Social Stratification and Economic Change

David Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032225982
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000562651
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1988, Social Stratification and Economic Change brings together, for the first time in textbook form, some of the most significant work both theoretical and empirical on stratification in Britain. In part I, David Rose provides on overview of stratification research, and papers from David Lockwood, John Goldthorpe, Gordon Marshall, Ray Pahl, and Claire Wallace tackle key theoretical issues. In part II, six papers commissioned for the book report on empirical studies and their implications. By bringing together an outstanding group of authors, all at the forefront of their field, the book makes an important contribution to debates on social stratification and will be invaluable for both students and researchers in sociology.

1 Introduction

David Rose

The contributors to this volume were all members of the Economic and Social Research Council Social Stratification Seminar in the years between 1973 and 1985. This group had a somewhat elitist, anti-feminist, exclusivist reputation in British sociology which, if understandable in terms of the development of British sociology in the 1970s, was undeserved. It began life as a result of an SSRC conference at Durham in 1972 (see Bulmer, 1975 (ed.), for the proceedings of this conference). One of the participants, Frank Bechhofer, persuaded the Sociology Committee of SSRC to finance a seminar to continue the type of discussions which the Durham conference had instigated. The initial membership of the seminar was provided by those sociologists who, in 1973, were in receipt of SSRC grants to study aspects of social stratification in Britain. The seminar was designed to provide an informal forum for the discussion of the common interests of its members. Over the years old members dropped out and new ones attended, with the new members being invited on the basis of the changing nature of stratification research. Towards the end of its life the seminar attracted funds from ESRC to widen its discussions by holding colloquia on particular themes. One of these, on gender and stratification, led to the publication of some of its proceedings (Crompton and Mann, 1986). With a change of policy at ESRC the decision was made to withdraw the regular funding of such seminars. This volume was conceived in the wake of that decision. It was not connived as a summary of the discussions which had taken place over the years, however, but more as some kind of memorial to the seminar’s erstwhile existence.

The first three chapters in Part One have all been published previously but are reproduced here because they are important theoretical statements and because they were initially published in rather obscure places and deserve a more accessible outlet. The remainder of the papers are all new and reflect the empirical work which was being conducted by members of the Economic and Social Research Council Social Stratification Seminar at the time of its demise. Since this work all has some bearing on economic decline and the social, political and economic changes induced during the life of the Thatcher administration, the title Social Stratification and Economic Change seemed appropriate. However, it was never the intention to produce a comprehensive review of economic change, still less of social stratification. What this volume is designed to do is to introduce students in particular to some of the important recent debates in social stratification, as well as to some of the more significant empirical studies of the 1980s in this area. Other recently published volumes complement the purposes of this one (for example, Roberts et al. (eds), 1985) and can usefully be used in conjunction with this to obtain a broader overview of the field.

Because this is primarily a student text, and given the difficulties which some of the chapters will present students, this introduction attempts some exegesis of what follows. It also tries to place the various contributions in a wider context, as well as drawing out some of the relationships between the chapters. Part One presents four complementary, largely theoretical papers. The main theme which unites them is that of anti-historicism, although they all make statements which go beyond this common denominator. Part Two offers a variety of empirical papers covering unemployment, political and work ideologies in a variety of local and national contexts. If this introduction and the papers which follow serve to awaken students to the importance of social stratification as the central element of macro-sociology, the book will have served an important purpose.

* * *

The chapters in Part One all raise central theoretical and empirical issues for the study of social stratification. Goldthorpe criticizes three approaches to the study of the working class which, while different in their analyses and prognostications, nevertheless share one thing in common. Each projects its own socio-political goals on to the working class through its particular brand of historicism. One of these approaches is Marxism and it is recent Marxist class analysis which is the subject of Lockwood’s chapter. In a penetrating critique of the most important Marxist contributions on class of the 1970s, Lockwood demonstrates, inter alia, Marxism’s inability to cope satisfactorily with the non-rational elements of social action. Whereas Goldthorpe and Lockwood are critical of perspectives with which they are out of sympathy, Marshall takes issue with much of the empirical work on working-class consciousness which Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s earlier work had stimulated. Marshall’s incisive review lays bare the inadequacies of both ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘ambivalence’ as interpretations of the available evidence on working-class consciousness and argues for new research strategies which relate consciousness to action. Finally, Pahl and Wallace critically examine the concept of cultural privatization which to an extent informs the empirical work of Goldthorpe and Lockwood, and Marshall, Newby and Rose. While readers must judge for themselves the merits of the arguments presented in these four chapters, this introduction attempts both to provide some explanation of crucial issues and to place the various authors’ work in their context.

John H. Goldthorpe has been a persistent and influential critic of liberal and Marxist accounts of social stratification throughout his career (see, for example, Goldthorpe, 1964, 1971, 1972, 1983a and 1986; Goldthorpe and Lockwood, 1963; Goldthorpe et al., 1969). In the essay reproduced here he criticizes each of these approaches to studies of the working class and extends his critique to ‘organicist’ writers in the literary tradition of F. R. Leavis. Intellectuals and the Working Class in Modern Britain was originally written for the 1979 Fuller Lecture in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, and as such deals only with developments to the end of the 1970s. The themes contained in the essay have continued to inform Goldthorpe’s more recent work (see, for example, Goldthorpe, 1983a and 1986), but this essay was selected for inclusion in this volume both because it deserves wider publication than it has hitherto received, and because the issues it raises are of continuing importance for the debate on the working class. Indeed, they are explicitly referred to in some of the subsequent chapters in this book.

As Newby has observed, studies of the working class have tended to predominate in British social stratification research, not least because of ‘the value commitments of sociologists, ranging from a desire to promote ameliorative social engineering to a historicist concern with the working class as a purveyor of political and social revolution’ (1981, p. 9). And it is historicism, of whatever theoretical or political persuasion, which is Goldthorpe’s main target in Chapter 2. Perhaps because of the influence of Popper (1945 and 1957) many people have come to equate historicism with Marxism alone. However, the fact is that Marxists are not alone in producing such accounts. Indeed one of Goldthorpe’s continuing preoccupations has been the historicism of avowedly anti-Marxist American social scientists such as Kerr, Bell and Lipset – the liberal theorists whom he discusses in relation to the work of Anthony Crosland (see, for example, Goldthorpe 1965, 1971, 1986). In Intellectuals and the Working Class in Modern Britain he extends his critique to a third group of writers whom he calls the ‘organicists’. In their work, as well as that of social democrats such as Crosland and Marxists such as Perry Anderson, Goldthorpe finds examples of ‘wishful, rather than critical, thinking’ about the working class. Ultimately this is because each group has considered the working class ‘as the crucial social agency for the achievement of their own social and political goals’. In so doing each has tended to ignore the niceties of the empirical evidence in favour of arguments concerning immanent tendencies and supposedly long-term historical trends. A brief examination of Goldthorpe’s claims in relation to liberal and Marxist theories might help to elucidate his essay further.

In the 1950s certain American social scientists began to develop a distinctive ‘theory of industrial society’ (compare Badham, 1984, Giddens, 1982 and Kumar, 1978). Typically this theory stressed the beneficial aspects of industrial societies as equalizers of opportunities, the institutionalization of class conflict through the extension of citizenship, the accompanying rise of the liberal-democratic state, and a ‘logic of industrialism’ such that as societies industrialize so they become more similar and converge in a common process of development. Much evidence was adduced for this view. For example, high rates of social mobility were taken as evidence of equalization and openness in society, as was the contraction of the ‘traditional’ (i.e. manual) working class and the growth of white-collar and service occupations. This latter trend was seen to involve a reskilling or upgrading of work in advanced industrial societies. Work would generally become both less alienating and less likely to be the source of class conflict. This development would be reinforced by another – the managerial revolution in which people-motivated rather than profit-motivated managers would take control of industry. Indeed some writers hailed the coming of ‘post-industrial society’ with its promise of greater wealth and less effort for all.

Unfortunately the social scientists who advocated such a view had misread their tea-leaves. As I have commented elsewhere, the promise of the post-industrial society has given way to the less comfortable realities of the deindustrializing society (see Rose et al., 1984). While industrial society theorists were correct to identify as important the contraction in the traditional working class and the expansion of white-collar work, they did not anticipate that this could lead to wider rather than narrower social and economic inequalities – especially in a context such as that experienced in Britain since the mid 1960s. Both the instrumental collectivism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, consequent upon the fuller participation of the working class in society, and the current reality of high levels of unemployment, along with the increasing tendency towards less secure forms of employment, have emphasized the extent to which liberal analyses of class structure and class processes are wanting.

These weaknesses of liberal theories have been made even more apparent by Goldthorpe’s work on social mobility and class formation (1980; 1986). For example, liberals had assumed that high levels of social mobility such as those found in western societies could be equated with high levels of social fluidity or openness in society. However, research by Goldthorpe and others has demonstrated that while the shape of the class structure has changed to produce higher levels of absolute mobility, nevertheless the relationship between class origins and class destinations has remained relatively the same. In other words, to take one example, the chances of a child of working-class parents achieving a secure position in the middle class have hardly changed at all in recent decades, once changes in the shape of the class structure (due to the decline in the numbers of ‘blue-collar’ workers and the increase in the number of ‘white-collar’ workers) are accounted for (see Goldthorpe, 1982; 1983; and 1986; Goldthorpe and Payne, 1986). Mobility and openness are not the same phenomenon. Hence, if class is relatively less important in late twentieth-century western societies, as liberals have claimed, it is certainly not because their class structures are more open. In so far as class may be somewhat muted in its significance in the 1980s, this is more likely to be the result of high levels of unemployment, insecure forms of employment and other similar divisions which principally affect the working class and its political and industrial organizations. However, it is by no means certain that class is as muted as some have claimed. A recent study of class in modern Britain has concluded both that class remains by far the most important form of social identity and that the death of social class has been much exaggerated (see Marshall et al., 1988).

Goldthorpe finds Marxist accounts equally as implausible as their liberal counterparts. Whereas liberal theorists of industrial and post-industrial society emphasized the incorporation of the working class and the embourgeoisement of society, Marxists have argued the opposite; namely the continuing hegemonic sway of capitalism over the working class, and the complementary thesis of proletarianization. In the essay reproduced in this volume, Goldthorpe focuses on those Marxist writers who have concentrated their attention on what might be termed the ‘false consciousness’ of the working class and the need to overcome this via ‘“the penetration of reason, of rationality into [the] closed affective universe” of the working class’. The problems involved here for Marxist theory are precisely those raised in Chapter 3 by David Lockwood and are discussed in more detail below. At this point we need only note the historicist elements in Marxist accounts to which Goldthorpe rightly objects.

Unlike their liberal opponents, Marxist writers see the extent to which the growth of an affluent consumer society could (and did) lead to greater class conflict – at least in the form of distributional struggles (Marshall et al., 1985). But, as Goldthorpe observes, Marxism requires more than mere distributional struggle of the working class; it requires socialist revolution. The whole Marxist argument regarding the hegemony of capitalism and the higher order rationality of a revolutionary proletariat to overcome it only makes sense if the working class is seen as having an ‘historically appointed affinity’ with socialism rather than a merely contingent support for it. This problem is compounded by a more practical one which confronts neo-Marxists – the decline in the magnitude of the working class. This is a problem which has taxed, among others, Wright (1978 and 1985) and Poulantzas (1979). It also accounts for the salience of the so-called ‘boundary debate’, about what, precisely, constitutes the working class in modern capitalist societies (see Parkin, 1979).

We have already seen that for liberal theorists the decline of manual employment and the rise of white-collar work represents an embourgeoisement of society. For Marxists, it means the opposite – proletarianization. It is argued that much of the new white-collar employment is, in fact, routine, degraded, lacking in autonomy and not dissimilar from the blue-collar work it has displaced (see, for example, Braverman, 1974). Hence the traditionally defined working class (male, manual and muscular) may have declined in numerical importance, but in objective terms much white-collar work is essentially proletarianized and working class in character. In effect, this allows Marxists to deny the charge that the increasingly differentiated nature of class structures has reduced the size of its revolutionary class.

Once again, however, what empirical evidence we have casts doubt on all forms of the proletarianization thesis. For example, the greatest expansion in nonmanual employment is not among routine white-collar workers, but in what Goldthorpe terms the ‘service class’ of managerial, administrative and professional occupations. Even if this evidence is ignored, it is not the case that routine white-collar workers form a monolithic, proletarianized group. Indeed they are every bit as internally divided as the working class itself. A crucial distinction which must be made in class analysis, and one which causes many problems, is that between persons and positions. Many different kinds of person occupy routine white-collar positions. Some persons will be at the start of a career which will take them to the service class; others may be at the end of a career in which clerical work represents the high point after years of manual work (see Stewart et al., 1980). In short the clerical work-force is much more differentiated than it would appear to be at first glance, with all sorts of consequences for the socio-political class formation of white-collar workers (see Marshall et al., 1988, Chapter 5, for more detail).

Thus Marxists and liberals alike have either ignored or misread crucial empirical evidence. Goldthorpe’s contention in Chapter 2, and in other of his essays (see 1971; 1972; 1986), is that this misreading is directly related to the historicism of the authors. As he has argued recently, liberal and Marxist theories

stem from an ultimate ambition of achieving some cognitive grasp on the course of historical development which can then be used for normative and political purposes: that is to say, to show that certain political beliefs, values and commitments have an ‘objective’ superiority in being those that the movement of history favours, while others can be ‘correctly’ dismissed as historically outmoded (1986, p. 27).

In the final paragraph of this essay it can be seen why Goldthorpe objects so strongly to such historicist perspectives – they leave out people; or, to put the matter more technically, they have weak micro-sociological foundations. People become ‘bearers’ of historical forces, agents in a process over which they have no control, rather than conscious actors ‘making their own history’ but not of their own free will (Marx, 1973b, p. 146). As Goldthorpe once remarked in another context, when confronting historical situations, rather than intellectual problems, we

don’t know how it will work out. I’m a good Popperian: I don’t believe in historicist predictions about what’s going to happen in the future, or in developmental laws of society – that’s why I’m not a Marxist. We have an open political situation. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t see any point in pretending that I do (Goldthorpe, 1978, p. 216).

David Lockwood is another ‘good Popperian’ and in Chapter 3 we find some of the points concerning historicism made by Goldthorpe being analysed in minute detail for the case of Marxism. ‘The weakest link in the chain …’ is probably the most sustained and demanding critique of Marxist class theory ever published. And, just as Goldthorpe’s essay reveals some of his most abiding concerns in sociological analysis, so it is with Lockwood’s essay on Marxism. Lockwood is regarded as a neo-Weberian sociologist but, perhaps more accurately, his writings demonstrate, as Halsey has observed, an attempt to combine ‘Parsons’ abstractions of value with Marx’s abstractions of material circumstances’ (1985, p. 160). This concern is expressed early in Lockwood’s career (see, for example, Lockwood, 1956) and appears clearly in the action frame of reference which he developed with Goldthorpe for research on the Affluent Worker Project in the 1960s. In a more theoretical form it is found in the classic essay on ‘Social integration and system integration’ (1964) which has a direct bearing on his chapter in this volume as well as his forthcoming text Solidarity and Schism.

System integration refers to the relations, whether of order or conflict, between the parts of a social system; social integration refers to the (orderly or conflictful) relations between actors in a social system (see Lockwood, 1964, p. 245 and passim). Parsons’ work (and that of other ‘normative functionalists’) tends to concentrate wholly on the problem of system integration, where socially binding values are of central importance; whereas the so-called ‘conflict theorists’ (for example Dahrendorf, 1959; Rex, 1964) tend towards an exclusive concern for social integration, where material circumstances, including class relations, are to the fore. Marx, on the other hand, attempts to relate the two in his social analyses by arguing that class conflict (social integration aspect) arises out of contradictions in the economic system between the institutions of property (class relations) and the forces of production (system integration aspect). For Marx, therefore, soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: Theoretical Issues
• Part Two: Empirical Research
• Bibliography
• Index