Thinking Sociologically About Class and Space

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