Thinking Sociologically About Class and Space Nicholas Gane Department of Sociology University of Warwick

Karl Marx Two main classes: the workers and the capitalists (or in his terms the proletariat and bourgeoisie) Class is about the struggle between conflicting interests

Max Weber Class is not necessarily relational but is more about stratification There is a difference between class and status Your occupation might not be the only thing that determines class

A FTSE 100 company Experian has produced a classification class Mosaic – which classifies populations by working with an unrivalled data set Their marketing blurb: ‘Experian’s Mosaic UK consumer classification provides an accurate understanding of the demographics, lifestyles and behaviour of all individuals and households in the UK’. Other ways of thinking about social class

Class/classification This is effectively a form of commercial social science (with huge datasets and processing power) It produces a spatial mapping of social class by ‘classifying all individuals, households or postcodes in the United Kingdom’ It divides this population into ‘141 Mosaic person types aggregated into 67 household types and 15 groups’ See strategies.co.uk/mosaicuk2009/html/visualisation.htmhttp://guides.business- strategies.co.uk/mosaicuk2009/html/visualisation.htm

Fieldwork: Haberdasher Street (N)

Haberdasher Street (S)

High Rise

Haberdasher Estate

City Adventurers

Home Ownership

Peabody I

Peabody II

Celebrity