Making and mapping Britain’s “new ordinary elite”

ABSTRACT

There has been a sharp intensification in public and academic interest in differing conceptions of an urban “elite” in recent times. However, the concept of social class in the construction and reproduction of urban elites has remained either an implied or unexplored concern. The purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical manifestations and methodological issues surrounding the definition of an elite which arose from the BBC's Great British Class Survey  experiment. This paper builds on our commonplace understanding of an elite as economically distinct by focussing on their social resources and patterns of cultural consumption, based upon a Bourdieusian“capitals” approach to social class, and highlighting dimensions of this cadre which have hitherto received scant attention in recent public and academic debate.

KEYWORDS:

• Elites
• spatial analysis
• capitals
• Bourdieu
• Great British Class Survey
• inequality

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to the Editor and to three anonymous referees for their time and insightful thoughts on this article. I also wish to thank Mike Savage for reading and commenting on an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [RES-577-28-0001].