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Understanding Social Stratification: Social Class
Abstract
After introducing the importance of stratification to sociological analysis, this chapter explores the concept of social class, and asks whether class is still a significant feature of contemporary society. You should gain a sense of the different approaches to social class, and how these build on but go beyond the classical Marxist and Weberian perspectives. You should also be able to understand the substantive issues that surround the debates over wealth and poverty in industrialised societies.
On the basis of a network analysis of interlocks among the largest Canadian corporations, this paper examines the restructuring of finance capital between 1976 and 1986, a time of great flux in the structure of capital, both internationally and in Canada. Results indicate a shift away from the relatively depersonalized system of `polyarchic financial hegemony' - prevalent during the post-war boom era - towards a `holding system' of family-controlled enterprise groups, the largest of which are self-contained financial-industrial complexes whose members are linked by complicated patterns of intercorporate ownership and capital allocation. The increasingly internationalized - and particularly continental - character of Canadian-based finance capital points to the consolidation of a circuit of transnational finance capital that expresses Canada's specific location in the global economy.
Use of the concept of class in sociology has come under three types of attack: that it contains residues of an unacceptable Marxist holism or otherwise lacks explanatory power; that it is an essentially contested and, therefore, ambiguous term and, that it is decreasingly relevant to contemporary social conditions. This article argues that all three criticisms are mistaken and have only become possible because of the survival of economistic thinking in both the Marxist and Weberian mainstream traditions in sociology. Class analysis needs to be rethought in Durkheimian terms as an externally constraining social, not economic, fact. Such an approach entails recognition of the role of money circulation as a collective representation through which the social division of labour is framed and classified. It is argued that this approach can be adopted without conceptual ambiguity, is consistent with existing research on the `impersonal possession' of private and public capital and complements the enduring contributions of existing class theories.
If `class' is defined in terms of the economic power (or lack of it) attaching to different roles through their relation to the processes of production, distribution and exchange, then the number of classes in a society is a function of the number of dividing-lines in its social space which can be so drawn as to mark qualitative differences between sets of similarly positioned roles. These differences are defined neither by income nor by employment status as such, but by one or more of the three functionally equivalent criteria of ownership, control and marketability. From this approach, it follows that the number of classes in contemporary British society is seven; and although this schema poses (like any other) a number of practical difficulties in assigning the incumbents of particular roles to their appropriate classes, it can help to clarify, and perhaps to resolve, several problems in current stratification research.
The Australian researchers offer one apparently damning criticism of Social Class in Modern Britain. Our treatment of the British survey findings on class identity are 'the height of sociological naivety', since we 'blandly inform readers' that social class identities have retained their salience, 'without any apparent reflection as to [the] veracity' of these data. Our results are merely 'an artefact of the design of [the] survey rather than an accurate reflection of the prevailing patterns of social identities in British society'. An alternative research strategy, 'making discursively available to . . . respondents other sources of identity formation', confirms that, in the Australian context, 'the relative salience of class as a source of social identity is . . . minimal'. In our defence we would submit that nowhere do we claim 'class is . . . the only category of subjective importance for Britons'. We simply maintain that (contrary to the weight of then prevailing academic opinion ) 'people's perceptions of social class are [still] sufficiently concrete to enable them to see this as a possible source of social identity' (Marshall et al. 1988:147). Or, again, that 'class is readily available as a source of social identity to most people' (Marshall et al. 1988:155). Even these more modest conclusions are but cautiously proferred. Thus, we explicitly concede that 'survey research [in general] is not the most appropriate vehicle for investigating the importance of different frames of reference in everyday life', and that our question about reference groups in particular 'is a fairly blunt strategy for unearthing the subtleties of social identities' (Marshall et al. 1988:148-49). Our reflections as to the veracity
The search for a new international economic order has become a fashionable issue. But even the idea of an economic order has scarcely been spelt out clearly. Usually the present crisis is identified as a ‘disorder’ of the world economy. This hypothesis hides the reality, analysed in this article, that on the contrary, the crisis is a restoration of capitalist order.
Social security spending accounts for almost 30 per cent of public expenditure and is projected to reach £74.7 billion in 1992-93. Almost half of this spending goes to the elderly. The cost of social security to the elderly has grown steadily in the post-war period, and will continue to grow given current policy, as the number of elderly people increases. The implied tax burden on those of working age will grow even more quickly than spending, unless the basic state pension is allowed to continue dropping relative to wages, as the number of those of working age, relative to the number of pensioners, declines in the next century.
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