Social categories and theoretical descriptions
Aggregates, collectives and sociolinguistic research
Class-based categories
People are routinely classified by institutions, such as government agencies, and by social actors in routine interactions, as belonging to particular groups. There are clearly identifiable patterns in the way membership of these groups correlates with opportunities for employment, housing, health-care and so on, and the concept of 'social class ' is a familiar one to invoke when discussing such correlations. In sociolinguistics, correlations are identified between membership of a particular social class and the use of particular variants within a language, though the definitions of class used within the discipline are controversial. Williams (1992), for example, points out that Labov's conception seems to rely on both subjective and objective aspects, and he is critical both of Labov's deployment of a subjective, social psychological concept of class and of his emphasis on '... the manner in which differences exist between objective groups rather than on the nature of the power relations that exist between them' (p.Bl). Despite some attempts in the sociolinguistic literature to accommodate less consensual conceptions of social class (e.g. Erickson 2001; Milroy 2001; Milroy and Milroy 1992), recent textbooks (e.g. Hudson 1996) appear to perpetuate the conflation of status and class. Holmes (2001) explains that '[t]he term social class is used here as a shorthand term for differences between people which are associated with differences in social prestige, wealth and education.... [C]lass is used here as a convenient label for groups of people who share similarities in economic and social status' (p.135). Class then continues to be treated as an attribute possessed by individuals, which can be correlated with other 'variables' in studies from within a whole range of social scientific disciplines. It is common for social class to be deemed to have an existence which is not observable, or therefore knowable, except as a statistical variable.
An alternative conception is prompted by the recognition that patterns of structured social relations tend to be stable and persistent, providing the contextual social conditions into which individuals are born. Structural inequalities are then understood as the necessary product of class relations. The empirical traces of these relations, such as disparities of wealth and income, are just that: traces of a larger set of social relations whose complex combinations generate, amongst other things, persistent and measurable outcomes. These relational patterns are logically antecedent and temporally prior to the individual, generating anterior distributions of resources within which individuals are involuntaristically placed by the accident of birth. Being born poor in a capitalist society will profoundly affect your chances of one day becoming a millionaire or the Vice Chancellor of a major university.
The claim here is that socially sustained and structurally reproduced distinctions among people are generated by social class processes. These distinctions are the categorical ones of social relations rather than aggregated individual attributes; that is, they derive from the powers and liabilities of class agency. All of these powers and liabilities are profoundly social and relational: they are properties of agency in an involuntaristic, collective sense. Amongst such powers are those for collective organization and social solidarity (in, for example, trade unions, social movements and political parties) and for the use of particular cultural resources (texts, symbols, dialects, histories and so forth). Class agency also entails liabilities. In the case of working-class agency these include: comparative political powerlessness, in terms of restricted access to the central points of political and economic decision-making; employment insecurity; and low opportunities to legitimately acquire income. These propensities are thus irreducible to individual attributes, not only because they are social and relational, but also because they are temporally prior to individuals themselves: they are amongst the structuring features of the contexts in which individuals seek to manage and negotiate a personal trajectory.
