Few concepts are more contested in sociological theory than the concept of “class.” In contemporary sociology there are scholars who assert that “class as a concept is ceasing to do any useful work in sociology” (Pahl, 1989) or even more stridently proclaim “the death of class” (eg. Pakulski and Waters, 1996; see also Holton and Turner, 1989). Yet, at the same time, there are also sociologists who write books with titles such as Bringing Class Back In (McNall, Levine and Fantasia, 1991), Reworking Class (Hall, 1997), Repositioning Class (Marshall 1997), and Class Counts (Wright, 1997). In some theoretical traditions in sociology, most notably Marxism, class figures at the very core of the theoretical structure; in others, especially the tradition identified with Durkheim, only pale shadows of class appear.
In what follows we will first examine in broad strokes the different ways in which the word class is used in sociological theory. This will be followed by a more fine-grained exploration of the differences in the concept of class in the two most important traditions of class analysis, the Weberian and the Marxist.

Varieties of class concepts

Many discussions of the concept of class confuse the terminological problem of how the word class is used within social theory with theoretical disputes about the proper definition and elaboration of the concept of class. While all uses of the word class in social theory invoke in one way or another the problem of understanding systems of economic inequality, different uses of the word are imbedded in very different theoretical agendas involving different kinds of questions and thus different sorts of concepts. One way of sorting out these alternative meanings is to examine what might be termed the anchoring questions within different agendas of class analysis. These are the questions that define the theoretical work the concept of class attempts to do. Five such anchoring questions in which the word “class” figures centrally in the answers are particularly important.

1. Class as Subjective location: First, the word “class” sometimes figures in the answer to the question: “How do people, individually and collectively, locate themselves and others within a social structure of inequality?” Class is one of the possible answers to this question. In this case the concept would be defined something like this: “Classes are social categories sharing subjectively-salient attributes used by people to rank those categories within a system of economic stratification”. With this definition of class, the actual content of these evaluative attributes will vary considerably across time and place. In some contexts, class-as-subjective-classification will revolve around life styles, in others around occupations, and in still others around income levels. Sometimes the economic content of the subjective classification system is quite direct – as in income levels; in other contexts, it is more indirect, as in expressions such as “the respectable classes”, the “dangerous classes”. The number of classes will also vary contextually depending upon how the actors in a social situation themselves define class distinctions. Class is not defined by a set of objective properties of a person’s social situation, but by the shared subjective understandings of people about rankings within social inequality. Class, in this sense of the word, would be contrasted to other forms of salient evaluation – religion, ethnicity, gender, occupation, etc. – which may have economic dimensions but which are not centrally defined in economic terms.

2. Class as objective position within distributions: Second, class is often central to the question, “How are people objectively located in distributions of material inequality.” In this case, class is defined in terms of material standards of living, usually indexed by income or, possibly, wealth. Class, in this agenda, is a gradational concept; the standard image is of rungs on a ladder, and the names for locations are accordingly such things as upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, lower class, under class. This is the concept of class that figures most prominently in popular discourse, at least in countries like the United States without a strong working-class political tradition. When American politicians call for “middle class tax cuts” what they characteristically mean is tax cuts for people in the middle of the income distribution. Subjective aspects of the location of people within systems of stratification may still be important in sociological investigations using this concept of class, but the word class itself is being used to capture objective properties of economic inequality, not simply the subjective classifications. Class, in this context, is contrasted with other ways that people are objectively located within social structures, for example, by their citizenship status, their power, or their subjection to institutionalized forms of ascriptive discrimination.