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Anthony Giddens as Adversary of Class Analysis

Will Atkinson
Sociology 2007 41: 533
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507076622
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Sociology
Copyright 2007
BSA Publications Ltd
Volume 41(3): 533549
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507076622
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore

Anthony Giddens as Adversary of Class

Analysis

Will Atkinson
University of Bristol

ABSTRACT

The special issue of Sociology on Class, Culture and Identity illustrated how often
Anthony Giddens is cited as an antagonist of class theory. It comes as some surprise, then, to find that his exact view on the demise of class has, to date, received
remarkably little in the way of substantial exposition and critique.This article seeks
to fill this void by outlining Giddens theory of the reflexive project of the self in
late modernity and its precise consequences for the concept of class, moving on
from that to distinguish it from the kindred ideas of Beck and to suggest some of
its key failings. Finally, I suggest the ways these problems can be overcome and
class salvaged in the process by turning to Bourdieu.
KEY WORDS

Bourdieu / class / Giddens / motivation / reflexive project of the self

Introduction
he recent special issue of Sociology dedicated to Class, Culture and
Identity (39/5, 2005) demonstrated just how often the writings of British
social theorist Anthony Giddens on late modernity are cited by class analysts as an exemplar of anti-class theory (see particularly Gillies, 2005; Hey,
2005; MacDonald et al., 2005; Woodin, 2005). There is, of course, good

533
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reason for this designation: Giddens idea of the reflexive project of the self, a
core component of his vision of contemporary societies, leaves little room for
class as a source of identity, action or politics. Instead, he holds, late modern
self-identities are reflexively constructed by individuals themselves, with action
flowing from the accompanying lifestyle orientations and politics issuing from
the post-materialist dilemmas of late modern societies.
Yet, despite the frequent citation of Giddens as an antagonist of their subject area, class theorists of any persuasion seem to have had remarkably little of
substance to say on his position. Some, particularly those allied to the Nuffield
programme, have taken it to task for its needless abstraction and detachment
from the hard realities of the empirical world (Goldthorpe, 2002; Marshall,
1997), others have rebuffed it as a tool of middle-class ideological reproduction
(Skeggs, 2004); but none has yet taken the trouble to unpack Giddens exact
view on class in his recent writings and wrestle with it in all its complexity. Even
Savages (2000) treatment of Giddens, probably the most sustained to date by
a class theorist, offers little in the way of conceptual critique and, in fact,
devotes only a few short paragraphs to explicating Giddens work alone before
conflating it with Ulrich Becks perspective on individualization. The task
here, then, is to address this situation by clarifying and appraising Giddens
position. His theory of the reflexive project of the self the key vehicle through
which the irrelevance of class is communicated and its position in his wider
theorizations of the self, late modernity and politics are adumbrated and distinguished from the cognate ideas of Beck. Once this is done, we will be in a
position to identify some of the key failures of the project, their links to limitations of structuration theory and, I want to suggest, the way in which they can
be remedied and the salience of class reaffirmed by turning to the work of
Bourdieu. The added irony in this last move is that it follows as an unanticipated consequence, to use one of his phrases, of Giddens own attempt to justify his position. To begin with, however, it is worthwhile situating Giddens
recent work in the context of his shifting relationship to class analysis over the
course of his long career.

From Advocate to Adversary

When he first emerged on the sociological scene in the 1960s and 1970s Giddens
relationship to class analysis could not have been more different to that of today.
At the time, the concept of class was enshrouded in an atmosphere of seedy
decay (Giddens, 1981: 9) as a result of two intellectual movements declaring, in
very different ways, its demise in the face of the institutionalisation of class conflict: the ascendant New Left, influenced by Marcuses writing on the onedimensional society, and the established academic sociology of Parsons and
other theorists of industrial society (Giddens, 1981: 269ff, 295; cf. 1982: 567).
Against both strands of thought the young Giddens, having already endeavoured
to foreground the analysis of capitalism in the work of the classics in his first

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monograph (1971) and to reconcile the study of elites with class theory (1974,
originally published 1972), set out in 1973 to rescue the term from its detractors
and re-establish its centrality to sociology (1981: 295). This was to be achieved
largely through a thorough re-theorization of class which, whilst blending insights
from both Marx and Weber, could avoid the theoretical weight placed on it by
Marx and his followers. For Giddens, economic classes were to be defined in terms
of market capacities that is, the attributes, such as property, skills or manual
labour power, conferring different bargaining strengths in the capitalist labour
market with aggregates of individuals sharing similar market capacities then
forming social classes, in the sense of distinguishable social groupings, chiefly
through the restriction of mobility chances. Adopting a term that would later
make him influential worldwide, he dubbed this process structuration. Having
thus redefined class, Giddens went on to produce contributions to most of the
major debates over it at the time from the nature of class consciousness to the
growth of the new middle class and the status of women in the labour market
that are still cited and contested today. These interventions, and the definition of
class underlying them, are usually read as neo-Weberian, but, Giddens insisted,
in reality his position owed more to Marx than Weber. The idea of market
capacities, he argued, was not to be equated with Webers notion of market situation, but was instead employed to emphasize the commodification of labour
and, thus, the centrality of the labour contract to capitalism (1981: 299). Either
way, the book in which all these arguments were forwarded, The Class Structure
of the Advanced Societies (1981[1973]), cemented Giddens reputation as a key
advocate of and reference point in class analysis.
From the mid-1970s onwards Giddens increasingly channelled his energies
into elaborating structuration as a general social ontology. Class continued to
be at the heart of his analysis of modern societies through this period, but his
writings on the matter, contained primarily in his two-volume contemporary
critique of historical materialism (1985, 1995 [1981]), took on a more abstract
and historical form. This was primarily because Giddens had set himself a new
task: to assert the salience of class in present-day societies whilst rejecting once
and for all Marxs evolutionist and class-reductionist schema of history. To that
end, he produced a new understanding of societal types and their development
which distinguished pre-capitalist class-divided societies and capitalist class
societies. The former, Giddens held, are marked by class divisions insofar as
private property exists, but only in class societies like those in the West, where
labour power is commodified in markets and interlocked in a relationship of
mutual dependence and conflict with capital, does class exploitation and domination seep into the core of the productive process and become central to
agents lives (see especially Giddens, 1995: chap. 5). In his quest to battle economic reductionism, however, Giddens went on in the second volume of his
study to demote capitalism to just one institutional dimension of modern societies along with surveillance, military power and the transformation of nature
or industrialism, and thus to just one source of conflict and politics amongst
others (Giddens, 1985: 310ff).

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After the second volume of A Contemporary Critique of Historical

Materialism Giddens relationship to class analysis seemed to shift dramatically,
and though he continued to publish essays explicitly addressed to the topic as
late as 1987 including a defence of the working class from Gorzs (1982)
famous valediction (Giddens, 1987: chap. 12) these appear, judging from the
references, to have been written no later than 1985. This was not an isolated
intellectual manoeuvre, but a component part of a broader reorientation of his
work in light of the events of the 1980s the Chernobyl disaster, the evaporation of traditional manufacturing and extractive industries, the fall of the Berlin
Wall and state socialism with it and, on a more personal level, the development
of his interest in self-identity as a result of his experience of several years of
therapy (Bryant and Jary, 2001) toward a delineation of the characteristics of
late or high modernity. In this corpus of work, capitalism, by definition a
class society, remains one of the four institutional dimensions of late modern
societies (see Giddens, 1990: 55ff). However, Giddens now claims, an increased
societal reflexivity and progressive de-traditionalization of the social order have
not only rendered self-identity a reflexive project to be constructed by individuals themselves, but promoted lifestyle choices rather than class constraints
to paramount importance in formulating action and subordinated the emancipatory politics of old to a new political agenda addressed to the existential
quandaries of late modernity.
Class analysts, as the Sociology special issue demonstrated, have perceived
these claims as a significant challenge to their area of study and usually describe
Giddens, in tandem with Beck, as a theorist of individualization a term he
himself does not use (see e.g. Crompton, 1998; Gillies, 2005; MacDonald et al,
2005; Savage, 2000). Though many seem content to cite Giddens as an adversary without commenting much further, there have been more extended reactions of three main types. First of all, there are those who admonish Giddens
for his lack of empirical grounding or who try themselves to test or discredit his
theory, usually at the same time as other similar theories such as those of Beck
or the postmodernists, through conducting original research or examining the
findings of others (e.g. Goldthorpe, 2002; Marshall, 1997; Phillips and Western,
2005). Secondly there are those who, whilst making the first argument, also
accuse Giddens of attempting to generalize middle-class experiences to the populace at large and emphasize the resonance of his work with the prevailing neoliberal climate (Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 2004; cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001).
Skeggs (2004: 524), for example, argues that Giddens depiction of reflexive
self-construction ignores the role of resources and processes of inscription by
privileged others in producing self-identity and, as such, resonates only with the
experiences of the middle classes. The attempt to portray it as universal, she
adds, is nothing more than a project for intellectual aggrandizement (p. 54).
However, alongside these two largely negative reactions there has also been a
more reconciliatory, third response to Giddens theory by Savage (2000) in his
work on the individualization of class identities. Drawing on Bourdieus theoretical apparatus and his own qualitative research, Savage (p. 118) contends

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that modes of individualization, as theorized by Giddens and Beck, should not

be considered a departure from class identities, but are in fact intricately related
to them. That is to say, the idea of class is employed by agents as a tool in the
construction of relational difference and individuality rather than similarity and
collectivity. More recently, Savage (2005) has gone on to show that this use of
class is not necessarily new either: his secondary analysis of the Affluent
Worker interviews reveals that even in the 1960s people were keen to emphasize their individuality and ordinariness. All three responses are interesting and
worthwhile, but none of them has yet involved extended critical conceptual
assessment of Giddens theory, or even produced a thorough dissection of
what exactly he has to say on class. Much, it seems, has been assumed or taken
for granted.

The Reflexive Project of the Self

To fully understand Giddens position vis-a-vis class, then, we must examine
the key idea in his work that signals its demise his theory of the reflexive project of the self. The starting point here is his account of what he calls, following Laing (1965), ontological security. This is not a new concept in Giddens
work ontological security was first introduced in Central Problems in Social
Theory (1979) as a principal explanans for the orderly, routine nature of social
life, the essential premise being that individuals have a basic psychological need
to quell anxiety and maintain trust in the continuity of events (i.e. feel ontologically secure) and that this is achieved through the routinization of social
conduct (Giddens, 1979: 120ff; cf. 1984: 50ff). In Modernity and Self Identity
(1991), however, Giddens draws on Kierkegaard and D.W. Winnicotts objectrelations theory to flesh out the processes through which ontological security
is generated in infancy and, in doing so, links it directly to self-identity. The
argument runs as follows: the basic trust that an infant invests in their caretaker as a result of early routine serves as an emotional inoculation against a
number of existential dilemmas and questions raised by human existence such
as finitude and relations with others which, if contemplated continuously,
would lead to an emotional paralysis. By providing tacit answers to these
dilemmas the inoculation produces a protective cocoon around the individual,
screening off potentially debilitating risks and threats emanating from daily life,
and allows a sense of continuity and order in events that is, a sense of ontological security. Importantly, one such existential dilemma is that of selfidentity, and, in this case, the protective cocoon enables a sense of integrity and
temporal continuity in the individuals biography that can then be reflexively
grasped and communicated to others. A persons self-identity is, therefore, not
to be found in any aspect of their behaviour or in the reactions of others but,
following the foundational analyses of MacIntyre (1981) and Taylor (1989),
consists instead of the self as reflexively understood by the individual themselves in terms of a particular biographical narrative (Giddens, 1991: 534).

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Self-identity, in other words, takes the form of an ongoing story of the

self (p. 54).
Now, under the conditions of late modernity, Giddens (1991: 80) contends, the nature of the self undergoes massive change. The traditions, cultures
and communal ties including those pertaining to class upon which it once
relied for its narrative have, as a result of globalization and the chronic institutional reflexivity of the social order, been evacuated from social life and supplanted by a context of multiple choice (p. 5; see also 1990, 1994a). As a
result, the self has become a reflexive project in which individuals must actively
choose, sustain and incessantly revise their narrative of identity themselves.
Each of us, he argues, now lives out:
... a biography reflexively organised in terms of flows of social and psychological
information about possible ways of life. Modernity is a post-traditional order, in
which the question, How shall I live? has to be answered in day-to-day decisions
about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat and many other things as well
as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity. (Giddens, 1991: 14)

Self-identity thus becomes, much like Luhmanns systems, internally referential,

that is, severed from external determinants of old such as kinship and place and
driven only with reference to itself. This is generally seen by Giddens, particularly in
the context of the new forms of intimacy and trust it injects into relationships, in a
positive light as a process of self-actualization, self-realization, self-exploration and
self-mastery, enabling a new level of autonomy, freedom of action (2002a: 47)
and control [over] ones own life circumstances (1991: 202).1 That said, a key
objective of Modernity and Self-Identity is to spotlight its pathologies too, namely
the burdensome nature of having to constantly reconstruct an inherently fragile
narrative of self-identity (1991: 1856), the increased prominence of shame over
the adequacy of ones identity and the inability to match up to ones ideal self,
and, most importantly, the fact that the reflexive project of the self takes place in
an ethical vacuum given modernitys institutional sequestration of moral issues
such as death and sexuality.
One particularly significant consequence of the new reflexivity of self-identity is, according to Giddens, the increased emphasis on lifestyle. The proliferation of choice as to how to lead ones life, he argues, coupled with the removal
of any authoritative guidelines on the matter, means that we not only follow
lifestyles, but in an important sense we are forced to do so we have no choice
but to choose (1991: 81). A lifestyle, he continues, is a more or less integrated
set of practices which an individual embraces [to] give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity (p. 81). They form a constellation of routines,
habits and orientations with an overall unity important for the sustaining of
ontological security which connects options in a more or less ordered fashion
and removes some courses of action from contemplation as out of character
(pp. 812). Once chosen, however, lifestyles are not immutable but reflexively
open to change in light of the mobile nature of self-identity (p. 81). A second
consequence, complementary to the burgeoning of lifestyle options, is an

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enhanced proclivity for life-planning. With the retreat of tradition and the sense
of fate it imparted, individuals, in a similar way to the institutions of modernity, colonise the future by integrating projected future actions, events and
projects with their past narrative of self-identity in a coherent unity. However,
not least because of the multifarious risks produced by modernity that threaten
to puncture the protective cocoon with a barrage of existential dilemmas and
shatter the integrity of identity, this plan is often disturbed as individuals are
called upon to make high-consequence decisions for the direction of their lives.
These occasions Giddens dubs fateful moments; they include, for example, the
decision to change jobs or shift career altogether.
So what, then, are the consequences of all this for social class? After all, so
long as contemporary society remains capitalist it also remains, by Giddens
own definition, a class society, and even if the underlying class structure is, by
his account, marked by a sharp decline of blue-collar manual labour and a significant rise of wired or symbolic workers on the one hand and a socially
excluded underclass on the other (Giddens, 1994b, 2000, 2001), the fact is
there still exists a class structure. At first Giddens concedes that lifestyle choices
are not equally open to all strata of society but may in fact be dependent on the
life chances and socio-economic circumstances of particular groups including
occupational groups (1991: 82) and classes (1997). But, he adds, even work in
the post-traditional society is by no means completely separate from the arena
of plural choices, for choice of work and work milieu form a basic element of
lifestyle orientations (1991: 82). Furthermore, though the constraints and
opportunities associated with class are still held to exist they have little bearing
on the actual social behaviour of individuals (1995: xv), are thoroughly permeated by the influence of biographical decision-making (1994c: 188) and,
in any case, retain only a refracted and transitory influence on life chances
given the upsurge of mobility and unemployment at all levels (1994b: 1434).
Lifestyle choice and life-planning are, in other words, more or less universal:
even the most deprived sections of society can and do, indeed must, make selfidentity a reflexive project and indulge in the creative construction of lifestyle,
often through the resistances of ghetto life as well as through the direct elaboration of distinctive cultural styles and modes of activity (1991: 856). In fact,
Giddens contends, lifestyles are themselves increasingly becoming structuring
features of stratification and social differentiation and can no longer, as is usually the case, be considered merely the results of class differences in the
realm of production (1991: 82, 228; cf. 1994a: 76; 1994b: 143). Ultimately, it
is obvious that for Giddens self-identity has become firmly detached from any basis
in class and, it seems, so too has action, as it now flows from a reflexive filtering
[of] all sorts of information relevant to [ones] life situations (1994b: 6) and the
lifestyle orientations and life-plans built thereon.
This has led Giddens to subordinate the emancipatory political agenda
associated with class and the equalization of life chances in favour of what he
calls life politics (1991: 20931). Centred around choice, identity and mutuality (1998: 44), the core concerns of the latter are the existential questions and

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issues brought to the fore in late modernity that fail to fit within the traditional
remit of emancipation or, for that matter, the framework of left and right in
politics. Ecological risks, the advance of techno-economic reason and the rights
of the individual over their body are all prominent examples. The emergence of
life politics presupposes a degree of emancipation from domination, of course,
but it cannot be considered, says Giddens (1994b: 91), merely a phenomenon
of the more affluent. To think this would be a basic error, for [s]ome of the
poorest groups today (and not only in the developed societies) come against
problems of detraditionalization most sharply. Neither is it the case that emancipatory politics has lost its relevance altogether, but, as the feminist movement
and the division between First and Third World countries illustrate, emancipation often goes hand-in-hand with lifestyle changes and, thus, life politics
(1991: 228ff).
Giddens subsequently built on some of these ideas in outlining his
well-known Third Way political programme (1998, 2000, 2001, 2002b),
something that struck a chord with New Labour in Britain and like-minded
administrations across the globe and recently earned him a place in the House
of Lords ironically an institution he once described as an anachronism in a
democratic society (1998: 74). Beyond Left and Right (1994b) is by far the
most interesting and scholarly treatise in this body of work, but since its publication the original theoretical underpinnings of Giddens programme seem
largely to have been substituted for a comparatively facile insistence on the
importance of globalization and the knowledge society. Furthermore,
though still nominally centre-left, the Third Way has drifted rightwards over
time, dropping entirely any talk of emancipation whilst at the same time
reversing some of its more radical propositions (see McLennan, 2004). The
earlier critique of productivism the overemphasis on productivity, economic growth and material wealth for example, is essentially abandoned
and replaced in Giddens sketch of a new egalitarianism, co-written with a
special advisor to the Prime Minister, by the New Labour dogma that
expanding the productive efficiency of the economy is necessary if inequality is to be tackled effectively (Diamond and Giddens, 2005: 106).
Nevertheless, through all this his emphasis on life politics and its grounding
in the prominence of post-materialist lifestyle issues remains.

Giddens and Beck

Giddens has by no means been alone in proclaiming the waning relevance of
class. Indeed, the early 1990s saw a proliferation of perspectives many of
which were outlined by erstwhile class analysts describing the concept as
redundant, dying or dead (e.g. Clark and Lipset, 1991; Pahl, 1989; Pakulski
and Waters, 1996). Not all were in agreement over exactly how and to what
extent this was the case, however, and many of them, particularly the various
post-Marxists, were as distant intellectually from Giddens as they were from

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ardent supporters of class analysis. But one thinker with whom Giddens is often
seen to have intellectual affinities on this matter is Ulrich Beck. Both put reflexivity at the heart of recent social changes, though they use the term in different
ways (see the debates in Beck et al., 1994), and both claim that as a result of
those social changes actors can no longer rely on the traditions of old to supply
their biographies but must now reflexively construct them themselves a process Beck dubs individualization (see Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim,
2002). Yet there are important differences between the two theorists which
have not always been made clear.
First of all, Giddens and Beck have different understandings of the causes
underlying the new reflexivity of actors. Giddens emphasis, as seen above, is
on the replacement of tradition with new contexts of multiple choice and
sources of information given the impact of globalization. For Beck, on the other
hand, it is the institutions and welfare regulations of industrial societies themselves, such as the education system and the labour market, that have disembedded agents from traditional ways of life and re-embedded them in new
ones in which they must produce, stage, and cobble together their biographies
themselves (1997: 95). This is because, he argues, these institutions are
adjusted not to group interests but instead presume the individual as actor,
designer, juggler and stage director of his or her own biography, identity, social
networks, commitments and convictions (p. 95). Secondly, the two thinkers
differ in their views on the extent to which class can be pronounced dead. Beck
is forthright: class is a zombie concept, that is, a concept that has died in reality and only appears to live on because sociologists continue to talk about it (see
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 20113). Giddens, on the other hand, is less
straightforward, explicitly addresses the issue of class only infrequently and, as
we now see, is rather more ambivalent when he does address it.

Failures of the Project

With Giddens position on class in late modernity and its key differences from
Becks now elaborated we can begin to probe into some of its major areas of
difficulty. A good place to start, having just mentioned it, is Giddens utter
ambivalence on the status of class when his writings are looked at in detail. In
some places, for instance, he attempts to make it clear that, unlike some of the
more radical critics of the concept, he actually wants to retain the idea of class
as a filter of life chances which, he argues, may impact upon lifestyle options.
Hence his assertion, in the preface to the second edition of A Contemporary
Critique of Historical Materialism written after his reflections on modernity
reached their apogee in the early 1990s, that class analysis has not lost its
importance (Giddens, 1995: xvi).2 As seen above, however, Giddens has an
unfortunate tendency to override this position completely in his effort to establish the reality of choice and reflexivity beyond the bounds of the affluent.
Furthermore, if life chances really are still shaped by class then it is difficult to

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see how the reflexive project of the self, as more or less universal, can be
described as bringing the individual greater control over their life circumstances, autonomy of action (Giddens, 1994b: 13) and self-actualization, in
Abraham Maslows (1987) sense of that term as fulfilling ones potential.
The issue is muddied even further by Giddens inconsistent and somewhat
tokenistic attempts to pull lifestyle into the definition of class and stratification.
Sometimes, for example, it is argued, la Bourdieu, that the individual relates
to the class system not just as a producer but as a consumer and that therefore
lifestyle choices and taste, as mobilized in active way by individuals and
groups, actively feed into social differentiation (Giddens, 1994b: 143; cf. 1991:
82). In other places it is simply access to the means of self-actualization that
forms the key source of class division and inequality (1991: 6, 228). The latter
conception is particularly problematic, for, as Giddens himself has argued, the
reflexive project of the self the fount of programmes of actualization and
mastery (1991: 9) is undertaken even by those populating the bottom echelons of society (the black female single parent living in the inner city in his own
example) (1991: 856). This would mean that no one is barred from the means
of self-actualization, save the most destitute, and that class effectively, and
against his original intentions, ceases to be at all in this regard.
The former conception, on the other hand, raises a fundamental question
to which Giddens has no satisfactory answer: why, exactly, would different
individuals and groups choose different lifestyles? Whereas for Bourdieu, to
whom he casually appeals on this, the underlying principle is the particular
habitus generated out of material conditions of existence, it seems hard to deny
that the overall tenor of Giddens position, despite disclaimers, is one of outright voluntarism. This is something he has long been accused of by critical realists (e.g. Archer, 1995), but in his work on late modernity and the reflexive self
his leanings toward it appear to have become even more apparent. Thus action
is said to flow from a reflexive filtering of information on ways of life and
options relevant to [ones] life situations (Giddens, 1994b: 6), whilst lifestyles
are claimed to be freely chosen (1991: 231) and revised by autonomous agents
on the basis of a self-identity constructed through a process of self-mastery
and realization. Indeed, echoes of Isaiah Berlins (1969) conception of positive
liberty are not too faint here. There is, however, something of a tension in this:
if lifestyles are to be defined as sets of routines, habits and orientations providing a frame for choice and action, as they were above, then it is hard to see how
lifestyle choices, including the decision to change lifestyle altogether, could be
made without being guided by the orientations furnished by the lifestyle already
adopted. Either the self must somehow, in a way left unexplained by Giddens,
be able to transcend the orientations of its lifestyle in order to choose or else
lifestyle choices are not as free as he would like to make out. This difficulty
aside, such a position fails to illuminate how social differentiation would actually be generated. Nowhere does Giddens consider, for example, the possibility that
the filtering of information, or the life situations one is likely to be in, may vary
with ones position in society the former absence is particularly conspicuous given

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that he once chided mass consumption theorists heralding the dissolution of

class distinctions for neglecting that information formally identical in content
may be interpreted and responded to in different ways, thus reinforcing extant
patterns of social differentiation (1981: 222).
But perhaps we are missing something here, some explanatory principle
from structuration theory that Giddens has forgotten to mention that solves the
conundrum of why agents would choose to construct the identities and lifestyles
they do in late modernity? Unfortunately not, for even if we probe deeper into
the complex theorization of action in structuration and beyond the problem
remains. As Thompson (1989: 74) has noted, at every step of the way Giddens
has simply failed to provide the necessary means to explain the differential possession between individuals and groups of particular wants and desires, interests and needs, or, in short, motivations (cf. also Loyal, 2003: 612). In
structuration theory, motivation, conceived as the source of the wants which
prompt action and furnish individuals with projects (Giddens, 1976: 85; 1984: 6),
plays a key role in the constitution of the agent along with their capacity to
rationalize and reflexively monitor action. Rooted primarily in the agents
unconscious, this being understood largely in the sense attributed to it by psychoanalysis, that is, as a receptacle of repressed urges bearing an internal hierarchy expressing the depth of the life history of the individual actor
(Giddens, 1984: 5), motivation impacts upon action through psychological
mechanisms of recall to which the agent lacks direct discursive access (p. 49;
for a critique of Giddens theory of the unconscious see Thrift, 1993). However,
no tools for exploring the differences of motivation and thus wants, projects
and lifestyle choices between kinds and categories of individual (Thompson,
1989: 74) are ever offered. Instead, Giddens draws on Erik Eriksons ego psychology to define motivation and its promptings in terms of a general urge to
reduce anxiety and sustain routine for the maintenance of ontological security
(Giddens, 1984: 57), with the only mention of individual differences being in
the context of pathologies of psychosocial development (p. 58). In this way, it
becomes clear that most day-to-day conduct is not motivated in any direct way
at all. Rather, as Giddens (1984: 64) puts it, there is a generalized motivational
commitment to the integration of habitual practices across time and space yet
precisely why individuals would have different habitual practices is never
explained. An effective link between the agents experience and practice, their
position in society and disposition to act, is missing. The definition of motivation is updated in Modernity and Self-Identity to denote an underlying feeling state of the individual, involving unconscious forms of affect as well as
more consciously experienced pangs or promptings (Giddens, 1991: 64).
Importantly, Giddens now binds motivation to feelings of shame over the adequacy of ones narrative of self-identity, developed out of the tensions and anxieties generated in handling the emotional involvements of social bonds in early
life, and the failure to live up to ones ideal self (pp. 649). It is impossible,
however, to see how this actually provides the wellsprings of action (p. 63),
and, in any case, it retains the inability to convincingly explain behavioural

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(and thus lifestyle) variations between individuals and groups in a way that
would be consonant with his comments on social differentiation.
Having broached the issue of ontological security, it is worth pointing out
that Giddens reliance on the concept in his theorization of motivation is also
problematic. Unlike Laing (1965), who saw it as more of a given in psychologically healthy individuals, Giddens tends to depict ontological security as exceptionally fragile being incessantly threatened in social life by even the slightest
glance of one person towards another, inflexion of the voice, changing facial
expression or gestures of the body... (1991: 52) and in need of continuous
maintenance. The end result is something of an exaggeration of the extent to
which individuals are on the brink of psychological and emotional destruction
in their daily lives, coupled with a more general overemphasis on the need of
individuals to constantly sustain routinized ways of life. Indeed, some of his
critics have persuasively argued that the unremitting motivation to uphold routines (including by extension those relating to lifestyle), contrary to the voluntaristic rendering above, appears to press on action in a causal or deterministic
way, effectively amputating the facility for choice so central to Giddens take on
late modernity and self-identity (Loyal, 2003; Loyal and Barnes, 2001). In fact,
Giddens has recognized exactly this, admitting that the need to preserve routine
curbs the capacity freely to choose how to be and how to act (1994a: 75).
Daily life, he says, would be impossible if we didnt establish routines, and
even routines which are nothing more than habits cannot be wholly optional:
they wouldnt be routines if we didnt, for longish periods of time, place them
effectively beyond question (p. 75). This is, of course, wildly at odds with
his other characterizations of the reflexive project of the self including his
assertion that the routines associated with a lifestyle are reflexively open to
change given the mobile nature of self identity (1991: 81). So where lifestyle
habits were once freely chosen, they are now not wholly optional; where routines were previously embraced and revised in giving material form to a narrative of identity self-constructed out of a milieu of choice, they are now put
effectively beyond question. Thomas Kuhn (1977: 3212) once said that consistency was a vital component of any theory worth adopting; if this were true,
then Giddens perspective would be far from enticing.

Linking Positions and Dispositions

There is, however, a way to overcome the problems raised above. Starting first
with the inability to link lifestyle choices and motivations in order to explain
social differentiation, there is a solution not only suggested by Thompson
(1989) but, as we have seen, appealed to by Giddens himself. This solution is,
of course, the work of Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990), which provides a clear
connection between structural positions, motivating dispositions and lifestyles.
As hinted at above, for him the motivational component underlying lifestyles is
the habitus, that is, the complex of durable cognitive and corporeal dispositions,

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Anthony Giddens Atkinson

tastes and schemes of perception possessed by each agent. This is generated out
of the particular class of conditions of existence generally taken as ones relative
distance from material necessity and the experiences this generates associated
with the agents position in social space as measured by the level of economic
and cultural capital they hold. Those possessing similar levels and types of capital are subject to similar conditions of existence and, therefore, possess similar
habitus and lifestyles. Conversely, those distant in social space are subject to
very different conditions of existence and life experiences and, thus, have different habitus and lifestyle patterns. The result is a homology between the social
space of positions and the symbolic space of lifestyles, with the latter then
becoming the site of a symbolic struggle over the relative legitimacy of the different arts of living. Only then are lifestyles implicated in the production of
social differentiation in the way suggested by Giddens.
Yet this is not all, for adopting Bourdieus tools also supplies effective remedies to some of the other difficulties plaguing Giddens approach. The tension
between voluntarism on the one hand and the depiction of lifestyle orientations as
guiding behaviour on the other, for instance, is dissolved. This is because lifestyle
orientations are, in fact, nothing other than the orientations furnished by the habitus in the form of schemes of perception, something agents cannot transcend to
make choices ex nihilo. This might perturb those eager to label Bourdieu a determinist, but when the habitus is understood as the active presence of the whole
past of which it is the product in the present (Bourdieu, 1990: 56), that is, the
accumulation and embodiment of past experiences and events as dispositions and
schemes of perception, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. Action always
takes place in the context of its past, and so even a sudden change of lifestyle
would be guided by the habitus. Further to this, Bourdieu has no need for the concept of ontological security in explaining the routinized character of social life,
and so evades its apparent psychological determinism. Instead, routine is largely a
product of the particular habitus, of course, but also more generally of the practical, unquestioning relation the agent has to the world that is built into it.
The overall consequences of espousing Bourdieus stance for Giddens perspective are, however, clear: lifestyle and even identity which for Bourdieu
(1991: 234; cf. 1984: 172) flows from the sense and vision of ones place in
social space are not a matter of reflexive choice by increasingly autonomous
agents at all. Rather, if we accept Bourdieus broader definition of class as
homogeneous conditions of existence and habitus, it becomes apparent that
they are, in fact, products of class.3 This is not necessarily an outright dismissal
of Giddens though, for what he describes as reflexivity the propensity to
change and experiment with ones lifestyle choices could itself be conceived as
a lifestyle based on a particular class habitus and conditions of existence. The
habitus and reflexivity need not, after all, be as inimical to each other as they
first appear (see Adams, 2006), and Skeggs (2004) argument that reflexivity
might be a disposition of the middle classes, generated out of a distance from
necessity, has some force. However, ultimately this is an issue better investigated through empirical research than theoretical rumination.

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Conclusion
The principal intention has been to go some way toward filling the gap left by
recent class theorists and researchers who are keen to cite Giddens but more
reluctant to engage critically with him in any detail. To that end, it is hoped that
Giddens actual position on class in his later writings has been made clearer, as
have its damaging ambivalences, contradictions and deficiencies and the way
these can be mopped up and class reaffirmed by following Giddens own
appeals and turning to Bourdieu. It remains to be asked what consequences
might follow from the criticisms pinpointed here for other aspects of Giddens
thought. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to conclude that much of his
broader theory such as his separation of modernity into four institutional
domains can be disentangled from the problematic funeral orations on class
and their flawed conceptual bases and assessed in its own terms. On the other
hand, however, it also seems clear that some of the points made above are likely
to have a critical bearing on Giddens conception of the political exigencies of
our time and could, therefore, be taken further. To give just one example, the
issue of whether the kind of reflexivity celebrated by Giddens is essentially a
middle-class disposition puts an interesting question mark over just how universal and superordinate life politics, the politics of choice, really are. A full
investigation of this, however, is beyond the tasks set for this contribution.

Acknowledgements
The research for this article was funded by an ESRC +3 studentship, award number
PTA-030200500219. My thanks are to Gregor McLennan, Paula Surridge, the
editors and the three anonymous referees for all their advice and suggestions.

Notes
1 Hence Giddens has described the reflexive project of the self as a healthy thing
(2003: 389), a fundamental benefit of the post-traditional world (1991: 231).
2 This is also the impression given in Giddens popular textbook, which has
always, even in its latest edition, devoted a chapter to class (2006).
3 I should note at this juncture that I have my differences with Bourdieu on a
number of points, but there is neither the space nor, given my general agreement
with the broad foundations of his position, the necessity to explore them here.

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Will Atkinson
Is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol. His main areas
of interest are social theory and class theory.This is reflected in his thesis, entitled The
Individualized Worker, examining empirically and theoretically contemporary ideas of
reflexivity and individualization as they relate to class.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UQ.
E-mail: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk

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