Class and Social Attitudes – A Framework for Analysis

A research framework for eliciting the links between class and social attitudes is proposed. It is argued that: such analyses should be based on a concept of class as qualitatively distinct positions in terms of employment relations; such an enterprise should be restricted to the following four broad attitudinal domains: attitudes to production/work, distribution/market, redistribution/state and reproduction/family; two important tasks are to map the pattern of class differences in attitudes and to test explanatory mechanisms, which can be hypothesised to be class-dependent interests and class-specific norms; political institutions and political articulation serve to modify the link between class and attitudes; two important contemporary trends in the link between class and politics may be summarised as the re-commodification of labour, and the political de-articulation of class.