Social Class Research Paper

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Class is a key concept in sociological theory, but its precise meaning and definition is highly contested. It is also a core explanatory variable in much empirical research, yet there is enormous diversity in the ways in which it is operationalized and measured. Most sociologists agree that social class refers to how people make a living, and that there are relatively stable patterns of inequality between different classes—but there the consensus ends. Indeed, some sociologists now argue that the concept of social class has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned altogether.

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1. Marx’s Class Theory

The concept of ‘class’ was central to Marx’s theory of how societies are constituted and how they change, although Marx himself never produced a definitive statement of how class was to be conceptualized. The treatment of class in his different works is not always consistent, but five basic themes emerge.

First, although different classes generally have different levels of income and different life-styles, it is not their income or life-style per se that distinguishes them. The crucial determinant of class is ownership (or nonownership) of productive property. Because people either own, or do not own, the basic means of production in a society, it follows that there can be only two principal classes in any mode of production. Under capitalism, these are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.




Second, class is not a ‘position’ which we occupy in society, but a relationship which one group in society has to another. This relationship is one of exploitation, for those who own the means of production add to their wealth by using the labor power of those who own nothing. Because class relations are always exploitative, they are always antagonistic. Class struggle is an inherent feature of all class societies, and this perpetual battle between classes is the motor driving human history.

Third, class is more than just a concept developed by social scientists to help them make sense of the world. Classes exist, and they have real effects. Even where the members of a given class do not recognize their class identity (a situation which Engels labeled ‘false consciousness’), class is still an objective reality shaping their lives.

Fourth, class struggle is a feature of every society since the development of settled agriculture. Even where divisions seem to reflect factors other than property ownership (e.g., in caste systems where status at birth counts more than wealth), the ‘real’ force structuring social relations is still class. Class relations shape every aspect of social life. Politics, law, art, and philosophy are the ‘superstructural’ expressions of a more ‘basic’ relation between owners and nonowners of the means of production. Class relations impose their stamp on every aspect of life.

Fifth, Marx claimed that the class relation between bourgeoisie and proletariat was becoming increasingly sharp. Capitalist societies were polarizing between a small number of large capitalists and a large number of propertyless proletarians. He predicted that the condition of the proletarians would become increasingly miserable, and that sooner or later, there would be a revolution which would replace the capitalist system with a socialist one in which there would be no classes because all productive property would be owned in common.

2. The Marxist Tradition Of Class Analysis

Later Marxists have wrestled with some major problems left unresolved by Marx’s analysis.

2.1 How Many Classes?

One of the most intractable problems arises out of Marx’s insistence that class is structured around the relationship between owners and nonowners of the means of production. Logically, this implies that there are only ever two classes, yet in Capital he identifies three classes in modern capitalism (landowners, wage laborers, and capitalists), and, analyzing the 1848 events in Paris, he finds as many as nine (proletarians, financiers, industrialists, the middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, intellectuals, the clergy, and the peasantry).

Later Marxists have sought to resolve this confusion in two ways. First, they have distinguished ‘classes’ and ‘class fractions.’ Owners of capital, for example, are a single class, but different ‘fractions’ of this class squabble when their interests diverge. Thus, landowners seek to extract high rents, but this conflicts with the interests of industrialists who want to keep their overhead costs down. Industrialists and landowners share a common class interest in the maintenance of the capitalist system, but their different interests in respect of profits and rents creates different fractions within the bourgeoisie.

Second, Marxist theorists have distinguished between a pure ‘mode of production’ (where there are only ever two classes) and actual ‘social formations’ (which may contain elements of more than one mode of production, and thus more than two classes). For example, France and the UK are structured around a capitalist mode of production (with two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat), but they also contain elements of an earlier, feudal, mode of production (the surviving elements of a peasant class in France, and an aristocratic class in the UK).

2.2 Theorizing The Middle Class

A common feature of modern capitalism in all parts of the world is the growth of managerial, administrative, and professional occupations. This ‘middle class’ cannot easily be explained as either a ‘fraction’ of one of the two ‘main’ classes, or a remnant of an earlier mode of production. Braverman (1974) suggested that large sections of it are ‘really’ part of the proletariat because they are increasingly subject to typically ‘proletarian’ conditions of labor such as job insecurity and deskilling, but this interpretation has been challenged, and higher up the hierarchy it is clear that managers and professionals are in quite a different situation from manual workers as regards remuneration, security of employment, career prospects, and workplace autonomy.

Recognition of these differences has resulted in various attempts to develop Marx’s theory to take account of the distinctiveness of the ‘new middle class.’ Carchedi (1975) theorized it as employees who simultaneously contribute to the functions of ‘collective worker’ (e.g., by coordinating the labor process) and of capital (e.g., by controlling their fellow workers). Poulantzas (1975) distinguished it on ‘political’ (supervisory functions) and ‘ideological’ (mental labor), as well as ‘economic’ (nonproductive activity) criteria. And Wright (1985), while emphasizing the division between owners and nonowners of capital assets as fundamental, differentiated nonowners according to their ability to ‘exploit’ skills and organizational assets (a class of ‘expert managers,’ for example, exploits both skills and organizational assets, while proletarians can exploit neither).

All of these formulations have been influential. Their weakness, however, is their complexity (Wright’s schema, for example, generates a total of 12 different classes). The more Marxist theorists have tried to develop a descriptively adequate account of the contemporary class structure, the more they have had to sacrifice the theoretical sharpness of Marx’s original approach.

3. Weber’s Concept Of Class

Weber contradicts almost every element in Marx’s approach. Where Marx insists that classes arise out of the organization of production, Weber treats them as distributional categories. For him, ‘economic classes’ can be identified wherever individuals share a common market situation, either in property markets (where those who are ‘positively privileged’ can live off revenues from assets) or in labor markets (where those who are ‘positively privileged’ can command high salaries in return for their scarce skills and qualifications). ‘Social classes’ are simply clusters of economic classes between which inter- or intragenerational mobility is ‘easy and typical.’

In this approach, social classes are not defined in relation to each other, as they are for Marx, but are mapped positionally in a hierarchy according to their market capacity. Weber therefore has no problem identifying a ‘middle class’; indeed, logically, there are two middle classes (a petty bourgeoisie of small property owners with a relatively weak labor-market position, and an intelligentsia who own few assets but who command high returns in the labor market because of their education and training). They sit between an upper class (positively privileged in property and skills) and a working class (negatively privileged on both, and therefore relatively poorly remunerated).

‘Class’ is not ‘real’ for Weber as it is for Marx—it is simply an analytical construct, a label to refer to clusters of individuals. Sometimes people express a common class identity and act accordingly—but a failure to think and act in class terms does not constitute a ‘false consciousness’ as it does for Engels.

It is also clear that Weber does not see class as pervasive and enduring in the way that Marx does. For him, class (market power) is only one dimension of power in society. In the modern period, it is often the most important dimension, but in other periods, the ‘social power’ of status groups (such as the old European aristocracy or the high castes in India), or the ‘political power’ of parties, mobilizing to turn state authority to their own advantage, has outweighed that of classes. Even today, status and political power can cut across class lines. There is no assumption in Weber, as there is in Marx, that the dominant economic classes are also the dominant social and political force in any society.

4. The Weberian Tradition

4.1 Class Location And Social Action

Weber’s approach to class analysis was essentially concerned with classification—social classes are ideal types. This has made things easier for later theorists, for unlike Marx’s approach, Weber’s work can readily be adapted and developed to take account of changed conditions (such as the growth and increased complexity of the middle classes).

What is lacking in Weber’s approach, however, is a causal theory. For Marx, classes act—they drive history through struggle. For Weber, however, classes are simply categories into which people can be classified, and the role played by these categories in the explanation of social phenomena is left open. Class may help explain some of the things that people do, but it may be irrelevant to others—the usefulness of the concept is left to empirical research to determine. This is both a strength and a weakness of the Weberian legacy. Its strength is that it has enabled the development of class typologies which appear both valid (they adequately capture some of the key sources of differentiation in contemporary societies) and reliable (they predict fairly accurately different patterns of social behavior and attitudes). Its weakness is that Weberian class analysis has often been limited to mapping differences between classes rather than explaining them. It generates useful depictions of the ‘class structure’ but seems to lack a theory of ‘class action’ (why and how a person’s location in the structure influences social action).

4.2 Work, Market, And Status Situations

One influential attempt to link people’s class position to their attitudes and behavior was David Lockwood’s (1958) study of clerical workers in Britain. He defined class position by people’s ‘work situation’ (i.e., the degree of autonomy they enjoy and the authority invested in them or exercised over them) and ‘status situation’ (i.e., their occupational prestige) as well as their ‘market situation’ (i.e., their income, job security, and career prospects), and he showed that on all three criteria, clerical employees differed radically from manual workers. These differences were then reflected in their behaviors and attitudes, such as willingness to join a trade union.

Lockwood and his colleagues utilized much the same approach in a later study of the British working class (Goldthorpe et al. 1969). The research refuted the embourgeoisement thesis—the idea that affluence was blurring the boundary between the working class and the middle class—by identifying clear differences in the work, market and status situations of well-paid manual workers as compared with white-collar workers. These differences were then held to explain the different patterns of consciousness found in each group. Lockwood (1966) also analyzed differences within the working class, arguing that different work and ‘community’ situations could account for the different ‘images of society’ characteristic of traditional proletarian workers (e.g., miners), traditional deferential workers (e.g., farm laborers), and privatized workers (such as those employed in modern, high-wage industries).

Since then, John Goldthorpe (1987) has used differences in the ‘work situation’ (authority relations) and ‘market situation’ (income, security, and prospects) of different occupational groups to develop a new, 11-category model of the class structure. Developed initially as a framework for the study of social mobility in Britain, this typology became the basis for a major international study of mobility rates (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992), and it has also been used to investigate issues such as the class basis of voting behavior (Heath et al. 1985). In comparison with other schema, it has been found to have a stronger predictive power and clearer internal consistency (Marshall et al. 1988, Breen and Rottman 1995), and it has won widespread acceptance in much of Western sociology.

4.3 Class Structuration And Social Closure

Lockwood’s concern with linking people’s experience, at work and in the locality, with their sense of class identity was later elaborated in Giddens’s theory of class structuration. He explicitly addressed the problem of how a shared economic location becomes important for collective social action.

Weber’s answer to this question emphasized patterns of social mobility and closure—social classes are clusters of individuals occupying market situations between which mobility is readily possible. Giddens (1973) refers to this as the ‘mediate’ structuration of social classes. He argues that market situations in modern capitalism typically cluster into three categories based around ownership of property, possession of qualifications, and possession of manual labor power, and that movement between these three is typically limited. These are the three social classes of the modern period, but Giddens then goes on to identify the factors (‘proximate structuration’) which keep them apart and help promote distinctive class identities. Here he echoes Lockwood’s work by emphasizing the importance of differences in the workplace (e.g., in authority relations) and in the locality (e.g., residential segregation). He argues that proximate structuration always leads to some degree of ‘class awareness,’ though not necessarily to ‘class consciousness’ in a Marxist sense.

The problem of linking the ‘class position’ that people occupy to their values, beliefs, and actions was tackled very differently by Frank Parkin (1979), who resurrected Weber’s neglected concept of ‘social closure.’ Closure refers to the way groups try to improve or maintain their privileges by restricting the access of others, and Parkin identified two main strategies. ‘Exclusion’ operates downwards and involves protection of privileges by dominant groups; ‘usurpation’ operates upwards and represents the attempt by subordinate groups to claim more privileges for themselves.

Exclusion typically seeks to defend privileges associated with property rights or qualifications (e.g., professional closure). Parkin defines the dominant class as those whose resources (revenues or salaries fees) derive mainly from the exercise of exclusion. Usurpation, by contrast, is typified by forms of solidaristic action such as trade-union organization, and it is the defining feature of the subordinate class. Those in white-collar occupations, who frequently claim rewards on the basis of their individual qualifications (exclusion) and through membership of the organized labor movement (usurpation), constitute an ‘intermediate class’ between these two.

Defining classes by their action (mode of closure), rather than by their location in a structure of positions, Parkin claims to have sidestepped the recurring problem of how to link class positions to behavior. In his view, the ‘class structure’ derives from collective forms of action, rather than the other way around, and there is no structure of positions independent of the way people act.

5. Measurement Of Class

Theoretical debates over whether and how to divide the population into discrete class categories are reflected in the different ways the class concept has been operationalized in empirical research.

5.1 Class As A System Of Categories

Class has often been operationalized in quite crude and untheorized ways. Many studies have simply distinguished ‘manual’ and ‘nonmanual’ occupational groups, and some have used the marketing industry’s six-fold system of classification based on spending power, but neither of these approaches corresponds to any sociological concept of class. In the UK, research has often used the government’s five (later six) class schema, but the criteria underpinning this system shifted over time from occupational prestige to skill levels creating confusion over what the classes designate.

In recent years, there has been a growing consensus around the use of systems of classification based on the Goldthorpe schema, and even the UK government’s system of classification has now been revised to bring it more into line with the neo-Weberian emphasis on work and market situation (Rose and O’Reilly 1997). However, there is still intense disagreement among researchers over whether it makes sense to measure class in terms of categories at all, irrespective of how they are derived.

5.2 Class As A Continuous Scale

In the USA, there is a long tradition of measuring class differences on a continuous scale rather than a categorical system of classification. The best known example is the 96-point scale developed by Blau and Duncan (1967) for their study of social mobility. They justified using a continuous scale rather than discrete categories on the grounds that there are no clear cutoff points between occupations on any of the pertinent criteria that might differentiate them. In other words, classes shade off into one another.

Their approach attracted widespread criticism. Despite reporting high correlations ( 0.9) between occupational prestige and income, and education levels, they were accused of measuring status differences rather than differences in market power, and they were attacked for their ‘conservative’ assumption that there is a consensus over the prevailing system of occupational rewards (Horan 1978). Partly in order to counter such criticisms, Stewart et al. (1980) developed a scale which ranks occupations according to the ‘social distance’ that separates them, and which does not therefore depend on any assumption of value consensus over the worth of different positions. In practice, this scale looks very similar to those based on prestige rankings and correlates highly with them, which suggests that the problem of ‘ideological contamination’ of occupational prestige scales has probably been exaggerated.

The advantage of continuous scales over categorical schema (such as Goldthorpe’s) is that they avoid the problem of drawing artificial class ‘boundaries’ (Kelley 1990). There is, however, no reason why we should not use both in empirical research.

6. The Future Of Class Analysis

Controversy continues today, not only over how to measure class, but also over whether the concept remains useful.

6.1 Women And Class

Feminists have criticized the failure of class analysis adequately to encompass the position of women. Like students, retired people, and the unemployed, married women who do not have full-time jobs are usually classified according to the occupation of their husbands, and even women who do have jobs may be allocated to their male partner’s social class where that is ‘higher’ than theirs. Goldthorpe defends this on the grounds that the ‘life chances’ of a lower-class woman married to a higher-class man are shaped more by his market situation than by hers, but this issue still generates considerable disagreement. Very different pictures of the class structure emerge depending on whether women are allocated to their own, or to their husband’s, class location.

6.2 Nonclass Identities

Feminists have also criticized class analysis for the assumption that ‘class location’ is more important than gender in determining life chances and influencing values and behavior. Their argument is complemented by those (notably in the USA) who emphasize the primary importance of race and ethnicity rather than class. There has also been some debate over whether people’s ‘consumption location’ (e.g., as home owners or renters) outweighs their class location, and postmodernists insist that clear class divisions have now fragmented into a multitude of different interests and identities.

Class analysts have tended to respond to such criticisms by appealing to evidence that class identity is still primary (Marshall et al. 1988). They point out that class effects may be crosscut by gender, race, or other identities without class itself losing its significance.

6.3 The Relevance Of Class

Some critics (Pahl 1989, Clark and Lipset 1991) argue that class is a concept that has outlived its usefulness. People no longer think of themselves in class terms, movement between class locations is common, boundaries between classes have blurred, and class analysis has failed to explain the causal link between class locations and social outcomes.

Responding to this, Breen and Rottman (1995) accept that class is a weak source of identity for many people, but they argue that people’s ‘objective’ class location is still crucial in explaining many aspects of their lives. Recent work on class differences in health and morbidity (Wilkinson 1996) are one striking example. It is probably fair to conclude that class does still correlate significantly with many of the phenomena studied in social science, but we often lack a clear explanation of the mechanism which translates ‘class position’ into social outcomes.

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