Images of class in Australian society : structure, ideology and social consciousness

Abstract

Investigations of class imagery reveal a fundamental concern with the way 'facts' of inequality and social differentiation are transformed in social consciousness and expressed in attitudes and actions. In this, a pervasive assumption is that individual consciousness is influenced directly and determinately by objective social conditions and experiences and, as a consequence, that images of class reflect these more enduring features of social life. The present investigation provides little empirical support for this contention. Using cross-sectional data and paying particular attention to class sentiment, it examines the character of class conceptions in Australian society, and assesses their social determinants using multivariate techniques. The results reveal a diverse range of structural class schemes and class identifications, but these characteristics are generally not synonymous with class sentiments as such. Moreover, while the social determinants of class identifications are found to be closely related to structural conditions and experiences, those of class sentiments are not. Nevertheless, class sentiments retain important class connotations, and they continue to exert an independent effect upon the way people vote after structural influences are controlled. In essence, class sentiments are subject to distinct social processes and constraints, and manifestly cut across particular social positions and class affiliations. This partial independence of class sentiments from structural conditions and class affiliations indicates that social consciousness is not a product of the direct or immediate impingement of social structure and external constraint, and highlights the critical significance of the means by which personal observations, experiences and knowledge of the social world are invested with ascribed meanings mediated through existing traditions, ideals, doctrines and practices. Images of class, then, cannot be understood without acknowledging that there is an ideological as well as a material context to social consciousness. Show more