Five Ways to apprehend Classes

This chapter assesses the importance of class differences in contemporary Denmark and at the same time seeks to entangle the many different understandings of class that are communicated in the debate on class differences. We will argue that a reason for this apparent confusion is that class actually manifests itself in different ways, and we will here seek to systematize these manifestations in five different forms. For this purpose, we will use Pierre Bourdieu’s class model from Distinction (1984 [1979]) as an inspiration and a starting point. Bourdieu regarded a society’s class structure as multidimensional and related to the possession of different forms of capital (see also Waitkus & Groh-Samberg in this volume). The primary principles of differentiation are the total volume of capital (the ‘sum’ of the main forms of capital: economic and cultural) and the composition of capital, or the relative weight of respectively economic and cultural capital.