The Importance of Class

Abstract

Class can best be understood as emerging from the complex interrelationship of work and horne life. Problems, limitations, and opportunities at the workplace generate behavioral adaptations that extend into the horne, creating the shared lifestyles, childrearing practices, inter-generational education and employment experiences, and common consumption patterns that constitute and reproduce a class.1 These adaptations are forged within a larger social and spatial structure of class segregation (Soja, 1983). The working class performs the direct economic production and low-level service, clerical, and adrninistrative work2 of society and tends to live in lower class neighborhoods.