Convergences and divergences of a Bourdieusian and occupation-based approach to social class: evidence from Croatia

ABSTRACT

This article juxtaposes a Bourdieusian and an occupation-based approach to social class in order to explore how they converge or diverge when it comes to empirically identifying high-level class groups and exploring the relationship between ‘objective’ class position and class self-identification in Croatia. The data for this study comes from a survey conducted in 2017 on a nationally representative sample of adult citizens living in Croatia. Contrary to authors who focus on the tensions between the two approaches to class analysis, we highlight how class analysis focusing on occupation and a Bourdieusian approach focusing on capitals align when it comes to identifying the ‘big picture’ of class in Croatian society. Both point to an unequal society with a small dominant class at the top and the majority at the bottom of the social class hierarchy. Although our findings show a middle-class identity bias, there is also overlap between ‘objective’ class location and class self-identification, irrespective of the class approach one takes. However, when it comes to obtaining a more nuanced portrayal of social class differences, a Bourdieusian perspective identifies an underclass which largely consists of the elderly members of Croatian society, with only primary education and insufficient state pensions, living in rural areas, who struggle to make ends meet. The majority of this most vulnerable group are women.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• Bourdieu
• occupation-based class schemas
• class self-identification
• multiple correspondence analysis
• cluster analysis
• Croatia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dražen Cepić, Dragan Bagić, Teo Matković, Jeremy Francis Walton, Vjeran Katunarić and the whole STRAT team for their insightful comments and suggestions. Any shortcomings are of course solely our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Though not in popular discourse. As Grdešić (2015) has pointed out, ‘class’ has been used as part of activist agendas against neoliberalism for the past decade or so.

2 This research, spanning different countries, highlights points of contention among researchers engaging with Bourdieu’s work on social class. These include the salience of Bourdieu’s cultural homology thesis as opposed to the notion (and findings) of cultural omnivores (e.g. Deaenekindt and Roose 2013; Katz-Gerro and Jæger 2013), i.e. the question of whether contemporary cultural class divisions are best captured by Bourdieu’s distinction between high and popular culture consumption or by the diversity of cultural consumption. A point of contention is also the distinction between ‘emerging’ and ‘established’ cultural capital (Le Roux et al. 2008; Roose 2015) which highlights the importance of noticing new, contemporary, more commercialized instances of cultural capital as opposed to traditional forms of culture. Furthermore, in education, for example, authors have debated the merits of a broader (e.g. levels of confidence and entitlement) as opposed to a narrow conception of cultural capital (‘highbrow’ cultural practices) when exploring social class reproduction in education (e.g. Lareau and Weininger 2003, Reay 2004, Reay, David and Ball, 2005, Marks 2009).

3 See Breen (2005, 41) for a list of possible aggregations of the Goldthorpe class schema.

4 (I) large employers, higher grade professional, administrative and managerial occupations, (II) Lower grade professional, administrative and managerial occupations and higher grade technician and supervisory occupations, (III) intermediate occupations, (IV) small employer and self-employed occupations (excluding agriculture), (V) self-employed occupations (including agriculture), (VI) lower supervisory and lower technician occupations, (VII) lower services, sales and clerical occupations, (VIII) lower technical occupations, (IX) routine occupations, (X) never worked and long-term unemployed.

5 For details on the development of ESeG see Meron et al. 2014.

6 The use of certain household measures as indicators of economic capital could lead to young people living at home to be classified according to their parents economic capital.

7 The position generator used in this study was an adapted version of the position generator used in the ISSP survey 2009 Social Inequality Questionnaire Croatia.

8 To verify the stability of the chosen solution, we have run several cluster analyses which resulted in similar results.

9 It is important to note that although members of this class have the highest volume of capital among our survey respondents, we can expect members of political and economic elites, who tend not to be captured in survey research of this kind, to have even higher volumes of capital. A theoretical and empirical question remains as to whether they would constitute the upper end of the dominant class or constitute a separate class cluster.

10 Our findings for managers showing that in comparison to professionals a smaller proportion of them report higher income and savings is somewhat surprising and challenges Bourdieu’s (1984) distinction of class fractions within the dominant class. However, this could be due to our sample size (only 2% of our sample are managers and some of them have also retired).

11 Bourdieu (1984) makes a three-class distinction between the dominant class or the “bourgeoisie”, the intermediate class or “petty bourgeoisie” and the dominated “working class”. According to Bohr (2018), ESeG groups 1 and 2 can be classified as “high class”, groups 3 and 4 as “middle class” and groups 5, 6 and 7 as “working class”. However, due to the occupational profile of group 5 in our sample (mostly administrative office staff) and the finding that they are less likely to self-identify as working class compared to groups 6 and 7, we have classified them as “middle class”. This classification also follows the example of Ančić et al. (2019a,b). Please note that the percentages displayed for the ESeG grouping do not include ‘other non-employed persons’ nor missing values. Whereas the sample size for the capitals approach is 1000, for the ESeG classification it is 719 respondents.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project number 3134.

Notes on contributors

Karin Doolan

Karin Doolan is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Zadar. She received her PhD in the sociology of higher education from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include class inequalities with a particular focus on how they are reinforced in educational settings and communities affected by disasters.

Željka Tonković

Željka Tonković is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Zadar. Her research interests include sociology of culture, urban sociology, social inequalities and network analysis. She has researched widely in the field of cultural consumption, with particular reference to the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital.