Despite sociology’s long history with theorizing class and using it as a major category of social life, there remains much disagreement about how to incorporate it into our research.  We are thankfully coming out of the “end of history” era where class was argued to no longer exist or be a defining aspect of life (e.g., Pakulski & Waters 1996; Cannadine 2000; Kingston 2000).  We know that class is part of any decent intersectional analysis.  Fundamentally different understandings of what “class” is, and how best to define it methodologically, however, may have impeded advance in empirical research that includes class.  Quantitative studies in particular often use level of education, income, or, more rarely, occupation, as a proxy for class.  But do any of these factors actually capture the relational and cultural characteristic of class?  Lareau and Conley point out that many purported studies of class “use the terms ‘inequality,’ ‘stratification,’ ‘family background,’ or specific indicators (such as education, wealth, income, or occupation) - sometimes interchangeably” leading to “considerable murkiness swirls around the empirical study of social class” (Lareau & Conley 2008: 3-4).  This conceptual murkiness seems to have inhibited class research. 

One exception to this general inhibition, however, has been in the thriving genre of class cultures studies.  Class cultures studies take the relational and messy aspects of class as their starting point, and seek to describe and explain how people act, think, and interpret the world in class-differentiated ways based on classed experiences, both in terms of the communities in which they were raised and the kinds of work and worlds they now inhabit.  The relational aspect is clear in a common focus on “opposing” class cultures, which specifically contrasts cultures of the working class and middle class.  Three recent examples, Privilege Lost by Jessi Streib, Bridging the Class Divide by Jack Metzgar, and We Are Still Here by Jennifer Silva will be reviewed here, alongside two classic examples in the field, Missing Class, by Betsy Leondar-Wright, and Reading Classes, by Barbara Jensen....