Class in the New Millennium: The Structure, Homologies and Experience of the British Social Space

Class in the New Millennium paints a fresh and comprehensive picture of social class in Britain today. Anchored in a broad repertoire of methods and pursuing a distinctive theoretical agenda, it not only painstakingly maps the structure, transformation and effects of the UK’s key fault lines but goes behind closed doors to see how they play out in everyday family life.

Throughout the book Atkinson throws new light on a diverse array of themes, including: the continued effects of deindustrialisation, educational expansion, feminisation of the workforce and surging employment insecurity; the persistence of lifestyle cleavages despite cultural and technological change; the growth of political disengagement, the transformation of the Labour Party and the rise of nationalism; the entwinement of class with space, place and physical movement; and the way in which class interacts with intimate relations to shape not just the way we decorate our walls or talk over the dining table but the very reproduction of the class structure itself.

This innovative title will appeal to scholars as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in the fields of sociology, politics and political science, cultural studies, cultural geography, social policy and social work.

Will Atkinson is Reader in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.