Different theoretical approaches to class analysis build their concepts of class to help answer different clusters of these questions. Weber’s work revolves around the third and fourth questions, with the fourth question concerning forms of historical variation in social organization of inequalities providing the anchor for his understanding of class. The narrower question about explaining individual life chances gets its specific meaning from its relationship to this broader historical question. Michael Mann’s work on class, especially in his multivolume study of The Sources of Social Power is, like Weber’s, also centred on the four question (Mann, 1986, 1993). John Goldthorpe’s class analysis centres firmly on the third question. While his work is often characterized as having a Weberian inflection, his categories are elaborated strictly in terms of the requirements of describing and explaining economic life chances, not long-term historical variations in systems of inequality. For Pierre Bourdieu, class analysis is anchored in a more open-ended version of the third question. Where he differs from Weber and other Weber-inspired class analysts is in expanding the idea of life-chances to include a variety of non-economic aspects of opportunity (e.g. cultural opportunities of various sorts) and expanding the kinds of resources relevant to explaining those life-chances from narrowly economic resources to a range of cultural and social resources (called “cultural capital” and “social capital”). “Class” for Bourdieu, therefore, is a much more expansive concept, covering all inequalities in opportunities (life chances) that can be attributed to socially-determined inequalities of resources of whatever sort. Finally, class analysis in the Marxist tradition is anchored in the fifth question concerning the challenge to systems of economic oppression and exploitation. The questions about historical variation and individual life chances are also important, but they are posed within the parameters of the problem of emancipatory transformations.

Now let us examine in some detail how these questions are played out in the Weberian and Marxist traditions, the two most important traditions of class analysis in sociological theory. The concepts of class in these two theoretical traditions share much in common: they both reject simple gradational definitions of class; they are both anchored in the social relations which link people to economic resources of various sorts; they both see these social relations as affecting the material interests of actors, and, accordingly, they see class relations as the potential basis for solidarities and conflict. Yet, they also differ in certain fundamental ways. The core of the difference is captured by the favourite buzz-words of each theoretical tradition: life-chances for Weberians, and exploitation for Marxists. This difference, in turn, reflects the location of class analysis within their broader theoretical agendas.

The Weberian Concept: Class as market-determined Life Chances

What has become the Weber-inspired tradition of class analysis (e.g. Giddens 1973; Parkin 1971; Scott 1996) is largely based on Weber’s few explicit, but fragmentary, conceptual analyses of class in Economy and Society ([1924] 1978). Weber writes:

We may speak of a “class” when (1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets. This is “class situation.”

It is the most elemental economic fact that the way in which the disposition over material property is distributed among a plurality of people, meeting competitively in the market for the purpose of exchange, in itself creates specific life chances....

But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate. Class situation is, in this sense, ultimately market situation (pp. 927-28).

In short, the kind and quantity of resources you own affects your opportunities for income in market exchanges. “Opportunity” is a description of the feasible set individuals face, the trade-offs they encounter in deciding what to do. Owning means of production (the capitalist class) gives a person different alternatives from owning skills and credentials (the “middle” class), and both of these are different from simply owning unskilled labour power (the working class). Furthermore, in a market economy, access to market-derived income affects the broader array of life experiences and opportunities for oneself and one’s children. The study of the life-chances of children based on parent’s market capacity, is thus an integral part of the Weberian agenda of class analysis.