Search

Through a brief examination of neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian arguments it is demonstrated that the class nature of the new middle class has yet to be established. The paper goes on to show that as well as differences arising out of material conditions (i.e. class differences), inequalities based on expectations of entitlement or norms are also significant in capitalist society. Weber's treatment of status has not encouraged an adequate understanding of the concept, and an alternative is outlined. The paper then argues that the differences between the so-called new middle class and the working class are reasonably understood on a number of criteria as differences between status groups which form part of a single class. Not only does this approach remove a number of difficulties from accounts of the salariat, it also helps explain the different political alignments of social collectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Braverman and his followers have been useful and influential in reviving a sociology of work. However as well as stimulating debate, the Braverman model has also created impediments to further analysis. This paper discusses some of these limitations and argues that, in part, they result from a particular reading of Marx which neglects crucial Marxian categories. In part, they result from weaknesses and ambiguities in Marxian theory. The second part of the paper focuses on the concept of control, and makes a plea for a revival of interest in the pre-Braverrnan sociology of the workplace. It is suggested that such work conjoined with that of recent theorists provides a more adequate basis for theory of capitalist labour processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary focuses on the article, Might Britain Be a Meritocracy?, by Peter Saunders, published in the 1995 issue of Sociology. The model of social mobility under conditions of perfect meritocracy used in Saunder's paper assumes that all the service-class fathers in Goldthorpe's sample have IQ greater than those of all the fathers in the other classes. This commentary has shown that if, as seems likely, this assumption is incorrect, the consequence is that a model which assumes meritocractic recruitment to the service class predicts a percentage of sons of service-class fathers as attaining service-class occupations, which is smaller than the actual percentage as observed by Goldthorpe. Put simply, if the crucial assumption is incorrect, and hence the mean IQ of the service-class fathers is less than 123, a suitably amended version of Saunder's model demonstrates that many of the sons of service-class fathers do not merit the service-class occupations that they have attained. The model presented in this commentary is, like Saunder's model, a crude and over-simplistic one. The empirical estimates of the mean IQ of the various classes presented in this commentary are also flawed, since they are based on an unrepresentative sample that did not use the class categories used by Goldthorpe and Saunders.

This paper argues (a) that some of the present difficulties experienced by the sociology of development can be overcome by a macro comparative historical focus on the qualitative differences between the long term development of the capitalist centre and periphery, as well as on the strikingly different developmental trajectories to be seen within the third world; (b) that Marxism in general, and the dependency approach in particular, although more suitable than alternative paradigms for such a historical comparative task, present certain limitations that can only be dealt with by the creation of new tools for the study of the non-economic spheres (particularly the political). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN a recent paper, Berger et al argue that traditional concepts of honour and reputation have been eroded as a consequence of subjective adaptations to modem industrial society. However, historical analysis of English libel laws suggests that honour and reputation are ideological elements whose contents are broadly specified by distinct modes of production. Thus feudal honour was an aristocratic class ideology which was necessarily transformed by the rise of commodity relations, Moreover, subsequent commodification of honour in English law derives from and reflects the emergence of capitalist forces rather than more general forces of modernization. The corollary of this observation is that in modern socialist laws, honour and reputation differ substantially from the parallel concepts in English and United States law, strongly reflecting a specifically socialist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two current approaches to the study of white-collar unionism are identified: a) the 'sociological' approach, which relates patterns of white-collar unionism to the class situation of white-collar workers, b) the 'industrial relations' critique, which rejects the association of class situation and union activity and argues instead that job regulation is the crucial independent variable. Whilst the approach developed in this paper is firmly within the `sociological' tradition, I argue that the neo-Weberian class analysis from which this tradition is derived gives an incomplete understanding of the location of the `white- collar' or `new middle' class in the class structure of advanced capitalist society. I outline an alternative strategy for the analysis of the `white-collar' class situation, drawn from Marxian principles. The essential ambiguity of the white-collar class situation is stressed, and this ambiguity is then related to patterns of white-collar representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]