Social Class Is No Longer Relevant in Modern Britain

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Social class is no longer relevant in modern Britain. The British society has often been considered to be divided into three main groups of classes, the upper class, the middle class and the working class. In days gone by an individual’s social class would affect their chances of getting an education, a job, etc. It would also affect the people who they could socialise with and marry, but is it still as relevant in modern Britain? Approaches and perspectives on the relevance of social class in modern Britain will be discussed. Post modernists would agree that social class is no longer relevant in contemporary Britain. Australian sociologists Malcolm Waters and Jan Pakulski consider that it has become unfashionable to see class as important these days, and they also claim there is growing evidence that leads them to believe that social class is losing its significance in capitalist society. Pakulski and Waters claim that the stratification systems of capitalist societies have passed and developed through three phases. Economic-class society, organised-class and finally in the last quarter of the century, status-conventional societies. In the status-conventional phase they consider stratification is based on cultural rather than economic differences. Pakulski also outlines four key feature of the change in stratification system in status-conventional societies. Culturalism, Fragmentation, this is where people have many different statuses based on their membership of different groups. Resignification and Autonomization, this is where an individual becomes independent, they choose how to act and what they should believe. They acquire their own set of values which cannot be predicted by their social class background. These four features suggest that social class is irrelevant and that in modern capitalist society there are far more important issues to be

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