Presentation Transcript

1. Thinking Sociologically About Class and Space

   Nicholas Gane Department of Sociology University of Warwick
2. Karl Marx Two main classes: the workers and the capitalists (or in his terms the proletariat and bourgeoisie) Class is about the struggle between conflicting interests
3. Max Weber Class is not necessarily relational but is more about stratification There is a difference between class and status Your occupation might not be the only thing that determines class
4. Other ways of thinking about social class A FTSE 100 company Experian has produced a classification class Mosaic – which classifies populations by working with an unrivalled data set Their marketing blurb: ‘Experian’s Mosaic UK consumer classification provides an accurate understanding of the demographics, lifestyles and behaviour of all individuals and households in the UK’.
5. Class/classification This is effectively a form of commercial social science (with huge datasets and processing power) It produces a spatial mapping of social class by ‘classifying all individuals, households or postcodes in the United Kingdom’ It divides this population into ‘141 Mosaic person types aggregated into 67 household types and 15 groups’ See http://guides.business-strategies.co.uk/mosaicuk2009/html/visualisation.htm
6. Fieldwork: Haberdasher Street (N)
7. Haberdasher Street (S)
8. High Rise
9. Haberdasher Estate
10. City Adventurers
11. Home Ownership
12. Peabody I
13. Peabody II
14. Celebrity