Magne Flemmen

from their place of residence, friends and family, and eating alone. Each of these fields allows for analyses that bring together the individual with wider structural conditions. In Part I, the authors question the impact of globalization on personal life, identify crosscultural variations in living alone, providing a tentative structural account to explain differences by country, while also examining the biographies of living alone. This leads to a discussion of the relationships between solo-living, partnering and parenting. In Part II, the discussion moves on to examine how people who live alone understand home and their consumption practices inside (and outside) the home. Part III explores the social networks of participants, connections, proximity and distance to friends and family, and their relationship to place and community. The book concludes with a final chapter that presents a forecast for future trends and analysis of living alone. My overall feeling is that this book is an ambitious project. The literature discussed was wide-ranging – drawn from sociology, geography, social anthropology and other related disciplines – and the cross-cultural considerations – an inclusion that is largely without precedent – that the authors draw on, in my opinion, make this book a major reference text for the study of housing and residence as well as living alone. Alongside this rigorous scholarly commitment, the book is insightful and balanced in its interpretation of the interview material. In-depth interviews collected in the homes of particular participants were presented with an almost ethnographic sensibility that transported the reader into participants’ homes. This presentation was also notable for its sensitivity to people’s stories. What really struck me was the skill with which the authors presented this material to portray complexity and diversity without feeling the need to overburden this with theory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my main criticism of the book relates precisely to its ambition. In its attempt to engage in the debates about globalization, identity and belonging on a range of different scales, transitions between large sections devoted to discussion of existing work and empirical data lacked fluidity. At times, this undermined the overall coherence of the narrative, which needed to be more clearly marked up to the reader throughout the book. I also felt that while many of the chapters concluded with a discussion that highlighted that the experience of living alone was shaped by class and gender, a more sustained and developed discussion would have strengthened the overall contribution of the book. Finally, the conclusion, while fascinating – drawing out the problems of living alone in relation to climate change, and also advocating for possible forms of cohousing and cooperative living – seemed a little bit tangential to the main contribution of the book. Given the diverse topics engaged throughout the book, the conclusion could have been better put to use in summarizing the findings and reiterating the main argument.

Today, ‘fear’ in its diverse facets is a topic growing in relevance in the media discourse. However, apart from analyses of individual psychic pathologies or general macro-sociological diagnoses, it has been largely neglected in (empirical) social sciences. The increasingly influential works of Bourdieu are no exception here, even though the concept of habitus inherently transcends positive interests such as lifestyle preferences, as analyzed in La Distinction. This becomes explicitly clear in his late works, above all in La Misère du monde, where the dispositions of agents are described in terms of the fears and worries associated with their positions in the social space and societal transformation processes. In this article the authors show that concerns, fear, and worries are constitutive characteristics of the habitus by investigating the structure of ‘fear manifestations’ in relation to the social space. Following Bourdieu’s conception, they construct a model of the Norwegian social space by applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to survey data. They then investigate how questions on fears and concerns are related to the capital structure of the space. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a reflection of their implications for a sociology of symbolic domination.

... Search within this text. Om demokratipessimisme og sosiologiens rolle. By Magne Flemmen. Log on. ... Magne Flemmen. Mastergrad i sosiologi 2008, Universitetet i Oslo. Stipendiat ved Institutt for sosiologi og samfunnsgeografi, Universitetet i Oslo. ...

Denne artikkelen tar for seg spørsmålet om sosial lukning av den økonomiske overklassen i Norge. Klasselukning betegner en tilstand preget av markert sosial ulikhet i sannsynligheten for å oppnå en bestemt klasseposisjon, altså en viss intergenerasjonell stabilitet. ...

ABSTRACT This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s rethinking of social class to investigate the connection between class and politics in contemporary society. We introduce a new class scheme that incorporates an often neglected hallmark of Bourdieu’s approach, namely the distinction between class fractions based on the preponderance of economic or cultural capital possessed. By relating our two-dimensional concept of class to a two-dimensional political space, we will show that the relationship between class and politics is homological – the systems of class divisions and political divisions exhibit a corresponding structure. The hierarchical dimension of class is associated with the divide between liberal and anti-liberal views on what is sometimes dubbed ‘new’ politics, whereas the capital composition dimension is connected with the classical left vs. right divide in terms of issues of redistribution, social spending and government interventions in the economy. We conclude by discussing whether political attitudes should be seen as a form of taste and as such on par with cultural tastes.

69), and it is later mentioned that women most often were interviewed alone and treated the interview as personal. This appears to me to be more relevant to the interpretation than Fleetwood allows for. This points to another problem I find typical for research where one group constitutes an implicit or explicit comparison; the men are not in focus in Fleetwood’s analysis, they are mostly there to help her analyse the women. This may explain why their accounts are treated in a less reflective way, because often their narratives are not analysed at all but, rather, stand alone as the taken-for-granted default from which the narratives of female drug mules depart. This produces an unfortunate gender bias in the presentation of agency: for example, when men speak of becoming drug-mules to provide for their families, this is not spoken of as ‘other orientation’, while women’s desire to provide is. Moreover, the fact that none of the men spoke of trying to back out of the deal (p. 154), something several of the women did, is taken to mean that the men did not have this experience, with no attempt by the author to investigate alternative interpretations, something Fleetwood consistently does in the case of the female respondents. The analytical and epistemological framework applied, namely narrative criminology and McNay’s reworking of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, are described in a clear and interesting way in Chapter 2. However, it is less clear how they have made a difference throughout. ‘Narrative’ and ‘habitus’ are used somewhat synonymously to ‘discourse’, ‘subject position’ and ‘script’, and these terms are also applied in some sections. I believe this relates to how Fleetwood actually departs from her stated aim of treating narratives as action and as productive of practices (pp. 40–41). Most often, she analyses how selves are constructed by particular ways of representing actions and relationships. The narratives are most clearly analysed as productive when the author links what is told with the institutions in which they are produced and which they affect, such as courts, prisons and religious organizations. This is the case in sections that deal with the confessional mode of the narratives or the missing excuses among some of the most privileged women, and this analysis is particularly interesting. The term ‘narrative’ is also employed in two different ways that are applied interchangeably: as one account out of many (in the sense that the women chose between narratives), and as the red thread or storyline that binds together the various experiences told and that discursively produces the self or the protagonist of which Presser speaks (p. 40). Early on Fleetwood discerns some dilemmas for scholars related to terminology, given the connotations different terms imply. This is particularly the case with regard to how the terms applied often construct drug trafficking as a market where rational business(men) operate which, she argues, hides issues such as exploitation and gender. The author’s use of terms that might be subjected to the same critique, such as ‘trade’ and ‘work’, further demonstrates how difficult it is to find terms that do not bind our analysis and understanding of the subjects we study. The book taught me a lot about ‘mule-work’, the drug trade and gendered subject construction. The strength of the book is its rich materials and the author’s probing and open analysis of it, and I warmly recommend it.

ABSTRACT Claims of the demise of class were in part fuelled by problems facing a class analysis of contemporary politics. Central to this was the emergence of the ‘new middle class’. Debates revolved around whether it would constitute a source of radicalism or conservatism. John Goldthorpe's concept of the service class has proven to be the most enduring contribution to these debates. The service class, Goldthorpe held, would constitute an essentially conservative element in contemporary society. Deviations from this expected conservatism were supposedly an intermittent, transitory phenomenon, devoid of structural basis. In this paper, I investigate the political attitudes of the Norwegian service class. Adhering to Clark and Lipset's insistence on the need for a more complex analysis of both class and politics, I take a multidimensional approach: political attitudes are seen within the two dimensions of economic and ‘post-materialist’ issues, and class divisions in terms of the two dimensions of volume and composition of capital, following Bourdieu. By applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis, I uncover a significant political heterogeneity with a structural basis in the different forms of capital, pace Goldthorpe. The fractions relying on cultural capital are markedly leftist, while their counterparts possessing economic capital constitute a right-wing. Also, service-class members with the most capital are more liberal than their counterparts with less overall capital. I argue that this points to the significance of a multidimensional concept of class, which in turn necessitates further work on how ‘Bourdieusian’ concepts can be synthesised with class analysis.

This paper considers the contemporary significance of white racism and its association with nationalist sentiment amongst a cohort late middle aged white Britons, using survey responses and qualitative interviews from the 1958 National Child Development Study. We have shown that although overt racism is very limited, a substantial minority of white Britons display ambivalent feelings which have the potential to be mobilised in racist directions. We argue against the view that disadvantaged white working class respondents are especially xenophobic, and show that racist views are not strongly associated with social position. In exploring the clustering of different nationalist and racist sentiments amongst economic and cultural elites, and comparing these with 'disenfranchised' respondents with little economic and cultural capital, we show that it is actually the elite who are most likely to articulate 'imperial racism'. By contrast, the 'disenfranchised' articulate a kind of anti-establishment nationalism which is not strongly racist. We also show that the elite are strongly internally divided, with a substantial number of the cultural elite being strongly anti-racist and committed to multi-culturalism, so generating strong internal factionalism between elite positions. Our paper therefore underscores how intensifying inequalities have facilitated the volatility and variability of nationalist and racist sentiment.

... Search within this text. Om demokratipessimisme og sosiologiens rolle. By Magne Flemmen. Log on. ... Magne Flemmen. Mastergrad i sosiologi 2008, Universitetet i Oslo. Stipendiat ved Institutt for sosiologi og samfunnsgeografi, Universitetet i Oslo. ...

In this article we use qualitative interviews to examine how Norwegians possessing low volumes of cultural and economic capital demarcate themselves symbolically from the lifestyles of those above and below them in social space. In downward boundary drawing, a range of types of people are regarded as inferior because of perceived moral and aesthetic deficiencies. In upward boundary drawing, anti-elitist sentiments are strong: people practising resource-demanding lifestyles are viewed as harbouring 'snobbish' and 'elitist' attitudes. However, our analysis suggests that contemporary forms of anti-elitism are far from absolute, as symbolic expressions of privilege are markedly less challenged if they are parcelled in a 'down-to-earth' attitude. Previous studies have shown attempts by the privileged to downplay differences in cross-class encounters, accompanied by displays of openness and down-to-earthness. Our findings suggest that there is in fact a symbolic &#...

In this article we analyse class cultures by mapping out differences in ‘original taste’; that is, respondents’ classed preferences for food and drink. By employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we produce a relational model of tastes. Using three indicators of social class – occupational class, income and education – we find clear class divisions. The upper and middle classes exhibit diverse and what are typically regarded as ‘healthy’ tastes; this contrasts with the more restricted and what are typically regarded as ‘less healthy’ tastes found among the working classes. Our findings challenge ongoing debates within cultural stratification research where it has become almost usual to demonstrate that the contemporary upper and middle classes exhibit playful tastes for the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the ‘exotic’. We find that upper- and middle-class households also enjoy very traditional foodstuffs. We argue that this illustrates a need for a relational understanding of taste: even the ...

In a recent paper in The Sociological Review, Atkinson and Deeming argue that tastes in food are homologous to the social space, exactly as it was in Bourdieu's Distinction. This would involve differences in food tastes not only along the class hierarchy, but also a clear-cut divide by the relative weight of cultural and economic capital. However, Atkinson and Deeming base their claims on insufficient data analysis: They misinterpret their own correspondence analysis and the additional tables, which they in turn fail to subject to even the most basic statistical analysis. We show that the results they present are actually at odds with their own interpretations and main conclusions. It is not just that Atkinson and Deeming's arguments lack support; their proposition about a culinary division between cultural and economic class fractions is contradicted by their own data.

"This thesis is concerned with the social differentiation of class relationships. Changes in the structure of capitalism over the last century or so paved the way for larger corporations with complex bureaucratised divisions of labour. In addition, modern societies undergo continuing struggles over the «relative autonomy» of various fields – for instance, the extent to which cultural production – the arts, science, etc. – should be governed by political leads or subject to market forces, or be free to establish their specific «rules». All of these processes imply that class relationships become more complex and differentiated – in sharp opposition to expectations fostered by the writings of Marx. The thesis addresses itself to the analysis of such differentiation of classes. Its principal approach lies in the application of the concepts of social space and forms of capital, drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, to model and analyse the differentiation of the upper and middle class of Norway. In this, it operates in an intersection of the ideas of Bourdieu with the classical formulations of class in the Weberian and Marxian traditions – what I call European class theory The thesis consists of three articles and an introduction. In two of the articles, I study classes defined with explicit reference to European class theory. The upper class refers to a category of broadly two types of class situations: those making their living off of some form of property ownership, and those making their living as high-level employees partaking in the control and management of corporations. By constructing what Bourdieu called a social space of these classes, internal differences in terms of their type and amount of capital are uncovered. The upper class is found to be principally differentiated by the volume of inherited capital – that is to say, resources pertaining to their social class background – and by the source of economic capital, opposing property-owners from employees. The middle class is operationalised by using John H. Goldthorpe’s concept and categorisation of the service class – professional, administrative and managerial employees on higher and lower levels, distinguished from other employees by the amount of institutionalised trust placed on them by employers. The differentiation of the service class is investigated with reference to their political attitudes. The principal line of division in the service class is found to be by the form of capital they primarily possess – economic or cultural – and this correspond to some extent with their principal political division – socialist vs. laissez-faire attitudes on economic issues. The secondary divide by the amount of capital the service class members have correspond to a division between liberal and anti-liberal attitudes. These papers support a broadly Bourdieusian view of class differences, but connects it to the view that class divisions are based in the property and market relations of capitalist economies. In the third paper of the thesis, I shift attention to discuss recent contributions to «Bourdieusian class analysis». Several British authors have attempted to effect a serious reorientation of class analysis away from such an emphasis on production and markets and over to the distribution of capitals and the workings of fields. In the paper, I argue that, notwithstanding the power of the approaches these authors advocate, such a fundamental reorientation should be rejected. Instead, what is called for is a systematic connection of the «Bourdieusian» ideas with the fundamentals of class relationships. The three papers are prefaced by a long introduction which presents the research question of the thesis; gives a thorough exposition of the theoretical perspectives informing the work; introduces the particular method and methodology applied in the quantitative papers; presents brief summaries of all three papers; and offers a concluding discussions which sums up the findings and also outlines the main theoretical implications and arguments raised by the work as a whole."

Recent developments in class analysis, particularly associated with so-called 'cultural class analysis'; have seen the works of Pierre Bourdieu take centre stage. Apart from the general influence of 'habitus' and 'cultural capital', some scholars have tried to reconstruct class analysis with concepts drawn from Bourdieu. This involves a theoretical reorientation, away from the conventional concerns of class analysis with property and market relations, towards an emphasis on the multiple forms of capital. Despite the significant potential of these developments, such a reorientation dismisses or neglects the relations of power and domination founded in the economic institutions of capitalism as a crucial element of what class is. Through a critique of some recent attempts by British authors to develop a 'Bourdieusian' class theory, the paper reasserts the centrality of the relations of power and domination that used to be the domain of class analysis. The paper suggests some elements central to a reworked class analysis that benefits from the power of Bourdieu's ideas while retaining a perspective on the fundamentals of class relations in capitalism.

Denne artikkelen tar for seg spørsmålet om sosial lukning av den økonomiske overklassen i Norge. Klasselukning betegner en tilstand preget av markert sosial ulikhet i sannsynligheten for å oppnå en bestemt klasseposisjon, altså en viss intergenerasjonell stabilitet. Forskningsspørsmålet er i hvilken grad klassebakgrunn påvirker ens sjanse for å være i den økonomiske overklassen–forstått som store eiendomsbesittere og toppsjiktet av ledere og andre lønnede ansatte. Videre undersøkes hvorvidt klassebakgrunn påvirker ens suksess ...

The point of departure in this book is that class analysis needs to engage more thoroughly with Beck, Bauman, Giddens and Archer’s claims that a new phase of modernity renders class irrelevant. It is not enough to demonstrate, say, persisting social inequality and its reproduction, since this is in fact not incompatible with either of these authors’ theories. Atkinson pinpoints a key issue: The four authors hail the coming of all kinds of social change, but a common denominator is their stress on increased reflexivity. Precisely what this means is not always clear. Atkinson interprets it as meaning a condition of ‘active, individual choice and deliberation’ (p. 8) in which social change has set actors free from the constraints of social structure and guidelines of tradition. This is the assertion he sets out to refute. The first part of the book deals with theory. Here Atkinson offers a fairly brief discussion of the four theorists of modernity, discusses earlier approaches to class and provides his own take on Bourdieu. He commits to a very thorough-going ‘Bourdieusianism’. Atkinson holds that in order to assess what Bourdieu has to offer, one must be willing to try out the entire perspective, as opposed to tugging concepts – like cultural capital – loose from the system they belong to and discussing them in isolation. This is sound in my view, and a welcome corrective to how Bourdieu is frequently treated. However, Atkinson is an almost annoyingly true believer: Bourdieu’s writings are treated as close to an infallible and exhaustive source of insight into class relationships. Admittedly, Atkinson does want to supplement Bourdieu with a few concepts from phenomenology. While these add-ons are agreeable they seem rather inconsequential for the ensuing analysis. It seems like Bourdieu is being installed as a new Marx – a strange fate for the undogmatic iconoclast. The bulk of the book is dedicated to empirical analyses. Here Atkinson uses qualitative interviews to show how, even under present conditions, 55 Bristol residents from different sectors of the social space still rely heavily on socially conditioned, ‘classed’ ways of perceiving, thinking and acting that lure beneath the level of the (discursively) conscious. Higher-class people are found to have taken up educational careers simply because that was what seemed ‘natural’, just as it did not occur to their lower-class counterparts that they could do the same. Something similar applies for other ‘choices’ and outlooks – on work, cultural consumption and politics. On all issues, the research participants’ ways of perceiving and thinking are clearly ‘classed’. But there is no trace of class identities and explicit recognition of class conflicts. Not even politics is understood in class terms. Atkinson joins the broader ‘cultural class analysis’ movement (Savage, Skeggs, Devine, Reay, and others) in taking this to be typical of how class manifests itself. This represents, I think, a significant advance over the narrow emphasis on categorical class identity. Remarkably, however, it does not seem to occur to Atkinson that this is in fact rather close to what (for example) Giddens claimed about the contemporary role of class. This is acknowledged by other ‘culturalists’, like Mike 192 Acta Sociologica 56(2)

Although social class was once central to political sociology, it has become increasingly less so; many analysts now believe that one’s class position is less important in determining political attitudes and political party preferences. Simultaneously, more attention has been paid to what might be called the culturalization of politics, as epitomized by the US culture wars and stereotypes like the “latte-drinking liberal.” Here, political attitudes are regarded as primarily structured by people’s lifestyles and broader way of life. But do political preferences have to be explained by either relations of sociomaterial conditions (e.g. class) or cultural orientations (e.g. status and lifestyles)? In this article, we argue in favor of an approach that aims to reconcile these factors, allowing for the empirical mapping of whether and how they intersect in shaping political party preferences. We investigate this by using detailed Norwegian survey data to measure the extent to which intra...

In this article, we address whether and how contemporary social classes are marked by distinct lifestyles. We assess the model of the social space, a novel approach to class analysis pioneered by Bourdieu's Distinction. Although pivotal in Bourdieu's work, this model is too often overlooked in later research, making its contemporary relevance difficult to assess. We redress this by using the social space as a framework through which to study the cultural manifestation of class divisions in lifestyle differences in contemporary Norwegian society. Through a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of unusually rich survey data, we reveal a structure strikingly similar to the model in Distinction, with a primary dimension of the volume of capital, and a secondary dimension of the composition of capital. While avoiding the substantialist fallacy of predefined notions of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' tastes, we explore how 168 lifestyle items map onto this social space. ...

A complete list of this memo-series is available in a PDF® format at: Foreword This report describes the background for and construction of the Oslo Register Data Class Scheme. The intention behind this class scheme is to use the unique possibilities for class research provided by the population data made available by Statistics Norway. In the beginning of the 2000's Statistics Norway started to use a new and better occupational classification based on ISCO-88. Moreover, high quality data on income that could supplement the data on occupations were available. In order to do research on class based on the register data, class classifications using the new occupational classification as well the other available registers had to be developed. Professor Marianne Nordli Hansen therefore initiated a class classification project, the ORDC-project. The idea behind the project was to follow up her work on classification based on register data in the 1990's, a work that drew inspirati...

In this chapter we focus on the notion of homology, understood as a systematic correspondence between social structures. We discuss and empirically assess a specific hypothesis forwarded in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction about a homologous relationship between three structures: a social space, a space of lifestyles and a space of political stances. Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we advance a novel technique for assessing the homology thesis. Focusing on the case of contemporary Norwegian society, we show that the distinct social universes of class, culture and politics exhibit strikingly similar structures. The structure of the social space – with a primary division between high and low volumes of capital, and a secondary chiastic division between cultural and economic – is echoed in both the space of lifestyles and the space of political stances. The chapter not only unveils the persistence of class-structured lifestyles and political attitudes, it also develops methodological tools to move beyond the misguided substantialist fallacy often implicated in assessing the homology thesis. The truly relational way of assessing it, we argue, is to compare rigorously the structures of independently constructed spaces, and not singular variables drawn from the social universes in question.

Today, ‘fear’ in its diverse facets is a topic growing in relevance in the media discourse. However, apart from analyses of individual psychic pathologies or general macro-sociological diagnoses, it has been largely neglected in (empirical) social sciences. The increasingly influential works of Bourdieu are no exception here, even though the concept of habitus inherently transcends positive interests such as lifestyle preferences, as analyzed in La Distinction. This becomes explicitly clear in his late works, above all in La Misère du monde, where the dispositions of agents are described in terms of the fears and worries associated with their positions in the social space and societal transformation processes. In this article the authors show that concerns, fear, and worries are constitutive characteristics of the habitus by investigating the structure of ‘fear manifestations’ in relation to the social space. Following Bourdieu’s conception, they construct a model of the Norwegian s...