Abstract
This article constructs a comprehensive new model of the contemporary class structure of Germany. More specifically, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s geometric conception of class relations and drawing on original survey data, it adopts multiple correspondence analysis paired with cluster analysis to chart the German ‘social space’, that is, the relational configuration of key forms of capital. It then explores correspondences with occupational groups, ethnic groups, other demographic features, lifestyle practices and tastes. The results disclose specific structuring effects of German peculiarities on the distribution of social power, including East–West reunification and the long-running guestworker programme. More fundamentally, though, in its basic structure, the space resembles that mapped by Bourdieu in France and those documented by others elsewhere, suggesting common principles of social and symbolic differentiation among Western capitalist societies.
Introduction
Germany was the historical breeding ground of the two most prominent theories of class in global sociology: the Marxist and the Weberian. Later on, the Bonn Republic’s post-war ‘economic miracle’ and welfare regime inspired one of the most famous declarations that class was no longer relevant in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Ulrich Beck’s (1992) theory of ‘individualization’. For some time now, however, a third perspective has been emerging in class analysis that breaks with many of the traditional assumptions of Marxist and Weberian thought while underpinning numerous studies across various nations confirming that, contra Beck, class still matters for shaping outlooks, identities and lifestyles. This perspective originated not in Germany, but in France, with publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) mammoth investigation and reconceptualisation of class and culture, and its reception in German sociology has generally been partial, fragmented, piecemeal and read through the lens of existing traditions of thought. Some studies of lifestyles have been highly instructive, for sure, but a systematic application of Bourdieu’s groundbreaking geometric model of class relations has not so far emerged in contemporary Germany.
In this article, we seek to remedy this state of affairs by constructing a new model of class in Germany based on Bourdieusian principles. To be specific, we use data from a national survey delivered in 2017–2018 and adopt multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), paired with cluster analysis, to chart the contemporary German ‘social space’, ‘classes’ within it and the symbolic translation of class positions in the form of lifestyles and tastes. Revealing the fundamental cartography of social power in this way divulges not only the specific effects of German peculiarities, including reunification, the technical education system and post-war immigration, but also the structural similarities to other capitalist nations studied by others. The article thus constitutes a strategic contribution – taking a powerful and populous nation as its case – to a larger project of comparative class analysis in Bourdieusian mode.
Class as social space and its symbolic translation
For Bourdieu, class in contemporary capitalist social orders is defined by possession of economic capital (money, wealth) and cultural capital (mastery of legitimated symbolic systems, proxied by education level and parental education). Capital possession is not reducible to one’s place in the occupational division of labour, but the latter does play a prominent role in distributing and specifying capital. Bourdieu identified myriad ‘fields’, for example, existing within the social space, structuring employment and exerting their own effect on the experience and practice of their members – the field of cultural production, the field of business, the field of education/intellectuals, the field of law and so on. Still, there are no definite criteria, like occupational titles, for bounding off one class from another. Instead, class relations take the form of a multidimensional ‘social space’, with individuals arrayed along axes according to the volume of capital as well as their composition of capital, that is, the relative balance of economic and cultural capital in their capital stocks. The space is, moreover, dynamic, with transformations of capital over time, or trajectory, built into the model as a hypothetical third dimension.
The social space is nonetheless a ‘class’ structure insofar as it underpins agents’ classifications of self and others: objective distances and directions in the space inform a sense of distance and difference and efforts to articulate it, the nature of human perception and language tending to operate in terms of categories (Bourdieu, 2018). These classifications orient around direct markers of capital, such as income or credentials, but they also fix upon the symbolic translations of social position in the form of lifestyles and tastes. Bourdieu (1984) argued, on the basis of a research on 1960s–1970s’ France, that differences in capital possession generate differences in consumption via habitus: preferences and dispositions attuned to the possibilities and impossibilities, and probabilities and improbabilities, associated with different volumes and compositions of capital. Making a virtue of necessity, those with little capital incline towards the accessible, the economical, the familiar and – in matters of food – the substantial. Those with high volumes of capital are disposed towards the relatively inaccessible or rare, but this varies by composition of capital: those richer in economic capital favour the luxurious and ostentatious (boats, expensive cars, etc.), while those richer in cultural capital are disposed towards stimulation and display of their symbolic mastery in the form of ‘highbrow’ culture (art galleries, classical music, etc.). Those with middling volumes of capital were marked, according to Bourdieu, by cultural goodwill, that is, appreciation of the culture or principles of those above them in the social space without the means to realise them in the same manner.
If the social space and its symbolic translations underpin everyday classification, descriptions and judgement, there are, nevertheless, no definite, substantive boundaries within the space (see esp. Bourdieu, 1987). Individuals are instead dispersed like droplets in a cloud. However, it can be useful, for analytical purposes, for the sociologist to distinguish ‘classes’ within the space on the basis of relative homogeneity of capital possession, conditions of existence, habitus and lifestyles, it being understood that these are merely ‘classes on paper’, that is, constructs of the observer serving useful explicatory functions rather than actual groups recognised by the populace. On this basis, Bourdieu (1984) identified the dominant, intermediate and dominated classes and different fractions of each depending on balances of capital. The dominant class, for example, he found to be structured according to an opposition between, on one hand, cultural producers and educators – or the fields of education and intellectual/cultural production – and, on the other, the masters of the economy – that is, members of the business or ‘economic’ field (see Bourdieu, 1996, 2005). Insofar as these opposed groups were locked in a struggle to impose their primary form of capital (cultural or economic) as superior, Bourdieu conceived them not as a unitary ruling class but as a fractious ‘field of power’ (Bourdieu, 1996; see also Schmitz et al., 2017).
Applying Bourdieu beyond France
Bourdieu’s analytical approach has become a major reference for studies of the relationship between class and lifestyles, in many cases being construed as a distinct thesis – the ‘homology thesis’ – open to empirical test and revision (e.g. Chan, 2010). Most purported tests or revisions of Bourdieu’s ‘thesis’, however, have ignored or rejected a priori the geometric conceptualisation of class and the multidimensional understanding of lifestyles the thesis rested on. It became a case of determining if a high social position was associated with exclusively highbrow tastes and, if it was not, then Bourdieu’s thesis was supposedly false or outdated (see Chan, 2010; Peterson, 1997, 2005). The limits and misleading results of that approach are now widely known, among them the neglect of indicators of luxury or ostentation to explore intra-class differences and inattention to the way in which genres or events are consumed and appreciated, that is, what individuals get or want out of them (Atkinson, 2011; Holt, 1997; Jarness, 2015). Dependence on regression analysis in most instances also marked a departure from Bourdieu’s relational logic (Schmitz, 2017: 129ff). Bourdieu was not interested in the hypothetical effect of social property A, all else being equal, on outcome B, but on the correspondence of a structuring space and a symbolic space – both understood in terms of distances, directions and dispersions of markers – as this is a better guide to the perceptual associations and judgements that people form, that is, their classifications and sense of place, or ‘symbolic boundaries’ (Jarness, 2018). Bourdieu instead used MCA, a technique designed to detect the major principles of difference and commonality within a set of variables by transforming statistical association into a multi-axis space.
After a period of general neglect outside of France, MCA has begun to be widely used to examine the relationship between class and lifestyles. Studies have been undertaken of, among other nations or regions, Flanders (Roose et al., 2012), France (Lebaron and Bonnet, 2014) and the United Kingdom (Bennett et al., 2009; see also contributions to Coulangeon and Duval, 2015; Hanquinet and Savage, 2018). The common modus operandi is to construct a model of the space of lifestyles using MCA and then examine the place of indicators of social position within it. Many still rely on genre categories and frequency of engagement in ‘highbrow’ or ‘popular’ cultural activities to construct the space, however, which commonly leads to axes of variety/restriction, engagement/disengagement and youth culture/traditional culture, and they deploy fairly rudimentary indicators of social position such as income, education level and homogenising class schemes. This is because they often depend on secondary data and are beholden to the variables available, or else simply follow convention. The result is a tendency to obfuscate the effects of capital composition and misconstrue this as a feature of social reality rather than a feature of the data (compare, for example, the results in Bennett et al., 2009, and Atkinson, 2017; and those in Börjesson, 2016, and Atkinson, 2021b).
Avoiding these limitations – and pioneering the use of MCA to test whether Bourdieu’s arguments in Distinction could be transposed across borders – is the work of Jörg Blasius and his colleagues on Germany (Blasius and Friedrichs, 2008, 2020; Blasius and Mühlichen, 2010 see also Blasius and Schmitz, 2014). Following Bourdieu’s original survey design fairly closely, and thus using variables related to furniture choices, clothing style, meals preferences, favoured drinks and ideal celebrity dinner guests, Blasius and his colleagues have demonstrated that there is a German space of lifestyles defined by two axes, one opposing tastes for form and function and another opposing tastes for the modern and the traditional. These corresponded with differences in income and educational levels in a manner suggestive of the power of both capital volume and capital composition. In the process, Blasius and his colleagues provided an alternative to the common use of cluster analysis in Germany to chart sociocultural ‘milieus’ (e.g. Georg, 1998; Spellerberg, 1996), though even the milieu tradition – most visible in the Sinus Institute’s programme of market research – has moved closer to Bourdieu and geometric reason over the years too (see, e.g. Jodhka et al., 2017; Rehbein et al., 2018; Vester et al., 2001), albeit without deploying MCA to document the relational configuration of milieus systematically. 1
Whatever the limits or insights of research on lifestyle spaces, however, it is one specific way of coming at the question of the relationship between class and culture – one which operates by seeking the key principles of variation in lifestyles and asking what factors, class among them, structure that space. A legitimate and illuminating approach, for sure, opening up possibilities for examining the multi-determination of lifestyles in contemporary social orders (cf. Atkinson, 2021a, 2021b). Yet one can come at the relationship from the opposite direction: one can map out the social space empirically, using MCA, and then examine how lifestyle indicators correspond with it, asking thereby what the direct symbolic translations of class positions are. This approach has been undertaken for parts of Scandinavia by Prieur et al. (2008), Rosenlund (2009, 2019), Flemmen et al. (2018) and Lindell and Hovden (2018), who all detected capital composition as a secondary principle of difference alongside capital volume and found correspondences highly reminiscent of Bourdieu’s model. In Rosenlund’s (2009) case, for example, high cultural capital was associated with highbrow culture and high economic capital with luxury items, and capital composition also had distinguishing effects in the intermediate and dominated zones of the space.
Ultimately, though, this second approach opens up possibilities for examining broader questions of class structure and the distribution of social powers, enabling, as it does, empirical investigation of the relationship between the social space and fields (including the field of power), the division of labour of domination and gender, age and ethnicity as compounding principles of struggle and domination. It opens up, in fact, even more basic queries relating to the very structure of the social space beyond the French test site. What actually are the key axes of difference in the national social space? Is capital composition a significant feature of spaces in other countries, or could some other principle of differentiation be more salient? If it is detectable, is it equally powerful from top to bottom of the social hierarchy? And are its elements – its defining properties – equivalent to those elsewhere given nationally specific industrial specialisms, tax/welfare regimes and educational systems (cf. Atkinson, 2020)? All in all, focussing on the structure and effects of the social space raises questions of comparative class analysis and not just comparative cultural analysis.
Features of the German case
Regarding the German case, there are good grounds for positing a general similarity between the contemporary national social space and equivalent spaces documented elsewhere. After all, Germany is a capitalist social order with an encompassing yet stratified education system. It may well be geared towards a specialisation in engineering and high-end manufacturing for export that comes with a strong focus on apprenticeships – and thus, conceptually speaking, a greater focus on what Bourdieu (2005) called ‘technical capital’, that is, certified practical skill, than cultural capital – but the evidence nonetheless suggests that academic training is more highly rewarded and that progression through the education tiers and tracks is heavily dependent on parental background (Schmitz and Barth, 2018). On top of this, Germany has, historically, been marked by a particular valorisation of traditional ‘high culture’. As Elias (2000) famously showed, the 19th-century German aristocracy adopted the language, manners and interests of their French counterparts – including interest in theatre, visual arts, opera and so on – to demonstrate their refinement. This Zivilisation, however, was then denigrated as superficial by the rising intelligentsia, who favoured a ‘deeper’ orientation towards art, literature, music and so on (Kultur) through self-education and self-development (Bildung) which was, in turn, despised by the nobility. As with France, this divide was reworked and redefined with the rise of economic capital – whereupon a perceptual-linguistic opposition between the business bourgeoisie (Wirtschaftsbürgertum) and the intellectual bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) emerged – and with the development after the Second World War of a differentiated market of symbolic goods as West Germany became an affluent consumer society.
The technical-centred education system and the Zivilisation/Kultur divide, however, hint that Germany offers a distinctive variant of general patterns rather than a mere reproduction of the French case. Similarly, other peculiarities of the German case may specify not only the substance of capital markers but the distribution of capital across the population as a whole and between specific subgroups. These include the comparatively low rate of home ownership (Voigtländer, 2009), with its effects on patterns of economic capital; relatively low rates of female employment, in line with a conservative welfare regime (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1993); and the legacy of East–West reunification, which involved not only the economic integration of two regions with divergent living standards, mobility rates and levels of productivity, investment and inequality, but also unification of the market of symbolic goods. With its various waves of immigration since the Second World War – war refugees, ‘guestworkers’, asylum seekers, Russian German resettlers and, most recently, refugees – the contemporary German class structure is also likely to be defined by its intersection with ethno-racial or ethno-national differences to a greater degree than Scandinavian nations and, perhaps, than Bourdieu admitted of France. Largely thanks to the guestworker programme, for example, a substantial minority of the German population are of Turkish or Southern European origin. 2
Some of these historical peculiarities may have become less pronounced over time in the face of cross-national convergences (see Atkinson, 2022). As in most Western capitalist social orders, the rate of attaining higher education relative to acquisition of vocational training has been steadily increasing, and women comprise a growing proportion of the paid workforce. The service sector has also begun to expand relative to manufacturing, including higher-level services (e.g. finance, education) and lower-level services (e.g. retail, care work), and political economy, once famously governed by distinctive ordoliberal principles, has shown signs of converging with the globally dominant Anglo-Saxon liberal model in which employment flexibility and insecurity have been institutionalised (Streeck, 2009). It might also be supposed that, as time has gone on, residual differences between West and East Germany have subsided. The extent to which the German social space resembles or departs from the model provided by Bourdieu and updated by others, therefore, remains an open question.
Data and method
We seek to go some way towards providing an answer by constructing a new, comprehensive model of the contemporary German social space and its relationship with lifestyle practices and tastes. This will yield insight into: the relationship between forms of capital, pathways of reproduction, fields and various demographic features; the major symbolic markers of class position and thus the guideposts for practical perceptions of place and difference; the generative chain leading from positions to practices via dispositions; and, via comparison with what has been found in other nations, cross-national similarities and divergences. The data for this endeavour are derived from a national survey (n = 2254) fielded in 2017–2018 and specifically designed to gather information on a wide range of indicators of capital as well as occupation, industry of employment, educational institution attended, demographics and lifestyles. Respondents were recruited for telephone interview in two phases. The first used random digit dialling with an oversample quota (20%) set for residents of Berlin to facilitate follow-up interviews. To counteract observed nonresponse bias, in which younger and non-degree educated people were underrepresented, the second phase used random digit dialling paired with screening criteria for age and education level to bring the final combined sample into line with patterns recorded in the 2011 Census. 3 A post-stratification weight variable combining gender, region and age by father’s education was then constructed, using the 2016 European Social Survey (for father’s education) and the 2011 Census (for all other variables) as benchmarks, to ameliorate residual discrepancies.
In line with Bourdieu’s methodology, we use geometric data analysis to construct the model of the social space (see Benzécri, 1992; Greenacre and Blasius, 2006; Hjellbrekke, 2019; Le Roux and Rouanet, 2004; Lebart et al., 2006). More specifically, we use specific MCA to distinguish principles of opposition between categories (or ‘modalities’). The ‘specific’ variant of MCA allows us to set some modalities of active variables as passive, so that they do not contribute to the model. This is useful for handling categories with small relative frequencies (<5%) and missing data. 4 To identify analytical ‘classes’ within the space, moreover, we use ascending hierarchical cluster analysis (AHC) based on Ward’s criterion of maximising inter-cluster heterogeneity and intra-cluster homogeneity, as measured by the ratio of internal to total inertia, on the principal axes (Hjellbrekke, 2019; Le Roux and Rouanet, 2004). This is an excellent fit with Bourdieu’s (1987) characterisation of analytical classes in terms of maximal internal similarity and external dissimilarity within a space, and thus reconciles the prevailing ‘milieu’ approach to sociocultural difference in Germany with relational (or geometric) reason. When coupled with MCA, it becomes possible to judge not only the distances between cluster centroids in multiple directions but also the degree of internal dispersion and points of overlap or blurring.
The active variables in the construction of the model are annual household income, current household savings, home value, education level and discipline at the tertiary level, father’s education when the respondent was 14 years old, number of books in the family home when the respondent was 14 years old and industry of employment. There are thus three indicators of economic capital, one of acquired cultural capital, two of ‘inherited’ cultural capital and one approximating field effects. 5 Relative frequencies for these are displayed in Table 1. To examine the relationships and homologies of the space, we project myriad supplementary variables into the model – variables, that is, which do not contribute to the determination of the axes. These are of two types. 6 First, there are further indicators of capital possession or specification, including share ownership, mother’s education and occupation (measured using a variant of the International Labour Organisation’s International Standard Classification of Occupations). Second, to assess the relationship between class and lifestyles, there are indicators of cultural practice and consumption. These cover rates of watching television and reading books, frequency of engaging in a list of activities, favourite activity from the list, favourite sport to watch and play, possession of named luxury items (second homes, boats, tailored suits/clothes, jewellery/watches valued over 500 euros and personal licence plates), number and value of vehicles owned, practices of body modification, favourite type of restaurant, preferred style of dress and ideal home décor. All of these variables are categorical. To judge the strength of association between supplementary modalities and axes of the space, we apply ‘typicality tests’ (Le Roux and Rouanet, 2004; cf. Lebart et al., 2006). Distances between points on an axis are judged notable when they are greater than 0.4 units, or standard deviations (SDs), and large when they are greater than 1.0 (Le Roux et al., 2020).
Relative frequencies of active modalities.
Missing data are set as passive. All economic values are in euros.
Finally, respondents were also asked to rate the level of importance they attach to several facets in relation to television programmes, books, music, food, sports and visual art. The point of this exercise was to tap into underpinning tastes, dispositions or ‘modes of consumption’ (Jarness, 2015), and the facets have been designed to gauge orientation towards excitement (action, buzz), the practical/realistic/concrete (relatable music, artistic skill, empathy with characters, filling food) and symbolic mastery (intellectual stimulation, insight into other worlds, information) as well as tradition, affordability, sociability and so on. Reponses were measured on Likert-type scales ranging from 0 to 10 and are treated as continuous variables. Sample means on the scales are provided in Table 2. Tests comparing the means and SDs on the scales for each cluster against the sample means have been applied to determine the characteristic (dis)tastes of clusters.
Sample average scale scores.
The German social space
The first two axes of the model account for 75% of the modified inertia rate, with notable drop off in inertia and levelling out after Axis 2 (Table 3), so we retain only these for interpretation. 7 The primary axis, accounting for over half the modified inertia, expresses capital volume (Figure 1). Indicators of high capital in all its forms – income, wealth, acquired and inherited cultural capital – gather towards the top of the axis, markers of low capital gravitate towards the bottom and indicators of middling stocks – including having undertaken an apprenticeship and having parents who did the same (i.e. technical capital) – sit in between. Income is by far the most important variable when it comes to variance explained on the axis, but indicators of high and low wealth, education and inherited cultural capital also contribute above average to the axis (Table 4). The high-capital pole also corresponds with employment in education or finance and professional-managerial positions, the lower-capital pole with the infrastructure sector (communications, transport, etc.) and manual, skilled or personal service work, and the intermediate region with manufacturing and extractive industries and employment in technical, clerical and socio-medical jobs, as well as cultural production.
Eigenvalues and inertia.
Eigenvalues and inertia have been modified using the formula provided by Benzécri (1992).
Contributions of active modalities to Axes 1 and 2.
Above-average contributions are marked *.
MCA model of the German social space.
The second axis accounts for 19% of the modified inertia and appears, at first sight, to capture capital composition. Indicators of high economic capital, on the right of the model, are opposed to indicators of high inherited cultural capital on the left. Two features of the axis, however, demand a more nuanced interpretation. One of these is the evident disparity in dispersion along the second axis according to position on the first. In short, the secondary principle of differentiation increases in salience in direct ratio to capital volume – similar to what Bourdieu posited in 1970s’ France, and to a model for the United Kingdom (Atkinson and Rosenlund, 2014), but unlike the spaces mapped in contemporary Scandinavia. Inspection of the space of individuals confirms this (Figure 2). This is not to say there are no principles of horizontal differentiation among those with less capital – many of the key markers are still atypically placed on the second axis and distances between then are often notable (> 0.4 SDs) – but they are certainly less pronounced than those higher in the space, which are frequently large (> 1.0 SDs).
The space of individuals.
The second feature of the axis relates to the nature of its explicative categories. Indicators of high inherited capital and high savings do play substantial roles, but many indicators of higher economic capital occupy more central locations on the axis – statistically ‘atypical’ locations, but not explicative ones. More important to the inertia of the axis are indicators of educational discipline (arts/social sciences versus business) and field of employment (education versus finance/extractive-manufacturing). Taken together with the increasing rate of dispersion along the horizontal axis according to capital volume, it would therefore seem that the second dimension of difference is closely tied to the structure of the field of power – a structure which opposes agents and functionaries of the intellectual, legal and medical fields, who also tend to be cultural inheritors, to agents and functionaries of the economic field, who also tend to have higher wealth holdings. Perhaps this is the contemporary expression of the old divide between the Bildungsbürgertum and the Wirtschaftsbürgertum. Yet the opposition also cascades downwards in the space, even to its lower section, opposing jobs allied to – without necessarily making their holders agents within – the economic field (technical, clerical and skilled workers) and those associated with health and cultural production.
Position in the division of labour (of domination) is not the only factor structuring capital possession, however (Table 5). Youth corresponds with low capital – principally because, students being excluded from the survey, most of those aged 18–24 years (79%) have not (yet) acquired post-secondary credentials – while rising age is associated with rising capital and a greater weight of economic capital, up until the limit of 65 years old, which implicates both life-course effects (accumulation of economic capital) and generational effects (changing rates of acquiring higher education). Men appear to be richer in capital, on the whole, than women, but the distance between points is minimal. Similarly, those residing in Eastern German states are likely to possess less capital – and especially less economic capital – than their Western counterparts, but again the distances between coordinates are modest (< 0.4 SDs). More pronounced are differences between urban dwellers and residents of rural regions on the second axis, reflecting disparities in opportunities for accumulating cultural capital and securing graduate employment as well as in property prices and feasible commuting options (cf. Atkinson, 2020), and the separation on the first axis between white Germans and ethnic minority categories, with other Europeans and Turks – that is, migrants, guestworkers and their offspring – being associated with low stocks of capital.
Coordinates and test values of additional sociodemographic variables.
p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
The AHC returned an optimal six-cluster solution. 8 When located within the plane of Axes 1 and 2, it becomes clear that they approximate three ‘classes’ relative to capital volume – dominant, intermediate and dominated – separable to varying degrees into ‘fractions’ according to capital composition (Figure 3). At the top of the space, therefore, the dominant class is split into three relatively small yet highly dispersed clusters: one richer in economic capital, one richer in (inherited) cultural capital and one with a balanced stock of capital. The intermediate class is cleft into two fractions by capital composition, the economic fraction being the single largest cluster, but the dominated class is homogeneous enough to be taken as a whole.
Clusters in the plane of Axes 1 and 2.
Lifestyles and dispositions
Projection of supplementary indicators of lifestyle practices and symbolic goods into the space discloses two sets of oppositions (Figures 4 and 5). On one hand, the vertical axis for capital volume is clearly associated with a polarisation of the exclusive and the accessible. Towards the high-capital pole gather practices and possessions signifying both symbolic mastery and economic outlay: ownership of numerous books, wide knowledge of artists, interest in classical music and playing an instrument as well as possession of luxury items (especially expensive jewellery) and multiple/expensive vehicles. These are associated with tastes for cycling, skiing and running; for spacious and distinctive homes; for Italian restaurants; and for watching only a little television. Towards the low-capital pole, on the other hand, gather indicators of lesser symbolic mastery – knowing fewer artists, owning fewer books, lack of interest in classical music – as well as indicators of lesser economic expenditure – no luxury items or cars and eating fast food. That those idealising a luxurious home are typically positioned here indicates a desire for legitimated modes of living among the capital-poor rather than current or even feasible décor, and thus misrecognition of dominant culture. Shopping, eating out and video games are favoured pastimes, and soccer and bodybuilding are popular physical activities, though non-participation in sports is also associated with the pole. Greek/Turkish restaurants correspond with low capital, which may be related not only to the positioning of Turks and other Europeans (including Greeks) in the space, but also to consumption of kebabs among low-capital white Germans as ‘fast food’.
Lifestyle indicators in the social space.
Frequency of engagement in cultural activities.
Cross-cutting the accessible/exclusive opposition on the first axis, and corresponding with capital composition, is the opposition between symbolic mastery and material consumption/luxury, though other factors are implicated too. Corresponding with the cultural pole of Axis 2 are the indicators of symbolic mastery (at the top of Axis 1) and distance from luxury consumption (at the bottom of Axis 1), while the economic pole is associated with luxury/car ownership (at the top of Axis 1) and lack of objectified or embodied cultural capital (at the bottom of Axis 1). The high economic capital region is also associated with skiing, a pastime that requires expensive equipment or travel. Not watching sport or television and prioritising clubbing correspond with the cultural pole, which would suggest an effect of youth, though this combines, perhaps paradoxically, with a taste for traditional clothes. The economic pole, meanwhile, is associated with taste for traditional cuisine, watching soccer, cinema and gardening – the last of these surely alluding to property ownership.
As an insight into underpinning dispositions and modes of consumption, Table 6 displays the orientation scales on which the class fractions score significantly highly (denoting inclination) and lowly (indicating aversion) compared with the sample average. Perhaps the most striking opposition is that between the cultural/balanced fractions of the dominant class, on one hand, and the dominated class, on the other. Members of the former are clearly oriented towards cultural goods for their capacity to stimulate symbolic mastery, and a desire for experimentation in the form of ‘different’ food – contemporary elements of Bildung, perhaps – but somewhat less interested in tradition, realism/practicality (relatable music, skilful art), substance (filling food), excitement (action, buzz), dance, emotion or relaxation. Those in the dominated class, by contrast, display almost the exact opposite taste profile (even if they spurn affordability), suggesting polarisations of form/function, abstract/practical, mind/body, cosmopolitan/local and new/old. Members of the economic fraction of the dominant class, like the other fractions of the class, are also disinclined towards excitement and the practical, as well as escape, but while they do typically value information – and are in a position to privilege health when it comes to food and sport – the same orientation towards activating symbolic mastery is not only absent but spurned, just as it is among the dominated class.
Dispositions by cluster.
Note: All test statistics are significant (p < 0.05).
As for the intermediate class, the cultural fraction is characterised by its particular inclination towards visual art, which is appreciated in multifaceted ways, and its relative lack of interest in information, relaxation, health, sporting buzz and stimulating symbolic mastery via books. The economic fraction, for its part, displays an orientation not only towards tradition and escapism, but also towards affordable yet exclusive food – as if to symbolise not only the frugality of the fraction, akin to its French counterpart described by Bourdieu (1984), but also cultural goodwill, that is, the effort to consume like those above (perceived in terms of exclusivity) without the same level of resources.
Conclusion
We have suggested, on the basis of our analysis, that the contemporary German class structure can be modelled as a multidimensional social space and that this space is structured in broadly the same manner as social spaces documented elsewhere insofar as capital volume and capital composition – that is, the opposition of cultural capital and economic capital – emerge as the prime factors of differentiation. We also saw that the salience of capital composition varied in direct ratio to capital volume and that it was heavily entwined with occupational fields and social origins. Ultimately, though, the second axis reflects the seemingly universal opposition between powers spiritual and powers temporal, or oratores and bellatores, and its contemporary manifestation, in capitalist societies, in the opposition between intellectuals (cultural capital) and economic leaders (economic capital), or in this case Bildungsbürgertum and Wirtschaftsbürgertum (cf. Atkinson, 2022; Piketty, 2020). Even German peculiarities – especially East–West reunification and post-war immigration – are structured by the distribution of these powers.
The symbolic translation of the German class structure and the dispositions mediating it, meanwhile, are organised around a prime opposition between the exclusive and the accessible and a secondary opposition polarising symbolic mastery, or cultivation, to luxury and property-related practices. This contains traces of nationally specific themes of Kultur and Bildung, but more fundamentally it too bears distinct parallels with 1970s’ France, contemporary Scandinavia and carefully constructed lifestyle spaces elsewhere. Within the intermediate class, for sure, the second polarisation meshed with another principle of differentiation, in which youth culture was distinguished from a more middlebrow lifestyle flecked with frugality and cultural goodwill, which reflects the empirical inextricability of the capital composition principle from life-course and generational effects, that is, trajectory effects. Again, however, this is not confined to the German case (cf. Atkinson, 2017, 2020, 2021b, 2022).
We have not been able to explore all pertinent questions here. Relationships with social capital, political/value orientations and symbolic domination, for example, need to be unpacked, systematic comparative analysis of varied social spaces pursued and investigation of the cross-national social structures underpinning differences or similarities between social spaces undertaken to grasp more fully the German case and its relation to others (we attempt these in Atkinson, 2020, 2022; Schmitz and Horneber, 2022). Still, on the basis of what we have presented here, we hold that Germany is not only a social order far from being ‘beyond class and status’ but also one progressing the agenda of comparative Bourdieusian class analysis by lucidly disclosing national specification of a structure of material and symbolic differentiation basic to contemporary capitalism.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The research on which this article was based was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement no. 677055).
