Collapse and convergence in class theory

Collapse and convergence in class theory

The return of the social in the analysis of stratification arrangements

MALCOLM WATERS University of Tasmania

Class is both the most enduring and the most controversial of sociological concepts. Perhaps this is because, although the idea of class is associated with the rise of capitalist industrial society, 1 it nevertheless manages to predate the institutionalization of sociology by at least half a century. Even then, the writings of Marx and Weber, which place central theoretical emphasis on class, if allocating only fragmentary exegetical attention to it, did not influence sociological conceptualiza- tions of inequality in Anglophone contexts until well into the twentieth century. This is surprising, given the fact that in everyday experience class is an unremarkable category for ordering the social world: that is, people routinely use such terms as "middle class" and "lower class" as descriptions of their experience. By contrast, within sociological dis- course, not only the forms but also the existence of class is a matter for contestation and even denial. Historically, class has never been com- fortably accepted within sociology. In most American sociologies, for example, it receives no reference; in British and other European sociol, ogy, while there is no dispute about its existence or importance there is an abject failure to agree on its meaning.

In the most conservative of sociological traditions, the very existence of class and certainly its utility as a sociological concept is denied. In 1966, Nisbet, for example, argued that class had been superseded by status as the central concept in the analysis of stratification systems. The grounds for this ethnocentric and thus mainly spurious assertion were that contemporary analyses of social inequality are founded upon the work of Tocqueville, which gives us the contours of a process by which aristocratic classes were replaced by achieved satus, and on Weber's discussion of the emergence of status gradations in the United States. Here Nisbet neglects the fact that Tocqueville's thought was

Theory and Society 20: 141-172, 1991. �9 1991 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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expressed as a form of political rather than sociological analysis, and also that Weber, by contrast with Marx, regards aristocratic feudalism as a precise example of a status ("estate") society and regards capitalism as the sole example of class society. Weber's rather trivial discussion of American status-seeking behavior compares unfavorably with his altogether more systematic and serious and certainly more influential analysis of class. Nevertheless, Nisbet felt able to conclude that: "Today, as a sociological concept, class is dead. ''2

Although we may disagree with Nisbet on the issue of the sociological importance of the concept of class, in terms of the American sociology of the 1960s with which Nisbet was presumably most familiar the statement was doubtless correct in an empirical sense. Class analysis did not so much collapse in American sociology as fail to develop. While Marxist class analysis did emerge within the nonsociological traditions of political economy and critical theory, only in the 1980s has it genuinely reached the pages of the central journals, and even now it is a minority perspective. Traditionally, class has been subsumed within or, more correctly, denied by arguments focusing on the relative status of occupations and the capacity of individuals to move among them, implicitly or explicitly underpinned by a theoretical stance in which the ranking of occupations is based on shared perceptions of the relative importance of their contributions to the maintenance and institutionalization of the central values of society. The taken-for- grantedness of this view is indicated in the widespread and uncritical use of the term "socioeconomic status" rather than the term "class."

In European sociology, the focus of debate has been the Marxist theoretical construction of class, especially its structuralist manifestations, and the opposition between that position and Weberian arguments. Here the problem is not the existence of class but the locus of its consti- tution and the pattern of its formation: are classes constituted solely within the social relations of production or can they be constituted elsewhere in processes of state reproduction or domestic relations; and how many classes are there and what are their relationships with each other? Here the meaning of the term "collapse in class analysis" is to be found in the failure of structuralist Marxist formulations to resist the neo-Weberian theoretical assault.

There are three main traditions in class analysis, each of which mani- fests at least some measure of what Barbalet calls this "qualified theoretical failure. ''3 The first is Marxist theory, which locates class forma-

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tion in the social relations of production, describes a structure of two main classes, and proposes a relationship of determination between economic relations and other social relations - domestic, political, and ideological. The second is Weberian theory, which identifies class as differential access to rewards provided by differential capacity to real- ize assets in the market for rewards. Third, there is functionalist or status theory, which theorizes the non-existence of class boundaries and thus posits a fluid or mobile set of arrangements in which individuals are rewarded on the basis of their achievements rather than their property assets.

As different as these positions are in substance, they share a common methodological procedure. They each specify a structure of positions or places that is regarded as objective or given (ownership of the means of production, possession of marketable assets, functional contribution), and also a formation, an actual process of social arrangements that is apparent to observers, a pattern of stratification. Following Giddens, 4 the link between them has come to be known as structuration, the process by which the structure generates the formation. As Holmwood and Stewart 5 indicate, this is a critically weak formulation in class analysis, and general throughout the theoretical region. The theoretical failure that causes the collapse in class analysis is a failure to reconcile the concepts of structure (the observer categories), with the concepts of the formation (the categories of experience). 6 My general argument in this article is that the theoretical convergence is indicated by a progressive reintegration of this duality around the concept of "social class," which is now widely held to be both structurally generated and manifest at the level of experience.

The challenge to class theory comes from the analysis of substantive developments. There are three such developments and the challenge from each is an argument for multiple bases of class structuration. The first is the development of the state, which provides alternative modes of ownership and possession to the ones given in the system of production and which offers alternative models of reward allocation to those indicated by the market. The second is organizational elaboration and specialization, which provides alternative modes of control and exploitation to those indicated by property ownership and thus provides for the intermediation of classes. The third is ascriptive differentiation based on gender and ethnicity, which is generated in civil and domestic contexts and which also offers an alternative basis of allocation to that provided by the market or in the social relations of production. 7

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I proceed in this article in terms of the theoretical development of class analysis, beginning with an outline of the originating statements for its three main forms and then showing the ways in which substantive processes pose problems for theory. I identify attempts to rescue class analysis in the face of these problems, focusing specifically on converging developments. Finally, I offer a "theory-sketch" of the class system under advanced capitalism indicated by these theoretical proposals.

Classes as places in the social relations of production

Marx explains the determination of class location in terms of the social relations of production. As is well known he specifies these relations to be exploitative and progressively so: the central class processes of capitalism are the commodification of labor and the valorization of capital. The original statements about the structuration of the class system that emerges from the social relations of production are primarily political and persuasive in character, directed at a working-class audience with the intention of raising its consciousness. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels outline what has come to be known as the abstract model of class, the structural pattern in relation to which actual class behavior takes place and toward which actual class struggles tend.

They note a progressive tendency for society to divide into two great classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, even at this stage, Marx recognizes the existence of "fractions of the middle class," which are located in relation to the classes of the basic model: "the lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant "'8 However, this petty bourgeoisie, as it has come to be known, is composed of residues from the decline of feudal society, conservative in their orientation, and the future victims of history as the historic classes polarize.

The colorful political language of the Manifesto disappears as the opti- mistic and youthful Marx comes to terms with the realities of capitalist society. A major disappointment was the failure of the European rev- olutions of 1848 in which it became clear that the complete realization of the abstract model had not occurred. This disjunction of theory and experience was explained by Marx as the consequence of alliances between the emerging industrial bourgeoisie and residual and conservative feudal classes, that is, the landed aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and, above all, the peasantry. Already then, he is forced to recognize

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not only the persistence of the intermediate classes but also the faction- alization of the historically significant classes. In his last statement on class, the unfinished, one-page fragment in Capital, 9 he recognizes three great classes - wage-laborers, capitalists and landowners - whose means of subsistence are, respectively, wages, profit, and ground-rent. Howerver, the lines of demarcation beween them are said to be every- where obliterated by the existence of middle and intermediate "strata." Nevertheless, Marx continues to insist on the historical tendency toward the dichotomization of class structure: the reduction of the independent labor of the petty bourgeoisie to wage labor, and the transformation of landed property into a form consistent with the capitalist mode of production, that is, a form that produces profit rather than ground-rent.

Even so, it is clear that Marx regards the intermediate strata as a theoretical problem. He recognizes that the middle strata are actually growing in relation to the expansion of the power of the ruling class. The middle class is said to be parasitic (relative to the system of class exploitation), providing political, military, and ideological services to the ruling class, but not making an actual contribution to the wealth of society by producing commodities, l~ However, it is also clear that Marx does not anticipate the growth of middle strata to major proportions in society, and his theorizing of the relation between the new middle class and the abstract model is thus inadequate to current social complexity.

Within the thought of Poulantzas, ~1 who is the main structuralist legatee of Marx, this distinction is emphasized between an underlying structure, the social relations given in the mode of production (e.g., the capitalist mode of production), and the actual and apparent set of class processes and events, the conjuncture or social formation. By reference to the former, "classes are groups of social agents, of men defined principally but not exclusively by their place in the production process .... ,, 12 These places are not defined independently of one another. They identify divergent and fundamentally antagonistic interests that promote a pattern of continuous struggle of control and resistance between the classes in relation to the production process. Of all neo-Marxist theorists, Poulantzas clings most determinedly to Marx's dichotomous model. This obliges him to engage in involved intellectual contortions in order to accommodate the duality of structure and experience. ~3

Poulantzas is also obliged by the facts of historical experience to make certain reformulations in Marx's theoretical categories of "ownership

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of the means of production" and "labor process." He re-specifies ownership as real economic ownership. The exploiting class does not merely own the means of production in a narrow juridical sense but possesses the means of production, it has the capacity to put the means of production into operation, that is managers of corporations and state agencies. TM This parallels Carchedi's identification of the membership of economic classes as those who perform the functions of of capital and labor respectively. 15

Marx had emphasized the development of technology and the technical division of labor (on the basis of task specialization) as the process by which labor was controlled and hnmiserated. For Poulantzas this process is subordinate to the social division of labor between exploiters and expoited: "it is the relations of production which have primacy over the labor process and the 'productive forces' ,,.16 Only those who produce surplus value by the direct production of commodities are prop- erly understood as the members of an exploited class. So Poulantzas is unwilling to amend Marx's definition of the proletariat and thus continues to exclude nonmanual workers from the working class.

Because the social division of labor takes precedence over the technical division of labor, the forms of exploitation operate not only at the level of production or economics but also at the levels of politics and ideolo- gy. This is particularly important in terms of the fragmentation of classes in a social formation along political or ideological lines. Thus unproductive (non-commodity producing) labor of an intellectual kind is in a contradictory position because it is exploited in relation to capital but exploitative in relation to workers. It thus comes to constitute a special class fraction.

However, the problem of the historical significance of these emerging occupational groups remains. The form of the class structure in Poulantzas comprises two dominant "economic" classes, but there are residual (e.g., peasant) or emergent (e.g., professional-managerial) social classesl7 that overlay them. He also says that there are fractions, strata, and categories that operate within classes. TM Fractions are differentiated places in the system of exploitation - artisans, for example, are a less exploited sector of the proletariat, and finance capitalists have a different basis for exploitation than do the industrial bourgeoisie. Strata are differentiated status groups, groups with differentiated ideological positions - for example, some sectors of the middle class are pro-capitalist and conservative, others are radical and pro-worker.

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All of these are "social" classes, the recognizable phenomena of experience.

Although Wright 19 takes his main cues form Poulantzas's analysis of the shape of the class structure, he finds Poulantzas to be inadequate in specifying the form of boundaries between the classes, and in particular rejects the notion of fractions and strata. In disassembling the criteria for class membership (i.e., economic, political, and ideological criteria), Wright finds that it is possible to be dominant on one or more criteria while being subordinate on others. These possible situations are called "contradictory class locations," which encompass this duality of experience. He maps a class structure with three consistent class locations, two of which are defined within the capitalist mode of production in its pure form, the familiar bourgeoisie and proletariat, with the third being identified by simple commodity production, the petty bourgeoisie. Between these class locations are contradictory class locations.

Two things appear to have changed Wright's mind about the contradictory locations argument. First, there was considerable theoretical dis- putation that suggested that the contradictory class locations are not in any way internally contradictory but are in fact quite stable and consistent at the level of experience. Semi-autonomous employees, professional workers, for example, receive moderate rewards, have moderate levels of control/autonomy, and are moderately exploited. The term "contradiction" implies conditions of work that do not mesh with each other, and the contradictory locations clearly do not meet this definition. 2~ Second, Wright engaged in empirical work on the changing shape of the American class structure, which produced notably "nega- tive" results. They posed the problem that the majority of the labor force was in the "contradictory" rather than the "historic" locations and that the trend was toward an increase in this imbalance. 21

In Marx and Poulantzas the production of commodities forms the basis of exploitation under capitalism, and exploitative relations define the classes. On the basis of a reading of Roemer's theory of exploitation, Wright therefore abandons the social relations of production as the sole source of class by suggesting an expansion of the concept of exploitation to a range of resources that operate in parallel with the means of production. 22 Two such resources, in addition to property, are important within capitalism: organizational assets and credentialized skills. In the discussion of organizational assets, Wright extends

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Poulantzas's idea of possession to a capacity to appropriate and plan the distribution of surplus that is distributed throughout bureaucratic hierarchies. By contrast, credentialized skills are capable of being distributed far more evenly than either the means of production or organizational assets. They nevertheless offer the possibility for the appropri- ation of surplus by rendering certain forms of labor scarce.

Wright's new map of the structure 23 thus becomes reminiscent of Weber, intersecting the dimension of possession of property with credentialized skills and organizational assets. This produces a scheme of twelve class locations. The fundamental division is still between owners and non-owners of the means of production. Owners are internally differentiated according to the extent to which they own sufficient capital to exploit the labor of others. Non-owners are internally differentiated on the basis of organizational assets and credentialized skills. The possession of organizational assets provides a priority basis of power and exploitation over credentials. The theoretical transition from Marx to Poulantzas to Wright may be summarized as follows:

1. An increasing acceptance that the social relations of commodity production are not the only bases for the formation of classes. State- ments of class formation must take account both of service production, in which capital accumulation is highly problematic, and nonprivate forms of possession located in the state.

2. An incorporation of a consideration of nonproperty assets into class analysis and thus an admission that property is not the only dimension on which critical forms of domination and subordination are possible. This theoretical move is accompanied by a retreat from the notion that relations between classes are unidirectionally exploitative. Credentials and authority provide a means of resistance to exploitation exercised by means of property.

3. An increasing recognition of the existence of stable, polychotomous class formations (social classes) which are unlikely to be transformed into polarized, dichotomous economic classes. In particular, both Poulantzas and Wright accept the existence of stable, middle-class formations. They: "...attempt to remove professional, managerial and other well-paid white-collar workers from the working class and place them somewhere else in the class structure. ''24

4. A parallel acceptance that the historical significance of the owner-

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ship and working classes may well be in decline, as is the possibility of a class-based politics.

A continuing insistence on the reality of class structure and the epi- phenomenal status of class experience is the weakness of Marxist analysis. Historical experience is accommodated by the theoretical construction of social classes. The more history escapes from the nineteenth-century model of a class structure posited by Marx, the more tenuous does the theoretical connection specified for the relation between structure and experience become. The general retreat from Althusserian, structuralist Marxism is a clear indicator of this failure.

Classes as market segments

In proposing a set of arguments about class, Weber responded directly to Marx's work, seeking to show that inequality was not entirely materi- ally determined but needed to be understood in terms of the ideas and intentions of its participants. However, like Marx and other structural theorists, he also makes a distinction between underlying structural causes and concrete arrangements. He says that classes "are not com- munities; they merely represent possible and frequent bases for social action "'25 These structural positions or places are differentiated from each other on the basis that they have a shared determining factor in the life chances of their incumbents. This factor is economic in character, involving the ownership of property or opportunity for income where such ownership is "represented" (negotiated and established) within markets for capital, commodities, and labor. Because Weber is talking about life chances, access to scarce goods and services, his is a consumption theory of class rather than a production theory. A class situation is one in which there is a shared typical probability of procur- ing goods, gaining a position in life, and finding inner satisfaction. 26

However, property is critical not because it allows exploitation but because it secures the situation in the market. The potential for class membership is not real until the determining factor is used in a market to secure access to privilege: "the kind of change in the m a r k e t is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual's fate. Class situation is, in this sense, market situation. The effect of naked possession p e r se .. . is only a fore-runner of real 'class, ,,27 Class situation thus intersects with the individual at the point of the market to provide for the emergence of social classes, "the totality of those class

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situations within which individual and generational mobility is easy and typical? '28 Weber thus identifies four actual social classes under capitalism, each with identifiably different access to rewards based on market situation, and each closed to the others in mobility terms. 29

The particular characteristic of these social classes is not simply that some have reward and opportunity advantages over others but that they are able to maintain and even enhance these advantages by ex- cluding the members of inferior groups. This is achieved by monopolizing the resources of property and credential granting institutions. It is also achieved by reducing possibilities for advancement on the part of inferiors. Thus Weber accepts from Marx the idea that the labor process homogenizes the working class and he also anticipates the major current controversy in relation to Marx's class theory, that of the emergence of the middle class. For Weber, the middle class is structured in a stable fashion, whereas for Marx it is problematic? ~

There is no statement of class exploitation in Weber except insofar as it can be accommodated within a more general set of processes known as "closure," the capacity to monopolize market segments and to resist the entry of members of other classes. However these are the central con- cerns for British neo-Weberian sociologists of class for whom the major focus of debate is the extent to which property remains a central aspect of class closure.

Giddens, for example, focuses on the "decisive moment" in Weber's thought, the way in which the market transforms objective potential into actual patterns of inequality. He calls this closure process structuration, "the modes in which 'economic' relationships become transformed into 'non-economic' social structures? TM The specified means of closure that he identifies correspond closely to those emerging in Marxist analysis: ownership of the means of production; educational and technical credentials; and manual labor power. These yield "the foundation of a basic three-class system in capitalist society: an 'upper" 'middle,' and 'lower' or 'working' class. ''32 By contrast, Parkin is rather more equivocal about the role of property in the class structure. In an early statement he focusses exclusively on the occupational order: "The backbone of the class structure, and indeed of the entire reward system of Western society, is the occupational order. ''33 The most important cleavage is between the nonmanual occupational categories at the top of the occupational order and the manual ones at the bottom. It is established in terms of rewards: income rewards but also job secu-

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rity, pensions, vacations, health and disability insurance, promotion opportunities, and physical working conditions. Importantly, there is no upper class in Parkin's analysis. In his later work, 34 Parkin is pre- pared to accept both property institutions and credentials as ways in which dominant classes exclude subordinate ones. The notion of property is extended to posessions (equivalent to Wright's concept of organizational assets). However, property is conceived only as a source of exclusion and not as a source of exploitation. 35 Moreover, property and credentials are argued to be interchangeable and equivalent forms of asset.

An important development in market theories of class is the idea that the market for labor power, that is, the working-class labor market, is internally segmented. The idea of dual labor markets was introduced by Piore who distinguishes between primary and secondary sectors. 36 The primary sector develops in instances where the supply of labor power can be controlled in some measure by those providing it in the market, by using credentials, by monopolizing skill, and by the operation of labor unions. The primary sector is internally segmented into an upper tier of professional, administrative, managerial, and white-collar workers and a lower tier of skilled workers and other blue-collar workers in large-scale monopolistic organizations. The secondary sector, by contrast, operates in industries that are characterized by small, labor- intensive firms in competitive situations requiring low levels of skill - "sweatshop" manufacturing, retailing, and personal service industries are particularly relevant.

In summary, the main theoretical developments in market theories of class are as follows.

1. A progressive deemphasis on property as a basis for market closure. Property differences become subsumed under organizational assets and in some analyses are regarded as irrelevant or as interchangeable with credentials.

2. A consequent unwillingness or inability to specify an upper or ruling class, and the disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie. A corresponding emphasis on the division between nonmanual and manual work.

3. A more recent admission that the working class may be internally segmented. This provides a capacity to accommodate ascriptively based minorities within the analysis.

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4. An increasing emphasis on closure processes (or structuration) as the mechanism of class formation.

The absence of a clear specification of an upper class is the critical weakness in neo-Weberian analysis. Whereas Marxist analysis makes a straightforward transition from legal ownership to possession of property as the basis of upper-class membership, statements about property have remained equivocal in neo-Weberian analysis. The critical theoretical problem appears to lie in separating those possessing significant amounts of property from those in command of organizational assets - to Weberians these groups appear to be continuous. The key to this problem is the Weberian emphasis on closure and the denial that exploitation at the level of capitalization is a qualitatively distinctive form of clusure. The theoretical requisite for the specification of an upper class is the concept of a capacity to put the means of production or reproduction into operation in such a way as to exploit the assets of others in order to accummulate capital, and Weberians fail to meet such a requisite.

Classes as clusters of occupational statuses

Nisbet's assertion about the death of class and its displacement by the concept of status can sheeted home to Parsons's influence on Amer- ican sociology. Whereas in Weber status is independent of class, Parsons uses the terms interchangeably. His main concern thus becomes why, in capitalist societies, some roles (positions) have higher status and are thus able to monopolize greater levels of reward than do others. Roles are ranked in terms of their significance as specified in the common value sys t ems Whereas in Marx and Weber values are associated with particular interest groups, so that the value-commitments of the upper class and the working class are different, in Parsons they integrate the commitments of differentiated interest groups; they are common to people with different statuses. In capitalist societies the structural subsystem that corresponds with these values is the occupational subsystem, so the principal dimension of inequality in capitalist societies is occupational prestige.

Parsons leaves unaddressed the issue of why some occupations are rewarded more highly than others. In seeking to explain the actual distribution of rewards Davis and Moore 38 accept Parson's view that the

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occupational structure has a functional relation to the society as a whole - it is a universal necessity for societal survival. Differential rewards are necessary because some occupations are more important for societal survival than others and people must be motivated to enter the more important ones. Therefore: "In general those positions convey the best reward and hence have the highest rank, which (a) have the greatest importance for society and (b) require the greatest training or talent. ''39

Parsons/Davis and Moore still provide the main theoretical assumptions of non-market and non-production based accounts of occupational differentation. The way in which they underpin such accounts is via evaluation. If one accepts that occupations are ranked by processes specified neither by production nor by a legal order, then they must be ranked or evaluated in terms of conscious negotiation between human beings. Indeed so confident are status-evaluation theorists that this is indeed the real process, that they reverse the by now familiar picture of an underlying structure and real and apparent processes. The apparent becomes real, the structure merely a model constructed by the observer.

The occupational structure in modern industrial society not only constitutes an important foundation for the main dimensions of social stratification but also serves as the connecting link between different institutions and spheres of inequality.... The hierarchy of prestige strata and the hierarchy of economic classes have their roots in the occupational structure; so does the hierarchy of political power and authority, for political authority in modern society is largely exercised as a full-time occupation. 4~

A fundamental shift in empirical stratification research occurred in the 1970s. As methodological procedures became more capable of dis- entangling the grounds for any particular individual's location in the stratification system so perceptions of it as a subjectively ordered reality began to shift in a more structuralist direction. In part this came from the comparative finding that patterns of circulation mobility were more or less common to all capitalist societies and conceivably to state socialist societies as well. This, the now-famous Featherman:Jones- Hauser (FJH) hypothesis, states that: "...the genotypical pattern of mobility (circulation mobility) in industrial societies with a market economy and a nuclear family system is basically the same. The phenotypi- cal pattern of mobility (observed mobility) differs according to the rate of change in the occupational structure, exogenously determined... -41

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More importantly, Featherman and his colleagues assert that the structural basis of the similarity is socioeconomic in character rather than being based on occupational prestige. 42

There thus emerged the possibility of taking the Weberian step of demarcating clusters of occupational statuses as classes identified by relatively high levels of internal mobility and by external closure. An influential recent analysis that takes off from the FJH hypothesis by identifying the underlying genotype as a class structure is that produced in Britain by Goldthorpe and his colleagues. 43 The British team adopts a broadly Weberian view of classes as situations of common market advantage. In a departure from its earlier empiricist emphasis 44 this later procedure incorporates a large dose of theoretical intuition. Goldthorpe regroups the scaled occupations into an a priori "sevenfold class schema" that combines aspects of work and market situations. 45 The market situation is given in levels of income and other conditions of employment, job security, and promotion opportunities; while the work situation is given in terms of what are described above as organizational assets. 46 Goldthorpe is careful to say that the schema is not hierarchical because there are status overlaps between the classes but few would accept this conceit given a consistent ordering in which professionals are placed at the top of the page and unskilled operatives at the bottom. More importantly, Goldthorpe seems to have several ideas in mind when he uses the term "class" He says: sometimes Classes I, II, and III are taken together as "white-collar" classes; more usually, classes III, IV, and V are the "intermediate class" between the service and working classes; and classes VI and VII are the working class. So it is unclear whether Goldthorpe intends a seven-class model or a three- class model, although the seven-class model receives most attention. However, the scheme begins to look very similar to Wright and to Giddens.

Whatever the form of the statement, it is made on a purely theoretical basis. The actual shape of the class structure, the real boundaries of social classes, may be derived from Goldthorpe et al.'s reserarch on the actual extent of closure between classes. This discussion of closure represents a considerable shift in the pattern of social mobility research during the 1980s, from measuring the movement of individuals on a vertical status continuum to trying to understand the overall fixity of structure, the extent to which it is generally in motion, its "social fluid- i ty. ' '47 The shift has also been marked by a change in methodological

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procedure, from regression analysis of determinants of individual mobility, to log-linear modelling.

Using such a model, Goldthorpe reaches two conclusions. 4s First, there is a marked level of intergenerational solidity at the peak of the class structure. There is only a small chance that professional, managerial, and senior administrative origins will lead to dissimilar destinations, and the further down the hierarchy one goes the less likely it becomes that a person will move up to class I. This indicates a considerable effect for the inheritance of credentials and of organizational assets. Second, while this high solidity declines as one moves down the hierarchy it does so in an irregular way. In particular, the proprietorial petty-bourgeois group also exhibits a high level of solidity. So property continues to be effective in structuring class. Third, although there is a historical increase in working-class mobility, it is limited in its range, so that there is a significant barrier between white-collar and blue-collar occupations.

These findings would be relatively insignificant were they confined only to Britain but widespread comparative research indicates that Goldthorpe et al. have indeed identified the FJH genotype. Goldthorpe himself, working with two other colleagues shows that the pattern also applies to France and to Sweden. 49 Kerckhoff et al. find a genotypical consistency between Britain and the United States. 5~ The findings are also largely supported in Jones and Davis's reanalysis of Australian and New Zealand data using the Goldthorpe method. They isolate a typical class pattern reflected in patterns of both occupational and of marital closure. 51

The main theoretical developments in status cluster accounts of class inequality are, then, as follows:

1. A progressive abandonment of oversimplified functionalist explana- tions of the forms of economic inequality in favor of an explanation in terms of a socioeconomic core that structures differential market advantages.

2. The displacement of continuous status scales in favor of a recognition of theoretically constructed, stratified clusters of occupations that are increasingly recognized as "classes."

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3. An increasing recognition that closure is a central class process so that some of these intuitively identified classes are understood to have empirically measurable barriers between them.

4. The progressive, cross-cultural identification and measurement of the critical barriers, those between the upper (or "service" ) class and the classes below it, those surrounding the petty bourgeoisie, and that between nonmanual and manual workers.

The critical problem that remains in developing social fluidity models into a theory of class is that the class categories are indeed a priori. For example, what Goldthorpe describes as the "service class" (in more conventional terms, the upper class) includes such diverse locations as CEOs in large-scale corporations and senior politicians and bureau- crats in the state sector on one hand and laboratory technicians, librar- ians, and shopfloor supervisors on the other. Likewise, the petty bourgeoisie includes both capitalists, who exploit labor in the strict Marxist sense, and the self-employed. The use of intuitively constructed occupational categories may well mask class boundaries that exist within them. Notwithstanding Abercrombie and Urry's claim that the functions of capital (control of labor power, reproduction of labor power, and conceptualization) are increasingly subsumed within this "service" class, 52 this subsumption is by no means uniform and many of the locations identified as professional, administrative, and managerial receive small return in the market and experience high levels of subordination in the work situation.

A scheme of class arrangements

If there is a broad consensus that emerges from these diverse accounts of the form of the class system it is that there is a series of general classes defined by the way in which the capitalist system structures the market for property, organizational assets, credentials, and labor power. This consensus is specifically agreed by some observers to focus on the notion of "social classes" as given in Weber and Poulantzas. 53 A social class has the following characteristics:

1. Its members have a common asset/liability situation in relation to the market, that is, they have similar market advantages and disadvan- tages. They therefore share similar reward or life-chance situations. In other words, members of a given class have similar opportunities and

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conditions. The most important indicator of class membership for most of the members of any society is occupation. However, for two important minorities class membership is indicated either by property ownership or status ascription by gender or ethnicity.

2. Members can move relatively freely within the class but with considerable difficulty outside it. They will have their careers within their class, place their children in it, marry within it, and their friends and associates will be part of their class. Classes are thus self-reproducing across time.

3. Members will practice closure against the members of other classes and will experience barriers to social intercourse established by other classes. The greater the level of class advantage the greater the extent to which closure practices will be exclusionary; the less the class advantage, the more likely they are to be usurpationary. The most effective means of exclusion are exploitative in character because of the capacity of exploitation to impoverish and thus suppress other classes.

4. Closure will frequently be practiced as formal or informal collective action that seeks to capture, control, or influence the economic and state systems within which class is produced and reproduced.

We may now examine the way in which these systems of production and reproduction structurate social classes, making particular reference to the ways in which this process of structuration has changed with the development of capitalism.

A fundamental separation in all structurally differentiated societies is a division of labor based on gender, which is related to a distinction between the sphere of domestic production and the sphere of public production. Substantively, in capitalist systems the sphere of domestic production is explicitly characterized by feminine labor and masculine dominance (viriarchy) and the form of households, including their capacity for social reproduction, is defined by this relationship. 54

The public sphere is constituted by relations of economic production and of state reproduction. State reproduction consists of general mechanisms of social control, intervention, regulation, and ideological dissemination, which have the effect of providing persistence to the system of economic production. We shall not enter here into the issue of the mutual autonomy of these two elements of the public sphere.

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I I Domestic ~ i Division of Labour Production ~ (sex-based)

(Patriarchy)

Household Reproduction

ard I Differentials

Ascriptive Status Differences

(Ethnicity, Gender)

Fig. 1. Structure, structuration and formation.

I!i!ii!i iiii!ii! !i!!}

However, we can say that because they are the institutional location for publicly significant property, these elements define the mechanism for reward allocation, the market. The market is an instititutional context within which achieved status assets (property, authority, credentialized skills, and labor power) are mobilized or exchanged in return for material and nonmaterial rewards. Differential individual possession of assets is conferred initially by household membership.

The distribution of rewards and the allocation of persons to positions is constituted in an occupational structure. However, the allocation of persons to positions is modified by anti-market "ascriptive status" mechanisms originating in the household. Households confer differential ethnic and gender identifies that provide an opportunity for exclusionary strategies in the market. Thus the possession of given amounts of property, authority, or credentialized skills, especially the latter, does not guarantee equivalence of reward between the ascriptively differentiated.

The substantive historical developments flowing though this structural arrangement over the past two centuries may now be characterized. During the nineteenth century, the typical pattern of structurafion was as follows. Production units were relatively small in scale, for the most part able to be managed and controlled successfully by individuals and families. Owners not only managed but supervised their workers and were directly visible to them. Work was mechanized, for example in

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mines, mills, agricultural and pastoral sheds, lumber camps and facto- ties, and so largely unskilled but massified. There was little intermediation between workers and owners and a relatively low level of service infrastructure. The reproduction both of labor and of the social relations of production was sited in the domestic sphere. So the state was underdeveloped relative to current conditions and viriarchy (masculine domination) was direct in its form. 5s In general, exploitation by owners was also direct and unconstrained and combinations of workers tended to generate relatively high levels of class consciousness, even of a revo- lutionary sort, in response. Thus, despite the persistence of such residual classes as the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, we have the clas- sic conditions in the nineteenth century of dichotomous class formation and antagonism.

Thus a Marxist analysis of the class structure may well be perfectly adequate to nineteenth-century capitalism, and a simple Weberian analysis may perhaps be appropriate to fin de sidcle developments. But a conceptualization of the class structure that is adequate to contemporary social conditions must take account of at least the following emergent patterns:

Monopoly capitalism: Capitalist development has produced neither worker immiseration at the average level nor a tendency for the rate of profit to fall but rather the eclipse of competition both between enterprises and between nations due to the emergence of the multinational corporation. The consequences for the class structure are threefold. First, as Marx himself recognized, the emergence of corporate capital changes the structure of the ruling class. 56 The principal consequence is what is known as the separation of ownership from control in which the (exploitative) functions of capital are performed by controlling managers, while stockholders merely own the corporation in a legal sense. Actual capitalists thus disappear from the production process and therefore, it might be argued, class relations cannot be understood merely in terms of property ownership. Second, increases in scale and specialization in an organization generate imperatives for coordination and, by extension, control. A key characteristic of monopoly capitalism is its hierarchical and bureaucratic organization, which mediates the relationship between capital and labor, increasing the level of surveillance and blurring the dichotomous division between them, and dele- gating control of the technical division of labor down the organizational hierarchy. Monopoly capitalism thus offers a stable basis for the formation of a managerial fraction of a new middle class. Third, monopoly

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capitalism is a major means for the control and division of the working class. Increased control is vested in the drive toward increasing technological rationalization in an effort to reduce the amount of surplus allo- cated to labor and to compete in the market for commodities. It also offers both the possibility of direct control of labor power without the necessity for human surveillance and the routinization of tasks that increases the replaceability of labor. Technology can also have the effect of dividing the working class, by allocating some of its members to the intermediate category of expert, thus improving their capacity for resistance. But even for those who remain as manual workers, their capacity for resistance to control and thus their capacity to extract higher rewards is enhanced by capital deepening because this raises the costs of shutdown. However, these conditions apply only in the monopoly capital sector of the working class. Here capital deepening provides a basis for instrumentally oriented union action and individual aspira- tion. However, monopoly capital also depends for its existence on a low-wage service sector, divided from the primary sector, that repro- duces labor power by the provision of services at the personal level and the distribution of commodities. Here the capacity for resistance on the part of workers is depressed.

Statism: The state expands its activities in response to failures both to reproduce capitalist class relations and to reproduce labor power. Fol- lowing Offe, 57 we can identify three ways in which this burgeoning state impacts upon economic structures under advanced or mixed capitalism. First, there are processes of state regulation in which the state establishes rules of competition within markets to ensure the survival of the commodity producers on which it relies for its existence; second, there are processes of state intervention, in which the state itself provides a capital infrastructure, principally for activities that reproduce labor as a commodity; and third, there are processes of state-sponsored corporatism in which the state seeks to minimize class conflict by the combination of capital and (primary) labor in joint organizations. Para- doxically these extensions of state activity into the economic sphere provide the basis for political restructuring of the shape of socioeconomic inequality, that is for an extended reproduction of capitalist class relations. The principal mechanism for this process is income redistribution - the property right to keep one's income or wealth is modified in terms of an obligation to pay taxes. Extensions of citizenship protec- tion, of which income redistribution is a central element, create extensions of state activity. The state itself becomes highly capitalized in terms of resources for defense, health and welfare, education, usually

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transportation and communications, and frequently other basic industries the operating costs of which are funded by personal taxation. The existence of these state resources restructures inequality in two ways. First, it provides infrastructural subsidies to controllers of corporations by providing the facilities and an appropriate environment for the operation of private enterprises. There may also be direct subsidies in the forms of taxation credits for investment, export credits and guarantees, low-cost loans, development grants, and so on. Secondly, it creates categories of workers with differential access to state property. The controllers of state property constitute a bureaucratic-political elite that distributes state resources and establishes consumption privileges for itself on this basis - improved access to salaries, travel, working conditions, pension schemes, and so on. There is also established a less autonomous and less privileged public-service category of workers, which largely pays taxes on its consumption but that enjoys a relatively high level of material security. The receipt of socioeconomic pro- tection creates membership in a third and lower stratum of dependent citizens whose social location is entirely contingent on state activity. These are the recipients of welfare benefits, unemployment insurance, pensions, and so on. They include the structurally unemployed and underemployed, the physically and mentally disabled, female heads of households, and the aged. Membership in the state-dependent underclass is stable and reproducing. This is especially true where membership intersects with an ascriptive status category based on age, gender, race, or ethnicity.

Credentialism: Credentials are most frequently developed in relation to the provision of services. The increasing incorporation of service workers into the capitalist mode of production has meant that special forms of exchange were developed for those services in a market geared for material commodities. In nuce, credentialism has had the effect of commodffying service provision. It did so by standardizing professional products as well as by arranging pricing structures in relation to them, a fee-for-service system. There thus was established a basis for accumulation on the part of service providers who could generate surplus beyond the costs of reproduction of their own labor- power and credentialized skills. The second wave of credentialism in the twentieth century may be interpreted as the outcome of efforts by occupational groups to modify the market, as the outcome of "closure" or "resistance." This is because for semi-professional and other occupations their services are already commodified, that is, standardized and priced, by the organizational structures in which they are located.

162

Moreover, the successes of the medical and legal model of credentialism could not be repeated to the same extent elsewhere because the mass pursuit of credentials has itself led to their devaluation as a means of closureY However, this view of the declining value and importance of credentials is by no means universally shared. In a controversial set of proposals about the future directions of society, Bell 59 argues that credentialed expertise will become the dominant factor in class formation. There are two steps in his argument. Firstly, he accepts Bumham's proposal of a managerial revolution so that the state is argued to be the dominant site of class formation. Secondly, there is said to be a progressive differentiation of property from occupational function, so inequality no longer depends on property ownership. Rather, occupation is contingent on the possession of credentialized knowledge.

Extended Viriarchy: Within extended viriarchy, 6~ production systems are segmented into internal labor markets in which career structures are radically separated. Within these markets, separations between the genders are maintained in a wide variety of fields, for example, between bank tellers and managers, secretaries and salesmen, and tea ladies and mail boys. These segmented markets are in part a product of the socially reproductive linkages between public and domestic arrangements, but they are also produced by a reconstruction of arrangements for biological reproduction. Careers are structured in terms of masculine characteristics, that is, without inbuilt arrangements for a normal interruption of career at the point of childbirth, and without routinized provision of childcare. Access to economic rewards and power in society is normally structured in terms of career development, and such access for women is severely constrained by this device of biological reproduction. Thus component wage labor remains the norm for women, with attendant potential for domestic subordination. However, the increasing primacy of the public (state and economic) sphere that characterizes the move to indirect viriarchy is most explicit at the level of biological and social reproduction. Firstly, technological development means that families are increasingly defined as inadequate in the social reproduction of labor power - that is, they are defined as unable to provide the abilities, skills, and commitments adequate to an advanced industrial economy. These socialization activities are progressively acquired by state agencies that hire women in quasi- domestic "caring" occupations. Secondly, the state increasingly regu- lates the process of biological reproduction. For most women, it does this through legal and medical institutions, by offering technological opportunities for intervention in conception and gestation, and also by

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taxation and family support/allowance policies. But it also does so through its welfare support for sole parents, which is primarily a confirmation of the domestic role of women. This confirmation is typically achieved by making support contingent on child raising, an abstinence from conjugal relationships, and disemployment in the public sphere. Thus a large number of women move from private to public depend- ence.

The situation in the twentieth century is thus far more complex than it was in the nineteenth century. The main source of the complexity is organizational elaboration in the face of increases in the scale and specialization of production and reproduction. The competitive drive for increased productivity increases both the technical division of labor and the size of production units. This provides three imperatives in production organizations: large-scale capital requirements indicating changes in the relation between ownership and control; intermediation between owners and workers; and expertise in the application of complex technology and specialized service. The complexities of such a system of production make it inflexible and unwieldy. The sheer size of production systems makes their management critical in terms of the geo-economic welfare of national societies. Reproduction both of the social relations of production and of labor power requires increasing inputs of human energy so the state is elaborated in its form and increased in its scale. At the same time, domestic systems are increasingly viewed as inadequate to the reproduction of the forms of labor power required in a complex technical system, so reproduction of labor power, too, is progressively incorporated into the state and elaborated. The structure of viriachal relations is thus transformed and the ade- quacy of individuals in relation to production is formally certified through a system of credentials.

The emerging consensus on what constitutes a social class and what structurates it means that not only the causes but also the general shape of current class arangements is also more or less agreed: "...both [Marxist and Weberian analysis] identify a propertied ruling class, a class of propertyless wage laborers, a class of small-property owners and a large propertyless grouping who are neither capitalists nor exploited wage laborers. ''61 However, on the basis of these historical developments we can identify three main problems with respect to the applicability of this four-class model to contemporary society:

1. The stability and unity of the petty bourgeoisie. Insofar as direct

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ownership of property continues to be significant in the structuration of classes, it lies in the arena of small-scale employment. By any stand- ard - exploitation of others' labor power, market advantage, organizational control, or status - small employers and some owner-workers are indistinguishable from an upper class. This is especially true of equity owning, independent professionals in the legal and medical fields. Indeed Kerckhoff et al. 62 identify relatively high intercategory flows among self-employed professionals, proprietors, and farmers. Therefore, this concluding sketch no longer treats the petty bourgeoisie as a separate entity. It is disassembled so that minor employers and independent professionals are treated as part of the upper class, while self-employed manual workers are located at the boundary between the middle class and the working class.

2. The class location of white-collar workers. It has become clear that the term proletarianization is an oversimplified description of the situation of white-collar workers. Rather than a simple trend to an increasing subordination of white-collar work, the occupational group has become disaggregated into a high control/autonomy, professional sector and a low control/autonomy, routine clerical sector. This is con- firmed by two sets of findings. First, all of the "social fluidity" research demonstrates considerable circulation through occupations so classi- fied. This indicates that routine white-collar work is not itself a coher- ent class location but part of several other locations. These locations are provided in a second set of findings by Stewart et al. 63 that show that clerical labor is both the culmination of some working-class careers and the boot camp for some middle-class, bureaucratic, and managerial careers. Routine nonmanual labor is also frequently a complete, subordinate, and low-paid career for women. We can therefore place "career" clerks in the working class, and clerks on the threshold of managerial careers into a middle class.

3. The integrity of the working class. A consistent orientation within Marxist, Weberian, and social fluidity analyses has been to view the lower or working class as relatively undifferentiated, that is, as a tradi- tional Marxist proletariat. However, even in Marx's original analysis, he identifies both a reserve army of unemployed labor and a lumpen- or tatterdemalion pro le tar ia t . 64 The latter consists of people permanently unemployed by virtue of age, physical handicap, or deviant orientation. More recently, Baran and Sweezy have described American blacks as a subproletariat based on a customary distinction between white and black jobs 65 and the concept of a ghettoized class or underclass con-

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fined to a labor-market segment defined by ascriptive characteristics of race, ethnicity, age, or gender has widespread currency. 66 We may therefore accept the notion of a secondary labor market, as defined by dual labor market theorists, and incorporate it into this sketch. This may in part help to redress the blindness that is frequently shown to the effects of gender and ethnicity on the operation of the class system.

In the descriptive model offered here, then, there are four classes:

1. The upper class, which possesses/owns property and which indirectly or directly uses this property to provide itself with privilege by means of the exploitation of the labor of others. Its members are typically, highly oriented to capital accumulation either on their own behalf or on behalf of the agencies they possess.

2. The middle class, which possesses authority (organizational assets), or credentialized skills, or (more rarely) minor property and uses these to provide market advantage, privilege, and a measure of autonomy.

3. The working class, which possesses and markets labor power but which is able to structure the market in some degree for its own benefit by manipulating the supply of labor through representative organizations.

4. The underclass, which has labor power but for which this asset is offset by the liability of status ascription on the basis of gender, ethnicity, age, or another factor that restricts its ability to effect a good price for its labor in the market.

There is also a general agreement that the basic class arrangement incorporate internal divisions based on variations in market advantage, life-style, and ideological orientation called variously: fractions, strata, status groups, categories, or even "classes". To avoid assigning theoretical priority to any such term, these may be called sub-classes. The main sub-classes are indicated in figure 2. The bold lines in the figure indicate relatively impermeable boundaries, the faint lines more per- meable ones.

The upper class includes the senior decision-makers in large-scale organizations, those who may be said to posess them in Poulantzas's sense. Business and state organizations are most significant here although leaders of churches and major universities, for example, may

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Classes Sub-classes

Upper class

Middle class

Working class

Under class

.;ontrollers of corporations & state agencies

Executive managers & Independent Small employers professionals

Middle managers & Employed Administrators experts

Managerial clerks & Semi-Professionals* Indirect supervisors & Technicians Routine clerks* &

Skilled manual workers Direct supervisors

Other primary sector manual workers

Secondary sector manual workers*

State dependents*

(*)Indicates significant structuration by female and/or minority group membership.

Fig. 2. A scheme of social class.

Basis of Inequality

Property

Authori ty/ Credentials

Labour power

Status ascription vir iarchal

subordination

also be said to possess and be able to exploit their organizations. Also included are independent professionals, those able indirectly to exploit the labor power of others because of their monopolized possession of certain means of reproduction of labor power; and also senior managers and small employers, both of which significantly possess capital assets.

The vertical line in the middle of figure 2 is a shaky divider between the possession of organizational assets and the possession of credentialized skills. To the left of the line is a rough hierarchy of authority run- ning from executives, through managers, clerks with managerial career expectations, clerks without them, 67 and direct supervisors. To the right there is a hierarchy of credentials providing a decreasing level of capacity in the market as we run from independent professionals, through employed experts (professional workers), semi-professional workers, technicians, and skilled manual workers (whose skills may not be credentialed).

The working class is divided between routine clerical workers and direct supervisors and skilled workers (i.e., the "proletarianized" middle class and the "embourgeoized" working class) on one hand and, on the other, manual workers who rely only on labor unions for market

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control. In the underclass, there is a separation between those who do work in the secondary market and state dependents.

Throughout, where there is a significant population of women or ethnic minority members in a sub-class, this will tend to depress the subclass in market terms, due frequently to the operation of segmented internal labor markets. Thus, the semiprofessions (teaching, librarianship, nurs- ing, social work, etc.) tend to have less access to privilege than employed experts (accountants, academics, engineers, scientists, etc.); routine clerks to have less privilege than managerial clerks; and, of course, secondary-sector manual workers to have less than primary manual workers.

Thus, far from facing absolute collapse, the qualified failure of class analysis in each of the three distinctive traditions examined here provides for convergence on a widely shared set of understandings. These understandings, which focus on the substantive nature of the social as a unified process, may be summarized as follows:

1. That the events that need to be explained are "social classes" rather than determined class structures or individual status attainment.

2. That social classes are socioeconomic in character. They are generated by a fundamental set of processes to do with human labor, its reproduction through the state and domesticity, and the way in which it confers differential advantages in terms of rewards.

3. That there is a relatively small number of classes and that the general shape of the class structure is common to societies with similar socioeconomic cores (i.e., similar systems of production and reproduction).

4. That the boundaries between classes are established by patterns of membership, recruitment, and association, on one hand, and relations of command on the other. Thus market closure and organizational location, while not sui generis, are central class processes.

5. That differential rewards between classes constitute a pattern of exploitation that pervades the entire range of the class structure. Thus expropriation is possible at the level of consumption as well as at the level of capitalization. To minimize reward shares for others in order to maximize one's own is to constrain others to labor on one's own behalf.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version was presented at the annual conference of The Australian Sociological Association, La Trobe University (11 Decem- ber 1989). Some of the arguments offered may also be found in my Class and Stratification: Arrangements for Socioeconomic Inequality under Capitalism (Melbourne, Longman Cheshire 1990). Helpful com- ments were made by Andrew Linklater, Jan Pakulski, and reviewers for Theory and Society. The article is the direct product of many years of association and argument with John Holmwood and Sandy Stewart.

Notes

1. Williams describes the development of the idea of class as follows: "It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that the modern structure of class, in its social sense, begins to be built up. First comes lower classes to join lower orders, which appears earlier in the eighteenth century. Then in the 1790s we get higher classes; middle classes and middling classes follow at once; working classes in about 1815; upper classes in the 1820s. Class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness, class conflict and class war follow..." in Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic, 1966), 176-77; original italics.

2. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition. 3. J. M. Barbalet, "Liminations of Class Theory and the Disappearance of Status: The

Problem of the New Middle Class" (Sociology 20 (4)): 557-575, 1986). 4. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (New York:

Harper Torchbook, 1973). 5. J. M. Holmwood and A. Stewart, "The Role of Contradictions in Modern Theories

of Social Stratification" (Sociology 17 (2): 23~4-254, 1983). Also see Antony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, and Athar Hussain Marx's 'Capital" and Capital- ism Today, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1977), and Barry Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

6. In "The Role of Contradictions," Holmwood and Stewart also argue that the form of the rescue is to transfer the failure from theory to experience within such con- structs as "false consciousness,""contradiction," and "status."

7. There have been numerous attempts to rescue class analysis in the face of the recognition of these developments. Typically, these attempts propose dualities of structure or experience, e.g., Allin Cotrell proposes economic and social classes in Social Classes in Marxist Theory (London: Routledge, 1984), Barbalet proposes class and status in "Limitations of Class Theory," Mich~le Barrett proposes class and patriarchy in Women's Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1980), as does Zillah R. Eisenstein in "Developing a theory of capitalist patriarchy and socialist feminism" and "Some notes on the relations of capitalist patriarchy" (Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Eisenstein, New York: Monthly Review, 1979, 1-54). This structure/action duality may also be found in Erik Olin Wright's conception of the contradictory class location discussed in Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left, 1978); in Nicos Poulantzas's identification of economic and noneconomic regions in Political Power and Social Classes (London:

169

New Left, 1973); and in the specification of genotype and phenotype by David L. Featherman, F. Lancaster Jones, and Robert M. Hauser in "Assumptions of Social Mobility Research in the U.S.: The Case of Occupational Status," (Social Science Research 4 (4): 329-360, 1975). Others theorize a process in which action is argued to undergo a transformation in the direction of the structural proposal. See, e.g., Harry Braverman's discussion of proletarianization in Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1974); James Burnham's prediction of a managerial revolution in The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941); and various arguments about the development of the service class in Nicholas Abercrombie and John Urry, Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-IndustriaISociety (New York: Basic, 1973). Each of these also fails but in so doing generates some critical theoretical developments in the direction of convergence.

8. Karl Marx, "Selections," in Anthony Giddens and David Held, editors, Classes, Power, and Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24.

9. Marx "Selections," 20-21. I0. See Stewart Clegg, Paul Boreham, and Geoff Dow, Class, Politics and the Economy

(London: Routledge, 1986), 37-38. 11. Nicos Poulantzas "On Social Classes" in Giddens and Held, Classes, Power, and

Conflict, 101-111. 12. Poulantzas "On Social Classes," 101. 13. "[I]f we confine ourselves to modes of production alone, examining them in a pure

and abstract fashion, we find that each of them involves two classes - the exploiting class, which is politically and ideologically dominant, and the exploited class, which is politically and ideologically dominated ... bourgeois and workers in the capitalist mode of production. But a concrete society (a social formation) involves more than two classes, insofar as it is composed of various modes and forms of production. No social formation involves only two classes: but the two fundamental classes in any social formation are those of the dominant mode of production in that formatioli." (Poulantzas, "On Social Classes," 106).

14. Poulantzas, "On Social Classes," 102-103. 15. Guglielmo Carchedi, "On the Economic Identification of the New Middle Class,"

Economy and Society 4 (1), 1975. 16. Poulantzas "On Social Classes," 105. 17. The situation of unproductive labour is viewed as similar to that of the petty bour-

geoisie. Professionals are excluded from the upper class on the grounds that they do not own the means of capital accumulation; and they cannot be included in the working class because their labor is "unproductive," produces no surplus value, and therefore cannot be exploited. Because work is to some extent self-directed but does not lead to capital accumulation, in Poulantzas's scheme, the professional workers of the new middle class are said to constitute a newpetty bourgeoisie.

18. Poulantzas, "On Social Classes," 108-109. 19. Class, Crisis and the State. 20. See, e.g. Holmwood and Stewart, "The Role of Contradictions." 21. See Erik Olin Wright and Bill Martin, "The Transformation of the American Class

Structure, 1960-80." (American Journal of Sociology 93 (1): 1-29, 1987) 24 where he is forced to admit the theoretical failure: "Capitalist societies cannot be analyzed concretely as simple embodiments of the abstract capitalist mode of production; they are always complex combinations of a variety of mechanisms of exploitation and accompanying forms of class relations"(italics added).

170

22. Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985) 23. Classes, 88. 24. Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis, 71. 25. Max Weber, "Selections" in Giddens and Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict, 61. 26. Weber, "Selections," 69. 27. Weber, "Selections," 62. 28. Weber, "Selections," 69. 29. "a) the working class as a whole - the more so, the more automated work becomes,

b) the petty bourgeoisie, c) the propertyless intelligentsia and specialists (technicians, various kinds of white-collar employees, civil servants...), d) the classes privileged through property and education" (Weber, "Selections," 71-72).

30. Marx also anticipates the emergence of the middle class. In Theories of Surplus Value, he criticizes those who neglect: "the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other." They are a "burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security and power of the upper ten thousand." See Giddens, Class Structure, 177.

31 Class Structure, 105, italics deleted. 32. Class Structure, 167. 33. Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (London: McGibbon, 1971) 18. 34. Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock, 1979). 35. Marxism and Class Theory, 53. 36. Michael J. Piore, "Notes for a Theory of Labor Market Stratification" in Richard C.

Edwards et al., editors, Labor Market Segmentation (Lexington: Heath, 1975), 125-150.

37. Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. ed. (Glencoe: Free, 1954), 388-389.

38. Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore, "Some Principles of Stratification," Amer- ican SociologicalReview 10: 242-249, 1945.

39. Davis and Moore, "Some Principles of Stratification," 243. 40. Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure

(New York: Wiley, 1967), 6-7. 41. Featherman et al., "Assumptions of Social Mobility Research," 340. 42. Featherman et al., "Assumptions of Social Mobility Research," 357. 43. John H. Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). It is worth noting that this Oxford team itself went through a theoretical transition. In their early work, John H. Goldthorpe and Keith Hope, The Social Grading of Occupations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), merely attempt to produce a more adequate version of a Blau and Duncan type scale focused on the "general desirability" of occupations. However, by the 1980s, they are clearly class analysts in the Weberian sense - indeed they use the term "class" quite explicity.

44. Goldthorpe and Hope, The Social Grading of Occupations. 45. Goldthorpe's seven classes are as follows: Class I: Large proprietors; higher profes-

sionals; higher administrators and managers. (Service class); Class II: Lower professionals; technicians; lower administrators; small business managers; supervisors of non-manual workers (Cadet level of the service class); Class III: Clerks; sales per- sonnel; Class IV: Petty bourgeoisie; Class V: Lower technicians; foremen and shop supervisors; Class VI: Skilled manual workers, Class VII: Semi-and unskilled manual workers (Social Mobility, 40-43]).

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46. Social Mobility, 40. 47. The use of the term "social fluidity" indicates the point of view of those who write

about it. From another point of view "social solidity" might be more appropriate, although this might be confused with "social solidarity," which has an altogether different meaning.

48. Social Mobility. 49. Robert Erikson, John H. Goldthorpe, and Lucienne Portacarero, "Social Fluidity

in Industrial Societies," British Journal of Sociology 33 (1): 1-34. 50. "The greatest degree of continuity (both intergenerational and career) is found in

farming, professional, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) proprietorial occupations. Second, there is greater fluidity within white-collar and within blue-collar categories than there is across the white-collar - blue-collar line. Third, to the extent that there is movement across that line, the most common origins and destinations are craft and clerical occupations. Finally, a class effect runs through the ... mobility tables" (Alan C. Kerckhoff, Richard T. Campbell, and Idee Winfield-Laird, "Social Mobility in Great Britain and the United States," American Journal of Sociology 91 (2): 281-308, 1985, 296-297).

51. They describe the respective class barriers as follows: "The farming sector and the service [professional, managerial, administrative] class evidence a high degree of class structuration as reflected in self-recruitment, endogamy, and barriers to mobility and exogamy. Moreover, the manual/non-manual divide defines two zones of occupational and marital exchange. The sons of nonmanual workers move fairly freely within the confines of the middle class, with lower risks of demotion to manual work. Similarly the sons of manual workers move fairly freely within the working class but have limited access to the middle class, once allowance is made for long-term changes in the occupational structure. This general pattern holds ... with marginally greater force in the labour than in the marriage market" (F. L. Jones and Peter Davis, "Class Structuration and Patterns of Social Closure in Australia and New Zealand," Sociology 22 (2): 271-291, 1988, 288). The theoretical shift under discussion is very apparent in the work of Frank Jones, who is the leading Australian analyst of social mobility. In 1976 he concluded: "we character- ise Australia as a stratified society with relatively clear patterns of inequality in occupational position, skill and training, income, and other characteristics. We do not term it a class society, if class is meant to imply the large-scale reproduction of unequal life chances from generation to generation" (Leonard Broom and F. Lancaster Jones, Opportunity and Attainment in Australia. Canberra: ANU 1976, 119). This may be compared with his use of the term class in 1988.

52. Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes, 122-125. 53. See Abercrombie and Urry, Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes, especially 89-

92; Clegg et al., Class, Politics and the Economy, 55; Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis, 70-72.

54. Malcolm Waters, "Patriarchy and Viriarchy: An Exploiration and Reconstruction of Concepts of Masculine Domination," Sociology 23 (2): 193-211, 1989.

55. Waters, "Patriarchy and Viriarchy." 56. Clegg et al., Class, Politics and the Economy, 105; Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of

Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review, 1942), 257. 57. Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 125. 58. See Randall Collins, The CredentialSociety (Orlando: Academic, 1979), 191. 59. Bell, Post-Industrial Society, 371-489. 60. In "Patriarchy and Viriarchy," I propose a reconstruction of the feminist concept of

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patriarchy. Masculine domination in highly differentiated societies is conceived as "viriarchy" - rule by adult males. There are two types of viriarchy: "direct viriarchy" in which women are confined to the domestic sphere and are dominated by virtue of unequal power in that context; and "extended viriarchy," in which women participate in the public sphere but in segregated and dominated occupational contexts. This section is based on elements of that paper.

61. Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis, 71. 62. "Social Mobility in Great Britain and the United States," 296-297. 63. A. Stewart, K. Prandy, and R. M. Blackburn, Social Stratification and Occupations

(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980). 64. Karl Marx, Capital (2 vols.). (London: Dent - Everyman's Library, 1957), 711-

712. 65. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly

Review, 1966), 257-258. 66. See, for example, Julius William Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago, 1987). 67. Stewart et al., Social Stratification and Occupations.

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Collapse and convergence in class theory