Offering a fresh and exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, this absorbing book investigates how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference. Exploring the topics of assortative mating; social capital; friendship networks and cultural identity; the book examines how hierarchy affects our tastes and leisure time activities, and who we choose (and hang on to) as our friends and partners. This book: * introduces debates on stratification by exploring its effect on everyday social relations * relates class inequalities to broader processes of social division and cultural differentiation, exploring the associational and cultural aspects of hierarchy * explores how groups draw on social, economic and cultural resources, using cultural 'cues', to admit some and exclude others from their social circle * explores new theoretical approaches to stratification: drawing on cultural theories of class, social interaction approaches, and research on differential association The book has a novel and fresh new way of looking at a well-established area in sociology - social stratification.

We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people's lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people's everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice? This book considers what provokes everyday 'views' or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as 'class', 'gender', 'racial' or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.

We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people's lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people's everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice? This book considers what provokes everyday 'views' or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as 'class', 'gender', 'racial' or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.

Offering a fresh and exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, this absorbing book investigates how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference. Exploring the topics of assortative mating; social capital; friendship networks and cultural identity; the book examines how hierarchy affects our tastes and leisure time activities, and who we choose (and hang on to) as our friends and partners. This book: * introduces debates on stratification by exploring its effect on everyday social relations * relates class inequalities to broader processes of social division and cultural differentiation, exploring the associational and cultural aspects of hierarchy * explores how groups draw on social, economic and cultural resources, using cultural 'cues', to admit some and exclude others from their social circle * explores new theoretical approaches to stratification: drawing on cultural theories of class, social interaction approaches, and research on differential association The book has a novel and fresh new way of looking at a well-established area in sociology - social stratification.