My title is ambiguous. In this essay I shall be touching on all three of the possible questions implied in it: how do the workers see themselves? how do they see the rest of society? how does the rest of society see the workers? But these clear statements may not immediately erase all danger of confusion. Alas, the study of class has long been monopolized by a few narrow theological fraternities who not only insist that the word ‘class’ shall be used as they decree, and in no other way, quoting from the texts as they go, but now also assume that any usage of the phrase ‘images of class’ must conform to precedents established by certain leading sociological writers. After bowing to Marx, Weber and Durkheim, one is then expected to stumble along in the footsteps of Willener, Ossowski, Bott, Lockwood, Goldthorpe and Buhner.

Such has been the influence of the work of these and other scholars that to talk of ‘images of class’ is to suggest that by definition one is going to be concerned with questions of ideological perspective, of ‘power’ models and ‘pecuniary’ models. Moreover, there is the implication that, as the authors of the classic study of the ‘affluent worker’ put it, one is concerned with ‘the destiny of the working class’ [my italics]. It is perfectly possible to share the view of Westergaard that ‘class imagery involves…a series of perhaps contradictory, conflicting, rather confused and ambivalent pictures of what society is like and where the individual fits into it’ without reaching his conclusion that in all images of class ‘there are inevitable political elements, whether they are explicit or not’.