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Is Britain a Class-Divided Society? A Re-Analysis and Extension of Marshall et al.'s Study of Class Consciousness

Marshall et al. have claimed that class is the major social structural influence on social consciousness and ideological conflict in modern Britain. In this paper I re-analyse data from the Essex class study and demonstrate that the class consciousness index devised by Marshall et al. is not an adequate measure of a unitary concept of class consciousness and that their claims about the pre-eminence of class as a structuring influence on identities and attitudes are not supported by the data. My analysis shows that education, income and several other factors influence levels of `class consciousness'. I go on to show that the class consciousness index in-appropriately aggregates diverse types of attitudes and identities, of which only `class identification' has a substantial association with social class. Moreover, class differences in attitudes towards redistribution disappear completely when they involve costs as well as benefits for working class respondents, thus indicating that classes do not differ in their commitment to egalitarianism. In the discussion several responses to the problems encountered in measuring class consciousness in contemporary Britain are examined.

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