Book Review: Social Class in Europe. New Inequalities in the Old World

Abstract

Is there such a thing as a European social space? If so, can we study it in terms of class analysis? What social inequalities would such a study reveal? French sociologists Cédric Hugrée, Étienne Penissat and Alexis Spire answer these questions in a synthetic and stimulating book based on three main assertions. Class distinctions matter; they play differently when considered on a European scale; and these differences are a key tool in understanding political conflict in and about Europe. Putting the European social space and its main divides at the heart of their project the authors take up a threefold methodological, sociological and political challenge. The book stands out first of all in terms of its innovative research design. Building on the vast international literature on class analysis – through works by Pierre Bourdieu, John H Goldthorpe, Mike Savage, David B Grusky or Daniel Oesch, to name but a few – the authors classify social classes and measure social inequalities in a multi-dimensional way that includes not only working but also living conditions. The book best illustrates the value of using the recent European SocioEconomic Groups (ESEG) classification to define social classes. Thanks to principal component analysis and clustering, the authors divide the European social space into three main classes – the working class, the middle class and the dominant class – whose characteristics and evolutions over the past decade are tracked down in the course of the book. Data on people in work (aged 25 to 65) are gathered and analysed from four combined Europe-wide surveys: the Labour Force Survey (LFS 2011 and 2014), the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC 2006 and 2014) and the Adult Education Survey (AES 2011) from Eurostat, as well as Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS 2015). The pros and cons of these various tools and surveys are briefly but usefully discussed in the introduction and the appendixes. Therefore the book is first a welcome invitation to further develop and discuss quantitative analyses of class structure at the European level. Then, mapping social classes and social inequalities in Europe represents a sociological challenge. The book draws a detailed and comprehensive portrait of Europeans, which will undoubtedly provide food for thought for any European comparative study. On this empirical foundation, the authors combine their own statistical results with concrete and telling examples taken from a variety of case studies (on Denmark, France, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, etc.) thus bringing together works that rarely discuss each other. In Chapters 1 to 3, the reader meets first of all the ‘weakened working class’, whose members share both social and economic vulnerability and are in competition with each other at the European level. Then comes the disparate ‘middle class’, disparate because of its diverse employment statuses, the gendered structure of occupations and the 1123623 TRS0010.1177/10242589221123623TransferBook Reviews research-article2022