Without commentary on the piece itself, but because it looks thoughtful and interesting, I'm passing on this reaction to the BBC class survey, from the British-based American commentator Michael Goldfarb:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22025328

It's a long piece which I haven't read in detail, but it does have a few subtleties which should go into this debate. Interestingly, like me, he finds himself allocated to a much lower social class than the one you might instinctively put him in based on knowledge of his life and attitudes, etc. The piece draws this out by dint of being reflective in the first part, causing the reader to form an impression of Goldfarb, and by then revealing the class he was allocated to.

I will comment on one thing, though: I'd like to clarify my comment a few days ago about the 'presentation' of this survey. I don't doubt that the seven categories were coined by the academic authors of the survey, and are arrived at on principled grounds, though I've yet to read the _Journal of Sociology_ article on it (it's on my desktop at work). Rather, what I meant about the 'presentation' of the survey was about the way it has been discussed in the media. There's been a lot of discussion of it in the British media; without exception, as far as I can see, this discussion has said that Savage and Devine have declared the 'former' three-way division of social class in the UK to be 'obsolete', and have 'replaced' it with a seven-way categorisation in which we have all got to find our place now. The implication is always that everyone _has_ a unique and enduring place on the SEC continuum, and maybe also that knowing what your place on it is, is an important piece of social knowledge to have. The continuing portrayal of the SEC continuum as a discrete scale and not a continuous one is what I wanted to emphasise, at the same time as I proposed that the seven-way scale at least pointed the way towards work we could do where (the elements of) SEC were treated in a continuous way. A seven-way division is still a division, of course, even though it's closer to being a continuous scale than a three-way division is; what the media coverage of this story has driven home to me is the extent to which the British (media) are attached to the fact of there being class divisions by which to classify oneself.

Damien

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Damien Hall

Newcastle University (UK / Royaume-Uni)

(French) Linguistics

 

Tel. +44 (0)191 222 8521

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