Erik Olin Wright

Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century—representative democracy plus technobureaucratic administration—seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. “Democracy” as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices. Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal, ensuring that all citizens benefit from the nation’s wealth. The Right of the political spectrum has taken advantage of this apparent decline in the effectiveness of democratic institutions to escalate its attack on the very idea of the affirmative state. The only way the state can play a competent and constructive role, the Right typically argues, is to dramatically reduce the scope and depth of its activities. In addition to the traditional moral opposition of libertarians to the activist state on the grounds that it infringes on property rights and

THE GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS A Comparative Study of the United States, Sweden, and Australia

The general-case glass ceiling hypothesis states that not only is it more difficult for women than for men to be promoted up levels of authority hierarchies within workplaces but also that the obstacles women face relative to men become greater as they move up the hierarchy. Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not simply present across levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically, this implies that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to men should decline with the level of the hierarchy. This article explores this hypothesis with data from three countries: the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The basic conclusion is that while there is strong evidence for a general gender gap in authority—the odds of women having authority are less than those of men—there is no evidence for systematic glass ceiling effects in the United States and only weak evidence for such effects in the other two countries.

Race, Class, and Income Inequality

The basic thesis of this paper is that class, defined within the Marxist tradition as common position within the social relations of production, mediates racial differences in income returns to education. That is, class position is viewed as a determinant of the extent to which education can be transformed into income, and thus it is hypothesized that much of the commonly observed racial difference in returns to education is a consequence of the distribution of racial groups into class categories. The results of the study strongly confirm this perspective: the differences in returns to education between black and white males largely disappear when the regression equations are run within class positions.

Varieties of Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure

IT has often been remarked that while class is perhaps the pivotal concept within Marxist theory, Marx himself never provided a systematic definition of class. The one chapter in Capital devoted to such an analysis breaks off after only two pages. There are numerous passages elsewhere in Capital, and in other works, where Marx does present many of the elements of a rigorous definition of class, but nowhere does there appear a sustained theoretical discussion in which all these

The Transformation of the American Class Structure, 1960-1980

This study explores a series of predictions concerning the likely changes in the American class structure in the 1970s made by Wright and Singelmann in their work on proletarianization. They argued that, in a period of economic stagnation such as occurred in the 1970s, there should be an acceleration of the process of proletarianization and a decline in the expansion of managerial and semiautonomous employee (or expert) locations in the class structure. These changes should occur both because of an intensification of proletarianization within economic sectors and because of decline in the shift of employment into the relatively less proletarianized sectors such as the state. On the basis of the data used in this study, none of these predictions is supported. Indeed, the evidence indicates a decisive acceleration of the growth of managerial class locations in the 1970s and a clear deproletarianization within and across economic sectors. These findings are interpreted as a result of two principal factors: the internationalization of American class relations during the 1970s and the effect of technological and organizational changes in production on clases in the United States.

Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias

This address explores a broad framework for thinking sociologically about emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures, especially capitalism. The framework is grounded in two foundational propositions: (1) Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social structures. (2) Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing. An emancipatory social science responding to these propositions faces four broad tasks: specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions; using these moral principles as the standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions; developing an account of viable alternatives in response to the critique; and proposing a theory of transformation for realizing those alternatives. The idea of “real utopias” is one way of thinking about alternatives and transformation.

THE SHADOW OF EXPLOITATION IN WEBER'S CLASS ANALYSIS

This analysis has two basic objectives: First, to understand as precisely as possible the inner structure of Webers concept of class, its similarities and differences from Marxs concept, and its relationship to the problem of exploitation; second, to use this interrogation of Webers work to defend the importance of the concept of exploitation for sociological theory. To understand the foundations of Webers class analysis one must look beyond his most synoptic treatments of class in Economy and Society and see how his concept of class is intimately linked to his investigations of the broad problem of rationalization in modern society. Class, in these terms, is the way economic power is distributed when economic action is organized to the greatest degree in an instrumentally-rational manner The problem of exploitation-the extraction of labor effort from workers-is treated, in this framework, primarily as a problem of technical efficiency and economic rationality in creating work incentives and effective discipline. This conceptualization leads to a relatively impoverished understanding of the nature of antagonistic interests generated by class relations. IF THEORETICAL frameworks are identified as loudly by their silences as by their proclamations, then one of the defining characteristics of class analysis in the Weberian tradition is the virtual absence of a systematic concept of exploitation. Nothing better captures the central contrast between the Marxist and Weberian traditions of class analysis than the difference between a class concept centered on the problem of life chances in Weber and a concept rooted in the problem of exploitation in Marx. This is not to say that Weber completely ignores some of the substantive issues connected to the problem of exploitation. For example, Weber, like Marx, sees an intimate connection between the nature of property relations in capitalism and the problem employers face in eliciting high levels of effort from workers. But he does not theorize this issue in

A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure

At the heart of the recent resurgence of Marxist theorizing on the problem of class has been what might be termed the &dquo;embarrassment&dquo; of the middle class. For all of their disagreements, all Marxists share a basic commitment to a polarized abstract concept of class relations. Yet, at least at first glance, the concrete class structures of contemporary advanced capitalist societies look anything but polarized. l This empirical evidence of a large middle class has provided critics of Marxism with one of their principal arguments against Marxist class theory. In response, a variety of solutions to the problem of the middle class have been proposed in the recent Marxist debates.

The Relative Permeability of Class Boundaries to Cross-Class Friendships: A Comparative Study of the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway

The structural analysis of classes can be divided into the analysis of class locations and the analysis of permeability of boundaries separating those locations. Marxist analysis of class structure has been primarily concerned with the first of these while Weberian class analysis has focused on the second. We attempt to combine a Marxist structural class concept, which views class locations in capitalist societies as structured by exploitation based on property relations, authority relations and expertise, with the Weberian concern with the ways lives of individuals traverse the boundaries of that structure. We examine patterns of friendship ties across class boundaries in four contemporary capitalist societies: the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway. Three empirical conclusions stand out: (1) The property-based class boundary is the least permeable of the three exploitation dimensions; (2) the authority-based class boundary is significantly more permeable than the expertise-based boundary; and (3) patterns of inter-class friendships are largely invariant across these four countries.

The Permeability of Class Boundaries to Intergenerational Mobility Among Men in the United States, Canada, Norway and Sweden

We explore the differential permeability of three class boundaries-the boundaries determined by property, authority and expertise-to intergenerational mobility among men in four developed capitalist economies: the United States, Canada, Norway and Sweden. We conclude: (1) In all four countries, the authority boundary is the most permeable to intergenerational mobility; (2) in the two North American countries, the patterns of permeability of class boundaries are broadly consistent with the expectations of neo-Marxist conceptualizations of class-the property boundary is the least permeable, followed by the expertise boundary, and then the authority boundary; (3) in the two Scandinavian countries, especially in Sweden, the property and expertise boundaries do not differ significantly in their degree of permeability; (4) the class boundary between workers and capitalists is less permeable than would be predicted from a strictly additive model of the permeability of the three dimensions of the class structure (property + authority + expertise); and (5) in the United States and Canada, the patterns of class boundary permeability to mobility are similar to the patterns of permeability to friendship and crossclass marriages, while mobility patterns in Norway and Sweden differ from friendship