The class analytic tradition has come under increasing attack from postmodernists, anti-Marxists, and other commentators who argue that the concept of class is an antiquated construction of declining utility in understanding modern or postmodern inequality. In large part, this state of affairs might be blamed on class analysts themselves, as they have invariably represented the class structure with highly aggregate categories that, for all their academic popularity, have never been deeply institutionalized in the world outside academia and hence fail the realist test. By defaulting to nominalism, the class analytic tradition becomes especially vulnerable to critique, with postmodernists in particular arguing that academics have resorted to increasingly arcane and complicated representations of the class structure because the site of production no longer generates well-organized classes that academics and others can easily discern.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline a neo-Durkheimian alternative to such postmodernism that points to the persistence of class-like structuration at a more disaggregate level than class analysts have typically appreciated. It follows that class analysis is well worth salvaging; that is, rather than abandoning the site of production and concentrating exclusively on other sources of attitudes and behavior (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender), one should recognize that the labor market is indeed organized into classes, albeit at a more detailed level than is conventionally allowed.