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
Other ways of thinking about social
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’.
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 http://guides.businessstrategies.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