Quantifying class trajectories: linking topological and temporal accounts

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the potential for quantitatively accounting of the social world as relationally constituted in both a topological and a temporal sense. As statistical procedures rest on underlying assumptions of the social world, I emphasise how multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) thinks relationally, as Bourdieu famously proclaimed, but to a lesser extent addresses the temporal pattering of social life. I point to the beneficial property of sequence analysis (SA) in thinking ‘processually’, and I argue that the combination of the two tools stimulates favourable opportunities for relational thinking in complementary ways. While adding SA to MCA inserts processual thinking into a relational space, the MCA helps embedding sequential patterns within a social structure. I critically assess this strategy by drawing on the diachronic underpinnings to Pierre Bourdieu’s oeuvre and empirically examine how his third dimension of social space – trajectory – might be ‘quantified’.