In 2011, Mike Savage, then a sociology professor at the University of York (he’s now at the London School of Economics), alongside Fiona Devine, a professor at the university of Manchester, designed and launched the Great British Class Survey on the BBC website. The objective, using the 160,000 responses, was to come up with a ‘more up-to-date model of class’ in the UK. And so they did. The survey revealed that class was no longer a matter of upper, middle and working – it was more complicated than that, featuring what Savage and Devine were to categorise as seven classes: elite; established middle class; technical middle class; new affluent workers; traditional working class; emerging service workers; and the precariat.

Savage himself followed up this analysis in 2015, with Social Class in the 21st Century. The spiked review decided to catch up with Savage to discuss his thoughts on the meaning of class today, the nature of inequality and class as an identity. Here’s what he had to say… spiked review: In your recent work, you’ve developed a seven-class schema. Why did you move away from the more familiar, middle- and working-class, bourgeois and proletarian, distinction? And why is there this fragmentation?

Mike Savage: Those old terms, middle class and working class, really hark back to an industrial society. The categories then were concerned with the divisions between manual occupations (working class) and non-manual occupations (middle class or lower middle class). And the assumption was that your occupation was the key defining feature of your class. And I think that way of thinking about class has become a bit outdated. This is partly because industrial and factory work has declined, so there are fewer classical working-class people in those terms. But also because there is an increasing range of factors that influence your situation in life. So, it’s not just the money you earn from your job, it also includes your inheritance, the money in your home, your savings, and also your education and qualifications.

The way we think about class is multi-dimensional. It takes a number of different aspects that influence your life chances. We don’t assume that the old occupational divisions are the prime ones. review: Your work draws on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his three ideas of capital – economic, cultural and social. How do the latter two – the cultural and social– confer advantage on some and disadvantage others?

Savage: The idea of capital for Bourdieu is that you have capital if that capital can convey advantages vis a vis other people. So if you’ve got a certain kind of capital, you are put in a position in which you are advantaged, and those advantages can be accumulated and passed on. And obviously we know about economic capital, we know that people with more money have got more advantages. You can convert economic capital into a better quality of life. But Bourdieu was very important in saying that it’s not just a matter of money, though money is crucial. There’s also cultural capital, and the argument goes that people who are socialised, by their parents mainly, into being able to appreciate culture in an abstract way, understanding abstract principles and abstract ideas, taught in their home to value art and culture, then they’re better able to convert their interests into educational achievements – that is, they’re able to do better in school and university. This means that those qualifications can be turned into better jobs. Bourdieu argues that how well you do in education isn’t just to do with how clever you are; it’s also to do with whether you’ve been given the right dispositions and attitudes when you’re young. And whether those convey the potential to do well in education.

And then social capital is the idea that your social networks are an important resource which might allow you to gain certain advantages. So the obvious example of this is the Old Boys’ network. If you went to an elite university and know lots of elite people in different walks of life, like a top judge, a top bank manager and a top doctor, you’re better placed to use those connections to benefit your own interests. So Bourdieu is really arguing that across these three categories of capital – economic, cultural and social – you can see how different sorts of advantages play out for certain people who’ve got the right kind of capital. And if these three kinds of capital work together, they can create add-on advantages as they spin off each other. review: Do the classes tend to associate and mix solely within their class? (For example, established middle-class types mixing with established middle-class types.)

Savage: It’s not as exclusive as that, no. We should not exaggerate how exclusive people’s social networks are. Chances are, people will know other people from different levels of the social structure. Having said that, particularly at the top level among the elite, they are more likely to know other people with high-status jobs. The same with the very bottom – the precariat – who are very unlikely to know people from a higher social-status group. So it’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s not like saying you only know people like yourself. But the chances of you knowing more elite people are significantly raised if you are yourself elite, and similarly with the bottom sections of the social structure. review: How do you assess the relations between the classes? Is there a widening division between top and bottom? A bunching and blurring together in the middle?

Savage: That’s exactly right. Our big argument, which we tried to get over quickly in the class survey, is that the old model used to be focused on upper, middle and working class with the big dividing lines in the middle. But what we’re saying now is that the top levels are pulling away, the elite people are much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago, and all the data on economic change confirms that. People at the bottom aren’t much better off, possibly even worse off because benefit levels haven’t really always kept up with inflation and so forth. So you see the two extremes pull apart, with the elite being a lot more elite compared to the precariat than used to be the case. And the middle is much more confused and fuzzy, so the dividing lines are much less easy to draw. The class structure today is a bit like a diamond shape. You’ve got the small elite class at the top, a long way apart from the precariat at the bottom, but in the middle it’s more complicated.

review: There’s a striking paradox here – as inequality has increased, as the top and bottom social classes’ pull away from each other, the actual awareness, the actual consciousness of class, of inequality, has declined. Why do you think this is? Savage: It’s a good question. People are generally aware of inequality and most people know that the gap between the rich and the poor is great. Many of them will say, ‘we have inequality and I don’t like that’. One of the reasons for people supporting Brexit was the idea of an elite not representing us. So there is that consciousness of people being quite polarised. But when you ask people what class do you yourself belong to, that’s when people are much more hesitant. I think the reason is because if you are in the middle, if you are of the 60 or 70 per cent of people in the middle of the class structure, it’s much more confusing to know where you lie, whether you’re in the established middle class or the technical middle class. And therefore you’re much less aware of where you stand.

Again, the two exceptions are the top and bottom. The elites are pretty much aware of themselves being privileged and much more likely to say that they’re upper class or middle class – they wouldn’t say they were working class. At the top level there is quite a strong sense of class awareness. And similarly, for people at the bottom, the precariat, people are aware of themselves being at the bottom so to speak. They may not call that being working class, they may use different labels to capture that, but they do have a feeling of being the ones who have lost out or not had the advantages that others have had. So I think that people are class conscious in a way, but they’re not class conscious in the older ways of thinking I’m working class and proud of it.