Class Inequality in Austerity/ Britain Power, Difference and Suffering

Class Inequality in Austerity Britain 
Power, Difference and Suffering 
Edited by Will Atkinson Steven Roberts and Mike Savage
Palgrave Macmillan
2012

When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010 in claimed it would deliver not just austerity, as necessary as that apparently was, but also fairness. This volume subjects this pledge to critical interrogation by exposing the interests behind the policy programme pursued and their damaging effects on class inequalities. Situated within a recognition of the longer-term rise of neoliberal politics, reflections on the status of sociology as a source of critique and current debates over the relationship between the cultural and economic dimensions of social class, the contributors cover an impressively wide range of relevant topics, from education, family policy and community to crime and consumption, shedding new light on the experience of domination in the early 21st Century.

Introduction: A Critical Sociology of the Age of Austerity; W.Atkinson, S.Roberts & M.Savage
Economic Crisis and Classed Everyday Life: Hysteresis, Positional Suffering and Symbolic Violence; W.Atkinson
"We never get a fair chance": Working-class Experiences of Education in the Twenty-First Century; D.Reay
Banking on the Future: Choices, Aspirations and Economic Hardship in Working-class Student Experience; H.Bradley & N.Ingram
"Aspirations" and Imagined Futures: The Im/possibilities for Britain's Young Working Class; S.Roberts & S.Evans
Personalising Poverty: Parental Determinism and the "Big Society" Agenda; V.Gillies
The Urban Outcasts of the British City; M.Clement
The Devalued and Stigmatized Working Class: The State of a Council Estate; L.McKenzie
Broken Communities?; M.SavageFacing the Challenge of the Return of the Rich; A.Sayer
Conclusion: Three Challenges to the Exportation of Sociological Knowledge; W.Atkinson, S.Roberts & M.Savage

WILL ATKINSON is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.

STEVE ROBERTS is is Lecturer in Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Kent, UK
MIKE SAVAGE is is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bergen, Norway and York, UK and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK