Bourdieu, housing and the spatialisation of class: some critical issues

Mike Savage

‘to account more fully for the differences in life-styles between the different
fractions – especially as regards culture – one would have to take account of their
distribution in a socially ranked geographical space. A group’s chances of
appropriating any given class of rare assets (…) depend partly on its capacity for
specific appropriation, defined by the economic, cultural and social capital it can
deploy in order to appropriate materially or symbolically the assets in question,
that is, its position in social space, and partly on the relationship between its
distribution in geographical space and the distribution of scarce assets in that
place’ (Bourdieu, 1985: 124: italics in the original)

Over recent years, there has been a signal impasse in the sociology of stratification in the
UK. The emphasis on occupation and employment position as the fundamental unit of
class position which has characterised class analysis since the early 1970s has
increasingly been called into question (e.g. Crompton 1998; Devine et al 2004). The
various writings of Pierre Bourdieu have been a central reference point for those who
have sought a different kind of class analysis, and his concepts of capital, habitus and
fields are now widely disseminated in the recent revival of class analysis in Britain (for
one discussion, see Savage, Warde and Devine 2005)1. One aspect of Bourdieu’s
contribution, explicit in the passage cited above is his concern to recognise the interplay
between social space and geographical space, and to locate stratification as a
fundamentally spatial process. This is an aspect of Bourdieu’s work which has not
attracted a significant interest: there is relatively little interest in the field of geography,
urban or housing studies in his conceptual approach and its implications. The aim of this
paper is to critically explore the potential for Bourdieu’s ideas to inform the urban
research agenda and in this encounter develop a new approach to social stratification.

This is an interesting exercise, I contend, in view of the considerable evidence that what
might be called the ‘spatialisation of class’ hypothesis is attracting increasing interest
from a variety of perspectives. This idea, baldly stated, runs that whereas your occupation
used to define your social class, now it is your residential location. Where you live is
more socially salient than your job. Insofar as this ‘spatialisation of class’ hypothesis can
be sustained, it indicates the potential of an invigorating reconciliation of research
agendas in the areas of stratification, urban studies, and housing studies. In wider political
terms, it indicates the need for a new concern with the politics of space and territory as
central to contemporary social relations.

The stakes are therefore high. The aim of this paper is to seek some conceptual clarity
about what is entailed – or what might be entailed – by the ‘spatialisation of class’
hypothesis. There are numerous precedents for linking stratification and housing. The
most prominent are the famous arguments of Rex and Moore (1967), and Pahl (1970), on

1
Evidence for this revival is best found in the most recent issue of the journal Sociology, a special issue
devoted to ‘Class Identity’.
housing classes and urban gatekeepers which emerged within neo-Weberian sociology,
before they were dissipated by the new Marxist urban sociology and the critique of
spatial fetishism (see Saunders 1981). Harking back even further, the Chicago school
ecological approach carries similar implications, and studies of ethnicity and race have
always been strongly influenced by this mode of analysis. We therefore need to be careful
that we do not simply lurch backwards to recover familiar, possibly discredited ideas: I
will argue that there are actually subtly different aspects to the ‘spatialisation of class’
hypothesis, which need to be carefully unravelled and distinguished. Bourdieu’s own
arguments offer one way of developing this perspective, but there are other issues which
need to be recognised, some of which problematise his arguments.

In developing this theoretical argument, I deploy evidence from a collaborative study

‘Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion’ (Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva,
and Alan Warde), which constructs a systematic map of cultural taste, participation and
knowledge in Britain using both survey and qualitative evidence2. This paper in no way
seeks to present the general findings (for early indications of which, see Bennett et al
2005; Savage et al 2005), but rather uses the data to exemplify pertinent issues in the
current debate. This will also provide context for the Elizabeth Silva and Dave Wright’s
paper.

I emphasise that in British debates the spatialisation of class hypothesis emerges out of an
‘impasse in class analysis’. I then turn to consider how far Bourdieu’s ideas offer a
satisfactory means of elaborating and developing this account. I argue that there is
considerable value in Bourdieu’s emphasis on the tensions of the social field in certain
kinds of areas, but that issues around cultural consumption in the home, and in domestic
space more generally, is underdeveloped, for reasons that I elaborate. I argue that we
need to supplement Bourdieu’s interest in social space with an elaborated account of
reflexivity to allow us to recognise the real significance of class and space.

1: The ‘paradox of class’.

My interest in the ‘spatialisation of class’ hypothesis lies working through what I see as
‘the paradox of class’ (Savage 2000), which addresses the contentious arguments about
the decline, or resilience of class, powerfully waged in British sociology the 1980s and
1990s between advocates of class analysis, notably John Goldthorpe and Gordon
Marshall (for instance Marshall et al 1988; Goldthorpe and Marshall 1991), and various
critics, notably Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Ray Pahl, Scott Lash and John Urry.

Traditional approaches to class, whether Marxist or Weberian, are rooted in a class

formation paradigm where - in specific circumstances delineated by social researchers -
classes could be seen to form as a social and cultural entity, on the basis of common
occupational positions. Most famously Goldthorpe’s (1980: 28) celebrated studies of
social mobility in Britain insist ‘the focus of our research… has been an interest in

2
The survey was a national random survey of 1564, with a response rate of 53%, and an ethnic boost of
200, which took place in 2003-04.
mobility from the standpoint of its implications for class formation and class action’. The
problem, bluntly, is that it is very difficult to detect class formation in the contemporary
world. This is not to say that class does not remain a very powerful predictor of a range of
life chances: educational prospects, social mobility prospects, health outcomes, and so on,
are all highly correlated with class: if anything, it appears a more powerful determinant
than twenty years ago3. However, despite this, there is little sign that anything akin to
class formation is taking place: people tend not to identify as members of clear and
unambiguous classes (Savage et al 2001), do not see themselves as sharing cohesive class
based cultures, in the way that historians (whether rightly or wrongly) have talked about
in earlier times. There is little sign that forms of social action are grounded in class.
However important class appears to be objectively, it does not seem to have much direct
impact on awareness and social action. Class structure does not relate to class formation
and action.

Retrospectively, the defining moment in this emerging recognition of the limits of the
class formation perspective derives from the debate about class and voting. In a series of
influential interventions, Anthony Heath, Geoffrey Evans and John Goldthorpe (see
Heath et al 1985; 1991, and especially Evans 1999) insisted that despite widespread
claims about the decline of class voting in Britain, there was no secular trend for the
relationship between class and voting to decline over time, when this relationship was
measured in terms of relative class voting, using the Nuffield class schema. This
argument can be seen as the last gasp of those insisting on the continued relevance of
social class for understanding political action. During the 1980s and early 1990s these
writers waged a dogged and skilful campaign to repudiate the ‘class dealignment’
orthodoxy. However, the New Labour election victory in 1997, and its follow ups in 2001
and 2005, fully confirmed the supporters of class dealignment. Even using Goldthorpe et
al’s preferred measures, large sections of the middle classes swung to Labour, away from
their ‘natural’ class party of Conservative or Liberal, and the historic association between
class and voting was almost entirely dissipated. Table 1 uses our CCSE survey on the
voting intentions of various occupational class groups, and shows how Labour
preferences - in particular – are now remarkably uniform across occupational class
positions: leaving aside the lower technicians where there are small numbers of
respondents, the percentage intending to vote Labour varies only between 22.5% and
30.8%4. With this shift, the historic links between the Labour movement, working class
politics, and indeed the class formation paradigm itself seems utterly dead.

However, this does not mean that class does not matter. During research from the later
1990s, I became interested in the cultural significance of residential location, where such

3
Though it is a moot point whether occupational class is the single most important predictor of such life
chances. Some researchers insisting on the importance of class, notably Wright (1997) avoid discussing
such issues by only exploring the impact of occupational class on specific life chance outcomes. By
contrast the eminent American sociologist of stratification, Donald Treiman (2001: 301) has recently
recorded that there is ‘growing consensus that the driving force in intergenerational status attainment is
family cultural capital, which is strongly reflected in the educational requirementsof the father’s
occupation’.
4
Further evidence of this shift comes from Whiteley et al’s study of the 2001 General Election which
demonstrates the limited importance of class.
location came to carry coded (and occasionally explicit) forms of class awareness and
identity. Drawing on 182 interviews with residents in different parts of Manchester,
Gaynor Bagnall, Brian Longhurst and I (Savage et al 2005) drew attention to the extent
that many respondents were highly vested, practically, emotionally and aesthetically in
their place of residence. This articulation of ‘elective belonging’ carried social signifiers,
and marked out places as the habitats of specific social groups. Rather than the image of
middle class spiralist which proliferated in the 1960s, where professionals and managers
moved regularly from one suburb to the next in pursuit of male corporate careers, it now
seemed that most people were highly resistant to moving, or at least, the place they
moved to needed to be appropriate for ‘someone like them’, or someone they aspired to
be. It was those who happened to be living in an area ‘simply’ because they had been
born and bred there, and had not made a choice to move to a place of their own, who
often felt they did not belong. It was those who felt they had made a conscious choice,
which they thought confirmed them in their identity, who now defined the meaning of
contemporary urban belonging. These spatial identities had complex class concomitants,
since a crucial way of assessing how far a particular place ‘fits’ someone with their class
character. Class identities seemed anchored into a territorial politics, though by being
spatialised, class becomes misrecognised as a salient social force.

2: Bourdieu’s social theory

The importance of Bourdieu’s social theory in addressing the paradox of class is that he
offers a coherent theoretical alternative to the class formation problematic. Unlike Marx
and Weber, Bourdieu is insistent that classes rarely form as cohesive social collectivities.
Such is the power of the three main forms of capital (economic, cultural and social), and
the symbolic violence they entail, that people routinely misrecognise their social location
and dis-identify with class (Skeggs 1997). For Bourdieu, classes are always disorganised
and fragmented, so that we should not expect to find them parading as definite social
groups.

In developing his own account of class, much has been written about Bourdieu’s
conceptions of ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’, especially with respect to whether they are
deterministic, either through implying an instrumental approach to social action (with
respect to the concept of capital), or in reducing social life to psychologically grounded
dispositions (habitus) (see generally Jenkins 1992; Swartz 2000). However, it is
Bourdieu’s conception of field that is the most important and needs most attention in our
discussion. Using his preferred sporting metaphors, Bourdieu sees social life as organised
around different ‘fields’ in which players struggle for position and advantage. This
metaphor of sport is very important for Bourdieu: it explains why he does not think there
are ‘neutral’ positions within a field5, and that it is inevitable that all players are required
to contest against others – even from hopeless situations. It is also not recognised enough
in the UK that Bourdieu’s emphasis on social space and on his concept of the field is

5
C.f. ‘it is not so easy to describe the “pure” gaze without also describing the naïve gaze which it defines
itself and vice versa: and that there is no neutral, impartial, ‘pure’ description of either of either of these
opposing visions’ (Bourdieu 1985: 32)
wedded to the use of correspondence analysis as his preferred methodological instrument.
Derived from the French mathematician Benzecri, correspondence analysis seeks to
render social position as a series of co-ordinates in Euclidian space, and through this
means to portray maps of ‘social space’6.

We can explore the ramifications of this approach by showing such a correspondence

analysis, drawn from our own CCSE survey (see Figure 1). This correspondence analysis
identifies associations from 168 different variables covering taste and participation for
music, reading, art, eating, sport, TV, and film. The way to read Figure 1 is that those
variables which are closer together tend to be co-present. Thus looking at the top left
hand side of Figure 1 we can see that those who like science fiction books also like heavy
metal music, for instance. The more that variables are distributed on the edges of Figure
1, the more they are exclusive compared to those in the opposite parts of the Figure. By
inspecting these visual arrangements, we are able to see what variables they are
incompatible with7. We can thus see Figure 1 as a kind of cultural map of contemporary
Britain.

One issue which Figure 1 immediately poses is how far Bourdieu is intrinsically wedded
to a Euclidian conception of geometric space in which it is the fixed distances between
points which are necessarily attributed great importance. Much contemporary spatial
theory insists on space’s non-linearity, for instance through the way that diverse
mobilities permit points physically distant to nonetheless be close to each other. This is
an issue which might problematise Bourdieu’s project. This is probably not an
overwhelming objection so long as Bourdieu sees correspondence analysis as a heuristic
device for unravelling ‘social space’ but it clearly does pose concerns about how social
space can meaningfully be mapped onto physical space. Here Bourdieu’s own
invocations about the overlap between geographical and social space are both under-
developed, and problematic. They are under developed because whilst there are numerous
rhetorical flourishes about the importance of physical space in his work, these rarely
amount to more than asides (see for instance, his account of ‘site effects’ in The Weight of
the World, or of his account of the phenomenological framework for his thinking in
Chapter 4 of Pascalian Meditations). Motifs recur, the most important of which is the
way that the physical separation between Paris and the provinces is an aspect of the
operation of cultural capital (with a pun on ‘capital’) itself (see Bourdieu 1985: 124;
1999: 125).

Bourdieu’s conception of the relationship between social and physical space needs to be
unravelled here. At one level, he models social space on the properties of physical space.

6
One can thus trace Bourdieu’s increasing deployment of the concept of field in his later work to his
interest in correspondence analysis which originated in the 1970s.
7
In order to aid interpretation, only those variables which contribute disproportionately to the two axes are
shown here. Others variables, which tend to be clustered towards the centre of the Figure and which are not
well separated are omitted. We only show axes 1 and 2 here, since these are significantly more important
than axis 3. For further discussion of the use of correspondence analysis in our work see Savage et al 2005
and Gayo-Cal et al 2006.
 ‘Just as physical space, according to Strawson, is defined by the reciprocal
externality of positions (…), the social space is defined by the mutual exclusion,
or distinction, of the positions which constitute it….. Social agents, and also the
things insofar as they are appropriated by them and therefore constituted as
properties, are situated in a place in social space….’ (Bourdieu 2000: 134, italics
in the original).

Let me pursue the value of this analogy point by looking at the patterns revealed by
Figure 1. Looking at the left hand side, along axis 1, most of the variables arrayed
indicate participation in particular kinds of leisure activities (museums, rock concerts, art
galleries, French restaurants, opera, the cinema). On the other hand, most of those
activities which one normally does ‘at home’ do not register on Figure 1. Only seven of
the sixteen genres of TV programmes contribute to axes 1 and 2, and even these seven do
not contribute strongly: the most important is that those who like soap operas who are
situated on the middle right hand side of Figure 1. Film genres, which can also be viewed
at home, are also relatively unimportant. Musical taste by contrast is highly
discriminating, and although most music is also listened to at home, we can also see that
the taste for musical genres is close to participation at musical events: thus those who go
to the opera and orchestral concerts are in the bottom left of Figure 1, close to those who
like classical music. Those who sometimes go to rock concerts are close to those who like
rock music, in the top left of Figure 1. We can go further than this: with few exceptions,
indicators of participation, rather than taste, are on the edges of Figure 1, which means
they are more socially exclusive.

My point here is that cultural tastes and activities vary in the extent to which they demand
spatial exclusiveness, and Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus is more salient for those
activities which occur in public rather than domestic settings. As IT and other media
allow an increasing access to a range of information, entertainment, and leisure without
having to go to specific venues, so it doubtful that Bourdieu’s framework will help us to
unravel their organisation. The ‘suburbanisation’ of cultural life (Silverstone 1996; 2000)
is likely to entail the limited significance of the kind of socio-spatial exclusivisities that
form the basis of Bourdieu’s approach.

This suspicion that Bourdieu’s thinking depends on a problematic emphasis on fixed

physical space that fails to grasp the increasingly dynamic and mobile nature of
contemporary social and cultural forms is strengthened by those elements of his work
which attribute causality to physical space itself. ‘Thus the distance of farm workers from
legitimate culture would not be so vast if the specifically cultural distance implied by
their low cultural capital were not compounded by their spatial dispersion’ (Bourdieu
1985: 124), somehow implying that spatial dispersion has its own metric independent of
‘culture’. Elsewhere, Bourdieu seeks to avoid this problem through proliferating
qualifying terms ‘Social space tends to be translated, with more or less distortion, into
physical space…. The space is defined by the more or less close correspondence between
a certain order of coexistence ’ (Bourdieu 2000: 134-5, my italics). These sorts of
qualifiers admit the problem, but do not provide a satisfactory means of understanding
how such ‘distortions’ happen.
Here I think it is possible to place Bourdieu’s own equivocations onto a more satisfactory
basis through a closer engagement with debates about identity and reflexivity. This can
be done by radicalising Bourdieu’s own insistence on the interplay between social and
physical space through making the relationship between these two itself the object of
analysis. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s conception of aura (1973), we can see that the
extent to which cultural activities and tastes embody distinction does indeed depend on
the extent to which they are uniquely positioned in time and space, but that there are
historical shifts in the way that auratic cultural forms operate. It follows that in an era
when many cultural forms are mechanically reproducible, and can be appreciated in
numerous different physical locations, then the extent to which these convey distinction
will decline. However, it does not follow that all aspects of social and cultural life are
remade, in the way that epochal theorists imagine, since there continue to be some social
processes which continue to demand exclusive use of fixed space. Residential dwelling is
arguably now the most important of these. People’s residential dwellings continue to
operate as exclusive, fixed, physical spaces: we don’t kick out other people and move
into their house to ‘try it out’ in the way that we might surf websites or TV stations.
Housing thereby remains a vital field which continues to mark one out. Where you live,
and the type of house you live in, cannot but mark you out individually in the way that
the TV programmes you watch, or the websites you surf do not (after all, you can scan so
many different kinds of websites….). The relative significance of housing vis-à-vis other
social and cultural fields thereby enhances its relative capacity to convey distinction and
thus is a fundamental part of the spatialisation of class.

A current instance of the telling importance of this point can be found in the politics of
educational choice, a further issue which has attracted much recent research interest. Like
housing itself, schooling remains fixed in specific locations, whilst the configuration of
schooling as a form of market provision has encouraged middle class parents to become
increasingly interventionist both in choosing appropriate schools for their children and in
intervening in their local schools to improve its performance. Ball and his associates thus
see an increasing concern to deploy local circuits of capital, where local schools become
increasingly interwoven with their local milieu. This, they also show is related to the
proliferation of forms of intelligence about local schools, both the ‘cold’ knowledge
produced by official inspections and which is produced on websites and in official
publications, and the ‘hot’ knowledge that is derived from first hand contact with the
school and from face to face communication with other parents and staff. Housing
location is a crucial way, therefore, in which urban politics and especially that of school
choice is anchored.

However, we need to be careful in elaborating this argument about the fundamental

nature of housing as ‘exclusive’. If we seek to overlay housing variables, along with other
socio-demographic variables on the space represented in Figure 1 (see Figure 2), the
housing variables perform relatively weakly in differentiating the space. Educational
qualifications, occupational class (on axis 1) and age (on axis 2) are much more important
than housing tenure, type of house, value of house, and region. Of course the housing
variables are too crudely measured here to show up: if we had ready access to post code
information for our sample so that we could map ACORN categories onto the space of
Figure 1, it is likely that they would prove highly significant8. Even so, we need also to
note a second feature of housing which sits at odds with my emphasis here on its
distinctively exclusive quality. Houses are usually important sites for accessing new
kinds of mobile media and IT, and thus whilst they operate as sites of distinctiveness,
they also are ‘ordinary’ locations which link residents to numerous others sites from
which they are physically distant. Housing thus becomes unusually janus faced: outward
looking and inward looking: both a site to articulate our distinctive qualities and one to
perform ordinariness. Let me now speculate on how this specific quality of housing might
be important in accounting for the salience of residence in people’s identities.

3: Reflexivity and identity

Central to my arguments about the paradox of class is the weakness of occupational class
as the subject of self-conscious identification. The research I conducted with Gaynor
Bagnall and Brian Longhurst (Savage et al 2005) showed how many employees, even
those highly committed to their jobs, dis-identified from it, and did not seek sustained
social contact or identification with other workers. However, as I have emphasised in the
early pages of the paper, it is not that occupational class or employment has become less
important as such, rather that it does not serve as an axis of identification. Hence,
although much has been made of the radical restructuring of work and its broader social
implications, we need to be careful to distance ourselves from any simple account of the
‘epochal’ remaking of employment relations. Thus, it has been claimed that the internal
labour markets of large organisations have been radically undermined, and that in several
sectors of employment, for instance in IT, the corporate career is giving way to the use of
consultants and short term and flexible working. In such a situation employees
increasingly depend on their social contacts to provide enduring resources for them to
find work, and this encourages them to live in regions where they can nurture their social
links with colleagues and associates. Using an ethnography of software developers in
Dublin, for instance, O’ Riann argues that this commitment to place is rooted in the
remaking of work relations, and the limited security of employment found in the highly
volatile labour market. Insofar as this is generally true, then it might explain the growing
importance of residence over work.

However, although there are some important examples of these processes, it is unclear
that such trends are of general importance (Nolan 2004). Self-employment has actually
fallen in the UK, from 11.5% in the early 1980s to around 8%, ‘The overwhelming
majority in the U.K. work for an employer… they do not feel secure, nor are they
necessarily content with their terms and conditions, but the incantation that careers have
disappeared is erroneous’ (Nolan 2004: 5). One third of the workforce has remained with
the same employer for ten years or more, a proportion which has changed little over the

8
In fact we do have post code data on those respondents who agreed to be re-interviewed by us, and we are
in the process of linking this data to assess precisely how post code types are mapped in space. However,
because the sample size will be significantly smaller than for the survey as a whole, it will not be a
definitive exercise
past twenty years. In short, we should not explain the salience of residential area for
identities in terms of the declining structural significance of employment, but should
instead focus on why it might be a more compelling.

The issue is therefore not that housing is somehow more structurally important than
employment, but that it is a more compelling vehicle for identity. Why might this be?
McNay draws on Bourdieu to argue that a powerful source of identification comes from
the dissonance when people move between fields in which they are very differently
positioned. The reflexivity of certain kind of professional women, she argues, arises from
their awareness of the discrepancies between their domestic, female subordination, and
their privileges in the field of work. A rather similar account can be derived from the
social network theorist Harrison White (1992) who argues that identity arises from
contingency: where actions are automatic they do not demand reflection. It is only when
things happen differently from the way that is expected that identity emerges to make
sense of this discrepancy. With Ann Mische, Harrison White has recently developed this
account to emphasise the subversive importance of ‘switches’ between narrative domains
(see Knox, Savage and Harvey 2006). Within any one area of our lives we proceed in
scripted fashion, knowing how to act, who to engage with, and with what tools,
knowledges and information. However, at certain times we switch domains, and at this
moment lies the possibility of the script breaking down, being re-written, or called into
question. Housing, possibly now has precisely this capacity as a technology occupying
sites located on various central ‘switching points’. The household is not the site of the
‘private domestic’, but rather the arena in which different connectivities overlap, co-
incide, and jostle against each other. There is not a domestic ‘habitus’ since the space of
housing is so multiply positioned: it is a place to bring up the children, relax, work,
connect with friends, families, listen to music. Through this mechanism, it can also act as
a central node for the reflexivities arising out of the ruptures and tensions between these
activities

A further point can be developed here. New forms of domestic reflexivity depend on, and
in turn constitute, new kinds of information. One of the most important currents here,
represented in other papers in this conference, relates to a fundamental development in
social knowledge, whose implications are still scarcely recognised. The tradition of class
analysis rose alongside the sample survey, and its major exponents give survey analysis a
privileged place in their methodology (see notably Goldthorpe 2000). Occupational
classes are effective research devices in part because they comprise proportions of the
population which are large enough to obtain sufficient cell sizes to allow multivariate
analysis to obtain statistically significant results. However, over recent decades, the
supremacy of the sample survey for quantitative analysis has been called into question by
the dramatic expansion of social data gathered on entire populations, now routinely
collected by large numbers of public and private agencies, and collated by companies
such as Experian.

Other papers at this conference present examples of the potential of this kind of
information for social analysis: the point I want to stress here is that this kind of data is
mapped onto physical locations, but not, in the British case at least, onto occupational
positions. When one has data on entire populations the appeal of occupational classes as
analytical categories becomes much less marked: one can use much more specific and
particular categories for analysis, and indeed by proceeding inductively through cluster
and factor analysis, one can group according to whatever criteria turn out to matter rather
than through imposing deductively a ‘class schema’. In addition, the preferred
methodologies for the analysis of real data are mostly ‘descriptive’ ones, using methods
such as factor analysis to group and classify. When one goes to Amazon.co.uk simple
social network methods are used to indicate exactly other titles have been bought by
those buying any specific book: there is no need to rely on complex inferential statistics
about the ‘probable’ choices of ‘someone like you’. Within this framework, the mapping
of spatial areas, through various forms of GIS, allow much more specific and hence more
‘valuable’ forms of knowledge than conventional class analysis, with its log linear
models and the like, can offer.

We can reasonably ask why this kind of social data proliferates on a spatial basis, yet not
on an occupational or employment basis. The answer is straightforwardly due to the
operation of property rights: employers mainly treat information about the conditions of
their employees as their private affair, and not to be disclosed into the public realm where
they can be entered into publicly accessible data bases9. By contrast, the very fact that
living spaces are particularised in space through being legally demarcated from others
permits to be publicly identified so that they can be entered into data bases. Residential
units, as the unit for data collection, can also then by used by powerful capitalist agents,
such as lending companies, to assess risk and entitlement. The point here is that if we
recognise the reflexivity inherent in contemporary cultural life, whereby individuals
reflect on the ways they are categorized, and by this process develop their identities
through recognising their differences from others, they are confronted today with far
more tools to allow them to do this around residential location than around employment
and occupation. As Roger Burrows and his associates have examined, these kinds of
analyses themselves feed into popular perceptions, especially through the potential of
people to use web resources to find out about different local areas. People thus have the
potential to find out much more about the social and cultural concomitants of location.
There is however, no counterpart which allows them to find out about the concomitants
of those who have the same job, or income, as them (there is no www.onthejob (for
instance) as a counterpart to <www.upmystreet>. Through this means, awareness of the
cultural politics of place can be enhanced through recursive and reflective processes,
whereas occupational class becomes an ever more opaque category. We have to see this
process as one which is itself depends on specific kinds of power relations, which are
then reproduced through its own routine operations, rather in the manner that Nigel Thrift
(2003) excavates a form of ‘knowing capitalism’ which depends on being able to know
itself through the proliferation of its auto-intelligence.

To conclude…..

9
The extent to which employment based data can become a public resource is a political issue. In some
nations data on individual incomes, derived from tax returns, is available for at least some research
purposes, though in others it remains confidential.
This instance reminds us of the need therefore not to give a priori attention to housing,
but to focus instead on the relationships between housing and other social fields, to
explore specifically why housing might be germane to contemporary identities. Of major
importance here is the restructuring of employment relations and the implications that
this brings