This first volume of The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies
offers a bold and wide-ranging assessment of the shape and effects of
class systems across a diverse range of capitalist nations. Plumbing a
trove of data and deploying cutting-edge techniques, it carefully maps
the distribution of the key sources of power and documents the major
convergences and divergences between market societies old and new.
Establishing that the multidimensional vision of class proposed decades
ago by Pierre Bourdieu appears to hold good throughout Europe, parts of
the wider Western world and Eastern Asia, the book goes on to examine a
number of significant themes: the relationship between class and
occupation; the intersection of class with gender, religion, geography
and age; the correspondences between social position and political
attitudes; self-positioning in the class structure; and the extent of
belief in meritocracy. For all the striking cross-national
commonalities, however, the book unearths consistent variations
seemingly linked to distinct politico-economic regimes.
This title will appeal to scholars and advanced undergraduate and
postgraduate students interested in sociology, politics and demography,
and is essential reading for all those interested in social class across
the globe.
Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open
Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has
been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
