Classes and social image

While in their 2008 book Social Class: How Does It Work? the authors complained that no one was researching this classic field of sociology (Lareau–Conley eds. 2008), class research and class structure have now become hot topics in sociology once again. This renewed interest is largely due to the research of Savage and his co-authors (2013) exploring British class structure. Building on the traditions of Bourdieu, their study identified three class-forming factors—economic, cultural, and social capital—and incorporated them into their model. Their findings sparked such widespread debate that the journal Sociology devoted a special section to reflections on them in its third issue of 2014. The significance of the publication is demonstrated by the fact that the Hungarian social science community also reacted quickly to the results, and GFK, in collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, prepared a study entitled Class Size 2014, which was widely reported in the Hungarian press. Using cluster analysis, the researchers identified eight classes, reporting on broad lower and narrow upper classes, with a shrinking and disappearing middle class, depicting the social structure as pear-shaped. From the perspective of this paper, perhaps the most relevant critique of the above model is the neo-Weberian critique formulated by Bradley (2014). Bradley's reflection is grouped around three points. First, he emphasizes that, in contrast to the previous mainstream view (most notably that of Goldthorpe