We take as our starting point the recent renaissance of studies of social class in the context of longer-term debates on inequality. Social inequality, alongside environmental sustainability have come to the fore in the early 21^st century as the primary existential threats to global civilisation. Ending inequalities between groups is either explicit or implied in several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from ‘ending poverty’ to ‘sustainable economic growth’ [C4] and for the World Economic Forum, ‘persistent inequality and unfairness’ (WEF, 2018: 9-10) is the number one global risk facing humanity today.

The last two decades have seen a series of important interventions by scholars which have had a significant global reach in animating such debates. Wilkinson & Pickett’s [C5]  The Spirit Level reached a mass audience with a series of analyses that suggested that national economic inequalities were correlated with a whole host of negative social outcomes ranging from poor health and higher teenage pregnancy rates through to crime, incarceration and limited social mobility and such correlations existed regardless of the relative wealth levels of different states. From an economic perspective, Thomas Piketty’s [C6] Capital in the 21^st Century has redefined debates on economic inequality. Through a series of longitudinal analyses, Piketty’s core thesis is that the returns on capital already accumulated will outstrip the possible gains from economic growth over the long-term, thus leading to the ever-increasing residualisation of wealth in the hands of an elite class. This means that inequality is inherent to capitalist systems that the. Piketty’s analysis resonated as it appeared to question the very fundamentals of capitalist logic in the hollow assumption of a ‘rising tide that would lift all boats’. Leading economists such as Anthony Atkinson [C7] Joseph Stiglitz [C8;C9] have also drawn attention to these challenges, while geographers such as Danny Dorling [C10;C11], third sector organisations and political movements such as the ‘Occupy’ campaign have focussed primarily on the stark and skewed metrics of inequality in the ‘1%’ or the ‘99%’.

Compelling as all of these interventions might be, one remarkable commonality in all is the neglect of social class as the mechanism through which such processes of inequality might either be seen to have been transmitted, mediated or otherwise refracted. Indeed, in all cases the focus has been almost exclusively on inequality as an economic concern with concomitant social and political implications. Given that the very purpose of social class is to describe or explain inequalities between different people [C12], this neglect is, from a sociological perspective, as sobering as it is revealing. Social class as measured and operationalised by the state, has from the start of the 20^th century, focussed on occupational fractions of the workforce, with the distinctions such as those between manual and non-manual labour revealing as much about the moral and social assumptions of a society which would devise such a system as it did about those it was setting out to define [C13]. The occupational approach to social class was overhauled through the ground-breaking work of John Goldthorpe. In Japan, Goldthorpe’s model has been adopted in order to understand changes in social class structure relative to Western countries, with Ishida [C14] arguing that the Japanese experience is one of comparable relative social mobility between class positions, but higher absolute mobility, largely due to Japan’s much more recent and rapid history of post-WWII industrial development.  

Goldthorpe’s model has been influential, forming the basis for state definitions of social class in the UK and internationally, but the ‘employment aggregate’ [C15] approach that he pioneered has come under increasing pressure in recent decades for a variety of complex reasons. The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences from the early 1980s was leading scholars away from comprehensive understandings of class structure and class formation towards more fragmented positions in which social class was contingent on individual factors and identities which informed the subjective experience of class, such as race, gender and sexuality. Ray and Sayer [C16] summarise this as the transition from ‘economy to culture’ based on the recognition ‘that most non-class social divisions could not be explained on the model of class’. In the US, similar challenges were emerging, with Pakulski and Waters [C17] citing de-industrialisation and the breakdown of Fordist economics as fatally undermining the effectiveness of class models based upon, and developed during the heyday of the post-War industrial/mass consumer boom. Perhaps above all, the slow failure of social class was best exemplified in its failure to predict meaningful political identities, particularly against the rise of neoliberal policies in the industrialised societies of the Western world. No longer was the ‘working class’ articulating a distinctive political[NC1]  voice, leading Pahl [C18] to conclude that ‘class as a concept was ceasing to do any useful work for sociology’, whilst Beck [C19] left the door ajar, memorably declaring class a ‘zombie category’, something ‘dead but still alive’. Such developments in the west stood in some contrast to those in Japan. The economic collapse of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s acted to resurrect social class divisions in the public mind at precisely the same time that both scholars and the general public in the West appeared to be becoming more oblivious to them. In Japan, fiscal crisis threw the disparities between Japan’s ‘kachi-gumi’ (‘winners’) and ‘make-gumi’ (‘losers’) into much sharper relief [C20] and was a harbinger of developments in the West after the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.  

The ‘capitals, assets and resources’ (CARs) approach to social class emerged during from the late 1990s as a response to these problems. This school was heavily influenced by the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction [C21] he sees class as formed not on the narrow basis of occupational role and relationship but upon an individual’s stocks of social, economic and cultural capital. Economic capital is the most recognisable of these as a person’s financial resources in terms of income, property assets and other holdings of monetary value. Less orthodox in understanding class were social and cultural capital. Bourdieu described social capital as the ability to leverage advantage through one’s social networks. So, for example, through attending an elite, fee-paying school, an individual has access to contacts from which wider members of society are excluded and which, following Grannovetter’s [C22] thesis of ‘the strength of weak ties’ can be mobilised in ways which translate one type of capital, (in this case, social), into another such as economic, though preferential and prejudicial access to jobs and professional networks. Cultural capital acts in some ways as a kind of lubricant in this process; through a shared understanding, knowledge and appreciation of different ‘highbrow’ cultural forms, individuals can demonstrate that they belong as part of an elite in-group, allowing certain privileged individuals to negotiate access which is denied to the majority. There has been an increasing apprehension of class as a lived and gendered experience in both countries (e.g for UK: [C23;C24]). In Japan, this has seen a hitherto neglected focus on the role of how marriage, motherhood and childrearing influence women’s positions in the class structure [C25;C26]. It has also seen a renewed focus on everyday or material culture [C27;C28]. And whilst education and ‘credentialism’ have long been a feature of Japanese scholarship on class and mobility, [C29;C30;C31], more recently the inequalities of subjective educational achievement [C32] and ‘shadow education’ [C33] have come to into focus in ways which either implicitly or explicitly map onto Bourdieusian understandings. There are also further signs of alignment in class debates in both countries which we seek to build upon. There has long been a focus within Japanese sociology on the role of institutions in identity formation. Traditionally, this tended to manifest in a concern with the homogenising, conforming power of the firm, or the school. However, more recently attention has shifted to the ways in which such institutions act to stratify and produce different class outcomes [C34]. In the sociology of education, for example, we can see very similar themes in the work of Vikki Boliver and Diane Reay.

During the early 2000s, this CARs or ‘cultural class analysis’ programme has also been developed through signal interventions by members of the research team and other colleagues (e.g. [C35;C36;C37]), however it was the GBCS between 2011 and 2013 which placed these ideas firmly in the public imagination. The GBCS was an experiment developed in conjunction with the BBC which aimed to address the contemporary role and relevance of social class in British society. Much of the work on the GBCS took place at CRESC: the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester and the ESRC’s primary investment into issues of social and cultural change. Over 320,000 people responded to the online survey, making it the largest exercise in ‘public sociology’ ever undertaken. Analysis of the data resulted in the development of a ‘new model of social class’ [C38] in which the UK population was classified into a new seven-fold class structure based upon their various stocks of social, economic and cultural capital, ranging from the ‘Elite’ at the top through to the ‘Precariat’ at the bottom. The release of the initial findings in 2013 drew unprecedented attention for a social science article, with over 7 million people or roughly 1 in 5 of the British adult population having accessed the associated BBC website in the week following publication. Most importantly, the interest generated by the initial paper and subsequent publications, most notably the 2015 popular monograph Social Class in the 21^st Century [C39] underlines powerfully the interest and urgency of a topic which deserves further investment. Again, it also reflects developments in the Japanese academy which have been breaking down the monolithic old class blocks into fractions which more readily reflect the turbulence and challenges of the life course in the modern world, such as with Co-I Slater’s [C40] work on the ‘new working class’ and their transition from school into the labour market. Specifically, we argue that the global reach of the GBCS, from the USA [C41] to Australia [C42] and the fact that the book has been translated into Japanese, amongst other languages, is firm evidence of the possibilities for cross-cultural fertilization of ideas and scholarship that exist through this strand of work. This long-term context provides a firm rationale for building upon that progress and developing this international network now at a time when Japanese scholars are approaching class analysis beyond limiting notions of ‘class consciousness’ and ‘alternative capitalist development’ [C43] to identify ‘the sorting and selection mechanisms that redistribute the population and the differential ways in which different groups are socialised for vastly different futures’ [C44].