Class identities and Class Niches

An interesting aspect of changing class structures in late-modernity is the various ways different strata seek to carve out class identities and niches – with the middle-classes in particular seeking to distance themselves from their “social inferiors” in a range of novel ways:

from “moral disgust” (the working class as “disgusted subjects”)

to well-developed “taste cultures” (distinctions based on highly subjective, ill-defined, criteria used create arbitrary social distinctions).

Recent media hand-wringing about “snobbery” is an interesting dimension to this debate – one that also links neatly into debates about the myth of classlessness…