I've had success with klass, which returns the class object. This seems to be Rails-specific.
Sample usage:
class Foo
end
Foo.new.klass
# => Foo
Foo.new.klass == Foo
# => true
Foo.new.klass == "Foo"
# => false
There is also a method that accomplishes this: Object.is_a?, which takes the class object as an argument and returns true if self is an instance of the class or an instance of a subclass.