Social space, social class and Bourdieu: Health inequalities in British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

This article adopts Pierre Bourdieu's cultural–structuralist approach to conceptualizing and identifying social classes in social space and seeks to identify health effects of class in one Canadian province. Utilizing data from an original questionnaire survey of randomly selected adults from 25 communities in British Columbia, social (class) groupings defined by cultural tastes and dispositions, lifestyle practices, social background, educational capital, economic capital, social capital and occupational categories are presented in visual mappings of social space constructed by use of exploratory multiple correspondence analysis techniques. Indicators of physical and mental health are then situated within this social space, enabling speculations pertaining to health effects of social class in British Columbia.

Introduction

Three general approaches to the conceptualization of social class can be identified in the public health literature:

• social class is equated with socio-economic status, i.e., income, educational attainment and/or occupational prestige,

• social class is a social group defined primarily by the nature of its relationship to the economic mode of production, a Marxist perspective, and

• social class is a social group defined relationally in social space by its possession and utilization of various capitals such as economic, cultural and social capital, a perspective based in the work of the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu.

While the body of work attributable to the first two approaches to social class is immense, very few health scholars have applied Bourdieu's relational perspective on classes to health inequalities (see Williams, 1995; Poland, 2000; Frohlich et al., 2001; Gatrell et al., 2004). After describing some of the ways in which Bourdieu's cultural–structuralist approach to conceptualizing social class differs from the other two approaches, this article utilizes original questionnaire survey data from the province of British Columbia to provide an exploratory empirical application of Bourdieu's perspective to health inequalities in Canada.

The first approach to class is located analytically at the level of the individual, equating social class with the social standing of individuals in various status hierarchies. (A Weberian focus on status, distinct from his conceptualization of class, is apparent here.) Although the number of status hierarchies operative in a given society are undoubtedly close to infinite, health researchers have primarily focused on measures of income, educational a and/or occupational prestige, each of which enables straightforward comparisons between individuals within linear status hierarchies. Hypothesized causal pathways from socio-economic status to health and well-being are also primarily individual-level in character, including such phenomena as stress, shame, learned effectiveness, health behaviours and material circumstances that often differ by status level. Of the three approaches to class and health, this approach has generated the largest body of empirical research (see Kaplan and Keil, 1993; Feinstein, 1993; Adler et al., 1994; Adler and Ostrove, 1999; Mirowsky and Ross, 2003 for reviews of the literature). From this literature it is clear that educational experiences and credentials, economic wealth and occupational prestige are persistent correlates of health and well-being in most or all developed nations, including Canada.

Some health researchers (e.g., Muntaner and Lynch, 1999; Coburn, 2000; Scambler and Higgs, 2001) have taken exception to the use of the term ‘class’ in the aforementioned body of research, however, instead advocating for a conception of social class embedded in the ontology of Marxist scholarship. For these scholars, a social class is a social group with an identity and existence above and beyond any one individual, implying that an aggregate of individuals who share a given characteristic is not necessarily equal to a social class. The most important social phenomena for health inequalities are group-level relations, therefore, wherein the health of individuals flow from (are a by-product of) class relations. In most Marxist scholarship, social classes are groups defined primarily by the nature of their relationship to the economic mode of production: thus economic ownership and control over productive facilities, budgets and other employees are some of the analytical criteria that serve to delimit the outlines of social classes (see the work of Wright, 1978, Wright, 1979, Wright, 1985, Wright, 1998 for instance). In contrast with the socio-economic hierarchies described above, class positions are not always arrayed in linear fashion from highest to lowest (Grabb, 1997).

The body of work applying this approach to social class and health is also impressively large, with an especially long lineage in the United Kingdom (e.g., Bartley et al., 1996; Hattersley, 1997; Borooah, 1999; Fitzpatrick and Dollamore, 1999; Prandy, 1999; Chandola and Jenkinson, 2000). Far less work of this kind can be found in the United States, however (although see Schwalbe and Staples, 1986; Boffetta et al., 1997; Muntaner et al., 1998), and almost none pertains to Canada (but see Veenstra, 2006). At the risk of oversimplifying the insights produced by this complex and wide-ranging body of work, I believe that this research has yet to clearly demonstrate the existence of social classes and illuminate the inter-class dynamics that influence health. Rather, some of this research has shown the relevance of control in the workplace for health—but likely because control over oneself and other employees is less stressful and thus more health promoting than being under the control of others. Other research has documented relationships between economic ownership for health—but likely because owners tend to be wealthier and exert more control in the workplace than employees. In short, the empirical relationships delineated by much of the social class and health research appear to demonstrate the relevance for health of various characteristics of occupations and the individuals that inhabit them, but do not obviously and clearly identify social classes (as groups) and the class relations (group dynamics) within which they operate.

In the early 1990s, Clark and Lipset (1991) proposed that social class is steadily declining in importance in post-industrial societies, a claim that has since sparked a massive dialogue regarding the currency of social class. (See Hout et al., 2001 for an enthusiastic counter-argument.) At the very least, Clark and Lipset (1991) are perceptive when they note that workplace divisions may not be the class-defining criteria in modern society that they were during the industrial era. Bourdieu's approach to conceptualizing social classes has caught the imagination of many social scientists because, while it shares affinities with Marxist perspectives, it does not rely primarily upon economic labour market criteria to delineate social groups that might be social classes.

In this article I draw primarily upon Bourdieu's vision of social classes as presented in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) and Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1998). Here, his social class framework is based upon his conceptualization of social space, a space of positions defined in relation to one another.

All agents are located in space in such a way that the closer to one another in those two dimensions, the more they have in common; and the more remote they are from one another, the less they have in common (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 6).

Within social space, groupings of similarly located agents have the potential to be social classes. Thus classes are defined relationally in his vision, and are groups sharing similar circumstances:

One must therefore construct the objective class, the set of agents who are placed in homogenous conditions of existence imposing homogenous conditionings and producing homogenous systems of dispositions capable of generating similar practices; and who possess a set of common properties, objectified properties, sometimes legally guaranteed (as possession of goods and power) or properties embodied as class habitus (and, in particular, systems of classificatory schemes) (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101).

Bourdieu's scheme incorporates multiple criteria for distinguishing among positions, such that every form of power or resource in social life, e.g., economic capital, educational capital and social capital, can be deemed a principle of distinction and thus a class-relevant capital. Of the many forms of capital, however, cultural capital (encompassing educational capital, social background and the cultural tastes fostered in personal and parental educational experiences) and economic capital are the fundamental principles of distinction in modern societies, according to Bourdieu, and serve to frame social space more prominently than do other forms of capital.

Cultural tastes and practices are particularly important for the manifestation of social groupings in Bourdieu's vision of the social space.

To each class of positions there corresponds a class of habitus (or tastes) produced by the social conditioning associated with the corresponding condition and, through the mediation of the habitus and its generative capability, a systematic set of goods and properties, which are united by an affinity of style (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 8).

Bourdieu essentially argues that the social space based upon the possession of capitals serves to frame cultural tastes and practices, and that these tastes then serve to manifest social class inequalities. Within the social space, dominant groups purportedly maintain boundaries between themselves and lesser groups by delimiting the nature of tastes—legitimate, middle-class and popular, or high-brow, middle-brow and low-brow—and then utilizing familiarity with these cultural forms to exclude others. The groups thus manifested within the social space, while not yet social classes (still requiring some form of political mobilization, perhaps, in order to become an active class), are predictive of social classes, or predisposed to become classes in the Marxist sense of the word, according to Bourdieu.

Always arguing for the necessary inseparableness of theoretical and empirical exploration, Bourdieu utilized survey data from 1960s France and correspondence analysis to craft his own visual representation of the French social space (Bourdieu, 1984, Bourdieu, 1998), grafting together a wide range of indicators from several questionnaire surveys of the public. He included variables assessing demographic characteristics, economic and cultural capital (assessed by income and educational attainment in particular), voting preferences and various occupational categories, lifestyle practices and cultural tastes. The lifestyle practices included activities such as golf, piano, chess, skiing, hiking, fishing and sailing, and the cultural tastes included beverage choices such as ordinary red wine, sparkling white wine, mineral water, whisky and champagne, musical tastes (Bach, Stravinsky, modern jazz, Petula Clark) and favourite actors. The exploratory analysis produced three primary dimensions of note: the first and most important dimension seemingly represented total volume of capital (referring to the sum of economic and cultural capital in particular), the second the relative composition of economic and cultural capital, and the third changes in these over time, or social trajectory. Bourdieu claims to have overlaid several spaces upon one another, a first composed of the space of social conditions, a second composed of the space of life-styles, and a third (imagined) representing the theoretical space of ‘habitus,’ i.e., the space of generative formula by which social positions and conditions are transformed into lifestyles practices and cultural tastes. The resultant visualization of the social space of France identified groupings of survey variable categories that, in Bourdieu's opinion, represented groups of positions that were potentially predictive of social classes.

I refer to Bourdieu's social class scheme as ‘culturalist’ because, like the work of Raymond Williams, it accords a significance to cultural tastes, sensibilities and practices that ‘scientific’ Marxist scholarship, relegating culture to the superstructure, does not. It is ‘structuralist’ because, like Saussure in linguistics and Levi-Strauss in structural anthropology, it focuses primarily upon relations among elements, adopting an ontology of intersubjectivity versus one focused on atomistic individuals and never obviously prioritizing one element over another. In addition, it has a ‘realistic’ quality because it is embedded in empirical observations in a particular context (France), an ‘objectivist’ character because the real is revealed in relations, but also a ‘constructivist’ quality given that perceptions relating to cultural tastes and dispositions are an integral part of his scheme. I believe that Bourdieu's cultural—structuralist vision of social classes has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the social class and health literature. If critiques to modern scientific Marxist perspectives are to be taken seriously, the framework may better represent the operative classes of modern-day society. It also incorporates explicit theoretical consideration of cultural and lifestyle practices embedded within social structure, some of which may influence health directly (and are generally under-theorized in the social determinants of health literature). In addition, it provides a means of utilizing individual-level survey data to present social groupings that may be predictive of social classes. Thus, in an analytical situation in which multilevel modelling (the only valid statistical way of attributing variance in an individual-level dependent variable to a second, higher group level) is inappropriate because the number of higher order groups in class analysis is small, the identification of heath relevant social groupings via the application of multiple correspondence analysis is still possible. Surprisingly, very few health researchers have engaged in this line of exploration to date.

My review of the health literature produced only one example of quantitative research explicitly utilizing Bourdieu's analytical framework to explicate health inequalities. Anthony Gatrell and colleagues (2004) applied Bourdieu's notion of the social space to inequalities in psychological morbidity in two cities in north–west England. Specially, they sought to resurrect Bourdieu's analytical method for describing a social space, noting in so doing that his quantitative work has been mostly neglected by social theorists. Although the authors were not explicitly concerned with identifying social classes, seeking instead to investigate the overlap between social space and geographical space, their analysis does address, at least indirectly, the third approach to conceptualizing social class. In order to assess the contribution of my analysis to the health literature, it is important to understand what Gatrell et al. accomplished in north–west England.

Gatrell et al. chose a high- and low-income locality from each of Lancaster and Salford and conducted a questionnaire survey in these localities. The survey achieved a response rate of 44% and a sample size of 777 for the analysis described in the article. Along with basic demographics (age, gender, marital status), they assessed numerous aspects of material circumstances and social relationships: economic capital (e.g., income, car ownership, satellite television installed, home ownership), educational capital (personal educational qualifications), occupational status, and social capital (sense of loneliness, desire to move, meeting with neighbours, sense of community). Upon entering these variables into a multiple correspondence analysis, the two primary dimensions produced by the analysis were interpreted by the authors to represent degree of economic capital and degree of social capital, respectively; degree of educational capital apparently adhered closely to the economic capital dimension. The authors then used logistic regression models incorporating these and other variables to identify the most persistent correlates of psychological morbidity; presence of a long-standing illness, loneliness, perceived troubles managing financially and age were then entered into another multiple correspondence analysis. The first dimension presented in the resultant correspondence map was indicated by financial worries and loneliness, and was most closely allied with psychological morbidity, whereas the second dimension was indicated primarily by age. Thus economic and social capitals were deemed to be closely intertwined when it came to the social space manifesting psychological morbidity. Finally, the authors engaged in exploration of the overlap between their conception of social space and geographical space (locality or neighbourhood of residence), but found surprisingly little correspondence between the two.

Gatrell and colleagues make an important contribution to the health literature by explicitly addressing Bourdieu's notion of social space, i.e., by thinking relationally and then utilizing an analytical technique that supports a relational perspective, and also by exploring the interconnectedness of geographical and social space, a connection that Bourdieu discussed (Bourdieu, 1989) but not incorporate into his own empirical analyses in France. It is especially interesting to note that their multiple correspondence analysis of various capitals produced a social space with its two primary dimensions delineated by economic capital (linked with educational capital) and social capital, not total capital (economic and educational capital summed together) and composition of (economic and educational) capital as reported by Bourdieu in his analysis of the social space of France. The analysis by Gatrell et al. is not entirely consistent with Bourdieu's theoretical vision of inequalities, however, because it engages in multivariate logistic regressions to identify candidates for inclusion in subsequent multiple correspondence analyses, thereby presuming strictly defined relations of causality, and because it ignores cultural tastes and practices (that importantly produce the affinities of style that contribute substantially to the nature of the social space, according to Bourdieu). As such their representations of the social space are not truly representations of the social space—based upon the possession of capitals and cultural tastes and practices to delineate the positions and conditions of agents—envisioned by Bourdieu in Distinction and Practical Reason. The authors note, of course, that there is no such thing as the social space, as every rendering of a social space is entirely dependent upon the selection of survey variables by the researcher. Still, the exclusion of cultural tastes and lifestyle practices means that the social space presented by Gatrell et al. may not represent a social space displaying social class boundaries.

This article adopts Bourdieu's cultural–structuralist approach in order to identify the health effects of social class, the latter not defined by economic ownership and control over the means of economic production but instead by the possession of various cultural tastes and dispositions, lifestyle practices, parental educational background, educational capital, economic capital, social capital and occupational type. This investigation is accomplished by virtue of the inclusion of a wide range of variables drawn from an original questionnaire survey of randomly selected adults into multiple correspondence analyses in order to present two visual mappings of social space, one for employed survey respondents and one for all survey respondents (employed and retired, older and younger). Also utilizing respondent's own self-assessed social class identifications, interpretations of social groupings that may be predictive of social classes are presented. Finally, indicators of physical and mental health and well-being are situated within these social spaces of British Columbia, thereby enabling the very first cultural–structuralist investigation of social class inequalities in health and well-being. I believe that the novelty of my analysis lies in its further resurrection of a strictly relational way of conceptualizing classes, its simultaneous consideration of multiple forms of capital and a wide variety of cultural tastes and practices, and its use of exploratory multiple correspondence analysis techniques to visualize the empirical manifestation of social (class) groupings in this modern-day Canadian context.