Symbols of class: A computational analysis of class distinction-making through etiquette, 1922-2017

Abstract

Social scientists of class and inequality have documented the rise of omnivorousness, informality, ordinariness, and emphasis on meritocracy. This apparent decline in class closure contrasts sharply with rising inequality and declining economic mobility. How are these competing developments reflected in everyday class distinction-making? In this article, we answer this question by applying Goffman's work on the symbols of class status to the analysis of unique data: a corpus of etiquette books published between 1922 and 2017. We use word embeddings to quantify the salience of six class concepts (affluence, cultivation, education, employment, morality, and status) in the corpus. We find that education and employment are increasingly salient while status, affluence, cultivation, and morality decline in their salience to class distinction-making. These results signal a decline of class operating as a status group through cultural closure, the rise of education and employment as the carriers of class in everyday life, and the corresponding legitimation of class position and class inequality based on supposedly meritocratic grounds. This research opens up new avenues for studies of class and the application of computational methods to investigations of social change.