Class Experience Mobility through Consumption,Work,and Relationships

Class Experience Mobility

Before I turn to CEM, a preliminary note on “class” is necessary. I follow Bourdieu (1984) in seeing class position as encompassing both class resources and class lifestyle; when I refer to “class” it is with this meaning in mind. Bourdieu is known for putting together materialist Marxian ideas of class (groups defined by a material relationship to the means of production, a la Wright [2005]) with Weberian (Weber 2004:180) ideas about status groups (groups that share a “specific . . . estimation of social esteem,” a culture, and a “specific style of life”; status groups may or may not be linked to social class). For Bourdieu (1966, as cited in Weininger 2005:84), class and status group are “nominal unities” rather than “real unities,” “which are always the result of a choice to accent the economic aspect or the symbolic aspect—aspects which always coexist in the same reality.” As Weininger (2005:84) writes, “the upshot of this is an insistence that class analysis cannot be reduced to the analysis of economic relations; rather, it simultaneously entails an analysis of symbolic relations, roughly along the lines of the status differentiation referred to by Weber.” This view of class—as something encompassing economic and symbolic aspects of class but not reducible to either—is essential to the intervention CEM makes in the class mobility literature.

From this perspective, sociologists typically use “class mobility” to refer to two notions of people’s movement between classes. First, resource-centered class mobility describes changes to a person’s resources or means of accessing resources (e.g., a working-class employee becomes a capitalist employer; a working-class student acquires elite cultural capital in college). Following Bourdieu (1984), I see resources as encompassing both economic and cultural capital. Second, lifestyle-centered class mobility describes changes to a person’s class lifestyle (e.g., a middle-class person moves to an elite college, and his lifestyle starts to resemble that of his higher-class peers). I conceptualize class lifestyle as having three major elements: tastes (preferences for specific styles, objects, activities, and so on), impression management practices (ways of managing one’s appearance, behavior, and expressions for self-presentation), and sensibilities (reflexive responses to and interpretations of everyday life) (Bourdieu 1984; Goffman 1959; Streib 2015). ¹ Different volumes of resources are typically paired with distinct class lifestyles, so class mobility encompassing changes to both resources and lifestyle may look like climbing a ladder with rungs held up by class resources on one side and class lifestyle on the other.

Of course, as someone climbs the ladder, it is not quite so simple as their gaining a new class lifestyle that corresponds to their class resources. Their primary habitus, Bourdieu’s (2000) word for the durable set of dispositions one acquires slowly in childhood, will likely endure. However, recent thinking in sociology emphasizes the mutability of the habitus. As people experience other class lifestyles, they may find their habitus partially transformed (Curl, Lareau, and Wu 2018; Friedman 2016) or gradually acquire a secondary habitus, a set of dispositions tied to the specific class lifestyles they experience (Desmond 2007; Lembo 2017; Wacquant 2014).

The literature has systematically explored long-term, durable class mobility, but it has not explored class mobility of a more fleeting nature. I introduce the concept of CEM to describe situations in which one’s class position remains stable while one temporarily experiences a lifestyle common to people with a class position different from one’s own. CEM can refer to upward or downward cross-class movement (and to movement into intersectionally defined class lifestyles or lifestyles defined by different compositions of cultural and economic resources; Bourdieu 1984), but I focus here on upward CEM, the temporary experience of some higher-class lifestyle. People access CEM through different CE processes, routes that have been institutionalized in the worlds of consumption, work, and relationships. To further elucidate upward CEM, we could compare it to credit, another tool that allows people to access higher-class lifestyles (Sullivan 2012). Credit works by temporarily increasing people’s economic resources; this temporary increase in buying power allows people to pay to participate in other class lifestyles. By contrast, CEM allows people to access other class lifestyles without spending economic resources.

Although fleeting, CEM can have lingering effects. CEM may have “positional value,” a “capacity to position” those who experience it “within a differentiated social world” (Beckert 2016:193), altering their objective class position. People who experience CEM may find their tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities transformed such that they acquire a secondary habitus that conforms to some higher-class lifestyle. This secondary habitus could then give them an advantage in navigating social sorting situations and social institutions that are tied to class resources. CEM may also have lasting effects on people’s self-understandings, an “imaginative value” rooted in “the images” CEM conjures for the person experiencing it (Beckert 2016:194). By supplying concrete fodder for class fantasies, CEM can reshape how people imagine their own class position and class trajectory, altering their subjective sense of class (Kluegel and Smith 1981).

In the following sections, I detail the six CE processes mentioned earlier, paying attention to the ability of each process to reshape people’s tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities. I order the processes by their increasing potential to provide access to and information about other class lifestyles. The processes also become increasingly complex in that subsequent processes may incorporate elements of preceding, more basic ones (e.g., there are elements of class spectatorship in class perks).

I theorize CEM by drawing on others’ research and data I generated as part of three overlapping projects. I draw examples from these projects just a handful of times, so I describe them only briefly here. The first involved one year of fieldwork with Las Vegas club crawl workers. Club crawl hosts lead large groups of revelers through nightclubs on the Las Vegas strip. Workers learn the ins and outs of nightlife at work, enabling them to use the perks of their jobs to enjoy an upper-class lifestyle. The second project involved 46 interviews with service industry workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews focused on the pandemic’s effects on workers’ lives and their work before the pandemic. Finally, the third project involved 64 interviews with workers, employers, and intermediaries about their experiences of the elite lifestyle industry. This research and the secondary research I reference throughout the article is primarily U.S. based; although some of the dynamics I describe may obtain elsewhere, they may operate differently.

Class Spectatorship

Several routes to experiencing other class lifestyles lie in the world of consumption. Class spectatorship is when proximity allows someone to observe another class lifestyle. The chef José Andrés experienced this as a teenager in Barcelona: “I would walk outside to one, two, three Michelin star restaurants, only so I could have the opportunity to have a glimpse inside, because my family would not take [me to them]; they were expensive restaurants” (Bloomberg Media 2022). Class spectatorship has become easier to experience and more intimate as more people have started to live their lives in commercial spaces and on the internet. The lifestyles of many class elites are on display in expensive restaurants and chic boutiques, and for the price of a ticket, a cover charge, or a cable subscription, people can peek into luxury boxes and VIP tables from the cheap seats, the dance floor, or their couches (Frank 1999; Mears 2020). Social media make observing other class lifestyles even easier, and neoliberal compulsions to seek and flaunt wealth encourage people to consume conspicuously and perform branded selves online (Duffy 2017; Hund 2023).

Class spectatorship involves getting close to other class lifestyles. In certain cases, our sense of closeness belies objective distance. Social media feed a sense of intimacy with other class lifestyles by allowing us to view and sometimes interact with people in other classes from anywhere in the world; anyone with an Instagram account can keep up with Palm Beach society life (@a.social.life) or high-end Los Angeles interior design (@clementsdesign). In other cases, material or social boundaries stand between us and another class lifestyle despite objective proximity; we observe other class lifestyles from the outside, like the teenage José Andrés peering through restaurant windows. In still other cases, the combination of objective proximity and minimal boundaries allows us to experience another class lifestyle from its edges. Lubrano (2004:23), who grew up blue-collar in Brooklyn, describes visiting Manhattan with his mother as a kid: “As a working-class person, you could partake of it in bits and enjoy its plenitude at the edges. Eat soup at Lord & Taylor without necessarily buying clothes, then light a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, gawking at the opulence of places.”

Regardless of our proximity to other class lifestyles, class spectatorship necessarily implies some distance that separates “us” from “them.” Thus, class spectatorship often incorporates fantasy. Class spectatorship fantasies can become material for constructing valued selves (Frye 2012; Illouz 2009). When the actor Yvette Nicole Brown was starting out in Los Angeles, she constructed an image of a future higher-class self via class spectatorship (Richter 2021). “[I] was starving all the time, never had food, but I would just get up every morning and walk down Colorado Boulevard,” Brown explained on a podcast. And I would just walk and look in windows and dream of like, “One day Ima be able to buy that body butter in the window. One day I’m gonna be able to go into that ice cream store. . . . Ima go in there and I’m gonna get a scoop of everything just to taste it, to figure out which one I like.” The internet has expanded the possibilities for aspirational fantasizing because it “is crowded with virtual displays against which consumers may test their tastes and allow themselves to construct pleasurable future scenarios of ownership” (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010a:119). Aspirational fantasizing may not be purely focused on the aspirant. As Pittman Claytor (2020) argues, middle-class Black professionals’ fantasies may be more relational in nature: A woman might dream of gifting her mother a luxury car.

Mid-CEM streams of fantasy can be interrupted by concrete reality, shaking our sense of self. The consuming spectator often has no formal right to the experience (Mansvelt 2005). Spectatorship may end when a waiter draws the curtains or when a security guard ejects you from a clothing store. This is especially common for people of color, who consistently face discrimination in consumption spaces (Austin 1994). Fantasies may be interrupted by jarring moments of disrespect (Anderson 2015), like the catcall that interrupts a girl’s window shopping or racist comments that return a Black shopper to reality (Gardner 1989; Pittman 2020). Anticipating interruption can itself make it difficult to fantasize with abandon (Chin 2001; Pittman Claytor 2020).

Class spectatorship can provide hints about predominant tastes in other class lifestyles. Ongoing consumption of higher-class lifestyles as a spectator can even reshape tastes: Research finds that consuming television programming that highlights upper-class lifestyles can leave people pining for stylish homes and designer shoes (Yang and Oliver 2010). The podcast producer and host Jonathan Menjivar (2023) developed a taste for high-end country design—“I just couldn’t get enough”—after getting a subscription to the magazine Country Living in high school. “There was feature after feature of nice, proper little houses out in the country somewhere with everything decorated just so. I thought it was so classy.” He “loved it” then and loves it now. “I will watch hours and hours of that home renovation show Home Town . . . that’s basically Country Living on HGTV.”

Like a careful ethnographer, a class spectator can learn about impression management in another class lifestyle, too. Dion and Borraz (2017:76) describe how some people observe luxury retail settings to learn how to “control their body language, emotions, and appearance” and “adapt their comportment” to “look like elite consumers.” These efforts may help nonelite customers avoid denigration from other customers and from retail workers (although, again, this may be attenuated by race). As the luxury retail example suggests, class spectatorship may be fueled by a desire to fit into another class lifestyle. As hooks (2000:21–22) wrote of her mother, a person can use magazines, television, and direct observations of the middle class to try to “fashion a middle-class sensibility.” Virtual consumption may remove the need to fit in. The online “consumer may indulge in pretending that they are the sort of person that is at home in showrooms of luxury cars, jewelry or apparel,” write Denegri-Knott and Molesworth (2010a:119), with no risk of embarrassment from “entering a luxury store in cheap clothes or arriving at a luxury car dealership in an old Ford.”

Although spectators can learn a great deal about other class lifestyles, there is always a risk that their knowledge is faulty or incomplete. A person may observe something resembling their image of a higher-class lifestyle and feel a sense of class elevation; however, that image may not map perfectly onto real life. Depictions of luxury on reality television or TikTok can distort reality (Riddle and De Simone 2013), and even the spectator observing real life (close-up and in real time) may misinterpret other class lifestyles. She may, for instance, miss details, mistaking red wine for a mark of distinction when its status comes from a particular label. The spectator may also miss how class signifiers’ capabilities are tied to race or gender. As Cartwright’s (2022:335; see also Khan 2011) work demonstrates, for example, race shapes the extent to which sensibilities can function as cultural capital: A sense of ease may be valuable to White students in elite institutions but inaccessible to students of color who may benefit more from the cultivation of “mild dispositions.” Even if the information one acquires via class spectatorship is comprehensive, it may not be useful if the spectator never gets a chance to wield it in a field where it has value.

Class Rental

A second route to CEM in consumption is class rental: experiencing another class lifestyle by temporarily possessing something one cannot afford to own. A middle-class woman might use Nuuly to rent a designer gown for her daughter’s wedding, while a young couple might spurn affordable hotels for nicer Airbnbs when they travel. Class rental allows people to simulate ownership, taking “possession of the meaning of a consumer good” without possessing the rights (McCracken 1986:79). People have long relied on class rental to dress up for events (e.g., tuxes) and enjoy their vacations (e.g., beach houses). However, opportunities for class rental exploded in the late 2000s: When neoliberal policies fueled financial sector growth, investors used their excess capital to bankroll new internet companies that proposed to turn objects people own into profitable ventures (Schor and Vallas 2021). This “sharing economy” eventually made class rental accessible with a few screen taps. The sharing economy also changed the meaning of class rental by facilitating the rental of the ostensibly real thing, a way to access another class culture that has not “been manufactured for our own benefit” (Grazian 2005:11). A woman who rents a Mercedes through the service Truro is renting a real Mercedes, one that a higher-class person supposedly uses to move through his higher-class life. No object or experience is essentially authentic (Peterson 2005; Wherry 2006). However, online platforms encourage people to construct rental as authentic, and this “common ‘sharing fiction’” drives sharing-economy consumption (Arvidsson 2018:289).

The sharing fiction may be enabled by the absence of markings that reveal rental (no “Enterprise” logo disfigures the Jaguar you rent through Truro). This is crucial to the relationship between class rental and impression management. Unmarked rental furnishes sets, props, and costumes that may become interactional tools for concealing renter status (Goffman 1951, 1959). A class renter whose ownership claim is taken at face value may be granted deeper access into another class lifestyle than apparent outsiders. Such access may include participating in interactions with “permanent residents” of that lifestyle, which should give the renter better information about predominant tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities. However, the impression management value of unmarked rental can be muted by discrimination. As Pittman Claytor (2020:172) writes, a “black man living in a luxury high-rise apartment building might be assumed not to be a successful entrepreneur but a drug dealer.” The same object may be interpreted differently based on who wields it (Cartwright 2022).

Rental need not be unmarked to be valuable. For one thing, renters may enjoy it regardless of others’ perceptions. In some cases, the experience is valuable if it feels authentic, replicating the renter’s idealized sense of another class lifestyle (Grazian 2005). In other cases, authenticity is inessential. Renters might focus instead on how objects and experiences symbolize for themselves some higher-class lifestyle. A middle-class teenager may be delighted to have any limousine take her to prom; she doesn’t care that everyone knows it’s a rental.

For another thing, the marking of rental as rental may be unrelated to its value when it is a part of a standard ritual event (e.g., holidays, ceremonies, or vacations). Ritual practices—like wearing formal attire or posing for pictures—make rental special by tying it off as a distinctive part of social life (Zerubavel 1997). These practices may also reveal rental: Cans dangling from a limousine’s back bumper disclose newlyweds’ special circumstances and suggest rental. However, the illusion of limousine ownership is not central to the wedding ritual. The marking of rental as rental may even increase rental’s experiential value by emphasizing its ephemerality: A limousine ride makes a night special when it is a one-off social occasion (Goffman 2019), not when one owns a limousine and employs a driver. Additionally, marked rental may position renters favorably in the context of their own class cultures. Class rental may sometimes be more about showing off to other middle-class people than winning upper-class approval.

Although explicitly temporary, class rental may shape renters’ tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities, especially when it is repeated with regularity. We can “quickly grow accustomed to the pleasurable things in our lives” as the novel becomes normal (Quoidbach and Dunn 2013), getting used to nice Airbnbs, designer clothes, and luxury cars the more we use them. Class rental may also endure in deep memories that beckon us to repeat it, like the pleasure of waking up in an island beach house enveloped by roaring surf and salty air or the thrill of popping through a limo sunroof.

Class Deals

A third route to CEM through consumption is getting class deals, that is, experiencing another class lifestyle by consuming goods or services at a discount. A man might purchase a secondhand Supreme sweatshirt on eBay, for instance, or take his family on a resort vacation after securing a discounted hotel room. In many cases, deals involve the sale of used goods. People have long relied on class deals to emulate the rich (Varholy 2008), but mass luxury consumption and the internet have made class deals more accessible. The neoliberal rise of increasingly differentiated elite and mass consumption has led to a growing surplus of luxury commodities. As fashion cycles shift, retailers discount products and services that are going out of style, consumers discard last year’s luxuries, and new groups of aspirational customers get pieces of the surplus (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie 2018). Internet technology has intensified and sped up this process. Dynamic pricing models, for example, allow companies to quickly discount goods as algorithms predict the prices customers are willing to pay (George 2022). Additionally, as with class rental, online platforms like eBay and Poshmark allow people to easily consign their unwanted stuff and search for secondhand luxury beyond their local Goodwill.

Class deals may alter people’s tastes over time. A person who buys more and more class deals may become accustomed to designer clothing: The loose threads on a polyester Forever-21 dress just won’t cut it when she compares them to the graceful stitches on the silk Anna Sui she bought used on Poshmark (Chen and Nelson 2017; Quoidbach and Dunn 2013). New tastes, as well as deals themselves (objects and services), can be marshaled for impression management (De Keere 2022). A man might wear a Frederique Constant watch (purchased on eBay) to a job interview to suggest a desirable hire’s taste (Rivera 2012). Unlike class rental, class deals may provide permanent additions to people’s symbolic arsenals, objects and services useful for impression management. However, class deals are subject to symbolic depreciation: Other people maintain and renew rented objects for you, but the things you own degrade. Objects may deteriorate physically (a rust-spotted car) or socially (once-fashionable décor), losing impression management potential as they molder. Symbolic value may also be lost when the supply of class symbols increases, elite tastes change, or symbols become associated with class aspiration (Currid-Halkett 2017).

Although class deals may change one’s tastes and augment one’s symbolic arsenal, these changes may be worthless as capital in another class lifestyle. To paraphrase Bourdieu (1984) on the autodidact, one’s tastes, possessions, and experiences may be arbitrary and illegible. Contemporary forms of online deal seeking, however, can counteract this tendency toward arbitrariness. First, the internet provides constant commentary (e.g., on blogs, TikTok, or Instagram) deciphering higher-class trends for outsiders. Consumers can learn to interpret objects through higher-class lenses that reveal subtle elite trends, from discreet styles to omnivorous tastes.

Second, online platforms allow people to collect things without spending money. By sorting through listings and “favoriting” potential purchases, people construct virtual collections. As they compare items they might never have had the opportunity to consider otherwise, they may gradually develop new tastes, becoming “collectors” who select products that conform with higher-class lifestyles (Becker 1982; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010a). The writer William Gibson describes how “browsing watches” was enough to give him “a sophisticated understanding” of high-end vintage watches: “He learned to read a ‘restricted code’ and distinguish between ‘swatches (which are collected like Barbies)’ and ‘the German Sinn chronograph that you aren’t really supposed to be able to buy here’” (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010b:68). The shift to collecting does not simply allow for the development of systematic tastes; it is a shift in sensibility, a new way of relating to everyday consumption. Of course, this collection does not remain solely virtual. The resulting physical collection (which can be used for impression management) reflects deep care and consideration.

New forms of deal seeking may change people’s relationship to consumption in another way: People no longer have to accept what they find on sale or secondhand at brick-and-mortar stores. They get to be choosey. Those who have learned to consume under conditions of scarcity may be able to approach consumption playfully under conditions of abundance (Bourdieu 1984; Featherstone 2014). Marketing for online retail outfits picks up on this dynamic. One example is a 2023 Super Bowl commercial for the shopping app Temu, which sells deeply discounted consumer goods: A woman dances around, pushing buttons on her Temu app as clothes, wigs, and other objects appear out of thin air, with each magical sale announced by a chime. We hear a woman’s voice speaking over clubby music: “I like it; it’s mine; the prices blow my mind; I feel so rich (ooh yeah); I feel like a billionaire! Temu—I’m shopping like a billionaire.” ²

At the same time, however, the experience of “shopping like a billionaire” may be limited. The rationalized internet search leaves less to chance and minimizes the possibility of discovery (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010a; Ritzer 2005). People must convert their fantastic desires into generic search terms, and full satisfaction may be perpetually delayed (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010b). Operating under the neoliberal compulsion toward ceaseless self-optimization (Amable 2011; Centeno and Cohen 2012; Zukin 2005), a person searching for a class deal online may hunt indefinitely as new objects come up for sale and new websites entice.

Class Curatorship

Compared to consumption-based CEM, work-based CE processes take participants deeper into higher-class lifestyles: As a worker, one observes (and often shapes) a lifestyle’s consumption and its production. One such process is class curatorship, when workers experience elevated class lifestyles at work. “Curatorship” comes from Goffman (1951:303), who calls workers who sell and maintain class status symbols “curator group” members. Class curatorship jobs can teach workers to “embody” their workplace’s “taste and culture” (Boyle and De Keere 2019:707), like how the Prada store employee becomes part of the elite Prada lifestyle while at work. Researchers have identified a variety of other relatives to class curatorship (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Pettinger 2004; Smith 2011; Warhurst and Nickson 2007; Williams and Connell 2010), but existing research does not theorize such work as a form of class mobility. Occupations in which people are brought into proximity with higher-class lifestyles are a historical constant, but class curatorship has become more possible in recent years. The neoliberal rise of luxury consumption called for more jobs facilitating the circulation of higher-class symbols (Mears 2020; Sherman 2011). At the same time, because mass luxury consumption threatens luxury’s power to confer distinction, companies have sought to protect their luxury brands in ways that make working for those companies more luxurious. They may, for instance, move their retail stores to exclusive shopping centers or carefully design store interiors to maximize prestige (Featherstone 2014).

Curatorship has also become more desirable. In older service occupations (e.g., domestic service), people served employers who were “above” them in the class hierarchy. Any elevation brought by an association with one’s employer meant embracing the system that marked one as inherently inferior (Coser 1973; de Tocqueville [1835] 2006). Some of these dynamics continue, often with race and gender hierarchies taking the role of class (Glenn 1992). However, as service work moved from the home to the market, its meaning was redefined under the influence of democratic ideals that rejected ascribed status. Today, some service workplaces seek to minimize rather than emphasize distinctions between servers and customers (Wilson 2016); in others, workers are elevated as valued embodiments of or authorities on taste (Dion and Borraz 2017; Foster 2022; Mears 2011). People increasingly treat work as a consumption activity, seeking jobs tied to brands they value and incorporating their job into their sense of self (Besen-Cassino 2014). Some workers, like online influencers, may even be primarily remunerated in “opportunities” to associate with certain brands (Duffy 2017; Hund 2023). This context houses new possibilities for experiencing class curatorship.

Despite the appearance of equality, class curators must take care to respect class hierarchy disguised as professional boundaries (George 2008; Sherman 2011). Otherwise, they risk social discreditation, a challenge to their performance of a socially equal self (Goffman 1956; Lizardo and Collet 2013). I spoke with one estate manager who described upsetting the class hierarchy: He told a joke that made his employer laugh, but when he told it again in the presence of her husband, she flashed a sharp glare to put him in his place. Assumptions of equality make new wounds possible when people are treated in ways that do not accord with equal status (Anderson 2015). Doormen, for example, who work in contexts that symbolically recall servant relations (e.g., with uniforms resembling servant livery) may feel demeaned by their work (Bearman 2005:139). By contrast, however, a second estate manager I interviewed preferred working in formal homes where household staff were expected to act like servants. As a Black woman who often worked for White families, she wanted clear boundaries that minimized the risk of discreditation from employers’ racialized interpretations of her behavior; in these relationships, there were no expectations of equality to spoil. Her experience of class elevation on the job was tied more to the fine homes she managed than to her employers’ class positions.

Employers in the high-end service sector frequently hire workers who already have some higher-class tastes (Boyle and De Keere 2019; Sherman 2011), but workers’ tastes also may change because of their work. Because class curatorship gives people regular access to other class lifestyles, and in fact requires that they familiarize themselves with those lifestyles, class curatorship can shift workers’ tastes. I interviewed service workers, for example, who said they became “snobbier” (about wine, cocktails, and bread) the more they worked in higher-class environments (a steakhouse, cocktail bar, and organic bakery, respectively). Deep lifestyle access makes it likelier that new tastes resemble higher-class tastes. Sherman (2011) and Boyle and de Keere (2019), for instance, describe concierges and luxury retail workers whose tastes came to resemble those of their customers over time.

Workers’ shifting tastes can map deeper shifts in sensibilities, new ways of relating to consumption. The Las Vegas workers I studied often came into the nightlife industry excited to see famous DJs in world-famous clubs as part of their work. However, as their relationship to nightlife culture shifted from one of scarcity to one of abundance (Bourdieu 1984), their nightlife sensibilities came to resemble the elite view: nightlife as a hierarchy topped by VIPs (Mears 2020). They became blasé about seeing popular DJs like Steve Aoki or Tiësto, preferring to work in clubs that gave them special treatment (e.g., free drink tickets).

Over time, class curators whose work brings them into contact with higher-class people may also develop a sense of appropriate impression management in higher-class settings. Lubrano (2004:156) describes a man who approached his job “like an anthropologist,” learning and adopting white-collar styles of talking, acting, and emoting for strategic use in white-collar contexts. Workers may also be explicitly instructed in higher-class impression management (Foster 2022; Smith 2011). Spence (2016), for instance, observed how the managers of yacht brokerage firms taught staff to identify and engage the superrich. Workers may be able to apply what they learn outside of work (more on this to come), but their class position is obvious on the job. Still, one can impress without concealment. The jobs might themselves be prestigious (Goffman 1951; Mears 2011), and class curators’ cultural mastery may impress customers from similar or lower class backgrounds (Dion and Borraz 2017).

As workers become habituated to higher-class lifestyles and come to appreciate the subjective sense of elevation they get from their work, they may become more committed to their jobs (Smith 2011). Work-based CEM can serve as a lifestyle wage, employer-granted access to a lifestyle otherwise accessible only through cash, credit, or hereditary advantage. For example, Kim Reed (2021), a former personal assistant to the chef Joe Bastianich, described how her acceptance of “workhorse” hours was partially tied to the allure of highbrow food culture. Influencer marketing takes the lifestyle wage to the extreme: Brands give unpaid marketers just enough free products and exposure to keep them hoping for more (Duffy 2017). Like Du Bois’s ([1935] 1975:700) notion of the “psychological wage” of whiteness and other alternative compensation systems that help maintain wage recipients’ subordinate position (Ditton 1977; England, Budig, and Folbre 2002; Jacoby 1997; Mears 2015), the lifestyle wage may offer contingent, temporary, and experiential elevation in lieu of durable class mobility.

Class Perks

Getting class perks is using the perks, fringe benefits, and extras that accompany one’s job to participate in other class lifestyles beyond the workplace. Class perks may be formally guaranteed by one’s job (e.g., free flights for airline employees or company cars), but they often come through informal networks built on the job. Like the CE processes described above, getting class perks is not a new phenomenon (Herzog 1996), but it has become more possible. Especially in the United States, commercial spaces (restaurants, not public squares) are increasingly the setting for casual social interaction, including elite social scenes (Guadio 2003; Mansvelt 2005). This makes service industry proprietors and employees (not elites) the gatekeepers of many elite lifestyle spaces. Because service industry workers are often more interested in making money than policing suitability for elite socializing, elite lifestyle spaces are open to more people than ever before (Featherstone 2014). With advances in internet and communication technologies, these spaces have expanded to include virtual ones, from social media sites to comment sections, interactive video games, and virtual reality worlds.

Commercial spaces “function as settings for the display and purchase of commodities” (Mansvelt 2005:79), making them optimal sites for performing worthy selves in a neoliberal era in which social value is tied to the market (Lamont 2023). These settings may be especially desirable to the service workers who staff them. As described previously, even though contemporary service workers see themselves as social equals of those they serve, they must sometimes act as customers’ subordinates (Korczynski and Ott 2004). Participating in commercial social spaces via class perks can be a salve for social discreditation, a way to balance out degradation endured on the job. This experience may be imbued with racial or gendered meaning (Pittman Claytor 2020). One Black nightlife promoter enjoyed using his work connections to get VIP treatment in nightclubs on his nights off. Class perks carried extra meaning for him because the experience of being recognized as a respected member of a nightlife community was an intense contrast to his experience of being followed by police in his daily life.

Class perks may include somewhat trivial experiences, like getting a one-off free beer from a bartender friend, but they can also shape most of one’s leisure time. The more class perks shape everyday life, the likelier they are to reshape tastes. As workers perform practices that correspond to particular tastes (those of people in higher-class lifestyles), these practices become habitual, and new tastes become possible (Lembo 2017). Sobering (2015) describes Ethan, a luxury-hotel concierge. Ethan sent customers to local businesses, building up a network of connections that gave him access to perks like free dinners, bottle service, and entry to live music shows. He developed an affinity for living like a “$30,000 millionaire” (a nod to his concierge salary): “That’s what I’m used to” (Sobering 2015:181). Similarly, one high-end restaurant worker I interviewed built up a network of friends who worked at other elite establishments. He used these connections to snag reservations at exclusive restaurants, where his meals were often “comped” (free). As his leisure time became an ongoing tour of his city’s haute cuisine, he grew increasingly discerning about the gourmet meals he couldn’t afford.

Class perks’ power to shape workers’ tastes also depends on its tempo of repetition. As with other forms of consumption (Quoidbach and Dunn 2013), the more regularly a person gets class perks, the likelier they are to become accustomed to them. Slow, ritual repetition may simply provide workers with a regular escape from the mundane. I interviewed a personal assistant whose boss treated her to a yearly spa trip; she relished the experience, but she did not get used to it. Limited access to enjoyable experiences or goods can increase our ability to savor those experiences and goods, in part because they remain special (Quoidbach and Dunn 2013). Regular repetition is a different story. Nightlife workers, for example, build connections with club security guards, managers, DJs, bartenders, and promoters who arrange for workers’ free entry to clubs, free drinks, and comped private tables. One club crawl host described how since coming to Las Vegas and getting used to VIP nightlife, she no longer could tolerate “being in a packed nightclub where you can’t stand anywhere without someone standing on top of you, standing in something sticky, or being pushed by a security guard to constantly keep moving.” Now, she will only go out when she gets a table with bottle service. Ethan, the concierge, was similarly transformed. Of his life of bottle service and luxury hotel rooms, Ethan said, “I act like I’m entitled to this kind of lifestyle, but I’m not part of it—I just work in it” (Sobering 2015:182). By allowing people to get for free what others pay for, class perks alter people’s relationship to consumption. As Ethan and the club crawl host illustrate, this can change people’s sensibilities.

Class perks may create new constraints even as they release people from financial ones. Class perks often come as a gift, not an entitlement; they thus come with strings attached (Mauss [1950] 1990). Recipients of gifted class perks may have to acknowledge the giver’s ultimate claim to resources. A promoter who secures a table with bottle service, for example, must graciously surrender his claim if paying customers want the spot. Recipients may also be expected to help secure any benefits of class perks for the giver. Giving out class perks can set in motion an exchange of “mutually enforcing prestige” (McClain and Mears 2012:136): Young concierges getting (free) dinners make restaurants look hip, graduate students eating (free) lunches at talks make academic departments seem vibrant, and attractive models in (free) jeans make designer labels seem desirable (Mears 2011). The person accepting class perks risks the perks’ retraction if they do not behave in ways that secure prestige for the giver. Sometimes, this means accepting another form of subordination in exchange for class elevation. A nightlife worker may have to accept hegemonic gender norms along with her free table: If she doesn’t dress to attract male customers, she might not get a table the next time she asks (see also Duffy 2017; Mears 2020).

Conditionality complicates class perks’ impression management potential. On the one hand, by facilitating CEM outside the workplace, class perks allow people to perform as members of other class lifestyles in settings where they are not marked as workers (Sobering 2015). Class perks can also supply high-quality information about others’ class lifestyles. Knowing about clothing norms in another class lifestyle or understanding higher-class perspectives on everyday life can help someone blend into that lifestyle, reducing the risk they will be revealed as a class fraud. On the other hand, class perks do not come with secure access to the machinery of higher-class impression management. Like an actor without a set, costume, or props, a person getting class perks may suddenly lose the tools they need to perform a higher-class self. Class perks bring people into sites of judgment where they surrender their control over impression management. People thus run the risk that the self they project (the higher-class self) may be “confronted by another self” (the lower-class self) “which . . . cannot be here sustained in harmony with the first” (Goffman 1956:269; see also Lizardo and Collet 2013). Without the backing of a receipt or rental contract, contingent higher-class selves can disappear in an instant.

Class Pairing

This final process takes us from work to relationships. Class pairing occurs when a relationship leads to one relationship member’s upward CEM. This is the “dating up” process, where a new romantic partner picks up her date in a car he can’t afford and takes him to a dinner beyond his means. Other examples include the friend with a boat, the officemate with season tickets, the neighbor with her parents’ credit card and an aversion to shopping alone, and the college roommate with a Martha’s Vineyard vacation home. Class pairing may involve groups of people rather than couples, like the family friends who spend big on their kids’ bar mitzvahs or the grandparents who pay for Disneyland trips. It may involve direct as well as “vicarious consumption,” when our friend’s fancy house and fancy car make us “feel just a bit more extravagant ourselves” (Belk 1988:157).

Diverse cultures have had stories of cross-class romantic pairing (Cinderella stories). Class pairing is, however, more possible than ever before because the cross-class social contact necessary for relationship formation has become more common (specifically, that between people who are presumptive equals) (Small and Adler 2019). People from lower-class positions have gained access to spaces long dominated by higher-class people. Expanding access to higher education means that working-class-origin students encounter peers and professors with more privileged origins (Jack 2019; Rosenbaum 2011). Meanwhile, people from higher-class positions increasingly seek out lower-class spaces in the service industry. Class-privileged workers look for “cool” working-class jobs, and class-privileged consumers hunt for “authentic” working-class leisure spaces to quench their omnivorous tastes (Besen-Cassino 2014; Grazian 2005; Ocejo 2017; Peterson and Kern 1996). ³ (These practices may exemplify “downward CEM,” a concept I return to in the conclusion.) The internet creates new opportunities for cross-class contact, too; research suggests romantic relationships that begin online are somewhat likelier than others to involve people with different educational backgrounds (Thomas 2020). Despite persistent homophily in social ties (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001), cross-class contact has also become more desirable. For instance, although class differences continue to matter for romantic relationships (Armstrong and Hamilton 2021; King 2021; Schwartz 2013), the rise of love-based marriage suggests people may be paying less attention to class differences in their romantic relationships than in past eras (Coontz 2006). Indeed, rather than repel partners, opposing class sensibilities can attract people from different class backgrounds (Streib 2015).

Cross-class relationships can be difficult to maintain. Contemporary social ties frequently have a voluntary character (Allan and Adams 2006; Coontz 2006), so their survival depends on “continuing affirmation” (Hess 1972). The neoliberal commercialization of everyday life means that we often affirm our relationships with shared consumption in commercial leisure spaces (Guadio 2003). As numerous online guides and advice columns suggest (e.g., Wong 2022; Young 2022), these commercialized relationship-affirming practices can challenge cross-class relationships in which all parties lack equal capacity to contribute. Class pairing is an important tool for managing potentially fraught situations (Zelizer and Gaydosh 2019).

When relationship participants have unequal statuses that map onto their class differences (e.g., bosses and employees, professors and students), class pairing is a straightforward way to solve the problem of unequal resources: The higher-status person treats, and class differences remain nested within status differences. However, when participants have equal status, the lower-class participant’s discrediting class position may more easily come to light. For class pairing to happen smoothly, people must engage in relational work (Bandelj 2020; Zelizer 1994) to manage resource differences without directly acknowledging them (Wigen 2023). For example, Zelizer and Gaydosh’s (2019) research on college friendships finds that affluent friends who become aware of resource differences might offer to “treat” their lower-class friends, but to do so, some normalize unequal contributions by reframing their friendship as kinship. ⁴ Relational work minimizes discomfort, making class pairing more enjoyable for both parties.

When class pairing is pleasant, people may be likelier to adopt the tastes, impression management practices, or sensibilities of another class. Yet encountering another class lifestyle can also be unpleasant (Bourdieu 2000; Friedman 2016; Jack 2019). Streib (2015:189) describes a blue-collar-origin man who joined his white-collar-origin fiancée for a visit to her family’s large estate, where he spent the entire weekend feeling “anxious and on guard.” A class pairing experience depends in large part on the behavior of others in that setting and whether they are willing to forgive faux pas and help lower-class people save face (Goffman 1956, 1959). Class pairing itself may have protective power, here: Cross-class ties may guarantee the legitimacy of the lower-class person’s presence, entitling the lower-class person to interactional respect (Podolny 2005) and increasing their sense of belonging (Carey et al. 2022).

Class pairing’s effects on tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities are shaped by temporal dynamics and relational context. When class pairing is a one-off event in which a single connection offers someone access to a higher-class lifestyle, it might feel like an escape from everyday life, special and meaningful simply because it’s different (Zerubavel 1997). The same is true of regular ritual events that bring together people from different classes, like the annual Christmas party a wealthy woman hosts for her middle-class church friends. These occasions may impart new tastes or impression management practices (e.g., the man who takes to wearing Chelsea boots after attending a friend-of-a-friend’s loft party where the host made an offhand comment about shoes) (Goffman 2019). More regular class pairing experiences and those that occur earlier in the life course (Ma 2021) are likelier to result in lasting transformations to sensibilities, tastes, and impression management practices. This may be especially likely if the lower-class person enters unfamiliar situations for which they have no immediately available frame (Young 2010). A low-income college student on her first trip out of the country may be shaped by the behavior of her wealthier study-abroad friends. Without a frame for international travel, she may come to see their behaviors—going to museums, to cool bars, and on weekend trips—as the standard thing to do in new places.

The transformative power of long-term relationships varies over the course of a relationship. People are most open to change of this sort in transitional periods (Goffman 2019; Ma 2021), so they may be likeliest to adopt others’ tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities early on (Streib 2015). In the first months of a romance, for example, one person might finally see the good in Taylor Swift or Canada Goose coats. As relationships progress, people may continue to take on their partner’s tastes and impression management practices out of habit (Lizardo 2021), becoming increasingly accustomed to the luxury car they drive or their penchant for La Croix. It is unclear whether the same will happen with their sensibilities, especially when it comes to romantic relationships (Streib 2015). Contemporary cultural ideals suggest intimate partners should accept one another for “who they are” as unique individuals (e.g., Bendory 2022; see also Coontz 2006; Swidler 2001). People in romantic relationships may resist becoming more like their partners at the level of sensibility, although other long-term relationships may be less subject to this resistance.

Relationships can be highly intimate, last a lifetime, and touch every piece of our lives, providing boundless access to and information about other class lifestyles. I interviewed Lucas, a corporate manager from a lower-middle-class background who learned about wealthy executives via his college roommate, Phillip. On one occasion, Phillip’s father (a Fortune 500 executive) and his father’s friend (a retired Fortune 500 CFO) took Phillip and Lucas out for a steakhouse dinner. After discovering their server had recently graduated with a business degree, the retired CFO told the server that if he could get his résumé there by the end of dinner, he would “make sure” the server would “have a job by the end of the week.” When the server brought his résumé with the check, the retired CFO said the server “was a smart man and he’d get taken care of.” This experience shaped how Lucas approaches executives at work: “They don’t care if you had to call your mom or roommate to get something done; if you had [the résumé] there by the end of dinner,” they’d get something done for you. Putting “time and effort into something” isn’t “going to impress an executive. . . . They want the outcome.” Regardless of its ability to transform, class pairing may have the greatest potential of any CE process to supply people with valuable information about how to operate in other class lifestyles.

Cem And Class Analysis

I now tie CEM back to central concerns of class analysis. I first consider how CEM may shape people’s capacity for long-term class mobility. I then turn to CEM’s effects on people’s subjective sense of class.

Conclusion

In this article, I introduced a theory of CEM and provided a typology of processes by which people engage in it. I argued that upward CEM may augment people’s capacities for long-term class mobility by transforming their tastes, impression management practices, and sensibilities or by supplying information about other class lifestyles that equips them for competent navigation of those lifestyles (Emmison 2003). CEM may also reshape people’s subjective sense of class by furnishing concrete and specific tools for reimagining present and future selves.

The idea of CEM opens up new areas of empirical inquiry around class stratification that I have not pursued. I focused on how CEM may affect those who undergo it, but higher-class people may themselves be influenced by others’ CEM. How might, for instance, cross-class friendships affect higher-class friends? Furthermore, by focusing on upward CEM, I have not explored the experience of going “down.” How would downward CEM operate? Some of the CE processes I described (e.g., class spectatorship) could facilitate downward CEM, but other processes might not have clear downward analogs (e.g., class deals). Downward CEM is also known as “slumming,” a pejorative term connoting voyeuristic exploitation. How might negative connotations shape the emotional landscape of downward CEM? And what of the motivations behind downward CEM? Upward CEM is easy to understand in a neoliberal culture, but why go down? Could going down be a means to another end, like ascending the gender hierarchy (Ocejo 2017), finding authenticity (Grazian 2005), or sating new or omnivorous tastes (Lembo 2017; Peterson and Kern 1996)? Do people go down to mitigate their discomfort with privilege (Friedman and Reeves 2020) or furnish a privilege-minimizing account (the old CEO’s-son-who-learned-the-value-of-hard-work-flipping-burgers-in-high-school trick)? More broadly, how does the direction of CEM shape its transformative power and its consequences for people’s conceptions of class?

I focused primarily on CEM’s relationship to class mobility, but future research must attend more deeply to intersections between class and other stratification systems. Lifestyles defined by class as well as race and gender will shape how people experience CEM and CEM’s influence over long-term mobility. Might Black elites’ sense of racial solidarity (Pittman Claytor 2020) make CEM less risky for people of color in higher-class Black lifestyles? Would this make it easier to translate CEM into long-term mobility? Additionally, because access to CEM is stratified, it may act as a mediator between race, gender, and class stratification. ⁵ At the same time, CEM may expose people to risks that vary systematically by race or gender. To explore these twin dynamics, we might draw insights from scholars of credit and debt, who highlight both unequal access to credit (a resource) and the consequences of indebtedness (Dwyer 2018). Parallels and points of divergence between CEM and credit/debt could deepen our understanding of CEM as a distinct social process.

Finally, the idea that CEM can shape subjective class and mobility expectations has important political implications. Social scientists have highlighted how cultural values and identities can lead people to vote against their interests (Cramer 2016; Hochschild 2016). CEM suggests a new mechanism by which people’s class identity could lead them to vote against their class interests: If people see themselves as future or current members of a class to which they do not belong, they may support policies that would advance the interests of the class to which they imagine they belong but oppose policies that would advance the interests of their own class. Additionally, by changing how we understand our own mobility trajectories, CEM may shape people’s perceptions of social opportunity. If people feel their futures are bright, they may imagine this is true for everyone in their society. As Day and Fiske (2017:272) find, “people’s willingness to maintain the societal status quo hinges,” in part, on their perceptions of opportunity: People who perceive high levels of economic mobility in their society are likelier than those who perceive low levels of economic mobility to support existing economic arrangements.

Understanding these new dimensions of CEM is important. Contemporary developments—from the rise of neoliberalism to new technology—have made CEM more desirable than ever, and it has more potential than ever to be a part of people’s lives. CEM is a fundamental social process.