Social Grade A

Social Status Upper Middle-class

Occupation High Managerial, administrative or professional

B, Middle Class, Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional

C1, Lower middle-class, Supervisory or clerical, managerial, administrative or professional

C2, skilled working class, skilled manual workers

D, working class, semi and unskilled manual workers

E, those at the lowest, state pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers

Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction (1979)

Social class is constructed by cultural taste; cultural taste is produced by education. Social class facilitates access to education and so cultural order replicates itself. In the process of education, the individual acquires cultural capital, which gives the individual the ability to identify culturally noble activity. Culture evolves through the nomination of new cultural activity as noble by individuals who are highly educated in the process of naming.

“The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in a struggle which has gone on unceasingly, from the seventeenth century to the present day, between groups differing in their ideas of culture and of the legitimate relation to culture and to works of art, and therefore differing in the conditions of acquisition of which these dispositions are the product. Even in the classroom, the dominant definition of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and art favors those who have had early access to legitimate culture, in a cultured household, outside of scholastic disciplines.” (Bourdieu, 1979, 2)

“Consumption is, in this case, a stage in the process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code”(Bourdieu, 1979,3)