Types of social class identity

Question 1

Traditional upper class identity

Answer 1

• Capitals –> social, economic, cultural
• Top Universities
• Private education
• Traditional, landowning aristocracy
• Marrying into other upper class families
• High culture leisure activities

Question 2

Nouveau riche upper class identity

Answer 2

• Traditional upper class regard them with poor taste, culturally inferior, lacking cultural capital
• Conspicuous consumption
• Acquired wealth in own lifetimes
• May attempt to achieve acceptance by traditional upper class but it is difficult
• Establish their identities through lifestyles and extravagant consumption

Question 3

Middle class identity

Answer 3

• Financial and creative
• Professionals –> value education, lawyers, doctors, independence
• High culture of cultural capital
• Concern with health
• Education commitment
• Recognition of individual effort, ambition, self help
• Deferred gratification

Question 4

Traditional working class identity

Answer 4

• Commitment to labour party
• Us vs them attitude to bosses
• Close knit community
• Manual work
• Strong sense of class solidarity
• Popular and folk culture
• Traditional gender roles
• Sugarman –> fatalism, immediate gratification, present time orientation

Question 5

New working class identity

Answer 5

• Emphasis on consumer goods and conspicuous consumption
• A privatised, home centred lifestyle
• Instrumental approach to work
• Little loyalty to others
• Women in paid employment
• High levels of home ownership

Question 6

The underclass identity

Answer 6

• New right writers such as Murray see features such as –> living off benefits, exclusion from school, high levels of illegitimacy and lone parenthood, crime, benefit fraud and drug abuse, work shy attitudes, education failure
• Chav stereotype
• Members cut off or excluded from the rest of society
• Jones believes in the demonization of the working class
• Jones/Shildrick/Marxism believes unemployment is due to structural inequality