Marking the Moral Boundaries of Class

This article welcomes the recent renewed interest in the topic of class withinsociology and cultural studies. This comes after a long period – from around themiddle part of the 1980s and into the 1990s – during which social class wasdismissed as a mode of understanding socio-economic and cultural conditions onthe part of both academics and mainstream political organisations alike.Working-class formations in particular came under scrutiny, increasingly seen tobe in terminal decline and fragmentation through the impact ofpost-industrialisation processes set in train in western economies from the turnof the 1980s onwards. The demise of heavy industry – steel, coal, textiles, forinstance – profoundly altered working-class communities, transforming thematerial world and cultural life of the British working class, powerfuldevelopments reinforcing the ‘end of class’ debate. Allied to this, theemergence within the academy of new theoretical frameworks associated withpostmodern thought claimed to undermine traditional understandings around class.This article insists on the continuing significance of class and does so byfocussing on an important recent response to the class debate, Andrew Sayer'sThe Moral Significance of Class (2005). This book stakes alucid claim for the importance of recognising class as a powerful determiningfactor of subjectivity. While drawing upon aspects of Sayer's theoreticalframework and argument to examine class experience, it is also the intention ofthe article to supplement Sayer's work by developing related theoreticalpropositions derived from the writing of Raymond Williams and the Russianlinguist and cultural critic Volosinov/Bakhtin.