The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, Volume 3: Love, Lifestyles and a Multiplicity of Capitals

This book continues the Class Structure of Capitalist Societies series by exploring the place of class among a confluence of factors in shaping people’s lives, loves and lifestyles across three nations.

Previous volumes in the series examined the shape, history and cultural expressions of class structures. Now, grappling with themes usually put under the labels of ’intersectionality’ and ’work-life balance’ and bridging literatures seldom brought together, this volume uses an innovative mix of statistical techniques to untangle the messy nexus of factors - class, age, gender, race/ethnicity, intimate relations, political context and more - underpinning everyday routines, spaces, possessions, practices, (im)possibilities and self-perceptions in the US, Germany and Sweden. In the process it advances the specific vision of class and social relations developed by Pierre Bourdieu, pursuing the case, above all, that conceptual and methodological progress is necessary to fully recognise and explore the multiplicity of desires, dispositions and demands at play in people’s lives.

The volume will be of major interest to scholars of class, culture, gender and family but will appeal to anyone interested in the interplay of identities and pressures implicated in contemporary experiences and inequalities.

Will Atkinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Class (2nd ed, 2024), Bourdieu and After (2020) and Class in the New Millennium (2017) as well as the other two volumes in the Class Structure of Capitalist Societies series: A Space of Bounded Variety (2020) and Social Space and Symbolic Domination in Three Nations (2022).