with parental
loans) to generate extra cash to invest in her map-making business – a venture
conceived as a form of self-realization and, ultimately, facilitated by the overall
distance from necessity her circumstances allow.
Presupposed here, of course, is the idea that not just capital but class dispo-
sitions are separable from occupational effects – after all, the point of plotting
capital is to reveal the major socio-cultural similarities and differences between
people. Conditions of existence, or distance from economic necessity (and, we
might add, the associated cultural conditions of existence that go with cultural
capital), produce habitus, and whilst occupational effects can contribute to and
compound these in exactly the same way as region, locale or family, the condi-
tions can be delivered independently of them by the wealth of factors mentioned
above. Hence the unemployed and homemakers are still subject to conditions
of existence dependent on how much capital they, and their significant others,

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 907

possess and will therefore have similar class dispositions (form over function,
manner over matter or whatever) as their employed social neighbours, albeit
specified by the particularities of their situation. The experience of housewives
and female part-time workers, for example, is structured by their confinement to
the domestic sphere as well as the internalized gendered dispositions forged by a
lifetime of external expectations. The tastes and practices they develop and dis-
play, either through the home (choice of furnishings, food bought and prepared)
or in their ‘leisure time’ (a ‘night out with the girls’ versus art or yoga classes)
are also shaped by the material and cultural conditions of existence provided by
their capital possession, including that coming from their spouses (who may be
more or less generous in how much money they distribute to their wife and the
household).8 Likewise, the unemployed share a common plight which will affect
their practices, but the differences in capital between them – education, back-
ground, savings, redundancy packages – plots them at different points in social
space and, along with the importance of trajectory in this instance (two people
with the same low means will act very differently if one was once a high-level
manager), marks out differences of disposition.
This means that, whilst statistics may reveal that the unemployed dispro-
portionately gather in the dominated section of social space where jobs are less
secure, as a category they can be so heterogeneous as to spread right over social
space. In fact, the same principle applies, in a less extreme way, to occupations
as well, and this is one of the most important, but overlooked, consequences of
Bourdieu’s perspective. Occupations are not pinpoints in social space, denoting
residence in a tiny, discrete, homogenous sector of the social structure. Instead,
because occupations going under the same name, with similar tasks, can remu-
nerate to relatively variable levels and require variable levels of credentials, they
occupy spaces with a greater or lesser spread over the social space. Witness the
diagrams in Distinction (1984: 262, 340), displaying correspondence analyses
of different sections of the social space, in which we see that the (analytical)
boundaries of particular occupational categories range over regions of different
shapes and sizes and even overlap.9 Secondary teachers, for example, tend to
cluster in the upper left section of social space, having more cultural capital rel-
ative to economic capital and displaying, on the whole, the dispositions and
practices associated with that zone accordingly. But we can recognize that,
empirically, individuals employed as secondary teachers have varying levels and
composition of capital (dependent on age, seniority, the school and subject
taught), and hence conditions of existence and dispositions, to the extent that
some may even overlap with industrial employers, themselves sneaking over
from their general gathering place in the upper right section of social space. Of
course, who gathers in which parts of this occupational region is itself affected
by an array of factors, not least gender and age (women and the youthful gen-
erally occupying lower positions) but also origins (especially in terms of social
capital available), and some occupations will have a greater spread than others.
So there is enough dispersion to recognize the internal heterogeneity of occu-
pational groups, even if there is still, analytically, a central hub of the occupational

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908 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

group – a mean position – around which the plotted individuals swarm.10 This
is something that Goldthorpe’s discrete classification, with its clear-cut bound-
aries and categorical ‘in-or-out’ logic, simply cannot recognize, raising all kinds
of questions over the analytical use of such a blunt instrument for picking out
the nuances and real patterns of social life, but the ultimate upshot, of this and
the other points in this section, is that occupation alone may not be enough
information to plot people reasonably accurately in the social and symbolic
space and fully understand their position within the multitude of class pro-
cesses. Knowledge of at least wealth, credentials and origins, all of which
Bourdieu uses alongside occupation in the final construction of social space,
would also be necessary in both quantitative and qualitative research to flesh
out the explanatory picture adequately.

Conclusion

What we have, in effect, is a reversal of the relationship between work and class
put in place by Wright and Goldthorpe. On the one hand, there is a new space
opening up for dialogue between the sociology of work and the sociology of
class, as processes within the world of work are once again envisaged as bear-
ing directly on the conceptualization and subject matter of Bourdieu-inspired
class research: experience, dispositions, struggles and social difference and dis-
tance. It allows, as a result, a valuable insight into the specification of the class
habitus, something which has vexed numerous critics of Bourdieu in recent
times (for an overview, see Atkinson, forthcoming). On the other hand, the rela-
tionship between class and occupation in statistical research, or for attribution
purposes, is weakened. Occupations may still be useful indicators of some
major elements of capital – so long as the categories are attuned to Bourdieusian
assumptions rather than Goldthorpe’s – but work is nevertheless logically sep-
arable from position in social space and, furthermore, gives only a rough proxy
for a heterogeneous, if limited, area of social spread rather than a discrete pin-
point. Ultimately, people without work can be plotted in social space, and peo-
ple in work can only be roughly plotted.
I would venture, therefore, a few suggestions for the practical conduct of
Bourdieu-inspired class analysis. Firstly, on a qualitative level it is important to
know as much about the respondents’ available capital, past and present, as
possible, and the likely effects of their job or lack thereof, if the differing dis-
positions and perceptions of apparently similarly situated individuals are to be
fully comprehended rather than written off as idiosyncratic or evidence of the
theoretical weakness of the habitus (cf. Lahire, 2003). In quantitative research,
on the other hand, there is a need to move away from the reliance on
Goldthorpe’s, or the ONS’s, scheme for classifying occupations – it may be
handy, but it is not logically sound – and to construct an alternative set of cate-
gories that can better capture the key divisions of capital and therefore condi-
tions of existence whilst remaining cognisant of the complications of occupational

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 Rethinking the work–class nexus Atkinson 909

effects. Furthermore, a range of additional variables indicating capital also need

to be included in analysis if the complexities of positioning and practices are to
be more accurately understood. One’s class is not determined by one’s occupa-
tion alone, as even Bennett et al.’s (2009) recent attempt to take Bourdieu to the
quantitative level implies, perhaps unintentionally, when it labels the ONS
categories as ‘classes’ and treats them separately from education, but by the
individual agent’s totality of pertinent resources, furnished by a multitude of
fonts, that feed into and orient their most routine experiences.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are to Harriet Bradley, Mike Savage and the three anonymous referees
for their useful comments. I hope they will forgive me for not being able to address
all of their concerns here. I am also grateful to Mike Savage for putting me in touch
with the editors, who were very accommodating and encouraging.

Notes

1 This also appears contrary to Bourdieu’s earlier work with Boltanski on the
space of posts (1981), before he had to ‘rethink the problem of social class from
top to bottom’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 160).
2 I am aware that Bennett et al. (2009) have recently rejected the idea of social
space in their attempt to reproduce Distinction, but, for reasons that cannot
be elaborated here, I am not convinced by their methodological procedure or,
therefore, their conceptual conclusions.
3 This position can therefore assimilate the ‘individuals in families’ approach
demonstrated in the analysis of Plutzer and Zipp (2001) and, under a different
description, by Bennett et al. (2009: Chap 12), in which capital and classed
experiences are logically individual but inflected by the dynamics of the house-
hold, even though the latter is premised on (mistaken) criticism of Bourdieu.
4 Notice that these categories are different from Goldthorpe’s because they dis-
tinguish the cultural and economic fractions of the dominant class rather than
rolling them together in a single service class. Hence the problematic nature of
current uses of Goldthorpe’s scheme amongst Bourdieu-inspired researchers.
5 Of course when the workers are women, as in Hebson’s (2009) study 30 years
later, the result is a compromised femininity, but the championing of being
‘down to the ground’, i.e. grounded or practical, and the resultant rejection of
white-collar work, is still evident (2009: 34).
6 This entails recognition of Goldthorpe’s distinction between the ‘labour contract’
and ‘service relationship’, but sees it as an important element in structuring subjec-
tive experience rather than life chances. The latter are more coherently linked to
general conditions of existence, which can, as we will see, transcend occupation.
7 I have elsewhere argued that, when looked at closely, Bourdieu’s theory as it
stands is actually unable to grasp fully and coherently such complicating fac-
tors (Atkinson, forthcoming), but also forwarded my own phenomenological
remedy in the same paper.

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910 Sociology Volume 43 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2009

8 Although both studies lack the methodological depth necessary to unveil this
richness, for the broad point cf. Green et al. (1990) and Bennett et al. (2009).
9 These spaces are not ‘fields’ in Bourdieu’s terminology, as they fail to display
the criteria necessary to describe them as such—for example, common stakes,
struggle and competition, etc. They are, however affected by the existence of
fields and people’s places and strategies within them, whether the field of power
(Bourdieu, 1984), the field of higher education institutions (Bourdieu, 1996),
the journalistic field (Bourdieu, 1998), the field formed by a large employer
(Bourdieu, 2005), or whatever.
10 This dispersal and overlap is implied in Bennett et al.’s (2009) research but left
theoretically unelaborated, primarily because they reject the idea of social
space, and obfuscated by their reliance on those troublesome ONS categories.

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Will Atkinson

Is an ESRC post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of

Bristol. He is interested in social class, inequality, social change and social theory and has
published on these topics in Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology and The Sociological
Review. He is currently converting his thesis into a monograph provisionally entitled In
Search of the Reflexive Worker.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8
1UQ, UK.
E-mail: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk

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