• social class

The recent growth of health disparities scholarship has not been accompanied by a parallel development in its key construct: social class. Rather, new research has kept the “social” in social inequalities to a minimum. With few exceptions,¹ social class understood as a power and political relation (managerial control, property relations, labour unions, political parties, class based social movements) is absent from social epidemiology. As suggested by the Whitehall study and several other analyses,² power relations can be a major mechanism by which …