Book Review Sample: Reviewing a Study of Social Class in Britain

Model Answer

The Book and Its Argument

In Class in Contemporary Britain: Inequality, Identity and Everyday Life, Sutherland (2021) sets out to update classic sociological accounts of social class for a period in which traditional occupational categories no longer map neatly onto lived experience. The book’s central argument is that class in Britain persists as a powerful structuring force, but that it now operates as much through cultural taste, social networks and geography as through income or occupation alone. Drawing on the Great British Class Survey and a series of qualitative interviews, Sutherland proposes an expanded, multidimensional model of class that incorporates economic, cultural and social capital, building explicitly on Bourdieu’s (1984) framework while adapting it to contemporary British data. The scope of the book is national, covering respondents across England, Scotland and Wales, and it deliberately moves beyond a simple middle-class and working-class binary to identify a more fragmented class structure, including groups the author terms the “precariat” and the “established middle class”.

For undergraduate sociology students, the text offers an accessible route into ongoing debates about whether class remains a meaningful category of analysis in a society that increasingly describes itself as socially mobile and meritocratic. Sutherland is careful to position the book within, rather than against, the existing literature, presenting the multidimensional model as an extension of Bourdieusian and Savage et al.’s (2015) survey-based traditions rather than a wholesale rejection of earlier occupational approaches, which gives the argument a cumulative, rather than combative, relationship to the wider field.

Summary of Contents

The opening chapters set out the theoretical case for revisiting class analysis, reviewing earlier sociological traditions from Marx and Weber through to Bourdieu, before introducing the survey instrument used to generate the book’s own class model. The middle section presents findings from the survey, mapping seven class groupings distinguished by combinations of economic, cultural and social capital, and illustrating each with interview extracts describing everyday consumption, leisure and social ties. A chapter on geography examines how class experience varies between London, other major cities and smaller towns, arguing that place has become an increasingly important axis of inequality in its own right, and that regional identity now interacts with class position in ways earlier national surveys tended to flatten.

Later chapters turn to lived experience, exploring how respondents talk about their own class position, often with reluctance or ambivalence, and how class intersects with generational change, particularly for younger respondents navigating insecure employment and rising housing costs. A further chapter considers education as a mechanism of class reproduction, drawing on interview material with parents and young adults to show how cultural capital is transmitted through schooling choices and informal social networks. The concluding chapter considers policy implications, arguing that interventions aimed at social mobility often misunderstand the multidimensional nature of class disadvantage, focusing narrowly on income while neglecting the cultural and social capital that also shape opportunity. Across the book, quantitative survey data and qualitative interview material are used together, giving the argument both statistical weight and human detail that purely quantitative class research can lack.

Critical Evaluation

The book’s principal strength is its combination of large-scale survey data with qualitative interviews, which allows Sutherland to substantiate claims about class structure while also showing how class is experienced and narrated by individuals. The seven-class model is a genuine contribution, extending earlier work by Savage et al. (2015) with more recent data and a sharper focus on geography, and the interview extracts do useful work in illustrating how respondents themselves resist or accept the labels the survey assigns them. However, the survey sample, while large, was collected through an online self-selecting method, and Sutherland’s acknowledgement of this limitation is brief relative to its potential effect on representativeness, particularly for older and lower-income respondents who may be under-represented in online surveys.

The qualitative chapters are rich but draw on a relatively small number of interviewees, and their selection criteria are not always made explicit, making it difficult to assess how representative the quoted voices are of the wider class groupings they illustrate. The geographical analysis is one of the book’s more original contributions, though the treatment of Scotland and Wales is comparatively brief next to the sustained focus on England, and a reader interested in devolved nations may find the regional comparison thinner than the headline claims about geography suggest. The theoretical framing is generally even-handed, engaging fairly with critics of Bourdieusian class analysis, though the book could have engaged more directly with intersectional critiques concerning how class interacts with race and disability, which receive only limited attention across the empirical chapters. The writing throughout is clear and largely free of unnecessary jargon, making the book accessible to an undergraduate audience without oversimplifying the underlying survey methodology.

Contribution and Audience

Class in Contemporary Britain makes a solid contribution to a well-established field by updating multidimensional class analysis with recent, nationally representative data and a stronger geographical dimension than much prior work. It will be of particular value to undergraduate sociology students studying stratification and inequality modules, offering an accessible bridge between classical theory and contemporary empirical debate, and the interview material makes it a useful teaching resource for seminar discussion as well as independent reading. The book is less suited to readers seeking a purely quantitative treatment, since its strength lies in combining survey findings with narrative interview material rather than in statistical modelling for its own sake.

Compared with Savage et al.’s (2015) earlier work, Sutherland’s text is narrower in scope but benefits from more recent data and a sustained focus on place, making it a useful companion to, rather than a replacement for, the foundational studies it builds upon. Readers wanting a fuller treatment of class and gender specifically may also wish to read the book alongside Skeggs (1997), whose earlier ethnographic work is referenced but not extensively engaged with in Sutherland’s account. The book would also pair usefully with Reay’s (2017) study of working-class educational experience, which offers a more sustained, single-site ethnographic account to set against Sutherland’s broader, survey-led national picture.

Conclusion

Overall, Class in Contemporary Britain offers a well-evidenced and readable update to multidimensional class analysis, successfully demonstrating that class remains a powerful, if increasingly complex, feature of British social life. Its combination of survey data and interview material gives the argument both empirical weight and human texture, even though questions remain about sample representativeness and the limited attention paid to intersecting inequalities. For students seeking to understand how contemporary sociologists operationalise and evidence claims about class, the book is a valuable and current resource, best read alongside the classical theorists and earlier survey-based studies it builds upon.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
Reay, D. (2017) Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes. Bristol: Policy Press.
Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S. and Miles, A. (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Pelican.
Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage.
Sutherland, M. (2021) Class in Contemporary Britain: Inequality, Identity and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.