Atkinson - 2007 - Beck - Individualization and The Death of Class - A Critique

Beck, individualization and the death of class:
a critique
1
Will Atkinson
Abstract
Ulrich Beck has argued that the changing logic of distribution and, more impor-
tantly, the individualization of social processes in reexive modernity have killed
off the concept of social class and rendered the analysis of its effects a awed
endeavour. The present paper takes issue with this perspective by exposing its key
weaknesses, namely its ambivalence and contradiction over what exactly consti-
tutes individualization and the extent to which it has really displaced class, its
inconsistent and caricaturized description of what actually constitutes class, its
erroneous and unsatisfactory depiction of class analysis, and its self-defeating
reasoning on the motors of individualization. The intention is not to conservatively
deny that social change is occurring nor to advocate any particular model of class,
but only to illustrate the aporias of Becks position with the aim of vindicating the
enterprise of class analysis.
Keywords: Beck; class; individualization; reexive modernity
Introduction
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheims theory of individualization,
rst forwarded in Germany over twenty years ago, is increasingly being rec-
ognized as a force to be reckoned with in English-speaking sociology. No
doubt this is due in part to the publication in 2002 of the jointly authored
Individualization, a text which sought to rectify the overemphasis on risk in
English-speaking commentaries on Becks corpus by lifting individualization
out of its easily overlooked position in the middle pages of Risk Society (Beck
1992) and reasserting it, as a component of the wider process of reexive
modernization, as nothing less than a multifaceted and far-reaching challenge
to the domain assumptions of sociology. Class, full employment, gender roles,
the traditional family all the categories with which the discipline supposedly
Atkinson (Department of Sociology, University of Bristol) (Corresponding author email: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk)
London School of Economics and Political Science 2007 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00155.x
The British Journal of Sociology 2007 Volume 58 Issue 3
continues to proceed have, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue, ceased to offer a
frame for individual identities, biographies and life situations in reexive
modernity. Instead, agents are compelled by the very mechanisms of modern-
ization to make themselves the masters of their own destinies.
Recent efforts to grapple with the theoretical and empirical content of
individualization have thus far surfaced mainly in the sociology of the family
(e.g. Smart and Shipman 2004) or work (e.g. Mythen 2005a) both areas
central, of course, to Beck and Beck-Gernsheims oeuvre (see e.g. Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Beck 2000a). But this has left cursorily examined or
unduly relegated to a subsidiary consideration a fundamental yet highly
contentious aspect of the theory developed particularly by Beck: the idea
that social class, a concept so often pronounced deceased, has died or, as he
prefers to say, become a zombie category.
2
This is not to say that it has been
ignored altogether. Indeed, as the recent special issue of Sociology dedicated
to class, culture and identity, in which he was cited as a detractor of class
declaring the demise of collective identities and traditional constraints in
youth transitions (Gillies 2005: 836; MacDonald et al. 2005: 874; Woodin 2005:
1004), demonstrated, Beck is coming to be seen as a key opponent of class
analysis. Yet whilst many have, in the course of their discussions of Beck or in
research addressed to broader currents of thought, declared the continued
salience of class and either rejected individualization outright or depicted it as
refracted through the prism of existing stratication arrangements (e.g.
Roberts, Clark andWallace 1994; Elliott 2002; Goldthorpe and McKnight 2006;
Brannen and Nilsen 2005; Mythen 2005a), a thorough engagement with the full
breadth, complexity and logic of Becks many-sided argument is yet to emerge.
Gabe Mythens (2005a, b) recent interventions, for example, by far the most
sustained attempts to illustrate Becks blindness regarding the persistence of
socio-economic inequalities, focus overwhelmingly on the risk-related ele-
ments of his theory and engage with individualization only in so far as it
pertains to employment. Even those within the culturalist strain of class
theory, who have justly accused Beck of not only ignoring the pernicious
impact of differential access to resources in transmuting individualization into
a process of social differentiation and distinction but of attempting to univer-
salize the very particular experiences of the afuent middle classes (Savage
2000: 1078; Skeggs 2004: 524), have refrained from providing any kind of
detailed conceptual critique or assessment of the coherence and consistency of
his theory.
The present paper, then, seeks to remedy this state of affairs by tackling
head-on Becks position on the death of class. In what follows its key facets and
their place in his broader thesis of reexive modernization will be unpacked
and exposited, focusing particularly on the central plank in his attack: the
theory of individualization. Thereafter, it will be demonstrated that not only is
Becks theory inconsistent across its component parts and ambivalent to the
350 Will Atkinson
London School of Economics and Political Science 2007 British Journal of Sociology 58(3)
point of serious contradiction but that it also rests on a number of awed
arguments and caricatures, both of the past and of class analysis, that substan-
tially weaken its credibility. It should be stated from the outset, however, that
my intentions here are not to deny the reality of social change indeed, many
of Becks other points are timely and thought-provoking if nothing else. Nor,
importantly, are they to champion any particular conception of class. Rather,
the aim is to provide a defence of class analysis in toto by elucidating the errors
and internal aporias peppered throughout Becks work that stand regardless
of the denition of class one subscribes to.
Reexive modernization and the demise of class
Attempting to tread a theoretical path between the nihilistic tendencies of an
over-zealous postmodernism and the myopia of a bankrupt faith in modernity,
Beck argues that contemporary Western societies are entering a second,
reexive phase of modernization in which the basic categories and assump-
tions of the rst phase essentially coterminous with the development of
nationally-bounded industrial society and the unconstrained implementation
of instrumental techno-scientic reason are being torn apart as a result of its
own dynamism (Beck 1992, 1994, 1997; Beck, Bonss and Lau 2003; Beck and
Lau 2005). It is, in other words, the very process of modernization itself that is,
for him, undermining the foundations of industrial society through its cumu-
lative side-effects and bringing into being a nascent stage of history charac-
terized by radically new social forms. Two aspects of this rather broad
development are particularly pertinent for our purposes: the changing logic of
distribution from wealth to risk as a product of the side-effects of technological
development (developed in Beck 1992: 1950; cf. Beck 1995: 12857) and, more
importantly, the dissolution of large-group categories, such as class, in the wake
of an individualization of social inequality produced by the welfare state.
The logic of distribution
In the industrial societies of the rst modernity, the axial principle was, Beck
argues, the social production and distribution of wealth, though this was nec-
essarily accompanied by a distribution of the risks produced by techno-
scientic development. Both wealth and risk distribution followed essentially
the same fault lines and led to the emergence of contradictions and conicts
between the two great hostile camps, as Marx and Engels (1992[1848]: 3) put
it, of labour and capital, that is, between classes (Beck 1995: 137). With the
onward march of modernization, however, this process has been reversed: the
rising afuence and protections of welfare societies and the unleashing of
hazards and threats on an unprecedented scale as a result of expanding
Beck, individualization and the death of class 351
British Journal of Sociology 58(3) London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
production have rendered the logic of wealth distribution subordinate to the
logic of risk distribution (Beck 1992: 19). Class position no longer apportions
the primary problems and conicts with which one must deal; this has been
replaced by ones position in relation to new global risks chemical poisoning,
food contamination, nuclear disaster and so on and the latter, Beck stresses,
does not follow the logic of classes:
. . . in the water supply all the social strata are connected to the same pipe.
When one looks at forest skeletons in rural idylls far removed from
industry, it becomes clear that the class-specic barriers fall before the air we
all breath. In these circumstances, only not eating, not drinking and not
breathing could provide effective protection . . . Reduced to a formula:
poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic. (Beck 1992: 36)
Even the wealthiest and most powerful of societys denizens are caught in the
maelstrom of hazards (Beck 1992: 37), not least because of the boomerang
effect the reacting back of risks on those who produced them and the
progressive devaluation of property (Beck 1992: 379). Accordingly, new
antagonisms, new interests and new political movements cutting across class
divisions emerge, dissolving the old boundaries and uniting all victims of risk.
Risk societies, Beck concludes, are not class societies (1992: 47).
Individualization
This is not, however, the only way in which class is being eradicated from the
social landscape in reexive modernity, for accompanying the transforming
logic of distribution is a thoroughgoing erosion of the social forms and large-
group categories of industrial society as the anchors of identity, life situations
and inequality with the onset of individualization. At the heart of this phe-
nomenon, Beck contends, is the dual process whereby, under conditions of
reexive modernity, individuals are disembedded from historically prescribed
social forms and commitments (Beck 1992: 128), including those related to
class, and subsequently re-embedded in new ways of life in which they must
produce, stage, and cobble together their biographies themselves (Beck 1997:
95). The chief mechanisms responsible for this, he continues, are the institu-
tions and welfare state regulations of industrial societies themselves, for these,
he argues, are not geared to group interests but insteadpresume the individual
as actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his or her own biography,
identity, social networks, commitments and convictions (Beck 1997: 95).
3
In
particular, he notes the impact of the expanding education system, which
recasts and displaces traditional lifestyles and ways of thinking with univer-
salistic forms of knowledge and language (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002:
32), furnishes individuals with a capacity for self-reective knowledge and
credentializes them on the basis of individual performance; the increased
352 Will Atkinson
demand for and expectation of mobility and competition in the labour market
which undercuts the formation of community and kinship support networks
and forces agents totake charge of their own life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
2002: 32); the democratization of formerly exclusive types of consumption and
styles of living, such as private cars, holiday travel and so on (Beck 1992: 95,
emphasis removed) as a result of increased standards of living, coupled with a
general shift away from a cultural value system in which professional and
nancial well-being, a stable family life and a respectable house and car sym-
bolize success to a new focus onself-fullment andindividuality (Beck 1998:
3954); the extension of employment insecurity and instability and, as a con-
sequence, potential poverty right across the socio-economic spectrum with the
gradual disappearance and exibilization of work (Beck 2000a); the juridi-
cation of labour relations; and the dynamics of new urban housing projects
which serve to shatter ascriptively organized neighbourhoods (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 35).
The result, Beck asserts, is that the old certainties, constraints and determi-
nations of class have, to borrow a phrase, melted into air and given way to
individual agency, choice and volition in the constitution of life situations
(Beck and Willms 2004: 24). People are increasingly forced to construct their
own biographies and self-identities from the diverse options available and to
anxiously navigate their way through the perilous social system armed with
nothing but their own capacity for reexive decision making. This does not,
however, lead to an unfettered self-creation of the world by emancipated
individuals, for individualization is, according to Beck, accompanied by a ten-
dency towards the institutionalization and standardization of ways of life
(Beck 1992: 90).
4
In reexively constructing their biographical trajectories and
sense of self agents have become wholly dependent on the dictates of the
labour market, the education system and the consumption of generically
designed housing, furnishings, articles of daily use, as well as opinion, habits,
attitudes and lifestyles launched and adopted through the mass media (Beck
1992: 132), whilst the search for self-fullment and its innite regression of
questions (am I really happy?, am I really fullled?)
. . . leads into one new response mode after another, which can then be
reformed in a variety of ways into markets for experts, industries and reli-
gious movements. In the search for fullment, people thus metamorphose
under certain conditions into products of mass culture and mass
consumption. (Beck 1998: 48)
It should be clear that individualization is not, as some writers have argued
it to be (e.g. Furlong and Cartmel 1997), simply a subjective phenomenon
concerning self-identities and attitudes alone, but a structural phenomenon
transguring objective life situations and biographies. As Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim (2002: xxii; cf. Beck and Willms 2004: 63) put it:
Individualization can no longer be understood as a mere subjective reality
which has to be relativized by and confronted with objective class analysis.
Because individualization not only effects the berbau ideology, false
consciousness but also the economic Unterbau of real classes . . . [it] is
becoming the social structure of second modern society itself.
Western societies are still capitalist, and yes, Beck contends, inequality of
income remains stable. But it is capitalism without classes (Beck 1992: 88),
and inequality of income rmly detached from its old moorings in class
categories. But then how, one might ask, is inequality distributed in a social
structure of individualization? Well, says Beck, inequality and poverty in
reexive modernity should be seen not as differentially distributed between
groups, as they were in the past, but between phases in the average work life
(Beck 1997: 26; Beck andWillms 2004: 102). People come and go into economic
hardship for a variety of (non-class related) reasons at different stages of their
lives as university students, as pensioners, after redundancy, following divorce
and this applies to the (temporarily) rich and poor, managers and manual
workers alike. Consequently, individuals can hardly been seen as occupying
static positions in a rigid class structure handed down from one generation to
another (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 51). Rather, they occupy precari-
ous, ambivalent positions that are subject to cancellation in a structure con-
ceived not in terms of locations at all, but in terms of movement (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 51).
Zombie categories
In sum: Society can no longer look in the mirror and see social classes. The
mirror has been smashed and all we have left are the individualized fragments
(Beck and Willms 2004: 107). Yet, Beck notes, the concept of class continues to
be discussed and debated in mainstream sociology as if it were alive and well.
Sociologists, it seems, remain, in their attempts to superimpose classes on a
classless society, hopelessly attuned to the rst modernity and its obsolete
large-group categories. For this reason he dubs class along with other con-
cepts of rst modernity such as the family, full employment and so on a
zombie category: the idea lives on even though the reality to which it corre-
sponds is dead (Beck and Willms 2004: 512; see also Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim 2002: 20113).
To make matters worse, Beck adds, the analyses produced by contemporary
class researchers are deeply awed because they actually depend on other
zombie categories for their denition and operationalization of their agship
concept. One example is the idea of a household. This, he argues, conceptual-
ized as a traditional conjugal family supported by the income of a (usually
male) breadwinner, forms the basic unit of class analysis and is taken as
354 Will Atkinson
something of a given (Beck 1997: 95; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 207;
Beck and Willms 2004: 20). Yet in the process of the normal chaos of love
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) so characteristic of reexive modernity, that
is, divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and co-ordinating two careers as women
continue to inltrate the labour market, exactly what constitutes a household
has become decidedly unclear, rendering it, like class in general, a concept
from the crypt. And if you cant dene a household, the basic unit of analysis,
then, Beck insists, the inevitable consequence is that you cant tell us anything
denitive about . . . class (Beck and Willms 2004: 20).
In his recent diatribes against methodological nationalism in sociology
Beck has also claimed that class analysis rests upon the existence of a
territorially-dened nation state as a container for the class structure and its
conicts (see Beck 2000b, 2002). Class concepts, he argues, are deeply, intrin-
sically depend[ent] on the ontology of the nation state (Beck andWillms 2004:
104). This is true, he notes, even of Pierre Bourdieus subtle reworking of class
in terms of the distribution of different forms of capital in a social space: the
idea of capital and its exchangeability, after all, functions only in a national
framework (Beck and Willms 2004: 105). Today, however, when individuals on
all rungs of the socio-economic ladder lead more transnationally mobile, cos-
mopolitan lives as a result of globalization, the idea of a nation state as an
impermeable container is also becoming a zombie category. People often nd
themselves simultaneously embedded in more than one national framework,
each of which positions them in starkly contrasting locations (economic
migrants are the obvious example), and this throws into considerable doubt
the ability of class to reveal anything substantial about individuals lives. In
Becks words: The categories of class are simply not differentiated enough to
capture such interlocked relationships of border-spanning, multi-perspectival
inequality (Beck and Willms 2004: 105). When sociology does adopt the req-
uisite cosmopolitan perspective (Beck 2000c), moreover, it becomes clear
that to focus on national (small) inequalities, as class analysts have been
doing for the past century, obscures the analysis of more pressing global
(large) inequalities between different parts of the world and, to some extent,
even legitimates them (Beck 2005: 24ff).
Critical comments
Becks position is, to say the least, comprehensive, bold and dramatic in its
implications effectively urging class analysts as they continue today to give
up the ghost. But these exhortations have gone largely unheeded. In fact,
researchers of class have hit back and labelled his theory data free, empiri-
cally devoid and without any rm mooring in the social world (Marshall 1997;
Goldthorpe 2002; Skeggs 2004; Brannen and Nilsen 2005), seemingly justied
by even a cursory glance at some statistical indices revealing the continued
inuence of class on income, access to consumption goods, health and, perhaps
most sadly of all, the chances of living beyond infancy (see the overview in
Scott 2006: 3949). Yet as convincing as they are to the faithful such statistics
can only be so effective in countering Becks claims, for one can well imagine
the kind of riposte he might muster: they are static snapshots that fail to reveal
the biographical redistribution of inequality, they do not evince class con-
straints but the outcomes of reexively constructed biographies, they cannot
capture the full range of phenomena encapsulated in the idea of individual-
ization, to use class categories is to impose zombie concepts on the data and so
on (see, for instance, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 301). This is not to say
that class analysts should cease their evidence-marshalling, but if Beck could
attempt to nullify empirical ndings with his theoretical apparatus then
perhaps a good way forward is to supplement the efforts of class researchers
with a primarily conceptual critique capable of dismantling this defence.
Without further ado, then, let us attempt to do just this.
Ambivalence and contradiction
Ambivalence is a key theme for Beck and, as such, often nds itself attached
as an adjective to a whole host of familiar sociological categories in his writ-
ings, including inequality, social structure and even society itself (see Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 4253). It is perhaps ironic, then, that it abounds in his
own work in terms of, rstly, what exactly individualization is and, secondly, its
precise consequences for class. On the rst count, there are a number of
instances in which Beck outlines the characteristic features of individualiza-
tion only to confuse matters by contradicting himself elsewhere sometimes
within a matter of pages. So, for example, we are told that the end of class
society will consist of a steady process of individualization and atomization
(Beck 1992: 99; cf. Beck and Willms, 2004: 88), but elsewhere that individual-
ization most certainly does not involve atomization (Beck 1997: 95); that
individualization spells the end of sociologys virtual xation with groups and
collectives (Beck 1997: 21), but that we can identify and should investigate
cultures of individualization and collective life situations (Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim 2002: 207); and that individualization does not mean each indi-
vidual is becoming more of an authentic I (Beck and Willms 2004: 67) but
that the main activity of the self-chosen life is a search for ones true self
(Beck and Willms 2004: 73). More centrally, however, we are told in some
places that the crux of individualization consists of disembedding followed by
re-embedding (Beck 1992: 128; Beck 1997: 95; Beck 1998: 33; Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim 2002: 203), in the way described above, but in others that individu-
alization actually consists of disembedding without re-embedding (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002: xxii; Beck andWillms 2004: 63). Now, even if this can be
356 Will Atkinson
put down to an undisclosed change of mind over time though it should be
noted that the discrepancy appears within the leaves of one book (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002) it involves a very different imagery. Re-embedding
conjures the idea that individuals are being re-rooted in new social forms, new
social relations andties, andnewmodes of reintegrationandcontrol (Beckand
Beck-Gernsheim2002: 203) involving institutionalizationandstandardization
hence the terminstitutionalized individualism; whereas permanent disembed-
ding, bringing Beck much closer to Baumans (2000, 2001) view on individual-
ization in liquid modernity, indicates a more free-oating existence. Such
regular inconsistency, contradiction and incoherence makes it difcult to com-
prehend exactly what individualization is supposed to consist of and, ultimately,
serves to undermine its credibility as a description of contemporary processes.
Secondly, Beck is rather equivocal on exactly how far class is being effaced
in reexive modernity. This is especially apparent in his discussion of the
altered logic of distribution, in which he explicitly concedes that some risks will
still be distributed along class lines and strengthen class society (Beck 1992: 35):
even in the risk society, he maintains, the rule continues to hold that wealth
rises to the top while risks sink to the bottom (Beck 1995: 137). But surely
there are no class lines left for risk to be distributed along? What with indi-
viduals going in and out of poverty so much, surely any risks operating on
socio-economic criteria cannot be described as being class-based? Why use the
term if it has no structural manifestation?
5
But then Becks view on this is
hardly unambiguous either, for whilst he has energetically argued that patterns
of social inequality have shifted out of the class paradigm by being distributed
according to phases of life rather than groups, he has also conceded that no
major change in the relations of inequality between major groups in our
society has taken place (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 205). More strik-
ingly still, he has argued that, in fact, [c]lass differences . . . are not really
annulled in the course of individualization processes at all, but only recede
into the background relative to the newly emerging centre of the biographi-
cal life plan (Beck 1992: 131, emphasis added; cf. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
2002: 31). This, alongside the similar admission that the changes brought by
individualization currentlyexist more in peoples consciousness, and on paper,
than in behaviour and social conditions (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002:
203), contradicts and thus saps the credibility from his bold declaration that
individualization is nomere subjective reality but a structural phenomenon of
second modern society.
The conceptualization of class
It is not, then, particularly clear what is supposedly coming into existence or
how radical it really is, but neither is it clear what exactly is being eroded. Beck
expends few words actually describing what class was, and where he does he
seems to vacillate between denitions to suit his line of argument. Sometimes
he is ghting against Marx, as in his discussion of the changing logic of distri-
bution and statements that classes have their foundation in the position of a
person in the industrial production process, in the antagonism of labour and
capital (Beck 1997: 23) but that immiseration, as the condition for the forma-
tion of classes predicted by Marx, has been overcome (Beck 1992: 96). In other
places he invokes as the image of the past to be shattered by the present the
Weberian denition of class, holding that whilst the unity of shared life expe-
riences mediated by the market and shaped by status, which Max Weber
brought together in the concept of social class applied up until the 1950s, it has
since begun to fall apart: Its different elements (such as material conditions
dependent on specic market opportunities, the effectiveness of tradition and
of pre-capitalist lifestyles, the consciousness of communal bonds and barriers
to mobility, as well as networks of contact) have slowly disintegrated (Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 34).
Elsewhere class is dened simply as income level (Beck 1992: 131), but most
often, and somewhat at odds with the actual Weberian (or for that matter
Bourdieusian) conceptualization of class in which such phenomena are rela-
tively contingent, it appears in terms of materially-organized collective soli-
darity, culture, identity, community and political action.
6
This last rendering,
however, coupled with the question-begging argument that biographies of old
were always relayed in the language of blows of fate, objective conditions
and outside forces overwhelming and compelling individuals compared to
contemporary individualized biographies speaking only of agents decisions,
capacities and compromises (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 25), amounts to
little more than a caricature of the past in an attempt to make the theory of
individualization appear more credible. As Marshall et al. (1988) demonstrate,
the type of homogeneous and solidary proletarian culture (Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim 2002: 42) posited by Beck has never really existed except as a
construct of dualistic historical thinking wishing to set up a straw man, for the
working class has always, to some degree, been perforated by sectionalism,
instrumentalism and privatism (see also Savage 2000: 105).
In contrast to many others who turned against class in the course of the last
decade (e.g. Pakulski and Waters 1996), then, Beck has no consistent or con-
vincing conception of what is supposed to have died. This inevitably raises the
question of how he can claim class is a zombie when what it looked like alive
and well is vague; how, in other words, he can condently identify class as a
walking corpse when he is not sure what the living, breathing body looked like.
The conceptualization of class analysis
It is not only Becks understanding of class that is debatable, however, but also
his understanding and rejection of class analysis. In particular, his repeated
358 Will Atkinson
assertions that class analysis is awed because it rests on the fellow zombie
categories of household and nation-state are highly problematic. First of all,
the notion that class analysis depends on the existence of conjugal households
recalls the dated and rather protracted debates that took place between John
Goldthorpe and others generally sympathetic to his approach over the correct
unit of analysis (Goldthorpe 1983, 1984; Heath and Britten 1984; Stanworth
1984; Marshall et al. 1988; Dex 1991; McRae 1991). Goldthorpe, of course, was
defending on both theoretical and empirical grounds the so-called conven-
tional view that indeed, as Beck suggests, the appropriate unit of class analysis
should be the family household based on the work and market situation of the
chief breadwinner, subsuming eo ipso all other family members under their
class position. But the fact that this perspective was contested by a number of
class researchers who, with the intention of wrestling women from the shadow
of their husbands class position in light of their increased labour market
participation, wished to (and indeed did) take individuals as the analytical unit
rather than households would seem to undermine Becks argument that the
latter constitute the irrevocable foundations of any viable class analysis. Beck
has, however, noted this debate, citing Heath and Brittens contribution (which
incidentally was one of the only interventions that did not advocate the indi-
vidual approach), and argued the incorporation of women in class analysis to
be doomed to failure for the simple reason that it necessitates a splitting of
social structure which can then never be put back together again in a single
image (Beck 1994: 14). But this argument makes little sense. It seems to
presume that to include women is to construct two separate and incompatible
class structures one for men and one for women rather than one including
both sexes, a procedure which clearly none of the participants in the debate
suggested.
Outside of the Goldthorpe affair, which perhaps Beck takes to be the
template of (English-speaking) class analysis, there is ample evidence that the
household does not form the basis upon which class analysis depends. In
Wrights (1979) early investigation into income determination, for example, it
is individuals who ll the empty spaces of class positions, regardless of their
gender, and thus it is they who constitute the unit of analysis rather than
households. Similarly, in Bourdieus (1984) construction of class as individuals
clustered in regions of a social space of relations dependant upon their pos-
session of economic and cultural capital, both men and women nd themselves
plotted as capital-holding subjects. In either case, the fragmentation of tradi-
tional families and the proliferation of ways of living (remaining single, cohabi-
tation, etc.), the occurrence of which have not been contested here, by
themselves pose no intrinsic difculties for the investigation of class processes.
As to the idea that class analysis is ontologically dependant on the anach-
ronistic vision of a territorially-dened nation state, this seems at rst to be
a more telling criticism. This is especially so, it appears, as regards Bourdieus
theory of class the ideas of social space, cultural capital and symbolic capital,
after all, only really work in a national frame, even if this does not necessarily
preclude the consideration of inuences on these concepts of international
affairs such as information ows, immigration or the global spread of neo-
liberalism, a target of scolding criticism in Bourdieus later years (Bourdieu
1998). However, once the real nub of Becks argument is exposed it begins, like
so many of his other propositions, to look less convincing. As seen above, the
main thrust of his critique on this front consists of the contention that indi-
viduals increasingly lead cosmopolitan lives nestled in more than one
national system, and that consequently class fails to illuminate salient forms of
existence. Now this can be questioned on at least two counts. First of all, it must
be asked: how many people can be said to actually live in such a way? When
globe-trotting elites and economic migrants the obvious examples of cosmo-
politans which Beck no doubt has in mind when forwarding this argument
are subtracted from the equation, exactly who is left leading this dual exist-
ence? Do not the majority continue to live rmly entrenched within one
national stratication system alone, however much it might be interpenetrated
by global processes? As Bauman (2002: 83) has pointed out, citing the research
of others, 98 per cent of the worlds population never move to another place to
settle, whilst even in Britain 50 per cent of people still live within ve miles of
where they were born. Secondly, why, exactly, must class be abandoned simply
because some people live in more than one national class system and may
occupy contrasting positions in each? Why, simply because an individual might
be a marginalized migrant in one system and a respected middle-class citizen
in another, does this mean that class analysis is irrelevant? Surely rather than
spelling the end of the study of class it actually raises interesting and viable
areas for investigation with the tools of class analysis, such as, for example, how
the disjunction caused by going from well-respected and economically secure
in one system to the bottom of the hierarchy in another is experienced and
maps into individual practice. Becks claim tagged to his argument that class is
not differentiated enough to comprehend this is specious and, as such, he
leaves no persuasive reason for believing that class analysis is a awed venture.
The motors of individualization
The nal weakness of Becks position emanates from his account of the causes
of individualization. It will be remembered that the central mechanisms
driving individualization are, for him, the institutions of Western welfare soci-
eties which disembed individuals from their old collective forms of life, to use
Wittgensteins phrase, and compel them to shape their own destinies. The
problem is, however, that Beck fails to acknowledge the ways in which some of
the key institutions he heralds as the slayers of class may be hindered in their
allotted role by the fact that they are riddled with class processes themselves,
360 Will Atkinson
aggravated further by the fact that he himself, once again falling victim to his
own contradictions, indicates that this may be the case. Some examples should
make this clear.
The postwar expansion of the education system was, for Beck, one of the
biggest revolutions that happened in the 1960s and the 1970s (Beck and
Willms 2004: 72), and so it is no surprise that he grants education pride of place
as a central motor of individualization equipping individuals with universal
forms of knowledge and self-reective capacities. There is, however, a critical
rider to this passed over, it must be said, with some haste: the successful
acquisition of universal knowledge and self-reection is, Beck admits, depen-
dent on both the duration and the content of the individuals education (Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 32). But what is likely to inuence whether an
individual decides to stay on at school or proceeds to university, the content or
quality of the education they receive and, on top of that, their ability or
inclination to absorb it? Beck remains silent, no doubt because it is hard to
deny that, despite educational expansion, middle-class youth, whether because
their families can mobilize economic, social or cultural resources to their
advantage (Reay 1998; Ball 2003; Devine 2004), because they have the requi-
site linguistic code (Bernstein 1971) or symbolic mastery (Bourdieu and
Passeron 1977) to succeed as a result of their socialization, or simply because
it is broadly rational given the resources and opportunities inherent in their
position (Goldthorpe 2000: 160205), continue to undertake post-compulsory
education, to study more abstract disciplines and to attend private schools
and prestigious universities at a higher rate than their working-class counter-
parts, with the result, perhaps, that it is they who are disproportionately more
likely to leave education with the universal and self-reecting knowledge that
allows them to be reexive in their labour market trajectories.
7
This possibility
is overlooked by Beck, who instead portrays education, in spite of his telling
concession that not all leave it equally reexive, to be a remarkably class free
institution experienced in a uniform manner regardless of ones background.
A second problematic propellant of individualization in Becks theory,
chiming in different ways with analyses of postmodern culture (e.g. Bauman
1988; Crook, Pakulski and Waters 1992) and the lambasting of the culture
industry by the Frankfurt school (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997), is the
expansion of consumption beyond its class-specic forms into a standardizing
mass phenomenon as a result of increased societal afuence and the new ethic
of self-fullment and individuality. Some aspects of this argument are true
enough: home-ownership, for instance, has spread considerably amongst the
British population following the introduction in the 1980s of the right to buy
council houses by the Thatcher government (on this see Saunders 1990), and
living standards have, on the whole, increased, allowing extended access to a
range of consumer goods. The issue, however, is over the new ethic of self-
fullment, and once again Beck appears to trip himself up with a fatal
concession: this development does not include all population groups equally
by any means, he writes, but is instead a product of better education and
higher income the poorer and less well-educated clearly continue to be
tied to the value system of the 1950s and its status symbols (Beck 1998: 47).
This statement, especially in light of the contradiction noted above regarding
who is more likely to attain a better education, almost amounts to an admis-
sion that the new ethic is essentially a phenomenon reserved for the middle
classes. Now this has important consequences in terms of consumption, for if
Becks argument is considered fully then it leads away from the idea of an
undifferentiated mass consumerism and posits instead the existence of a
consumption cleavage mapped along class lines: on the one hand, a poorer
section who strive to consume conventional goods in a conventional manner,
and on the other, a more afuent and educated section who, in their quest for
self-realization, it between attitudes, activities and goods like bees in search
of pollen. In fact, a strikingly similar though more complex argument was
forwarded by Bourdieu in Distinction, where he identied an emerging new
petite bourgeoisie whose lifestyle is characterized by a search for identity and
self-expression and a refusal to be assigned to a class all demonstrated in the
vast number of practices they undertake, from aikido to yoga, astrology to
weaving, dance to transcendental meditation (Bourdieu 1984: 35471). This
class fraction, comprised mainly of producers and propagators of symbolic
goods (those in sales, marketing, advertising) and consultancy and social
assistance professions (such as social workers, counsellors, youth leaders,
therapists) was, for Bourdieu, ascendant and its lifestyle becoming more
commonplace. The point is, whatever the many differences between Bour-
dieus position and Becks on this, Becks vision of consumption, far from
depicting the erosion of class differences, effectively, and against his inten-
tions, re-establishes class as a primary division in reexive modernity in a way
altogether compatible with existing class theory.
Conclusion
No doubt there are further problem areas in Becks perspective that could
have been pinpointed, but enough has nevertheless been said to illustrate
some of the aws shedding doubt on its credibility: its damaging ambivalence
and contradiction as regards what exactly individualization is and how far it
has superseded class, its inconsistent and unsatisfactory depiction of what class
was before its membership of the living dead, its misguided portrayal of class
analysis, and, lastly, its self-defeating logic on the causes of individualization.
Paradoxically, if Beck were to try to iron out these difculties by making his
position more consistent and coherent he could, in many ways, risk producing
an even more problematic thesis. To rescue his reasoning on the motors of
362 Will Atkinson
individualization, for instance, he would seem to have to either retract the
caveats concerning self-reective knowledge and the ethic of self-fullment
and forward the unrealistic argument that they are, in fact, more universal than
originally proposed, or else somehow explain, in the face of much sociological
research (which he can no longer dismiss so easily), how their uneven mani-
festation is unconnected to class processes. Furthermore, if he were to clear up
his conception of class this could, in effect, amount to arguing that individual-
ization only really applies to that conception, leaving adherents to alternative
models wondering why they should then take it seriously at all. But perhaps
this is underestimating Beck he is, after all, a far from unsophisticated thinker
and, as such, might be able to circumvent the identied anomalies in a rather
more satisfactory way.
It is worth noting that Beck is hardly alone amongst contemporary social
theorists in claiming the irrelevance of class. The 1980s, 90s and the start of the
new millennium have witnessed a vast proliferation of theoretical perspectives
from postmodernism and globalization theory to recent attempts to apply
complexity theory to the social sciences aligning themselves to the view that
the present is simply too uid, too transient and too awash with turbulent
global scapes, mobilities or networks to be comprehended with the static and
clunky ontological categories of the past. As John Urry (2003: 95), an erstwhile
contributor to class theory, has recently insisted, in the new world of global
complexity sociology must unremorsefully jettison its old theoretical schemes,
including that of class domination, and effectively start from scratch. Yet
within this inuential stream of thought which, as McLennan (2003) has
shown, has an unfortunate tendency to adumbrate a new conceptual apparatus
without convincingly demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional sociology
for grasping its problematics Becks perspective remains one of the most
explicit and sustained efforts to illustrate exactly why and how class is
outdated. Exposing its errors whilst demonstrating class to be a more exible
concept than assumed might thus give good cause to question the claims of
those theorists content to declare the redundancy of class on the basis of a
rather more cursory analysis.
(Date accepted: June 2007)
Notes
1. This paper arose out of doctoral work
funded by the ESRC, award number PTA-
030-2005-00219. Many thanks are due to
Gregor McLennan, Paula Surridge and the
anonymous referees for their helpful com-
ments and suggestions on an earlier draft.
2. Comparable theories have been for-
warded by Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994),
Bauman (2000, 2001) and Honneth (2004).
In many respects, however, these positions
are less radical than Becks: Giddens writ-
ings, for example, continue to be suffused
with the language of class and are thus much
more ambivalent (see Atkinson 2007),
whilst Bauman places such an emphasis on
economic resources in determining the
winners and losers of liquid modernity that
he could actually be described as forwarding
a new class theory (Gane 2001a, b). It should
also be noted that though Beck pushes this
aspect of the individualization thesis more
than Beck-Gernsheim, whose own work is
more concerned with its consequences for
women and family life, the latter neverthe-
less, as evidenced by their jointly written
contributions, shares his viewpoint.
3. For this reason Beck often describes
individualization, borrowing a term from
Parsons, as institutionalized individualism.
4. Thus individualization is not, as
Anthony Elliott (2002) supposes, inherently
inimical to Ritzers idea of McDonaldiza-
tion, though Beck has rejected it elsewhere
(Beck 2000b: 427).
5. This is not the only place Beck uses
class to denote a continued reality: through-
out his conversations with Johannes Willms
(Beck and Willms 2004) he refers to eclecti-
cism at different class levels (2004: 37) and
the extension of work insecurity to the
middle class (2004: 82).
6. For a avour see e.g. Beck (1992: 13,
4850, 113), Beck (1998: 328, 171n6), Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: 37, 423).
7. According to the latest edition of
Social Trends (2006: 3942), 76 per cent of
school pupils whose parents were in higher
professional occupations and 72 per cent of
those whose parents were educated to at
least degree level achieved higher grade
(A* to C) GCSEs or equivalent in 2004,
compared with only 33 per cent of those
whose parents worked in routine occupa-
tions and 41 per cent of those whose
parents were educated below A level. Fur-
thermore, 85 per cent of those whose
parents were in higher professional occupa-
tions continued on to post-compulsory edu-
cation compared with only 57 per cent of
those with parents in routine occupations,
and amongst those who did continue only
31 per cent of the latter studied A levels
instead of more vocational qualications
(e.g. GNVQs) compared with 74 per cent
of the former. Finally, 44 per cent of 18
year-olds with professional parents contin-
ued on to higher education compared with
just 13 per cent of those with parents in
routine occupations.
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