Against culture? Class analysis,strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism after Beverley Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender

Abstract

Beverley Skeggs’ first book (Formations of Class and Gender [FoC&G]) has been central to the study of class and culture, pushing it towards a more sustained consideration of intersections with gender and, to a lesser extent, race. Yet, some tensions within Skeggs’ work remain unrecognised, and hence unresolved, in recent debates about class, culture and their link with intersecting inequalities. This article argues that FoC&G encapsulates two different approaches to the study of class and culture and that the distinction between these approaches has a significant bearing on how sociologists do class analysis and, potentially, imagine class politics. On the one hand, Skeggs’ focus on upwardly mobile working-class women, her longitudinal methodology and her heterodox theoretical toolkit challenge the analytical conflation of class positions, dispositions and practices, providing important tools to research class trajectories (as opposed to class positions) and class formations as socially heterogeneous. On the other hand, this approach coexists with a strategic essentialism that emphasises broad differences between working- and middle-class dispositions, and with a methodological nationalism that centres whiteness and, more subtly, citizenship status. I show that this combination of strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism remains influential in later class analysis, particularly as Bourdieu’s influence grew and Skeggs’ theoretical originality was downplayed. I argue that the anti-essentialism of FoC&G – its reflection on the representational limits of class analysis – remains important for future research on multi-status class formations. However, it needs to be expanded towards a deeper understanding of how strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism influence class analysis’s representational strategies.

Keywords

citizenship status class culture methodological nationalism migration race strategic essentialism

Introduction

I shave, wear shorts [braghe corte], eat sausages, and sweat! I’m not like the people from PD [Italian Democratic Party], who never sweat, probably because they have a particular kind of blood. I don’t think I ever saw Enrico Letta all sweaty, maybe he has more culture, he was professor in Paris! (Matteo Salvini, Secretary of the Northern League Party, July 2022)¹

Identities are not then reflections of objective social positions which is how class is often theorized (if at all). This . . . would be to see identities always retrospectively. Nor are social positions essential categories. (Skeggs, 1997, p. 94)

Associating Beverley Skeggs’ work with the words of a far-right politician, who, despite his middle-class background, has consistently depicted himself as the voice of ordinary Italian citizens (Salvini, 2016), might come across as counterintuitive. Yet, Salvini’s use of gendered working-class signifiers – eating sausages, sweating and wearing shorts, in contrast to the cultured manners of centre-left leader Enrico Letta – can help us reread Skeggs’ first book in a new light, recovering the anti-essentialist aspects of her work in Formations of Class and Gender (hereafter FoC&G).

Opening with Salvini’s words might also come across as too nationally specific, perhaps at odds with Skeggs’ British focus. Yet, as Westheuser (2020) recently argued, other national contexts, including Britain, are no stranger to the game of working-class performances by right-wing political figures, who carefully conceal upper-middle-class backgrounds and tastes when mobilising representations of working-class culture as down-to-earth and anti-intellectual. These representations are important not only because they ‘freeze’ public understandings of class groups, excluding those who do not fit with aggressively masculine, white, heterosexual and ableist representations of the working class. They matter also because they tell us something about the limitations of ‘cultural’ forms of class analysis, which, following Bourdieu (1984), emphasise the structural correspondence, or homology, between class positions, embodied dispositions and cultural practices. Yet, Skeggs problematised this position in FoC&G for, as I argue in this article, reasons that are worth recentring in debates on class and culture.

This article argues that while FoC&G has greatly influenced cultural class analysis, its contribution as a work of class theory has been downplayed and partly misunderstood. I will show that the book is frequently referenced as a milestone for the study of working-class culture, class stigma and social mobility, but with little engagement with its central theoretical contribution. This contribution is a reflection on the representational limits of class analysis. By putting lived experience and biographical change at the centre of its methodology, the book challenges homogenising and stigmatising political representations of the working class, but also sociologists’ own representational strategies (especially the Bourdieu of Distinction²). The book explores the transformation of class positions and the tensions it generates in cultural practices and identifications, showing that these have a biographical and contextual dimension that cannot be reduced to static class positions, and hence to equally static, homogenising conceptions of taste and culture. At the same time, a form of strategic essentialism (which I shall unpack in the next section), sustained by an implicit methodological nationalism, significantly limits the book’s intellectual project. I will show that this aspect of FoC&G has been the most influential on later class analysis, with important consequences over how ‘the working class’ remains imagined and researched.

The article will start by revisiting Skeggs’ conceptual innovations in FoC&G, discussing her critique of Bourdieu and the wider tensions between anti-essentialism and strategic essentialism within the book. While Skeggs reflects on the limits of sociologists’ representational strategies (including her own), she also develops a Bourdieusian account of working-class exclusion that partly reproduces broad distinctions between working- and middle-class ‘dispositions’. This sustains a more static conception of class ‘cultures’ and their differences, despite Skeggs’ concerns about essentialising representations.

In the following section, I connect Skeggs’ strategic essentialism to the influence of methodological nationalism, which, I argue, FoC&G is less successful in problematising and reflecting upon. By linking together Black Feminism, post-colonial theory and post-structuralism, Skeggs connects working-class stigma to wider histories of racialisation and colonialism. However, her empirical focus on white, working-class English women brings significant limitations to this project, setting the epistemic boundaries of working-class experience not only around ‘race’, which FoC&G partly problematises, but around citizenship, which the book does not mention.

The article’s third part will discuss how FoC&G’s strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism influenced its reception and later cultural class analysis, where distinctions between working- and middle-class culture become more clear-cut; where their association with whiteness is only partially challenged (without disentangling race from citizenship status); and where Skeggs’ concern with the tensions between representation and lived experience, and between social reproduction and biographical change, has been replaced with Bourdieusian framings and problematics.

The article’s final part suggests some ways of returning to and expanding FoC&G’s reflection on the representational limits of class analysis. By introducing research on the stratification of migration and citizenship, it highlights what class scholars can learn from this scholarship about the multi-status composition of the working class and the impact of wider political and economic processes on its formation. Understanding class formations, particularly the working class, as multi-status has become especially pressing at a time when putatively ‘authentic’ images of working-class culture are mobilised against the rights of migrant and racialised members of the working class. In this context, where class ‘culture’ is equated with national, white culture and pitched against ‘immigration’ and race (Davies & MacRae, 2023), Skeggs’ reflection on the representational limits of class analysis needs to be expanded towards a more nuanced understanding of methodological nationalism, its different dimensions, and its effects over class analysis.

Against Bourdieu? Between anti-essentialism and strategic essentialism

FoC&G focuses on the experiences of 83 white working-class women living in the North West of England, interviewed at different points of their lives, from when they enrolled in a ‘caring course’ at a local further education college in their mid-teens, until 12 years later. Skeggs’ longitudinal ethnography, combining multiple interviews and participant observation, allows her to explore her participants’ experiences of multiple social relations (education, labour markets, consumption, sexual and romantic relationships) and to capture changing social positions and practices across a large part of their lifecourse. Bourdieu is a central reference throughout the book, but Skeggs’ relationship with his ideas and methodology (particularly in Distinction) is significantly critical.

From Bourdieu, Skeggs (1997) takes the idea that structural exclusion from middle-class forms of capital leaves enduring marks on individual experience, in the form of both economic insecurity and dispositions of the body and psyche (pp. 7–8). This structural exclusion is what, for Skeggs (1997), defines her participants as ‘working class’, even if they mostly reject identification with this stigmatised category (Chap. 5) and even if their family backgrounds, occupational and educational trajectories are somewhat heterogeneous. Indeed, some participants or their parents, at some point of their biographies, could have been classified as ‘lower’ middle class according to the then Registrar General scheme (Skeggs, 1997, pp. 77–81).³ Yet, Skeggs argues, it is their prolonged experience of stigmatisation and economic insecurity that more aptly describes their class position, including for those experiencing economic upward mobility. If there is an idea of class ‘culture’ in FoC&G, it is about the long-standing effects of structural and symbolic exclusion. It is less about specific cultural tastes and practices, which, as I discuss below, her participants partly change across their lifecourse, and which frequently escape the Bourdieusian trope of a ‘taste of necessity’ (Bourdieu, 1984).

A dispositional (hence Bourdieusian) account of classed experience coexists, in the book, with an anti-essentialist critique of homogenising class representations, including Bourdieu’s characterisation of working-class culture. Indeed, Skeggs criticises Bourdieu for the idea that social positions generate a coherent set of dispositions, practices and identifications. As she remarks:

Class positions and class identity . . . are not the same. The young women had a clear knowledge about their ‘place’ but they were always trying to leave it. Bourdieu (1987) argues that the dispositions acquired as a result of social positioning in social space means that the occupant of a position makes adjustments to it . . . . But what Bourdieu does not account for is the processes by which the adjustment is either made or resisted. Adjustment may not happen. There may not be a fit between positions and dispositions. (Skeggs, 1997, p. 81)

This position significantly differs from Bourdieu’s ‘homology’. Indeed, for Bourdieu (1984), the genesis of the habitus – a pre-reflexive ‘structuring structure’ of dispositions – depends on individual and family position in social space, and hence on the volume and composition of inherited capitals. Skeggs (1997) does not reject this premise, but is interested in ‘movement through social space and place’ and the tensions it generates in ‘processes of identification and differentiation’ (p. 4). Moreover, she is concerned with the subjective experience of public (one could say hegemonic) representations of class groups, which remained peripheral in the Bourdieu of Distinction (Tyler, 2015). It is from this position that FoC&G develops an original contribution to class theory, which also depends on Skeggs’ engagement with a heterogeneous range of theoretical traditions (to which I shall return in the next section).

Skeggs (1997) argues that stigmatising images of working-class culture produce an ‘emotional politics of class’, namely, a range of responses from ‘fear, desire, resentment and humiliation’ to ‘dissimulations and resistances’ (pp. 95, 32). Hence, her participants try to escape the way they feel positioned by middle-class institutions, media and individuals in various ways. They engage in processes of self-development, via the caring courses and, for a minority, university education (Skeggs, 1997, p. 96, n. 10). They also engage in practices of ‘passing’ (as respectable) in the areas of consumption and fashion. Some upwardly mobile participants, once they have acquired enough economic capital, develop middle-class tastes in areas like house decorations and art consumption (Skeggs, 1997, pp. 82–95). Skeggs is ambivalent towards these practices. At times, she suggests they are doomed to failure because her dispositional account of class leads her to conclude that her participants will never ‘perform’ middle-classness with the ease of those born middle class (Skeggs, 1997, pp. 91, 105).

At other times, however, Skeggs emphasises a different logic of practices. Getting ‘glammed up’, for instance, ‘gives agency, strength and worth back to women and is not restricted to youth’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 111). Similarly, going out together is ‘about friendships, hedonism, irresponsibility and intimate solidarity’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 106). In these contexts, middle-class standards of respectability and femininity remain a ‘structuring inconvenience’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 109), but they are not accepted as unquestioned truths (namely, as a Bourdieusian doxa). These practices represent moments of (carefully qualified) agency and respite, which are navigated with the limited capitals her participants have access to. More importantly, they are not formalised as indicators of working-class ‘taste’. Skeggs’ concern with subjectivity and lived experience, and with their irreducibility to both political and academic representations of working-class women, makes FoC&G especially reflexive towards its own representational strategies and towards concepts, like homology and habitus (see further below), that imply a higher degree of abstraction, leading potentially to homogenisation.

There are arguably two types of class analysis within FoC&G, which Skeggs mobilises at different points in the book to render the complexity of her participants’ experiences. One is profoundly anti-essentialist, as Skeggs aims to challenge stigmatising public representations, but also a Bourdieusian account of dispositional practices that risks mirroring such representations. The other is strategically essentialist, because she highlights that differences in trajectories, identifications and practices do not displace a shared, enduring experience of dispossession. This tension is explicitly recognised by Skeggs (1997, pp. 31–32) and is arguably what keeps the book adventurous, inspiring and politically relevant.

Skeggs never uses the concept of strategic essentialism in FoC&G and, more generally, class analysis has rarely engaged with feminist, post-colonial and critical race reflections on strategic essentialism as a political practice (Tyler, 2015, p. 507). Nonetheless, Skeggs uses Bourdieu to highlight a shared and embodied experience of dispossession in spite of differences in backgrounds and later biographical trajectories. This has strong parallels with strategic essentialism, namely ‘a political strategy whereby differences (within a group) are temporarily downplayed and unity [is] assumed for the sake of achieving political goals’ (Eide, 2016, p. 2). Strategic essentialism has historically challenged dominant forms of essentialism, such as notions of biological inferiority ascribed to women and racialised minorities (Hill Collins, 1990/2000, pp. 28, 299). Not dissimilarly, FoC&G deconstructs public representations of working-class women as vulgar, loud and immoral to highlight a shared, enduring experience of exclusion from middle-class forms of cultural, social and economic capital.

Yet, at the same time, FoC&G keeps returning to differences in biographical trajectories, cultural practices and identifications, because these are central for a representation of Skeggs’ participants that avoids homogenisation. In this respect, while Skeggs (1997) relies on Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions, she avoids the concept of habitus (used only twice in FoC&G), replacing it with a wider array of concepts, including performances, subject positions and identifications (pp. 12–13). This theoretical eclecticism (see further below) allows her to capture changing practices and identifications across her participants’ lifecourse and in relation to different contexts and relationships (for which Skeggs only occasionally uses the Bourdieusian concept of field). Methodologically, her ethnographic and longitudinal approach always ‘keeps in check’ wider theoretical abstractions, treating tastes and identifications as performative and context-specific accomplishments. This avoids their reification through theoretical abstraction (implicit in Bourdieu’s notion of habitus) or technical formalisation (e.g. Bourdieu’s formal modelling of tastes in Distinction through Multiple Correspondence Analysis).

Interestingly, in the book’s Conclusion, Skeggs (1997) clarifies that her theoretical generalisations still place some ‘limits on the representation of the women’s heterogeneity’ (p. 160). Nonetheless, this heterogeneity emerges from her empirical materials. Intra-class distinctions (within the working class) and inequalities between the trajectories of her participants are central to the book’s findings (Skeggs, 1997, pp. 82–95). Moreover, the book highlights the importance of studying social trajectories, namely, biographical movements, not only across social space (Bourdieu’s [1984] definition in Distinction, p. 110) but in the context of historically specific, neoliberal processes of political and economic restructuring (I shall return to this point later).

From strategic essentialism to methodological nationalism

Skeggs’ original class theory draws on an eclectic theoretical mix. Her engagement with Black Feminism, post-colonial theory and post-structuralism makes her work attentive to how ‘temporal processes of subjective construction’ are grounded in histories of racialisation and colonialism (Skeggs, 1997, pp. 162, 42–44). This allows Skeggs (1997) to identify historical connections in the stigmatisation of Black and white working-class women (p. 115), situating class within a wider ‘matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins, 1990/2000, p. 18). In this respect, Skeggs’ theoretical eclecticism is partly in line with Bhambra’s call for ‘connected sociologies’. By taking Black Feminism and post-colonial theory seriously, at a time when sociologists still saw ‘cultural studies’ with suspicion (Rojek & Turner, 2000), FoC&G challenges ‘the substance of what is recognized as sociology’s past’, showing ‘a consideration of how this would alter the way in which we think about sociology in the present and the future’ (Bhambra, 2014, p. 3). The book engages in a ‘theoretical synergy’ (Meghji, 2020) between different traditions that markedly differs from Bourdieu’s more parsimonious view of theory as a modus operandi, which favours the development of a narrower range of concepts through their empirical testing (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 161–162). Rather, Skeggs leverages the epistemic strengths of different languages to narrate her participants as complex, multi-faceted characters. This was a considerably different intellectual project than the one of later Bourdieusian class analysis, as I shall discuss in the next section.

At the same time, the book’s empirical focus on white working-class English women is more in line with what Go (2016) defines as ‘analytical bifurcation’, namely, the tendency of Western/Northern sociology to ‘reinscrib[e] a methodological nationalism that occludes expansive relations across space’ (p. 89). Indeed, the empirical spaces navigated by the book show little presence of a multi-ethnic (let alone multi-status) working class, and the unequal impact of racialisation on minoritised and migrant members of the working class remains outside of the book’s perspective. By contrast, Skeggs highlights similarities in the notions of ‘degenerate’ values that have historically been ascribed to both white and Black working-class women (e.g. Skeggs, 1997, pp. 1, 115, 117, 121–123, 166). This gestures towards possible solidarities across racialised divisions (a form of class-based strategic essentialism). However, it also significantly underplays the power of whiteness and, hence, the hierarchical dimension of racialisation, which exposes Black and other minoritised working-class women to additional disadvantages. To be fully unpacked, these would have required the same methodological attention that FoC&G devotes to white working-class women.

This methodological nationalism contributes to the wider tension between anti-essentialism and strategic essentialism within the book. While Skeggs’ methodology highlights a variety of trajectories, practices and identifications among her participants (within structural constraints), she also constructs an ideal type of white working-class experience. This ideal type is sensitive to historical processes of deindustrialisation and neoliberalisation (see next section), but not to the geopolitical and transnational processes that constituted Britain’s working class throughout its colonial and post-colonial history (Virdee, 2014). The concept of methodological whiteness (Bhambra, 2017) partly captures this position. Indeed, this is where the book’s reflection on the representational limits of class analysis stops.

However, there is more to this methodological whiteness, as while FoC&G partly acknowledges race, it ignores its entanglement with the ‘bordering’ of citizenship (El-Enany, 2020). This is an important distinction to fully understand the impact of the book’s strategic essentialism on later cultural class analysis, which, like FoC&G, has addressed questions of race to some extent (see next section), but has ignored their link with the stratification of citizenship status. The book’s fieldwork took place between the 1980s and early 1990s. By this time, Britain had introduced a range of transformations to immigration and citizenship legislation which turned former non-white colonial subjects into ‘immigrants’ (El-Enany, 2020, pp. 73–132). This had enduring intergenerational consequences. The offspring of former colonial subjects, even when born on British soil, would no longer be automatically granted British citizenship. This now depended on their parents’ citizenship and residence status and on additional measures, such as application fees and ‘good character’ tests, which disadvantaged the most economically vulnerable families (Valdez-Symonds, 2019). The consequences of these and later transformations have recently become visible with the Windrush scandal. Yet, this process was well underway during the years of Skeggs’ fieldwork, making Britain’s working class, de facto, a multi-status class formation (de Noronha, 2020).

This analytical bifurcation (Go, 2016) between questions of social class and questions of ‘immigration’ has profound implications not only for Skeggs’ reflection on the representational limits of class analysis – setting its epistemic boundaries – but for class analysis at large. As I show below, this blindness towards the linkages between race and citizenship is largely reproduced in later cultural class analysis.

Skeggs in cultural class analysis: A gateway to Bourdieu?

FoC&G is regularly referenced as being an influence on later cultural class analysis, particularly in the British context, where Skeggs has been credited with introducing Bourdieu to a new generation of sociologists (Abrahams et al., 2016). However, a closer inspection of how FoC&G is discussed in this scholarship reveals a subtler process of narrowing down the book’s intellectual project, and a progressive preference for Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capitals and field.

I argue that this framing of Skeggs’ work as a ‘gateway’ to Bourdieu is problematic for various reasons. Firstly, the reflexivity of FoC&G towards its own representational strategies is absent in later scholarship, where the use of Bourdieusian categories sustains more static representations of working- and middle-class culture (and a focus on more linear biographical trajectories in research on social mobility). Secondly, Skeggs’ methodological nationalism remains unrecognised in later scholarship, particularly along the lines of citizenship, but with enduring difficulties in relation to questions of race and ethnicity. Thirdly, while Skeggs situated her analysis in the context of economic and political processes of neoliberal restructuring, later Bourdieusian scholarship frequently abstracts class positions, or trajectories, from political and economic processes.

This section focuses on interventions that are framed as contributing to a new form of ‘cultural class analysis’, but it also includes work that engages critically with this tradition. Much of the discussion includes UK-based sociologists, but it also shows the international influence of cultural class analysis, albeit rarely beyond Northern and Western Europe (Cvetičanin et al., 2021; Hazir, 2014).

FoC&G has been defined as a ‘key exemplar’ of cultural class analysis (Atkinson, 2010, p. 10). The book’s impact was recognised at the time by sociologists who were working on the disappearance of social class from everyday, political and academic language. Scholars like Reay (1998), Lawler (1999) and Savage et al. (2001)⁴ argued, along with Skeggs, that the ‘death of class’ was itself a classed process, one that was taking place in the context of growing economic inequalities and that was hiding everyday practices of social distinction, which revealed classed identities even if class was not invoked as a marker of self-identity.

Later, FoC&G was praised for innovating a Bourdieusian approach to the study of class in several respects. Various contributions mention the book’s innovative focus on working-class women (Bennett et al., 2008, p. 17; Bottero, 2005, p. 113) and its nuanced exploration of the hierarchies of value developed by working-class communities (McKenzie, 2015), particularly in comparison to Bourdieu’s schematic treatment of working-class culture in Distinction (Tyler, 2015). Skeggs is also referenced as a leading theorist of class stigma (Sayer, 2005) and, in recent years, she has been praised for her pioneering interest in the lived experience of social mobility (Folkes, 2022; Ingram, 2018).

However, in-depth critical discussion of FoC&G as a work of class theory is surprisingly rare. Contributions by Bottero (2004), Flemmen (2013) and Paton (2014) represent partial exceptions, and reveal a broader trend about the reception of FoC&G. According to Bottero, Skeggs deserves praise for having challenged individualisation and late modernity theories, showing that class remains salient in everyday life despite its disappearance as a category of self-identification. Yet, Bottero recognises a risk of essentialism in the approach Skeggs and others take:

Reay and Skeggs follow Bourdieu in contrasting the self-assurance of the middle class with the unease and discomfort of the working class. However, such competencies are relative and contextual. By being cast in older ‘class’ (i.e. middle-class versus working-class) rather than in hierarchical terms, these accounts tend to downplay the double-edged nature of such processes. Sections of the middle classes also feel cultural shame, discomfort and social reserve in their relations with higher social groups . . . and fractions of the working class engage in social distancing with subordinates. (Bottero, 2004, p. 993)

For Bottero, the use of broad working-/middle-class oppositions reproduces ideal types that are too homogeneous. Although one could disagree with the more individualised (and hence potentially depoliticised) perspective advocated by Bottero at the time, her discussion shows that Skeggs’ focus on her participants’ shared experience of class stigma and dispositional disadvantage has been the part of FoC&G that has received the most attention.

Flemmen also recognises a risk of essentialism. His main concern is with the invisibility of ‘relations of production’ in British cultural class analysis (Flemmen, 2013, p. 331). By framing capitals as group properties and by focusing on broad differences in the cultural capital of the working and middle classes, Skeggs and others remain blind to how ‘property relations and the workings of capitalist markets generate significant differentials of power’ (Flemmen, 2013, p. 337). A focus on cultural distinctions thus risks obscuring the relevance of economic capital and the structural processes that arrange its unequal distribution. Paton (2014) makes a similar critique by arguing that Skeggs and others miss the material interests that drive cultural distinctions. In the context of gentrification, class stigma generates surplus value; it is not simply a product of middle-class snobbery. Moreover, cultural class analysis misses the diverse responses to neoliberal restructuring within working-class neighbourhoods, where some individuals participate in, or benefit from, gentrification (Paton, 2014, pp. 183–184).

In a sense, these authors argue that there is too much ‘culture’ in Skeggs’ approach, readily situating FoC&G within cultural or Bourdieusian class analysis. While these assessments are partly correct (as discussed above) and point to more general problems with cultural class analysis (see below), there is no suggestion that theoretically and methodologically, FoC&G also points towards a different class analysis, one that distinguishes between ‘culture’ as a political economy of representation (Tyler, 2015) and its lived experience, particularly across unequal biographical trajectories. Moreover, Skeggs (1997) connected the political economy of culture to neoliberal processes of welfare and labour-market restructuring, which are central to the trajectories of her participants through the post-Fordist, feminised (and racialised) care industry (pp. 50–59). The book’s economic and political context, and its bearing on Skeggs’ analysis, is missed if her work is seen entirely through the lens of cultural and Bourdieusian approaches. In FoC&G, ‘culture’ remains connected to historically specific articulations of political and economic power. However, this focus on the linkages between cultural, political and economic power largely disappears in later cultural class analysis.

The differences between FoC&G and cultural class analysis become more evident if one looks at how the latter has evolved, especially in work that has focused on cultural tastes, where concepts like class position and homology take centre stage. Tellingly, the recognition of Skeggs’ work in this area is limited, aside from some mentions of its importance in the study of gender and cultural capital (e.g. Atkinson, 2016; Bennett et al., 2008).⁵ As discussed above, FoC&G focuses on consumption as a realm where a range of practices and identifications are possible. Her participants ‘do’ consumption in different ways depending on ‘local circuits of exchange’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 116) and, sometimes, for values that are not reducible to a logic of capital exchange (Sayer, 2005), such as hedonism, solidarity and fun. By contrast, the study of cultural taste has either followed the Bourdieu of Distinction or Richard Peterson’s ‘omnivore thesis’ (Hazir & Warde, 2016). Here, the main concern is to map taste patterns, strategies of distinction and, more recently, political tastes (Jarness et al., 2019) on class positions (and sometimes on class fractions), with some consideration of age, gender and national differences (Atkinson, 2016; Bennett et al., 2008; Cvetičanin et al., 2021; Hazir, 2014). This is largely a sub-field of stratification studies, where there is little interest in biographical trajectories, changing practices and tastes, and broader political economies of representation (Back, 2015; Tyler, 2015). In this context, the reflection of FoC&G on the representational limits of class analysis has been mostly ignored.

Others have read FoC&G in a different light, namely by expanding its focus on experiences of social mobility. Interestingly, while Skeggs’ influence on this strand has been recognised (Folkes, 2022; Lawler, 1999), it is Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of ‘cleft habitus’ that has come to dominate this area (p. 100). Similar to Skeggs’ focus on the dispositional side of class exclusion, this literature shows that socialisation into working-class backgrounds leaves an ‘emotional imprint’ on biographies of upward mobility (Friedman, 2016). It creates embodied dispositions which are later negotiated in social fields dominated by middle-class norms, such as elite professions and higher education (Ingram, 2018; Reay, 2004). Experience of these fields brings conflict within the habitus, partly because working-class dispositions are stigmatised in middle-class fields, and partly because limited access to (inherited) economic and social capital slows down careers and exacerbates precarity, even if one has nominally ‘entered’ an elite profession (Crew, 2020; Friedman & Laurison, 2019).

This debate is important also because, compared to other areas of cultural class analysis, it is here that the experiences of racialised minorities have received some attention, particularly British citizens with Black Caribbean, Black African and South Asian backgrounds. This work has highlighted how racism operates as an additional burden on the trajectories, identifications and cultural practices of upwardly mobile Black and Brown Britons (Meghji, 2019; Rollock et al., 2014; Saini, 2023; Singh, 2021; Wallace, 2016). A key finding of this work is that specific intersections of race, ethnicity, religion and gender considerably affect chances and experiences of upward mobility, problematising colour-blind class categories and ‘white’ definitions of cultural capital (Franceschelli, 2016; Scandone, 2022; Sepúlveda & Lizama-Loyola, 2022; Shah et al., 2010).

However, a number of consequences stem from following Bourdieu, rather than Skeggs, in research on social mobility. Firstly, Skeggs examined less linear social trajectories, which, to some extent, anticipate recent debates about precarious adulthood and non-linear processes of capital accumulation (see the case of Angela, Skeggs, 1997, pp. 78–79). This debate gained momentum after the 2008 economic crisis (Allen, 2016; Varriale, 2019). However, Bourdieusian studies of social mobility focus on more direct transitions into middle-class educational and, more rarely, occupational contexts (Burke, 2017). While these transitions present remarkable challenges (to one’s dispositions, resources and self-worth), there is a risk of reproducing the same logic of social mobility tables, where ‘origins’ and ‘destinations’ are decontextualised from wider, not necessarily linear, lifecourse trajectories (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). Migrant trajectories, as I discuss below, are more difficult to situate within this perspective. As a result, this scholarship privileges national citizens, even when focusing on non-white Britons.

Secondly, with its more individualised⁶ focus on the ‘cleft habitus’, this scholarship tends to ignore sources of inequality that do not need to be ‘embodied’ to be powerful, as they pertain to political and economic processes that have effects across social fields. Skeggs identified such processes in labour-market restructuring and welfare spending cuts. However, as anticipated earlier in this article, transformations to immigration and citizenship regimes also produce class effects, hence are part of the political economy of class relations. An individualised focus on the ‘cleft habitus’ can therefore miss structural-historical transformations to processes of class formation, namely, the political, economic and legal mechanisms that affect the composition of class groups and mobility and immobility across class positions.

Thirdly, Skeggs’ concern with dominant class representations is not obvious in the more individualised approach of social mobility studies. As highlighted at the start of this article, images of the white working class as victims of globalisation, and, at the same time, as ‘rough’ and anti-intellectual, have become particularly relevant in political rhetoric, and they are linked to a framing of ‘immigration’ as an economic and cultural threat (Mondon & Winter, 2019). Cultural class analysis, in both its ‘social mobility’ and ‘class positions’ variants, has had little to say about these partially new cultural representations and their political significance.

Overall, this section has argued that Skeggs’ reflection on the representational limits of class analysis, and her focus on the tensions between representation and lived experience, biographical change and social reproduction, has been replaced with Bourdieusian problematics and framings in later cultural class analysis. At the same time, the methodological nationalism of FoC&G has rarely been discussed, hence it has been largely reproduced. Research about racialised middle-class minorities is an important exception, as it has explicitly criticised the methodological whiteness of cultural class analysis (Meghji, 2019). However, this work has not disentangled race from citizenship and migration, as it either focuses on racialised British citizens or does not give analytical weight to migration and legal status. Significant parts of the working and middle classes, hence, remain invisible in these contributions.

How can class analysis recover, and expand, FoC&G’s reflection on the representational limits of class categories? As the next section argues, class analysis should engage more with scholarship on the stratification of citizenship and migration regimes, as it provides important insights into multi-status class formations, the political and economic processes that produce such formations, and hence the intersectional composition of the working class. This work shows why Skeggs’ reflection on the representational limits of class analysis needs to be expanded to include methodological nationalism and, hence, the political economy that distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens.

Beyond the representational limits of class analysis: Multi-status class formations

As discussed earlier in this article, legal transformations in citizenship and immigration status have made the British working class – or more accurately, the working class in Britain – a multi-status class formation. However, the stratification of citizenship and immigration is not a British peculiarity. Class analysis rarely links the neoliberal restructuring of the post-Fordist years to international transformations in immigration and citizenship regimes. Yet, since the 1970s, legislation and policy in these areas – particularly (but not exclusively) in Anglo-American contexts and former European empires – have moved towards more restrictive and selective models, with growing limitations on migrants’ access to social rights, increasing skill- and qualification-based stratification, and criminalisation of undocumented migration (Menjívar et al., 2018; Vickers, 2020).

This is the historical and political context in which migrants’ classed trajectories, experiences and identities develop and need to be situated. While representations of an ‘authentic’ (white) working class, evoked at the start of this article, obscure this wider context, migrants are over-represented in ‘low-skill’ (namely, low-pay and low-status) positions in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture and food processing, while migrant women are predominantly employed in the precarious care sector (Vasey, 2017; Vickers, 2020, pp. 17–54). The stratification of citizenship status is thus central to the production of an unequal, multi-status working class, making migrants exploitable workers and affecting extended networks of families and relationships (de Noronha, 2020; Kofman, 2018; Menjívar & Abrego, 2012).

The stratification of citizenship and immigration regimes produces what Menjívar and Abrego (2012), expanding on Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, call legal violence. This violence, normalised and made legitimate through legislation, is both structural and symbolic. It is structural because it impacts migrants’ life chances and access to different forms of capital (the core of Weberian and Bourdieusian class analysis), but it is also symbolic because it dehumanises migrants, legitimising their stigma and exploitation, while producing physical and psychological pain – and prolonged, intergenerational insecurity – among undocumented migrants and those with more insecure legal status. Legal violence thus has a profound impact on migrants’ social position and access to resources and identities, producing class inequality (Benson, 2020; Bonjour & Chauvin, 2018). This makes legal status – or, rather, the increasingly large grey area between citizenship and non-citizenship (Gonzales & Sigona, 2017) – a central source of class stratification.

In this context, Skeggs’ focus on unequal social trajectories, and how they are affected by a wider political economy, is more helpful than a focus on homologies between class positions, dispositions and practices. The latter risks obscuring the political and legal mechanisms that make accumulation and loss of capitals (namely, social mobility) possible in the first place, while reproducing the centrality of whiteness and national citizenship.

The linkages between this wider political context, classed trajectories and identities have been more effectively captured by migration scholars who, sometimes, draw on Skeggs or on more heterodox readings of Bourdieu.⁷ Erel’s (2010) work on ‘migrating cultural capital’ has been pioneering in this context. Drawing on biographical interviews with Turkish and Kurdish migrant women, Erel addresses capitals not as properties of social positions, but (similar to Skeggs) as resources that are mobilised across the lifecourse and in concrete contexts. She also shows that migration can generate new resources and dispositions. However, this does not necessarily lead to linear trajectories of upward mobility. In national receiving societies, ethno-racial and gender hierarchies, legal and political restrictions and the existence of established migrant networks (shaped themselves by struggles over resources and classifications) affect her participants’ class trajectories as much as (and sometimes more than) their class backgrounds.

The trajectories of individual migrants across class positions can also produce complex practices of identification and distinction. On this question, a growing literature provides evidence of the enduring power of classed dispositions and capitals across migration, which can reproduce forms of class stratification within migrant groups (Fathi, 2017; Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010; Varriale, 2021). Yet, migration also shows the limitations of a class analysis that focuses solely on culture. In the context of migration, neither ‘embodied’ cultural capital (tastes and dispositions) nor ‘institutionalised’ cultural capital (formal qualifications) are necessarily recognised as legitimate resources, hence they do not necessarily unlock economic and social capital (Savage et al., 2005). This depends on legal restrictions, processes of racialisation, and migrants’ limited access to ‘national’ forms of social and cultural capital in receiving societies (Hage, 2000; Varriale, 2023). Such factors can sustain trajectories of downward social mobility despite relatively high (embodied and institutionalised) cultural capital, depending on specific intersections of legal status, race, gender and class background (Erel & Ryan, 2019; Krivonos, 2018; Samaluk, 2014).

In the context of downward mobility, migrants can become complicit in processes of racialised and classed stigma, trying to embody the ideal type of ‘deserving’ migrant, while displacing stigma onto other racialised groups and even onto the white working class. However, as argued by Krivonos (2018), these ‘claims to whiteness’ do not necessarily translate into symbolic recognition, or into economic and social capital. Indeed, migrants’ investment in classed and racialised distinction practices can help legitimise their exploitation in employment sectors that rely on migrant labour (Varriale, 2021). Focusing on migrant members of the working (and middle) classes can thus help class analysis reconnect the study of cultural distinctions with a wider analysis of political and economic processes, and how these limit (or magnify) the power of cultural capital.

Considerable work remains to be done on how class resources and dispositions shape migrant trajectories, identifications and practices vis-a-vis different legal and political constraints, while intersecting with other social divisions (Bonjour & Chauvin, 2018; Varriale, 2023, 2025). Yet, the work discussed in this section can provide some of the ‘toolkit’ (Swidler, 1986) for a class analysis that becomes more critical towards public representations of the working class, as well as more attentive to the risks of abstracting class positions and class ‘culture’ from wider political mechanics of class formation. By looking at ‘immigration’ – hence beyond its epistemic and political boundaries – class analysis might be able to return to (and expand) the anti-essentialist ethos pioneered by Skeggs in FoC&G. This would lead to a more nuanced understanding of the linkages between class, citizenship, migration and race.

Conclusion: Culture without guarantees

Issues of representation presented almost continuous ethical dilemmas. (Skeggs, 1997, p. 31)

This article has argued that Skeggs’ FoC&G raises theoretical, methodological and political questions that remain important, but which have been neglected in later class analysis. I have shown that Skeggs’ work has been seen as a ‘gateway’ to Bourdieu and as an exemplar of cultural class analysis. Yet, this framing minimises the book’s contribution to class theory, while centring Bourdieusian problematics and framings.

By contrast, I have argued that FoC&G represents a reflection on the representational limits of class analysis. While the book provides a dispositional (Bourdieusian) account of working-class exclusion, developing a distinctive form of strategic essentialism, it is also concerned with the homogenising effects of academic representations of the working class. Here, Skeggs becomes critical of Bourdieu and highlights (within constraints) her participants’ spaces of mobility and agency, and inequalities and distinctions within the working class. Moreover, she focuses on class trajectories, rather than class positions, exploring the tensions between (changing) positions, dispositions and practices, while situating her participants’ trajectories in a wider political economy. Methodologically, Skeggs ‘keeps in check’ theoretical abstractions like habitus, homology and taste through careful ethnographic contextualisation and a longitudinal analysis spanning more than a decade. It is this anti-essentialist and self-reflexive approach that allows her to convey ‘the complexity, resilience, good humour and sharpness of the women of the research’, albeit within limits that Skeggs (1997) still found unsatisfactory (p. 15). This approach differs from later, Bourdieusian studies of cultural taste and social mobility because it is a reflection on the tensions between the academic representation and the lived experience of social class. The book’s epistemic vigilance towards theoretical and technical abstractions, and its discussion of the limits of its own representational strategies, remain unparalleled in later scholarship on social class.

However, the article has also argued that the strategic essentialism of FoC&G – its dispositional theory of working-class exclusion – is premised on methodological nationalism, which limits the book’s intellectual project. While Skeggs connects working-class stigma to wider histories of racialisation and colonialism, she centres the experiences of white, working-class English women, while ignoring the linkages between race and citizenship. As a result, the book ignores both a multi-ethnic and a multi-status working class that was already an empirical reality at the time of Skeggs’ fieldwork. I have shown how this methodological nationalism continues to influence later cultural class analysis, also affecting contributions that address questions of race and ethnicity.

Notwithstanding these limitations, I have argued that Skeggs’ reflection on the representational limits of class analysis is worth recovering and expanding. The article’s final section has introduced research on the stratification of citizenship and migration because it can significantly aid this project. By focusing on multi-status class formations and the political processes that produce them, this work shows how class analysis can reconnect the study of ‘culture’ with the political economy of class relations (as Skeggs did in FoC&G) while challenging ‘immigration’ and citizenship as epistemic limits of class analysis (which FoC&G did not). Moreover, this work highlights the relevance of Skeggs’ early focus on class trajectories and on biographies of social mobility that are not limited to linear paths of upward mobility.

At this point, some readers might ask, why would class scholars want to deconstruct useful distinctions between working- and middle-class dispositions, and unpick useful concepts like class position, habitus and homology? What would be the theoretical, empirical and political paybacks of what Tyler (2015) calls a ‘sociology of declassification’ (p. 508)? Arguably, class analysis requires some degree of strategic essentialism to capture structural trends in the stratification of resources. If we deconstruct class categories too much, don’t we risk slipping into a politically amorphous methodological individualism? My argument is neither that we should focus on individuals, nor that we should abandon class categories. It is also not an argument against a dispositional theory of class inequality, which remains important in capturing the hidden injuries of social mobility, and the enduring exclusion of the working classes from upper-middle-class spaces and representations.

My argument is that Skeggs’ reflexivity about the power of ‘class names’ (Tyler, 2015), and what structural processes, social differences and lived experiences they make visible or otherwise, has lost its centrality in debates over class and culture. While FoC&G was limited by forms of methodological nationalism and whiteness, its reflexive, theoretically heterodox and holistic approach (which includes elements of both cultural and political sociology) remains important and should be expanded to fully include migrant and racialised members of class formations within class analysis’s sociological imagination. Familiar academic narratives about neoliberalism, growing economic inequalities and stigmatisation of the working class remain at best partial if historically co-constitutive processes of bordering, citizenship stratification and legal violence are not accounted for and if they are not seen as issues of class politics (de Noronha, 2020, p. 55). Indeed, it is the epistemic blindness towards these processes that makes the ‘white working class’ a plausible, common-sense ‘folk category’ (Bourdieu, 1987), which can be mobilised against race and migration (and gender) as ‘identity politics’ issues seen as somewhat inimical to social class issues (Bhambra, 2017; Davies & MacRae, 2023).

Overall, FoC&G reminds us that strategic essentialism requires ongoing disciplinary reflexivity; hence, it is always ‘without guarantees’ (Hall, 1986). It can promote solidarity, effective political practice and good sociology, but it can also ‘freeze’ particular understandings of class groups, obscuring their intersectional composition (particularly for the working class), wider mechanisms of class formation and their historical specificity. Indeed, with its emphasis on ‘groupness’ and group ‘names’, strategic essentialism can be appropriated by political forces with little interest in social justice, equality or redistribution. This is why a ‘sociology of declassification’ (Tyler, 2015) is central to the ongoing renewal of class analysis.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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