The Case for a New Class Map

reviewers for especially detailed and useful comments. For the deficiencies that remain, we take full responsibility. The Case for a New Class Map It is increasingly fashionable to claim that social classes are purely academic constructs that no longer provide much information about lifestyles, attitudes, and other individual-level outcomes. The few available tests of this claim rely on stylized measures of social class that either group detailed occupations into a small number of “big classes ” or reduce them to scores on vertical scales of prestige, socioeconomic standing, or cultural or economic capital. These approaches may understate the total effects of the site of production by failing to capitalize on the institutionalized social categories that develop at the detailed occupational level. We test this hypothesis by assessing the extent to which conventional measures of social class capture inter-occupational variability in 55 individual-level outcomes from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the General Social Survey (GSS). In bivariate and multivariate analyses alike, our results reveal that big-class and gradational approaches account for only a modest proportion of the total association between the site of production and individual-level outcomes. We conclude that postmodern accounts of inequality have become popular not because the