The Nature and Social Location of Everyday Conceptions of Class

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Abstract
The study of everyday conceptions of social inequality and social class epitomizes some of the central issues of sociology, especially the relationship between consciousness and action. A broadly social-phenomenological/interactionist framework of analysis is put forward and previous studies reviewed and criticized (primarily on the grounds of superficiality and lack of validity). An intensive study, carried out in Australia on a stratified random sample, is described and some of the results summarized. It was found that few respondents' class schemes corresponded to traditional power/ownership dichotomies or prestige hierarchies and that the concept of a `money model' was too ambiguous to be useful in analysis: a wider variety of Class Scheme Types is proposed. Their social location was such that, while the distributions obtained reflected some of the general trends observed in earlier research, there were also some interesting divergences.