Conclusion: If “class” is the answer, what is the question?

Summary

The specific definitions and elaborations of the concept of class that have been explored in this book are shaped by the diverse kinds of questions class is thought to answer. A concept whose task is to help answer a question about broad historical variations in the social organization of inequality is likely to be defined quite differently from a concept used to answer a relatively narrow question about the subjective identity of individuals in contemporary society. These questions, in turn, are embedded in broad theoretical frameworks. This is one of the things which theoretical frameworks do: they help pose questions. Questions are not generated simply by curiosity and imagination encountering the empirical world; they are generated by curiosity and imagination, organized by theoretical assumptions and animated by normative concerns, encountering the empirical world. These assumptions and concerns are what give specific questions salience and demarcate the tasks that the concept of class is called upon to accomplish. One way of trying to sort out the various perspectives on class explored in this book is thus to map them onto the salient inventory questions posed within class analysis. This will be the task of this chapter.

Six questions are particularly important for which the word “class” often figures centrally in the answers:

1. Distributional location: “How are people objectively located in distributions of material inequality?”

2. Subjectively salient groups: “What explains how people, individually and collectively, subjectively locate themselves and others within a structure of inequality?”