Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
babysitter – and they are constructed in all the various areas of social life. Moreover, defining inequality solely in terms of income tends to conceal not only the political power relations between social groups, but also the internal divisions within them.24 The notion of class allows us to distinguish not only the lack of resources or the dependence of the working class in relation to the middle class and the dominant class, but also an equally determining factor, what Olivier Schwartz calls the ‘assignment of low and subordinate status’ that is manifested in exclusion from the centres of economic, cultural and political power.25
Sociological analysis in terms of social class makes it possible to avoid reducing the study of inequality to the vertical and graded reading implied by scales of income or assets.26 Aside from everything that separates social groups, internal divisions within social classes are equally crucial in the reconfiguration of inequality today. Within the working class, for example, the contrast between skilled workers, the proportion of whom is declining, and unskilled workers, on the rise owing to the expansion of the teritary sector, is accompanied by differences in class consciousness and in political and cultural participation. Among the middle class, even after the New Public Management turn that applies new rules to the public sector, there are still differences in conditions of employment between employees in the two sectors, which have repercussions in many other areas of social life. Differences in the arena of work are matched by differing cultural practices, values and political orientations, and by different lifestyles altogether.27 Each ‘big class’ contains a large number of occupations, and this heterogeneity can obscure important divisions, but the ‘microclass approach’ cannot be clearly implemented at a European scale.28
What are the empirical bases for defining social classes? Some sociologists, following Marx, place the emphasis on position in the sphere of production, and hence on economic resources; others, on the basis of a rereading of Weber, focus on statutory position and the signifiers of cultural and symbolic differentiation. In his work, Pierre Bourdieu attempted to combine these approaches, distinguishing class-fractions on the basis of their relative economic and cultural capital.29 In this book, we draw on this multidimensional approach to describe the social space in Europe, taking the view that the term ‘class’ refers to the combination of economic and cultural capitals that construct both the socially and economically dominated positions of certain social groups and the forms of separation, distinction and cultural boundaries between them. The term can then be used as an overarching indicator of inequalities in standard of living (cultural practices, consumption, housing, access to health, etc.), employment and work. In statistical studies, this class position was for a long time measured in terms of individuals’ occupation and employment status (employed or self-employed), in order to account for both their economic and their cultural resources. However, this representation of the social world has been subject to considerable criticism over the last twenty years.
Some writers point out that, in societies hit by unemployment and precarity, the crucial division is between insiders and outsiders, those included in and excluded from employment. Others, who take the view that occupation is increasingly less useful in explaining social behaviours, have developed more complex approaches based on multiple indicators. The British sociologist Mike Savage and his team, for example, suggest that individuals’ financial resources, cultural practices (tastes in music, new technology practices, etc.) and their social capital (their network of relations) should be combined in a new analysis of class in the United Kingdom.30 At the European level, it is not yet possible to reproduce this approach, since current statistical surveys do not include questions that would allow these three types of capital to be measured. Moreover, assigning individuals to a given social class on the basis of their cultural practices (for example, the use of new technology) can tend to distinguish age groups – ‘young’ fans of hip hop and NICT (new information and communication technologies) as against ‘older people’ who love rock and are less comfortable with NICT – rather than social classes.
In fact, as recent studies show, occupation remains a useful tool for shedding new light on inequalities between citizens and their way of life.31 It is still a determining factor, even when individuals have no job – or are no longer in formal employment. The unemployed vote, for example, is not homogeneous, and is linked much more to differences in social affiliation (most recent job), social origin (parents’ profession) and level of education than to the fact of being unemployed. The same is true of pensioners, whose social practices remain largely determined by the position they held in the labour market.
Assigning Europeans to a social class on the basis of their occupation is nevertheless still a risky business. It is debatable whether occupations can be equated – a French and a Hungarian nursing assistant, for example – when their characteristics (qualifications, position in the hierarchy, tasks undertaken) may vary from one country to another. In view of this, we use a classification of socioeconomic groups in which occupations may be classified in slightly different ways in different countries: depending on the country, nurses may be classed among intellectual and scientific professions, or with associate professionals – but the social hierarchies derived from these categories are similar across the different European countries.32 The second problem is that European data on the most recent job held by unemployed people or by pensioners are usually lacking, with the result that our argument is necessarily based on people in work.33 This restriction of the analysis to people in work under-represents the groups that are economically and socially most vulnerable,34 but it offers an overarching frame of reference for social inequality that opens new avenues for research, particularly for observing the way in which class configurations are constructed in relation to the division of labour in Europe.
Moreover, thanks to two new sources of empirical data, it is now possible to make a statistical study of inequality in terms of class. First, the fact that European studies of employment and standard of living based on large samples have become stably established over the last ten years means that individuals’ occupational status can be correlated with a whole range of indicators without losing the statistical representativeness of the results. Second, the standardised socio-economic classification for Europe, known as the European Socio-economic Groups (ESEG), devised in 2014 and adopted by Eurostat in 2016, has the virtue that it can be used in studies throughout Europe.35
This classification divides people who are in work into seven socio-economic groups and thirty subgroups. We use these as a basis for separating the European social space into three classes: the working class, the middle class and the dominant class. Besides being useful pedagogically, this tripartite division of the European social space is built by weaving together a conceptual approach to social class with the results of the various surveys on which we drew. The method by which these classes were identified (described in Appendix 2) is based on observation of the income, qualifications, standard of living and conditions of employment and work of the thirty socio-economic subgroups. The working class incorporates unskilled white-collar workers and manual workers (cleaners, farm labourers, those employed in the retail and service industries, etc.), skilled workers (those employed in craft; in the food and drink industry; in construction, metallurgy and electronics; and drivers), nursing assistants, childcare workers, home-care assistants, craftsmen and farmers. Those identified as members of the middle class include shopkeepers; skilled white-collar workers (office workers, police officers, receptionists,