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Class, identity and culture 63

expansive consideration of the work of Skeggs (2004) as this facilitates my
formulation of a further consideration of a number of ideas of identity. This
will be followed by a similar consideration of the work of Sayer (2005) for the
same reasons. One further introductory comment is necessary. In developing
my argument in this chapter through a focus on class, I do not seek to down-
play other equally significant forms of social division and inequality. Rather,
first, I would argue that the sort of approach that is being considered here has
more often been considered in the light of such divisions of gender and race.
In this sense, class can be seen as a kind of ‘limit’ case. If the argument works
here, then it is all the more powerful as class divisions and class identities have
often been seen as stable and in some sense ‘traditional’. Second, as will be
seen, these modes of social division actually influence one another in a num-
ber of important ways and to consider class often actually means paying dif-
ferent forms of attention to these other forms of inequality as bases for identity
formation anyway.

Class, culture and identity: a new agenda
A number of writers have argued recently that there is a new approach to the
analysis of class. I will take a paper by Devine and Savage (2005) to exemplify
key aspects of this approach, although as with all new developments there are
actually different points of emphasis by a number of the authors involved and
some that are debating the position suggest that indeed this position might
not be as new as some of its advocates suggest (Crompton and Scott 2005).
Devine and Savage (2005) make a number of important points. First, it is
important to recognize that while there has been a renewed attention to the
ideas of culture and identity within class analysis in the contemporary period,
such attention has been an important aspect of that analysis. Thus, ‘rather
than seeing the issue of culture as a new one, we concur with Abbott (2001)
that it has always been one of the core concerns in the discipline’ (2005: 3).
However, despite this significant presence class and culture were considered in
a particular way within sociological research, especially within Marxist class
analysis, but in other variants as well, ‘studies were organised around a “class
formation problematic” that examined the ways that people might be aware
of their structural class position’ (p. 5). This involved a particular understand-
ing of the relationship between structure and culture, which, following Pahl
(1989), Devine and Savage (2005) call a ‘S-C-A [i.e. structure–culture–action]
approach’. Here ‘researchers saw consciousness as the intermediary between
structure and action’ (p. 5). This became the terrain for debate in much British
class analysis in the 1960s and 1970s. The debate was about the nature of these
links, whether they existed or indeed were dissolving due to wider changes in
society. One of the problems was that there was a ‘need for a more complex
understanding of the relationship between class and culture’ (p. 8). There were
effectively two ways out of this situation. The first involved an ever more
complex measurement of structural or ‘objective’ class locations or positions
using increasingly sophisticated quantitative techniques. This was combined
with a view of the culture problem that theorized links between structure and
action via a rational action model (RAT). The issues with the sort of approach