Classes and Castes: The idea of social class is much more powerful than that of ethnicity. People frequently characterize themselves as working class or middle class. Although few admit to being upper class with the highest one reserved for the aristocratic inheritors of old, landed wealth. The term social class has complex meanings with social and political dimensions. People who describe themselves as working class perceive themselves to have respectable but unprivileged origins and typically are born into a family supported by wages from industrial or agricultural labor paid in cash at the end of the week. In these families neither parent has a college degree and the housing that the family occupies is rented. There is a strong association between the idea of being working class and supportive of the
Wide open grounds surround Belfast's Northern Ireland Parliament Building for security reasons.
trade union movement and the Labour Party, the identification thus is with a set of corporate or collective economic and political interests and aspirations. A self described middle class person has a social background and political attitudes that suggest parents with white collar jobs whose salaries are paid monthly by check and who are likely to have professional or advanced education, to live in an owner occupied suburban house, and to have made strategic choices about their children's education. They are likely to use their education and social skills for upward economic mobility and to support the Conservative Party, which stresses self sufficiency and individualism. These differences have never been as clear-cut as the rhetoric of the main political parties and professional critics of the social order have asserted. The concept of class has recently fallen out of favor with politicians and sociologists as the nation's social and economic structure has changed dramatically with deindustrialization and the growth of social mobility and the knowledge economy.
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