Abstract
The relevance and continuation of class in late modern society has been at the heart of contemporary debates in youth studies. Beck and others argue that major social changes are impacting individual’s relationships with status-based classes. Individuals have been ‘disembedded’ from traditional communal contexts and re-embedded into new modes in which the ability to create life paths and new identities is achieved through individual reflexivity. How these changes and developments are impacting the class relationships and trajectories of young people is an important area of debate. It has been suggested that while the young see individual solutions and choices as central to their lives, outcomes are still strongly connected to social class. This contradiction has been seen as an ‘epistemological fallacy’ where a disjuncture between objective and subjective dimensions obscures underlying class relationships. This article draws on data collected from an ESRC research programme on Pathways Into and Out of Crime and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explore understandings, meanings and relevance of class in young people’s lives. This is accomplished primarily by depicting how class is subjectively impacting young people’s educational and occupational choices and how it is embedded in their everyday reflexivity.