“In the largest study of class in Britain ever undertaken, the Great British Class Survey of 2011, which used all three forms of capital [(financial, social and cultural)], the English sociologist Mike Savage and his colleagues concluded that there were now not three but seven classes in their society today.

There was still an elite at the top …, 6 percent of the population. … And there is still a well-defined place at the bottom: 15 percent of the British population [form a] ‘precariat“. …

But between theses two classes, Savage identified five distinct groups. … These groups don’t have a shared sense of what activities confer standing – reading versus computer games, classical versus contemporary popular music, cricket versus soccer, and so on – and the relative prestige of their occupations is also far from agreed upon. Class in Britain isn’t a ladder. It’s a mountain, with multiple paths for ascent and descent. It rises, though, from a single valley to a single peak.”

aus: Kwame Anthony Appiah: The lies that bind. Rethinking identity. London: Profile 2018, S.165/166.

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