Componentes software de la arquitectura

As a microcosm of class-analysis (see Crompton, 1995), Bourdieusian (e.g. 1984 [1979]; 2011 [1986]; 1987; 1989) forms of class-analysis have classically eschewed engagement with feminist social theory (see Skeggs, 2004: 19-20). Since at least the 1990s, however, a successful synthesis of the two traditions has been realised, culminating in a distinctive programme of Feminist Class-Analysis. Central to this interface has been the Bourdieusian (e.g. 2011 [1986]) model of “capitals”. In Feminist Class-Analysis, this schema is enlisted metaphorically (here, see Skeggs, 1997a; 1997b: 10; 161; 2004: 16; 48) in order to analyse the affective, habitual and experiential aspects of classed-belonging. ¹⁵ This is in diametric opposition to alternative operationalisations in which the schema is used mathematically (see Walkerdine et al., 2001: 39) – that is, as a(nother) form of ‘political arithmetic’

(Skeggs, 2004: 20, 43, 62) class-analysis – in which it is employed to allocate individuals into social classes. Conversely, in Feminist Class-Analysis, the schema has been used to describe how classed identities are (re-)produced in everyday life (e.g. Skeggs, 2004: 3, 5, 100-101, 108, 117-118) and, specifically, how classed identities are forged relationally, through so doing. ¹⁶ Skeggs (1997b) offers an

15 On “metaphor”, as a Formal Analytic resource, see §2.3.1.

16 This conceptualisation shares a number of similarities with the emerging “Critical Social Psychology of Class” (see K. Day, Rickett and Woolhouse, 2017: 475-480; see also, Holmes, 2019a).

illustrative example of this approach in her ethnography conducted with a group of working class, white women.

In this research, Skeggs (1997b) demonstrates how the classed identities of her participants came to be constituted through the details of their relational, quotidian practices. Skeggs (1997b: Ch. 5) observes, for example, that participants enacted a number of habitual practices to “dis-identify” with working class values, and so insulate themselves from negative judgements. Practices included, for instance, making ‘investments in their bodies, clothes, consumption practices, leisure pursuits and homes’ (Skeggs, 1997b: 95). The social class positions of Skeggs’ (1997b) participants were, in this way, enacted through the constitutive features of their different lifestyles. Further still, these identities were constituted relationally;

constructed with respect to what they omit or negate. This habitual, relational perspective of class-formation is a key contribution of Feminist Class-Analysis, and has been furthered in subsequent research. Lawler (2005: 431), for example, has argued that the construction of middle class identities can be furnished through articulations of ‘disgust’ vis-à-vis working class values (see also, Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989: 30; Lawler, 1999: 14; Tyler, 2008: 19-20).

Feminist Class-Analysis, as conducted within the Bourdieusian idiom, has thus functioned to further respecify the active conceptualisation of social class promoted in the Bourdieuisan oeuvre (Holmes, 2019a; 2019b). In summary, social class is positioned, here, as an aspect of social identity that is (re-)constructed actively and relationally in everyday life (see Crompton, 2008: 100; Tyler, 2015: 500). In contrast to the (neo-)Marxian and (neo-)Weberian approaches outlined above, the Bourdieusian position does not elide the “lived-work” of social class(es); nor is it treated simply as addendum through the mediatory lens of “Game Theory” and/or

“Rational Action Theory” (see Skeggs, 2004: 43, 67). This comparatively agentic conceptualisation of social class instead forms a locus for sociological inquiry in its own right.

1.6 Summary

The Bourdieusian approach thus relocates social class to the realm of consumption and, with it, everyday life. The lived-work of classed occupants is thereby

accommodated in this tradition and informs the statuses they can be legitimately ascribed. Qualitative research conducted using this framework – such as Feminist Class-Analysis – appreciates this component most markedly. The Bourdieusian perspective is not employed here simply to classify populations in preparation for quantitative inquiry, and/or for their analysis in the aggregate (e.g. Savage et al., 2013). Focal, instead, are the quotidian elements of classed-belonging.

Programmatically, therefore, this tradition, in particular, preserves the “dynamic”

conceptualisation of social class advanced by Bourdieu. Furthermore, it also upholds this theorisation procedurally insofar as it does not focus on the ascription of individuals into fixed classed positions.

How Bourdieu’s approach has been operationalised, therefore, is distinctive of preceding approaches by virtue of the primacy awarded to everyday life and to its corresponding focus on the lived-work of classed incumbents. Classed statuses are treated, therefore, not as static ‘threshold’ phenomena (à la Schegloff, 1991: 62;

1992a: 127), but as performative social identities that are both achieved in and reflexively expressed through the details of persons’ everyday lives. Bourdieusian (e.g. 2011 [1986]) class-analysis can therefore be distinguished in this respect.

However, this is not to say that it is, as such, completely removed from the (neo-)Marxian and (neo-)Weberian traditions introduced above. Instead, homologies continue to obtain with respect to the use of social class as an analysts’ resource and regarding the status of participatory relevance. These two parallels are outlined subsequently. Before they are addressed, however, the extent to which Bourdieusian (e.g. 2011 [1986]) research investigates classed incumbencies within everyday life requires qualification.

1.6.1 Everyday life

The empirical study of everyday life has a central position in Bourdieusian class-analysis. As introduced above, such research has investigated this domain through both quantitative and qualitative methods. Feminist Class-Analysis in the Bourdieusian mould, for example, has attended to the perceptions and lived-experiences of classed incumbents, culminating in qualitative descriptions of how classed identities are formed and sustained relationally and habitually (see, e.g., Skeggs, 2004: 118), and so uncovering what have been described elsewhere as the

“hidden injuries” of social class (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: e.g. 32, 38, 49).

Bourdieusian research, however, nonetheless remains limited in the investigation of this domain. Most notable, here, is the level of granularity upon which everyday life has been analysed. In this case, this research has restricted its purview, overwhelmingly, to participants’ accounts of their situated conduct, whereby perceptions are gleaned through “self-report” methods, such as interviews (e.g.

Lawler, 1999; Reay, 2002; see also, Savage et al., 2001; 2005a; 2005b), focus groups (e.g. Skeggs, Thumin and Woods, 2008) and video-diaries (e.g. Walkerdine, et al., 2001).

What it remains unable to provide, therefore, are insights into the details of individuals’ situated conduct, itself. In other words, they cannot be employed to analyse the practices that make relevant persons’ classed identities by/for co-participants. This distinction, between accounts of situated conduct, and of the conduct itself, has been elaborated by Psathas (1990: 9), who notes that recollections may constitute ameliorated versions of the reported conduct, and which are subject to the contingencies of remembering and forgetting (here, see also, Heritage, 1984a: 234-238). It will also be recalled that participants’ retrospective reports are not only re-processed from howsoever they were experienced, initially, into some subsequent interdiscursive form (Psathas, 1990: 6), but participants’ very testimonies are equally conditioned by the vicissitudes of the local environments within which they are recalled (e.g. Schegloff, 1998b: 252, fn. 18). Bourdieusian research has, therefore, acknowledged that social class is reportedly and/or observably enacted in everyday life. But it has not investigated how, where and/or for what practical purposes it is relevant for individuals in their everyday interactions.

To qualify, this omission is, of course, surprising. As others have noted, Bourdieu articulates an elegant theory of social class; one that promotes the significance of everyday life. However, this approach has neither elaborated, nor borne out, a procedural apparatus that can be used to examine the naturally-occurring social interactions occurrent between individuals (see Schegloff, 1996a: 162; Maynard, 2003: 71; M. H. Goodwin, 2006: 161; see also, Ford, Fox and S. Thompson, 2002a:

7). ¹⁷ It is paradoxical, therefore, that since (at least) the “cultural turn” of class-analysis, social class has been heralded as an agentic achievement; one that is produced and reproduced through quotidian praxis. In this sense, it has been respecified from a purely economic, “threshold” phenomenon, such as that which has been differently calibrated in the traditions of Marx and Weber, to a performative concept that is indexed through practices of cultural consumption (Holmes, 2019a;

2019b). Nevertheless, this research has not investigated how classed identities come to be occasioned in and through the details of individuals’ naturally-occurring conduct. Social class is re-conceived habitually, therefore, but how it features in situated interactions remains overlooked or obscured. The Bourdieusian tradition thereby aligns with the (neo-)Marxian and (neo-)Weberian approaches in this respect.

1.6.2 Analysts’ resource

Everyday life is therefore embraced by the Bourdieusian tradition, but only to a qualified extent. This contrasts the two remaining homologies which continue to obtain. These relate to the status of social class as an analysts’ resource – one that researchers are entitled to define – and to the absent requirement of participatory relevance. It is not that these homologies are incorporated but qualified by the Bourdieusian tradition, but rather that differences are negligible; both approaches align closely with the positions adopted in (neo-)Marxian and (neo-)Weberian research. The case of the former is most readily appreciable: Social class, here, remains a concept for which analysts are licensed to adjudicate. Whether this is determined ‘mechanically’ (see Savage, 2000: 110) through ratios of “capital”

(Bourdieu, 2011 [1986]), or as ‘metaphors’ (see Skeggs, 1997b: 10; 161; 2004: 16;

48), the coordinates of the concept remain delimited by analysts who define the operative ‘“cutoff” points’ for “classed” incumbencies, to borrow the expression (here, see Cicourel, 1976 [1968]: 168). Substantively, of course, Bourdieusian research entails a considerable shift in priorities from )Marxian and (neo-)Weberian research; what has formed the prevailing focus of critical comparisons.

How the phenomenon is adjudicated, for example, is no longer discriminated unilaterally through an economic criterion, but by way of Bourdieu’s (e.g. 2011

17 Susen (2013) is one notable exception.

[1986]) comparatively multidimensional schema (recall §1.5.1). However, this notwithstanding, the concept remains, fundamentally, an analytic resource; one circumscribed consensually by analysts.

1.6.3 Participatory relevance

Neither the qualified status of everyday life in the Bourdieusian tradition, nor the treatment of the concept as an analysts’ resource, have formed the focus of considerable sociological reflection. The final homology, by contrast, is a much-discussed feature of the Bourdieusian approach. This concerns the status of participatory relevance. For both the (neo-)Marxian and the (neo-)Weberian traditions, it will be recalled that the populations proposedly described need not identify with the ascriptions that are issued by analysts in order to warrant their classification, as such. In other words, the approaches align inasmuch as neither operate on a basis of participatory relevance. This position is also shared by the Bourdieusian tradition. It is set forth explicitly by Savage (2000) in the following passage.

“Bourdieu’s approach allows us to see class relationships as fundamental to claims of legitimacy and entitlement. However, his arguments lead not to an emphasis on class as heroic collective agency, but towards class as implicit, as encoded in people’s sense of self-worth and in their attitudes to and awareness of others – in how they carry themselves as individuals. Social distinctions that Bourdieu sees as lying at the heart of class processes might not always be apparent to people themselves, since if the culturally advantaged recognized their taste explicitly as part of that privileged class, this would devalue it, by contaminating it with a pragmatic and instrumental meaning utterly at odds with its claims to be universal, which lie at the heart of the entire Kantian aesthetic. It is hence the very salience of class struggles over distinction which explains why it is so difficult for them to be explicitly named and identified by their protagonists, and to be tied down into a neat model specifying the relationship between social location and culture.”

(Savage, 2000: 107, my emphasis)

In order for phenomena to be cast in classed terms, therefore, these need not be recognised by participants, commensurately. Bourdieusian research does not, in this way, trade upon a criterion of participatory relevance. Social class is understood, instead, to undergird social relations implicitly; that is, sub-/un-consciously (see W.

Sharrock and Anderson, 2016: 26). This conceptualisation is sustained in the quantitative tradition pioneered by Bourdieu (e.g. 1984 [1979]), using geometric methods of data-analysis (here, see Rouanet, Ackermann and Le Roux, 2000), in addition to the qualitative research conducted within Feminist Class-Analysis.

In the former, methods such as “Correspondence Analysis” and “Multiple Correspondence Analysis” (see Le Roux and Rouanet, 2010) are employed to explicate and to visualise latent homologies that potentially undergird sets of categorical data. What such methods do not yield, however, is whether such relationships are avowedly relevant for the co-participants intendedly described; a condition that is presumably orthogonal – even antithetical – to the use of latent methods of modelling. Social class positions are understood, accordingly, as a phenomenon that may be educed by the researcher through the construction of particular indices (e.g. Savage et al., 2013: 225-229), and where the boundaries between social classes are determined by using – and, specifically, by way of comparing (C. Mills, 2014: 441) – statistical methods of model selection; or, alternatively, through a criterion of theoretical coherence (e.g. Savage et al., 2015:

1030). A similar position regarding participatory relevance is upheld in qualitative Bourdieusian research; including that adopted in Feminist Class-Analysis. The research of Charlesworth (2000), for example, an ethnography conducted in Rotherham, typifies this position.

Charlesworth’s (2000: 7) approach involved looking ‘beneath what is said’ by participants. Through this approach, Charlesworth (2000) imputes the relevance of social class when participants do not articulate this relevance explicitly. ¹⁸ Examples

18 I have limited myself, here, to one exemplar of this approach. Additional instances, however, proliferate in Bourdieusian research (e.g. Skeggs, 1997b: 30-31, Ch. 5, 151; 2005:

50-54; Savage et al., 2005a: 146; 2005b: 114-116, 121). Examples can also be located in related traditions of class-analysis (e.g. Willis, 1977: 119-126, 137, fn. 1, 173; 2001:

200-of such an approach punctuate Charlesworth’s (2000) research. This includes, inter alia, the production of “expletives” (e.g. ibid.: 114-115), “profanity” (e.g. ibid.: 231-234), “laughter” (e.g. ibid.: 146), the absence of “euphemism” (e.g. ibid.: 214-215, 227, 229), and use of “brevity” (e.g. ibid.: 231-232). Charlesworth (2000: 237) even ventures so far as to attribute the entirety of the working class ‘articulatory style’ to their classed status. For Charlesworth (2000), therefore, this absence of participatory avowals of their self-conscious awareness is not a requirement for ascriptions of classed relevance; nor is it an omission, thereof. It is conceived, instead, as affirmative of the classed positions that are occupied by participants. In other words, it is because participants are deprived of such reflexive resources that they could not frame their experiences in classed terms (e.g. Charlesworth, 2000: 143). The very absence of participants’ orientations to social class is thereby transposed, en passant, into an instantiation of its putative omnirelevance (here, see fn. 252).

Participatory relevance thus occupies a non-criterial status in Bourdieusian class-analysis, aligning with the (neo-)Marxian and (neo-)Weberian traditions previously arrayed. In this case, it is not by-product of how the concept has come to be operationalised in quantitative, aggregate focussed inquiries. Rather, akin to the position of Marx and Weber (§1.3.3), it is fundamentally ineluctable of the approach.

19 Social class is conceptualised, as Skeggs (1997b: 74) writes, as a ‘structuring absence’, undergirding social relations implicitly. While Bourdieusian research has, then, reconfigured social class as an everyday achievement, this contribution is qualified with respect to the level of abstraction upon which this project has been realised (§1.6.1). Moreover, it has further retained the concept as an analytic phenomenon (§1.6.2); one that can be defined and ascribed by analysts, at their discretion, regardless of participatory (dis-)consensus (§1.6.3).

215). “Feminist Psychology”, for instance, showcases a host of conforming examples (e.g.

Reay, 1999: e.g. 90, 95, 102; Walkerdine et al., 2001: 46-47).

19 For EM/(M)CA reflections on this procedure, see, differently, e.g., Atkinson (1978: 211, fn. 8), Travers (1999: §5.1-§5.5) and W. Sharrock and Anderson (2016: 26).

1.6.4 Summary

This chapter has provided a partial review of transdisciplinary traditions of class-analysis. This has been conducted with modest ambition. I have shown that social class constitutes a longstanding locus of sociological inquiry; one that has been researched and theorised since the inception of the discipline (cf. fn. 4) under the auspices of diverse approaches. My purview here has been confined to three of the most predominant traditions of class-analysis; namely, Marxian (§1.2.1), Weberian (§1.2.2) and Bourdieusian research (§1.5). In turn, I have outlined how social class features within these traditions and underscored three novel homologies that are shared by these approaches and which also hold for other disciplinary traditions (e.g.

§1.4). Condensed, these are as follows:

(1) Everyday life. Social class has been overwhelmingly neglected in everyday life. When recognised, it has been investigated predominantly through theoretical models or self-report methods.

(2) Analysts’ resource. Social class is treated as a concept that is legitimately adjudicated and circumscribed by analysts.

(3) (Ir)relevance. The ascription of an individual, or set of individuals, into a social class does not require avowed recognition of this incumbency by the population ascribed.

Together, this position has been shown to be differently sustained across a range of traditions of class-analysis. As ethnomethodologists have observed, however, this approach is not localised to this tradition of research but represents a more generic type of sociology. Livingston (2008), for example, captures this dimension, in part, under the rubric of “Sociologies of the Hidden Order”:

“In sociologies of the hidden order, the workings of society are believed to underlie, or be hidden within, the visible actions and behaviors of members of society … In contrast, sociologies of the witnessable order examine how members of society produce and sustain the observable orderliness of their own actions.”

(Livingston, 2008: 124 in Heritage, 2018: 35)

To this effect, past sociological research has been content to treat social class as a status that need not be salient for the populations described, but one that can be employed by analysts at their discretion. A related dimension to this is what Bloor (1976 in Heritage, 1984a: 67; see also, Bloor, 1973; Benson, 1974: 127; Atkinson and Drew, 1979: 235, fn. 11; Wooffitt, 1992: 1-2) has referred to as the ‘sociology of error’. Analysts, in this capacity, are not merely entitled to define the occasions in which social class is (ir)relevant, but that their very ascriptions, thereof, can be prioritised over participants’ own (dis-)identifications, irrespective of whether these align, compete with or contradict those stipulated by analysts. Taken together, these dimensions represent a distinctive form of sociology; what has been referred to elsewhere as ‘constructive analysis’ (e.g. H. Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970: 340) – or

‘formal analytic sociology’ (e.g. H. Garfinkel, 1991: 10; hereafter, FA). ²⁰ As illustrated above, this has left a clear domain of inquiry available for EM/(M)CA research; namely, occasions in which classed social identities are made avowedly relevant for individuals, in situ, in the course of their everyday lives. Thus, it is to these comparatively “overt” orientations to social class that I direct my attention to here; that is, to the study of social class in the ‘witnessable order’ (see Livingston, 2008: 124 in Heritage, 2018: 35).