Abstract

Some of the important conceptual debates between different approaches to class analysis can be interpreted as reflecting different ways of linking temporality to class structure. In particular, processual concepts of class can be viewed as linking class to the past whereas structural concepts link class to the future. This contrast in the temporality of class concepts in turn is grounded in distinct intuitions about why class is explanatory of social conflict and social change. Processural approaches to class see its explanatory power as deriving from the way meanings and identities are linked to class via a history of experiences; structural approaches, in contrast, emphasize the linkage between class and perceived interests via the objective possibilities facing people in different class locations. This paper tries to integrate these two temporalities by exploring the ways in which trajectories of class experience intersect structures of objective possibility in shaping different dimensions of class consciousness