Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle Class Formation in Contemporary Britain

by Mike Savage

Property, Bureaucracy and Culture places the British middle classes in their historical and regional contexts in order to explain how they exercise a powerful impact in present-day British society. The authors develop a new theoretical perspective on the middle classes, criticizing fashionable but unhelpful theories of the "service class," and drawing upon the work of Wright and Bourdieu to develop a theoretical realist perspective which is sensitive to the variety of ways in which middle-class formation takes place. They argue that the British middle class has been split between a cohesive and well-established professional middle class, and an insecure and marginal managerial and self-employed middle class. The book shows how this split has been widened by recent changes in economic structuring and explores the implications for society today.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 1992

About the author

Mike Savage is a Professor of Sociology at the University of York.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.