Property Bureaucracy & Culture

Middle Class Formation in Contemporary Britain

Michael Savage, James Barlow, Peter Dickens, Tom Fielding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134657469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This assured and powerful study explores the condition of the middle classes in Britain today. The authors outline a new theoretical perspective for exploring the middle classes and provide the reader with up-to-date empirical information on the class structure.

1
Are the Middle Classes Social Classes?

Social scientists have puzzled over the middle classes for well over a century. At the most general level the reasons for this are straightforward. Most concepts used to analyse social divisions are simple, binary ones: that is to say, they divide people into two groups along a single axis. A great variety of concepts have been used in this way: society has been divided into the propertied and propertyless; exploiters and exploited; powerful and powerless; those functional for society and those non-functional, and so forth.

Such concepts can be readily applied to groups that are clearly at the extremes of any of these poles, such as a ‘ruling class’ or ‘establishment’ on the one hand, or a working class on the other. But they run into problems when applied to those who do not instantly appear to fit either of the binary terms used: that is, those who are not particularly powerful, but who are not excluded from power; and who do not appear to exploit anyone in a particularly obvious way, but who do not seem to be exploited either. The middle classes, because they are in the middle, do not readily fit into the types of binary concepts so widely used in social science.

Classical social theory has left three ways of‘coping’ with this problem. The first tendency is to squeeze them into binary oppositions by positing a set of links between the middle classes and either the dominant or subordinate social group. The second tendency is to adopt a more descriptive approach and to abandon any clear attempt to explain the specificity of the middle classes. The third – and in our view most promising – avenue has been to explore how the middle classes might actually be social classes in their own right. This has, in British work, centred around discussion concerning the argument that some groups within the middle class can best be seen as a ‘service class’.

Before passing on to consider the debate on the service class, let us briefly assess the limitations of the other two approaches. The attempt to link the middle classes to other groups involves finding a mechanism by which the interests and concerns of the middle class can be attributed to a different – dominant or subordinate – class. The most common linkage used here is a functional one, where a certain middle class grouping is seen as functioning, or performing a particular service, for a dominant social group or for ‘society’ as a whole.

This view of the middle classes is explicitly found in functionalist sociology, where the position of any group can be seen as a reflection of its functional importance for society as a whole. But it also surfaces in a more interesting way within both Marxist and Weberian accounts of social stratification. For Marx the dominant and organising principle in capitalist society is that of capital accumulation. When one class of people own the means of production they can employ the propertyless and by the exploitation of their labour, can extract profit for themselves.

This crude account involves the type of binary opposition characteristic of much social science. Initially, there seems little place for a middle class within it at all, since it envisages a capitalist class opposed to a working class. And, indeed, some Marxists have argued that the middle classes are a chimera, who will at some stage be ‘proletarianised’ so that they join the rest of the working class. Braverman (1974) argues, for instance, that capital tends to deskill labour by breaking and simplifying the labour process so that labour can be made more productive. Braverman considers that this process tends to reduce even ‘middle-class’ or white-collar occupations to the level of working-class ones, and tends to argue that the middle class is becoming less distinctive as property becomes centralised (see Abercrombie and Urry 1983: 56–60 for discussion).

Braverman also refers, however, to the separation of conception from execution: the way that within capitalist production the ‘thinking’ work is taken away from the actual production process and hived off to specialist workers, leaving manual workers simply to execute – carry out – instructions given by others. This separation of conception from execution, which Braverman sees as an essential part of the deskilling process, has also provided a theoretical criteria for Marxists to distinguish a distinctive middle class responsible for the conception of work.

This latter approach is followed in rather different ways by Wright (1978), Carchedi (1977), Abercrombie and Urry (1983), Carter (1985), and Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich (1979). We shall not go into the rather different ideas developed by each (see for discussion Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Lockwood 1988; Goldthorpe 1982), but note that within this perspective the middle class is best understood by the functions it performs for capital, or the capitalist class. For Carchedi this involves the supervision and surveillance of labour; for Wright it involves the control over the physical means of production, control over labour power and control over investment. The important point to note here is the way in which the criteria for determining the role of the middle class is derived from an analysis of its functional importance to capitalism.

Two points stand out here. Firstly, as a result of their theoretical perspective, Marxists can examine managers much more easily than they can professionals, administrators or the self-employed. The most important Marxist works on the middle class have focused on the role of managers, and especially managers in private industry (e.g. Wright 1978; Carter 1985; Braverman 1974). Professional workers are less easy to categorise since they are less centrally involved in the manufacturing process, while the self-employed petite bourgeoisie is often assumed to be of declining significance. Secondly, the effect of relating the middle class to the capital accumulation process is that the role of this class is strongly related to the process from which it is derived. Virtually by definition, it is not possible to see this class as having any independent social and political effectivity.

These criticisms of particular Marxist approaches are not especially novel (see, e.g., Lockwood 1988). The same theme also emerges in Weberian work, however. The characteristic stress here concerns how the middle classes are functionaries for the processes of domination, which Weber sees as pervasive throughout all societies. In modern societies it is the role of the middle classes as bureaucrats that is given greatest emphasis. Weber saw bureaucracies as the embodiment of an impersonal, rational authority, in distinction to traditional or charismatic authority based on personal characteristics, which is characteristic of older societies. The middle classes have a distinct role as functionaries within bureaucratic processes. Weber himself drew attention to the purely passive role of the middle classes within this framework.

In the great majority of cases (the professional bureaucrat) is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is entrusted with specialised tasks, and normally the mechanisms cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top.

(Weber 1978: 988)

As in Marxist work the focus is on how the middle classes serve others and hence do not interfere with the ‘pure’ workings of a given social process.

The same stress arises in subsequent Weberian work: for instance, in C. Wright Mills in his study White Collar (1951). For Mills the dominant trend in the USA in the decade following the Second World War was the growing bureaucratisation of society. The old, independent self-employed middle-class strata were giving way to the large corporations: ‘the organizational reason for the expansion of white collar occupations is the rise of big business and big government, and the consequent trend of modern social structure, the growth of bureaucracy’ (Mills 1951:68). It was this dominant trend which allowed Mills to argue that different middle-class groups were being subject to this force for bureaucratisation.

The general stress is to see the middle class as a lieutenant class, performing certain functions for other classes or groups. Hence its members are not important in their own right, but only as the functionaries for others. Such a perspective, we would maintain, disables any serious inquiry into the nature of the middle classes from the start. It not only assumes a degree of middle-class passivity which is counter-intuitive to anyone with experience of middle-class life but also acts to morally absolve the middle classes. Since the real villains of the piece are the dominant classes, the middle classes are largely exempted from having to scrutinise their own actions as possible causes for social inequality or division.

The second legacy of the classical tradition is, in some ways, more useful. Its main emphasis is descriptive – an attempt to draw out the empirical variety of social groupings and testify to their distinctiveness – and Weberian writers have led the way here. Weber himself recognised the diversity of people in intermediate social positions, and suggested that there were four distinct social classes: between the working class and capitalist class was a petite bourgeoisie and a class of propertyless intelligentsia and specialists (Weber 1978: 302–7). Weberian writers ever since have specialised in producing other class schemas, many of which emphasise the diversity of intermediate social classes and groups.

The problem with such work is simply that it does not explain why these descriptive groupings have emerged. Much Weberian writing in this area shelters behind extended definitions and descriptive categories rather than providing a rigorous attempt to explain processes of social class inequality. The exception to this, within the Weberian tradition, is among those who have attempted to develop Weber’s theory of‘social closure’ to give a fuller understanding of the processes by which groups might be able to achieve a specific position in society through processes of exclusion and inclusion (Parkin 1979; Murphy 1988). Social closure works through one group restricting access to a certain prized good or service, so enhancing its own position at the expense of other social groups.

Parkin’s advocacy of the idea of social closure has led to a considerable interest in the processes by which certain groups may carve out privileged positions for themselves. However, its explanatory value remains more doubtful. This is because it is not clear why some groups are able to engage in successful social closure and others are not. Why are doctors typically able to engage in effective struggles to close their profession from outsiders, but school teachers, for instance, are not? Insofar as this question can be addressed within closure theory the usual response is to examine the types of resources which specific groups can bring to help their closure strategies. Anne Witz, for instance, has shown how medical men were able to draw upon patriarchal gendered resources in order to enhance their professional projects in Victorian Britain (Witz 1991). This sort of argument, however, soon begins to deploy explanatory concepts that are outside the remit of closure theory itself – in Witz’s case, the concept of patriarchy, for instance.

Social closure may then be a useful way of showing how specific groups are able to achieve middle-class positions, but it is not especially helpful in showing why they are able to do so. It offers no systematic way of explaining why certain people are able to achieve middle-class position. We therefore turn to the third legacy of the classical tradition, which argues that the middle classes are best seen as distinct social classes in their own right. This, we argue, is the most helpful way to proceed out of the impasse left by classical theory.

What are Social Classes?

The third legacy of classical stratification theory argues that the middle classes should be seen as social classes in their own right, rather than as simple functionaries, or intermediate groups. The precise status of the claim that a particular group forms a social class is, of course, hotly contested, since the concept of social class is one of the most controversial in the social sciences (e.g. Calvert 1982; Furbank 1985). Our view on this matter is presented and defended in Appendix 1, which can usefully be consulted at this point by any reader wishing to discover the more general theoretical orientation of our work. Since, however, the primary concern of this book is to throw light on the middle classes, and because the debate on class analysis has become so esoteric and purely technical that it is now largely only of interest to specialists, we content ourselves here with presenting only the basic features of our approach.

In our view social classes are first and foremost stable social collectivities. They are groups of people with shared levels of income and remuneration, lifestyles, cultures, political orientations and so forth. This is why they are interesting to social scientists, since by being social collectivities they are able to engage in social action and so have an impact on social change. The concept of social class is not, therefore, best seen as a classificatory device by which people are slotted into specific social classes on the basis of a given trait such as occupation, but is primarily concerned with the issue of class formation.

This formulation does, however, beg one crucial question. There are usually lots of social collectivities in diverse walks of social life, but not all of them can usefully be seen as social classes. Boy Scouts, for instance, are a social collectivity with shared cultures and lifestyles, but it hardly seems appropriate to regard them as a social class. In order for a social collectivity to be regarded as a social class it has to have its roots in a process of exploitation.

The concept of exploitation is itself problematic. It has its origins in Marxist analyses of social stratification, in which one class exploits another if it appropriates labour from that class. This, however, is rather restrictive and is economically deterministic, arguing that exploitation is only an economic process. More recently other Marxists, such as Erik Olin Wright, have preferred a less specific, more general notion of exploitation, in which ‘one person’s welfare is obtained at the expense of another’ (Wright 1985: 65). The particular case of the extraction of surplus labour is one – extremely important – example of this, but there are others. For instance the concept of‘deleting the labour’ developed within symbolic interactionism (Star 1991), where a particular person’s contribution to an activity is concealed or hidden, is another variant. When an academic man writes a book that draws upon his wife’s labour as typist, copy-editor, researcher, general discussant, or provider of domestic labour, but where only his name appears on the cover, her labour has been deleted.

The important point here is that the concept of exploitation specifies a relationship between classes: an exploiting and exploited class. Hence, it shows how a social class differs from another sort of social collectivity because it inherently stands in opposition to other social groups or collectivities. It is this which gives it historical importance, since the ensuing (latent or manifest) conflict between these classes may well be of major importance in shaping social and historical change.

The most difficult conceptual problem here is how the relationship between specific types of exploitative relationships and particular social collectivities can best be formulated. A deterministic account, where exploitative relationships always give rise to full blown social collectivities, is wrong, since in some cases people may be involved in exploitative relationships without forming wider social collective ties to others who are also involved in these relationships. In our view, theoretical realism, as developed by Bhaskar (1975), Keat and Urry (1975), Sayer (1984) and Outhwaite (1987), offers the most useful way of resolving this problem. Realists begin by thinking about the causal powers of specific natural or social entities. People, to give a trite example, have the power to speak, or work, by virtue of the fact that they are people. However, these causal powers may only be manifested in specific contingent circumstances: people do not speak if they are gagged, nor do they work when sleeping.

Applied to the study of social class we first need to think about the types of causal power involved in differing types of exploitation. Of crucial importance here is the way varying types of exploitation have the differing causal potential to give rise to stable social class collectivities. The best way of thinking about this is by considering how easy is it for the exploiting class to store the gains it has won from the exploited class. Only if they can be stored can they be transmitted to others, moved to different places, or accumulated. If they can be stored it is far more likely that they will give rise to stable social class collectivities. This is the point developed by Offe and Wisenthal (1980), who show that because capital can be stored and accumulated (in the forms of stocks and shares, property and so forth) it is much easier for capitalists to organise than it is for workers. Since labour power cannot be stored outside the individual bodies of workers, the working class remains more fragmented and divided, and is less able to develop cohesive class identity and action.

This analysis of the causal properties of specific forms of exploitation must, however, be supplemented by an examination of the sort of contingent conditions that might allow these varying causal powers to exercise their properties. In periods of economic recession, for instance, capitalist class formation might be hindered because of competition between firms. In liberal democracies working-class formation might be enhanced because of the potential strength of their relatively large numbers in influencing voting patterns.

We have now set out the rudiments of our approach. The claim that the middle classes are social classes involves showing that they have been formed as cohesive social groups, which are linked to specific types of exploitation.

Theories of the Service Class

In the 1930s the Austrian Marxist Karl Renner argued that there was a growing ‘service class’ of professionals and managers in contemporary capitalist societies. Although his ideas were taken up by Dahrendorf in the 1950s, it was not until the 1980s that debate on the possible existence of a service class really took off. In the USA a similar set of debates emerged around consideration of the idea of a ‘new class’ (Gouldner 1979), or a ‘professional-managerial class’ (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979). Yet the debate has been enormously confused, largely because the proponents of the ‘service class’ idea have very different ideas of what social classes actually are. The idea of the service class has been used in at least six different ways in existing literature, but it is common for the same writer to use the concept in several different ways, without acknowledging possible contradictions between uses. We need to begin by unpacking the different meanings of the ‘service class’, since in our view some of these are useful, but others less so. Some of them follow in the classical tradition we have criticised above, while others take the debate onto more fertile ground.

Initially the concept of the service class, which began with Karl Renner in the 1930s, shares a similar problematic to that of the classical tradition we have criticised above, in which the service class is functionally related to capitalism. Renner saw the emergence of the professional manager and the decline of the owner-manager as an indication that ‘the functions of capitalists appear sub-divided in a steadily growing number of salaried employees of the very highest and of high and of lower rank’ (quoted in Dahrendorf 1959: 94). Since capitalists can no longer carry out all their activities personally they delegate them to groups of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ARE THE MIDDLE CLASSES SOCIAL CLASSES?
• 2 THE DYNAMICS OF SERVICE-CLASS FORMATION
• 3 THE HISTORICAL FORMATION OF THE BRITISH MIDDLE CLASSES
• 4 THE CONTEMPORARY RESTRUCTURING OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES
• 5 THE HOUSING MARKET AND THE MIDDLE CLASSES: CLASS, TENURE AND CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
• 6 CULTURE, CONSUMPTION AND LIFESTYLE
• 7 SOCIAL MOBILITY AND HOUSEHOLD FORMATION
• 8 REGIONAL CONTEXT AND SPATIAL MOBILITY
• 9 CLASS FORMATION AND POLITICAL CHANGE
• 10 CONCLUSIONS
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index