Class identity Flashcards
What does Vice’s the UK’s young reoffenders: Rule Britannia tell us?
That marginalised youth have a restricted habitus with a lack of opportunities therefore they are stuck in a poverty cycle and can’t imagine a life beyond their council estate
What is cultural capital?
The ability to recognise other cultures and languages and how it influences your life
What is economic capital?
Your wealth
What is social capital?
It is the resources, benefits and opportunities individuals gain from their network of relationships and social connections embedding the value of social interactions, trust and shared norms within a community or group
Who came up with the ideas of capitals?
Bourdieu 1984
What is habitus?
It is the way in which people perceive and respond to their social reality through their skills, disposition and habits they gain through socialisation
What is objective and subjective sense of class identity?
Objective can be measured through jobs and leisure activities whilst subjective is how you feel within the class system despite the objective factors
What is Max Weber’s idea on social class?
The likelihood of a person gaining access to opportunities, experiences and material goods
What is cultural capital embodied?
They are intangible and unquantifiable and include an individual’s practices, general disposition, skills, knowledge and accent
What is cultural capital objectified?
The possession of a material object that is acceptable to dominant agents in a social space
What is cultural capital institutional?
They are rewards such as qualifications given by educational institutes
What is Mackintosh and Mooney (2004) theory on the upper class?
They argue that this group is largely “invisible,” since they don’t interact with the majority of the UK population, having separate education, leisure activities and so on.
How do Marxists believe charity is used?
To normalise destitution
Who are the super rich?
They are a social class group that have made their fortunes through hard work and the media portray them as celebrities because of their lavish lifestyle. However, unlike the upper class, they lack cultural capital.
What is Savage (1992) opinion on social class?
They argue that there are cultural differences between the middle class factions of professionals and managers
What is Savage (2015) opinion on social class?
He used Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital to divide up the classes further, identifying groups such as the established middle class, the technical middle class and the emergent service workers
What is Saunders (1990) opinion on social class?
They note differences in cultural values of the individualistic private sector workers and community orientated sector workers
How do you judge social class?
- money
- possessions
- house
- lifestyle
- holidays
- style
- television viewing habits
- accent
- occupation
- norms / values
What does Tony Blaire believe?
We are all middle class now
What is Fox (2004) theory on social class?
The middle class can be separated into the upper middle class, the middle middle class and the lower middle class
Who are the working class?
They are a romanised social group defined by skilled, semi - skilled and unskilled manual workers uniting under a proletarian identity of traditional gender roles, close family and a close association with their class
What is Skeggs (1997) theory on social class?
He studied working - class women who felt humiliated by the ways which teachers and doctors judged and dismissed them due to their working class background. So, women felt they have to look respectable in their style in fear of judgement
What is Murray (1984) theory on social class?
He argues that over - generous benefits encourage some people to develop a culture in which they don’t take responsibility for their own actions and have an expectation that they will be looked after the state
What is Marshall (1998) theory on social class?
They point out that surveys frequently show that people still themselves belonging to a particular class
What is Braverman (1974) theory on social class?
Capitalist production methods are designed to deskill workers and reduce their control over the labour process through simple jobs and repetitive tasks making them easily replaceable with machinery for efficiency. This deskilling makes workers vulnerable to exploitation creating dissatisfaction, low moral and mental health problems
What is Bloodworth (2018) theory on social class?
They consider the effects of declining working class industries as people are taking gigs to earn a wage losing a sense of community that comes from work and could be used as an explanation why we voted out of the EU in 2016
How is the under class characterised?
- high rates of illegitimacy and single parenthood
- high rates of crime
- high rates of welfare dependency
- low levels of education and employment
- a sense of hopelessness and despair
What are the reasons for the underclass?
- decline in traditional family
- rise in single - parent families
- decline in social capital
- increased drug use
- decline in work ethic
What do post modernists Pakulski and Waters (1996) believe about social class?
They argue that we are no longer defined by what we do, which is the basis of social class identities but rather by what we consume a shift from production to consumption
