Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle Class Formation in Contemporary Britain

Property, Bureaucracy and Culture places the British middle classes in their historical and regional contexts in order to explain how they exercise a powerful impact in present-day British society. The authors develop a new theoretical perspective on the middle classes, criticizing fashionable but unhelpful theories of the "service class", and drawing upon the work of Wright and Bourdieu to develop a theoretical realist perspective which is sensitive to the variety of ways in which middle-class formation takes place. They argue that the British middle class has been split between a cohesive and well-established professional middle class, and an insecure and marginal managerial and self-employed middle class. The book shows how this split has been widened by recent changes in economic structuring and explores the implications for society today.