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that massively divides girls and young women in terms of their educational attainment
and life trajectories' (Walkerdine et al. 2001, 4). Others stress the continued power
of class to determine lifestyle and differences between class factions. Wynne (1990)
for example, uses Bourdieu's concepts of economic and cultural capital in his
ethnographic investigation of the differences in lifestyle between two contiguous
factions of the 'new middle-class'. Similarly, Savage et al. (1992) use empirical
work to modify Bourdieu's (1986) claims about French class and culture, arguing
that the British middle-class is made up of three factions that must also be set against
variables of gender, age and region. In these studies, all of which in some way account
for the specificity of dramatic social and cultural change, class continues to be the
key determinant in the differences between peoples' lifestyle and life chances.
Others offer a more robust dialogue with contemporary social theory, in an
attempt to engage with the conceptual approaches which map social change, while
holding on to class as a category. Savage (2000) and Southerton (2002) both bring
contemporary social theory to bear on their analysis of class. Their work is not
wholly incompatible with Chaney's (1996) claim about the shifting nature of forms
of social identity. For them, class still matters, but its form of salience has changed:
'ordinariness' has become a central identity motif, replacing collective class identities
with individualised class identities (Savage 2000b); and while class is still central, it
is not the only factor at play in social practices of identity and belonging (Southerton
2002).
The issue of whether people still feel a sense of belonging to social class is
addressed in a tranche of empirical studies by Savage (1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2001,
2005). He contends for example (2000b), that people tend not to recognise the
structural significance of class, and in cultural terms, class is not self-consciously
acknowledged as a source of social identity. Yet as he asserts: 'structurally, in terms
of the impact on people's life chances, class appears to be as important as it ever was,
indeed possibly more important than it was 30 years ago' (Savage 2000a, xii). While
he suggests that in contemporary Britain class is no longer a stable origin of collective
identity, he argues against the 'individualization' thesis (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991)
that class is a redundant concept in late modernity. Using an empirical survey with
200 middle-class men and women in Manchester, Savage analyses 'repertoires of
class talk' (Savage 2000b, 110): respondents were asked if Britain was a classless
society and if they identified with a social class.
Arguing for a move which no longer sees class as a collective enterprise,
Savage draws on Bourdieu's notion that class groups act to
differentiate
themselves
from others in the social field. For Bourdieu, class is implicitly experienced as a
category which is embedded in people's sense of self-value; it affects their approach
to others and, crucially, how they conceive of themselves as individuals. In this
way, Bourdieu's approach gestures implicitly towards some of the useful tenets of
individualisation while holding on to the category of class. Savage's data revealed
that people were uncertain which class they belong to, in fact two-thirds of the sample
were ambivalent about their class identity. Despite this, people did have a working
knowledge of class terminology: they recognised it as a measuring device which
acts to 'position' people and they were aware of the social assessments of people
which inhere in class terms. Significantly, people were more ready to discuss class
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