Within a society, a set of people who are of the same economic position, and who may share the same tastes and social status. In capitalist societies, class is defined by socio-economic status, but post-Fordism has created a new division: specialist, skilled workers, in highly paid positions with a large degree of self-determination, and low-paid workers with few skills, working in poor conditions with little or no security. This pattern is common in service employment, but is exacerbated among women (McDowell (2006) Antipode 38, 4; Ward et al. (2007) Geoforum 38, 2).

Bondi and Christie (2000) Geoforum 31, 3 observe that ‘the spatial mobility of middle-class lifestyles are taken for granted in ways that sharply remind those struggling to participate in British society of their precarious hold on, if not their exclusion from, the mainstream…This self-consciousness about social position operates in relation to gender as much as class.’ Lekhi (2000) New Pol. Sci. 22, 3 maintains that class is ‘a process that is, by necessity, only ever evolving and never fully constituted’. ‘Working classness is seen as a dynamic and relational category which is simultaneously economic and cultural. It rests not only on the material and labour market position of individuals, households and communities, but also on symbolic value and cultural practice, intertwining a number of interpretations of class position and class subjectivity’ (Stenning (2008) Antipode 40, 1).