We talk about class pretty regularly in the world of Democratic politics: we argue over whose policies are best for the middle class, complain about how Republicans don’t care about the working class, explain how John Edwards’ upper class position doesn’t undermine his genuine commitment to the poor, or how his working class background allows him to really understand the plight of the working poor.
But what do all these terms mean? Do you and I picture the same people, or mean the same kinds of jobs, when we talk about the "middle class"? Do the people we’re talking about identify with the classes we imagine them in, or any class at all?
These are questions the field of sociology has been asking, and trying to answer, for the better part of the last 60 years. I’d like to use this diary to take you through some of the answers as well as some of the unresolved issues, and then talk about what you think "class" means, and how you think we ought to use the term.
Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life. Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the Feminisms and Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or MissLaura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.
The first scholar sociologists look at for discussions of class is Karl Marx (yes, that Karl Marx). For him, your "class" meant your "relation to the means of production." If you own the stuff that gets used to make stuff - a factory, arable land, machines and tools, etc – you’re a member of the bourgeoisie. If you don’t own that stuff, you have to sell your labour power to folks who do, and you’re a member of the proletariat. Marx acknowledged the existence of a few other classes in his time – peasants who were still farming little bits of their own land, the folks in the "reserve army of labour" who couldn’t even manage to find someplace to sell their labour power, petit bourgeois with just a few workers, whose businesses struggled to survive. But he was pretty sure that as capitalism developed, those classes would disappear into the ever-expanding proletariat, and the distance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would become ever more stark.
The important thing for Marx was not how much money you made, or whether others respected the work you did, or even what you had to do all day at work. For Marx, what mattered was whether you had to sell that part of yourself that Marx considered essential to human nature – your ability to use your brain and body to make stuff, to create – to someone else. If you had to sell your labour power, you were by definition alienated not only from the things you created, but from yourself, from your essential nature as a human, and from your fellow humans. And you were also exploited, because the person to whom you sold your labour power was making money from the value your labour created – money that should rightfully be yours.
For Marx, then, working class folks’ interests are opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie in two fundamental ways: in the short term because they want to make higher wages, while the capitalists want to make higher profits; in the longer term because it is in their interest to overthrow capitalism, which of course the capitalists want to maintain. Marx’ class concept brings together many elements of class other theorists seek to separate – for him, market position, status, income, and interests all stem from ownership or not of the means of production.
Max Weber’s "Class, Status and Party" is largely an attack on this unified way of seeing class. For Weber, class meant simply market position, a class was all those with similar "life chances" in a market – be that a labor market, a credit market, or a commodity market. Status meant the honor or esteem others held you or your social group in, and status groups were "lifestyle" groups defined by consumption – often, but not necessarily, from the same class. Weber rather snarkily lambasted Marx for thinking that the working class would necessarily realize its joint interests and act on them; for him class was a possible, but not necessary, basis for group action in parties.
Now, most folks who talk about Marx’s conception of class do so in order to refute it (I’ll get to them in a moment), but there’s at least one prominent class theorist who instead has tried to apply and extend the essential elements of Marx’s analysis, while accommodating the differences between the capitalism of Marx’s time and our current economic system. Erik Olin Wright’s class schema includes 12 categories along 3 dimensions. While the scheme is a bit complicated, his basic point is that your class situation still has to do with your relation to the means of production, but that relationship isn’t a simple binary "own/don’t own." One of his dimensions is ownership of the means of production, but instead of a simple either/or he includes the size of the company owned. His other two dimensions are possession of "organization resources" (ie, control of the organization of production, without necessarily owning it) and "credentials" (ie, legitimated and valued skills or education). In this schema, the director of marketing at a major corporation is in one of the "upper" classes, even though she may not own the means of production herself.
Many others, though, have dispensed with Marx’s set-up almost entirely. They’ve argued that the key aspect of class is something else entirely. For Ralf Dahrendorf in 1959, that "something else" was "authority" – if you have authority at work (or potentially other places, too – any "imperatively coordinated association") you’re in an "upper class" in that situation; if not, you’re in a lower class.
None of these formulations, so far, leads to the class terminology I used above, the one that most of us probably use in our day-to-day lives: lower or working class, middle class, and upper class. Anthony Giddens (1973) and Frank Parkin (1979) each use different elements of Weber’s work to arrive at this sort of three-class typology. For Giddens, class has essentially to do with the resources available to you when you come to a "bargaining encounter" in the marketplace – those with "ownership in the means of production" (sound familiar?) are "upper class"; those who possess "educational or technical qualifications" are "middle class" and those whose only marketable asset is their labor power are "working class." Giddens goes on to discuss mechanisms that can create divisions within classes – such as level of authority in the workplace, type of work ("mental" versus "manual", a distinction quite popular in sociology at the time) and what he calls "distributive groupings" or what kinds of things people buy (a bit like Weber’s status groups). So while doctors and HR managers are probably in the same class (at least if the doctor doesn’t own her own practice), they may be in different parts of that class.
Instead of starting with Weber’s own definition of class, position in the market, Parkin builds on Weber’s idea of status groups and social closure to define classes. Socially closed groups – classes – come in three basic varieties. Exclusionary closure groups are those attempting to privilege their own group at the expense of another (45); their power operates downward, to keep others from getting the resources they already have. This "downward power" is a broader case of the type of exploitation Marx saw in the bourgeoisie/proletariat relation. While Giddens sees only property as the means for achieving the "top" place in society, Parkin sees skills and especially credentials as a means for exclusion as well. What’s key about both property and credentials for Parkin is that they are state-sanctioned ways for individuals to pass advantages on to their children. Property is directly inheritable; credentialing also strongly favors those who grew up learning the skills necessary to gain the credential. But while Giddens sees classes as "aggregates" and emphatically not "groups" in the sense of those likely to act together in any way (84), Parkin’s definition emphasizes group action.
There are also sociologists who’ve dispensed with the idea of class entirely, in favor of a picture of society as a more or less continuous unidimensional hierarchy. Most of the folks who take this approach were influenced by Otis Dudley Duncan’s Socio-economic Index, or SEI, first published in 1964. Many studies up to this time had shown that when people were asked to rank occupations from best to worst, or highest to lowest, there was remarkable similarity in their ordering. Almost everyone puts "doctor" at or near the top, "janitor" at or near the bottom, and so on for all the occupations they used. These occupations were then given "prestige scores" – higher scores for higher-ranking jobs, lower scores for lower ones, and these scores were used to model things like how likely sons are to have jobs similar to their fathers’. But you can’t make people sit and order all of the census occupational categories, so our friend Otis Duncan worked out a model that showed that prestige scores were based on the percentage of people in an occupation above the median income at the time and the percentage of people in that occupation above the median education level at the time. He then used his formula to generate prestige scores for the occupations that had never been ranked, and this became known as the "socio-economic index" or often just "Duncan’s SEI."
This way of picturing class is extremely handy for quantitative sociologists, as it gives them a single number to work with for any individual in the workforce. Of course, it also has a lot of problems. No one has a good theoretical basis for these prestige scores, except that lots of people agree on ranking occupations. And the scores generated through Duncan’s procedure are a mix of what might be called "true prestige" – how folks would rank that occupation – and measures of the average income and education within an occupation.
More importantly, though, part of what’s compelling about the concept of class is that it makes it possible to think about "class interests" and "class consciousness" – even outside a Marxist framework. Occupational hierarchy work can tell us a number of important things – the classic work by Duncan, for example, showed how father’s education, income and occupation factored into predicting son’s education, occupation and income. But it can’t help us think about class consciousness, class voting, class interests, and so on.
I won’t have time to go into class voting in this piece (though I’m working with a professor of mine who knows a lot more about it than I do to put together a diary here later in the summer). But I want to tell you a bit about class consciousness in the United States.
When of people in a nationally representative survey were asked whether they consider themselves "poor, working, middle, upper-middle, or upper class" 98% of people could pick one of those classes, and nearly 80% said they identified "very strongly" or "somewhat strongly" with a class (Jackman & Jackman 1983).
| poor | working class | middle class | upper-middle class | upper class |
everyone | 7.6 | 36.6 | 48.3 | 8.2 | 1.0 |
whites | 4.8 | 35.8 | 46.4 | 9.0 | 1.0 |
blacks | 27.7 | 41.5 | 22.1 | 1.5 | 1.5 |
everyone else | 14.1 | 39.1 | 32.8 | 7.8 | 0.0 |
Many of the things you’d expect about who identifies with which class hold up – higher classes on average have higher incomes and higher education levels, as well as occupations with higher SEI scores. Parkin and Giddens both wrote a fair amount about how race and ethnicity could either strengthen or weaken class solidarity, depending on how class and race lined up with each other. Jackman & Jackman show this to be the case – blacks who identified themselves as middle class had much less "warm" or "close" feelings for their class than those who identified as poor or working class. Class origin, race, and a few other things also have to do with class ID; but there’s also not a perfect correlation between any one, or any combination, of these factors and class identification – there are people who identify as "working class" who are better off on every measure than others who identify as "middle class" and vice versa (that’s from a not-yet-published piece by Mike Hout).
Giddens repeatedly emphasized in his work that there’s no reason to expect that class consciousness will arise from class situation, but he did outline three potential levels of class consciousness - class awareness (there’s such a thing as a class and I’m in one); conflict consciousness (the interests of my class are at odds in some way with the interests of another class or classes), and revolutionary consciousness (my class interest is in changing the entire system of production). Jackman and Jackman found plenty of evidence for the first level of consciousness, but didn’t even look for the 2nd or 3rd levels.
So, we've gone from Marx's claim that there were only 2 important classes in capitalism, that their interests were diametrically opposed, and that all other important differences come down to class position... to survey research showing that, yes, people do more or less identify with a class, although that class may be called "middle" or "upper-middle" and they may or may not think their interests are opposed to those of other classes.
Do any of these conceptions of class appeal to you? What kinds of jobs, or consumption patterns, or relation to the means of production are you thinking about when you say "middle class" or "upper class"? Do you think it's the same as what other people mean?
UPDATE: I ran out of time to do paste in the bibliography, but I'll come back and do that later.
...*and here's the bibliography!*
Bibliography
Theoretical Takes
Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1959. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Davis, Kingsley, and Wilbert E. Moore. 1945. "Some Principles of Stratification." American Sociological Review 10:242-9.
Giddens, Anthony. 1973. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.
Parkin, Frank. 1979. Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique. New York: Taylor and Francis Books.
Sorenson, Aage B. 2001. "The Basic Concepts of Stratification Research: Class, Status, and Power." in Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, edited by David B. Grusky. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Tumin, Melvin. 1953. "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Response." American Sociological Review 18:387-94.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1979. "What is Class." Pp. 3 - 18 in Class Structure and Income Determination, edited by Erik Olin Wright. San Francisco: Academic Press.
—. 1980. "Varieties of Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure." Politics and Society 9:328-33.
—. 1984. "A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure." Politics and Society 13:383-422.
Class Identification
Baxter, Janeen. 1994. "Is Husband's Class Enough? Class Location and Class Identity in the United States, Sweden, Norway and Australia." American Sociological Review 59:220-235.
Davis, Nancy, and Robert Robinson. 1988. "Class Identification of Men and Women in the 1970s and 1980s." American Sociological Review 53:103-12.
Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
Goldthorpe, John H. 1983. "Women and Class Analysis: In Defence of the Conventional View." Sociology 17:465-88.
Jackman, Mary R. 1979. "The Subjective Meaning of Social Class Identification in the United States." Public Opinion Quarterly 43:443-462.
Jackman, Mary R, and Robert Jackman. 1983. Class Consciousness in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
Ritter, Kathleen, and Lowell Hargens. 1975. "Occupational Positions and Class Identifications of Married Working Women: A Test of the Asymmetry Hypothesis." American Journal of Sociology 80:934-48.
Vanneman, R., and L.W. Cannon. 1987. The American Perception of Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Class & Politics (just a few)
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 1991. "Are Social Classes Dying?" International Sociology 6:397-410.
Clark, Terry Nichols, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Michael Rempel. 1993. "The Declining Political Significance of Social Class." International Sociology 8:293-316.
Hout, Michael, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza. 1993. "The Persistence of Classes in Post-Industrial Societies." International Sociology 8:259-277.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1979. "Classes in Advanced Capitalist Societies." Pp. 19-55 in Class Structure and Income Distribution. San Francisco: Academic Press.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1989. "The Transformation of the American Class Structure, 1960-1980." American Journal of Sociology 93:1-29.
Occupational Takes on Class
Grusky, David B., and Jesper B. Sorenson. 1998. "Can Class Analysis Be Salvaged?" American Journal of Sociology 103:1187-1234.
Featherman, David L., and Robert M. Hauser. 1976. "Prestige or Socioeconomic Scales in the Study of Occupational Achievement?" Sociological Methods and Research 4.
Featherman, David L., F. Lancaster Jones, and Robert M. Hauser. 1975. "Assumptions of Social Mobility Research in the U.S.: The Case of Occupational Status." Social Science Research 4:329-360.
Hauser, Robert M., and John Robert Warren. 1997. "Socioeconomic Indexes for All Occupations: A Review, Update, and Critique." Sociological Methodology 27:177-298.
Hodge, Robert W. 1981. "The Measurement of Occupational Status." Social Science Research 10:396-415.
Treiman, Donald J. 1976. "A Standard Occupational Prestige Scale for Use with Historical Data." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History VII.