Book | Chapter
(2010) Class, individualization and late modernity, Dordrecht, Springer.
The idea that class has ceased to structure life courses was always the more controversial and contentious component of the reflexivity thesis. Much more credible, so most commentators admit, are the claims that class lifestyles, differentiation, explicit identities, talk of class and class politics – in short, the various elements of the symbolic dimension of class – have waned to the point of extinction and been supplanted by atomization, personal responsibilization, reflexively adopted leisure interests, subcultural or other affiliations and post-materialist politics. But, leaving politics and explicit class discourse until the next chapter and focusing here on lifestyles and social identity, some prefatory reflection is necessary to ensure conceptual rigour. Specifically, what precisely would it take for a phenomeno-Bourdieusian model of the structuring of lifestyles and identities by class to be defeated by social change? If globalization and affluence have opened out the lifeworlds of the population to a spectacular array of new and exotic practices while relegating others to history, does thisipso facto demolish class lifestyles and identification?
Publication details
Full citation:
Atkinson, W. (2010). Distinction and denigration, in Class, individualization and late modernity, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 133-159.
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