Gordon Marshall

Social class in modern Britain

List of tables Preface Social class and social inequality When is a social class? Constructing the Wright classes Class formation and social mobility The structure of class processes The moral order of a capitalist society Making and unmaking class consciousness Goodbye to social class? Class politics Conclusion Bibliography Appendix - technical details of the British survey Coda - constructing the Goldthorpe classes Index

The Promising Future of Class Analysis: A Response to Recent Critiques

Class analysis has recently been criticised from a variety of standpoints. In this paper we argue that much of this criticism is misplaced and that, as a research programme, the promise of class analysis is far from exhausted. The first part of the paper clarifies the nature and purpose of class analysis, as we would understand it, and in particular distinguishes it from the class analysis of Marxist sociology. The second part then makes the case for the continuing relevance of class analysis, in our conception of it, by reviewing findings from three central areas of current research.

Against the odds? : social class and social justice in industrial societies

What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the distribution of abilities among the population. This fascinating, interdisciplinary study brings together recent developments in normative thinking about social justice with new empirical findings about educational attainment and social mobility. The result is a path-breaking contribution to our thinking about issues of class and justice, one that will be of interest to both sociologists and political theorists for many years to come.

Social class and underclass in Britain and the USA

It is commonly argued that the research programme of class analysis is undermined by its appararent neglect of large numbers of economically-inactive adults who do not form part of the analysis, but are affected by class processes, and form distinctive elements within any class structure. This paper disputes the claim that welfare dependents, the retired, and domestic housekeepers show distinctive patterns of socio-political class formation. Nor are the class-related attributes of the supposed underclass so distinct that they require separate treatment in a class analysis. Evidence which supports the orthodox strategy of sampling economically-active men and women is taken from national sample surveys of adults in Britain and the USA.

Presbyteries and profits : Calvinism and the development of capitalism in Scotland, 1560-1707

Part 1 Max Weber on the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: introduction the grounds for the study, the controversial Max Weber, an outline of the study, Weber and Scotland Webers protestant ethic theses, previous commentaries on Scotland and the Weber thesis, conclusion. Part 2 The Scots Calvinist ethic: sixteenth-century Scottish Calvinism introduction, a brief outline of Calvinism in Scotland, formal doctrine, commentaries and expositions, primitive Calvinism in sixteenth-century Scotland, seventeenth-century Scottish Calvinism introduction, commentaries and expositions, formal doctrine, neo-Calvinism in seventeenth-century Scotland, the doctrine of covenants and its implications. Part 3 The spirit of Scottish capitalism: traditionalism in economic activity Weber, Scotland, conclusion, the manufactory movement introduction, industrial policy, manufacturing enterprises in Scotland the Newmills Cloth Manufactory, Haddingtonshire early history, 1645 to 1681, the new company established, June 1681 to May 1684, capitalists at work, June 1684 to May 1703, labouring people, June 1684 to May 1703, the final years, June 1703 to March 1713, conclusion, colonies, credit, and coal colonial endeavours and the Darien company, banking, coal-mining. Part 4 The development of capitalism in Scotland, 1560-1707: Weber vindicated - the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism introduction, accounts of everyday practices, Weber, Marx, and vocabularies of motive, conclusion, the capitalist spirit and the genesis of modern Scottish capitalism, introduction, Webers comparative analyses, ends, means, and conditions of action. Appendix: manufacturing enterprises in Scotland, 1560-1707.

Goodbye to Supervisors

Liberal theories of post-industrial society and Marxist theories of the labour process tend to converge in their respective accounts of the place of supervisors in relation to putative changes in the organisation of work. A common conjecture is that supervisors are progressively being denuded of their powers and functions within industry. This paper uses data from a national sample survey of Britain to discuss the substance of the supervisory role in modern capitalist enterprises. The conclusion reached is that direct supervision in the workplace is not obviously in decline. The data also raise issues about the categories of employment status used in official statistics as well as those of the Goldthorpe class schema.

Constructing the (W)Right Classes

In Classes Erik Wright offers his second major contribution to neo-Marxist debate on social class. In effect, this new text incorporates both an autocritique of his earlier theory of contradictory class locations, and a new theory of such locations, together with empirical investigations based on this new theory using data drawn from Wrights own survey of the American population and a similar one conducted in Sweden. While we have some reservations about Wrights new model, we wish at the outset to compliment him on producing a highly lucid account, not only of his own ideas but of those of others who have influenced him. We must also register an interest since we are colleagues of Wrights in the International Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness which he has organised in his usual indefatigable manner since 1978.

Economic Restructuring: The British Experience

This article deals with certain aspects of British economic decline. After a short historical review of British economic performance, the phenomenon of deindustrialization is examined. Two major economic theories of deindustrialization are discussed alongside empirical evidence of the recent, rapid decline in Britains manufacturing base and its worsening trade performance in goods and services. The effects of multinational corporations are also briefly examined. In the final section of the article, attention is given to some of the social and political aspects of deindustrialization. In particular, evidence on poverty, unemployment, and living standards in contemporary Britain is discussed in relation to a sociological model that attempts to explain certain apparent paradoxes of British society. This model is an extension of T. H. Marshalls pioneering work on citizenship and social class and serves to highlight both the continuing stabilizing effects of the modern status order and the possibility of further clashes between the competing claims of citizenship and social class.

Distributional Struggle and Moral Order in a Market Society

This paper challenges the widely held view that novel and fundamental changes in the structure of social hierarchy have altered the basis of distributional conflict in modern Britain. Reference to nineteenth-century developments shows that sectionalism, egoism and privatism are not peculiar to the present economic recession. It is then argued that commentators on the left and right alike have oversimplified the relationship between the distributional order of societies, on the one hand, and the specific forms taken by distributional conflicts on the other. This means that the implications of the lack of a capitalist Sittlichkeit (morality or moral order) for social integration may be quite different from those commonly drawn in recent studies.

Proletarianization in the British Class Structure

Four different versions of the currently fashionable thesis of proletarianization in the class structure are identified. The central propositions of the argument are then tested empirically with reference to the class mobility experiences of a representative sample of men and women in Britain. An appropriate shift share analysis confirms that, though there are some differences between the sexes, a net upgrading rather than a degrading of the class structure has occurred. On these grounds the thesis of proletarian. . * * * * . . . lZatlOn 1S reJected as lt app les ln t nlS country. Just as the thesis of embourgeoisement formed the lynchpin for debates in class analysis during the affluent years ofthe early 1960s so has the argument about proletarianization of the class structure come to hold centre-stage during the recessionary 1 980s. Although one process is primafacie the inverse of the other there are several close similarities in the arguments themselves. Both were taken up seriously by sociologists after first having been popularized by non-academics or by academics writing in semi-popular format for a non-specialist audience. Both, indeed, were already public issues by the time they entered the arena of sociological discussion. In the former case the various folk-theories were organized about the commonly-held belief that Western societies were witnessing the demise of the class system and emergence of a mass consumer society. Similarly, the harbinger of sociological debates about proletarianization was a popular belief that economic problems in the advanced industrial societies had created a newly-impoverished class of subemployed and unemployed marginal workers and welfare dependents, and a working class whose traditional skills and work-practices had been undermined by the organizational imperatives of standardized and automated production. The British Journal of Sociology Volume XXXIX Number 4 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:31:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Proletarianization in the British class structure? 499 Because they were rooted in such diffuse and often polemical origins, subsequent sociological discussions of embourgeoisement and proletarianization were generally multifarious and mostly confused, more or less from the outset. It was not until the late 1960s, and the publication of the AfWuent Worker Study, that the theoretical foundations of the embourgeoisement thesis were clarified and its core propositions subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny. A similar adjudication in the ongoing debate about proletarianization has yet to be attempted. The present paper offers a modest contribution towards that end. It reports some of the findings from a recent national survey of class processes in Britain. These seem to the authors to bear directly on the issue of proletarianization and so help to clarify the parameters of the debate. They also suggest that, while there are many matters yet to be resolved, the central premise of the thesis is clearly flawed: the changing British class structure does not reflect a process of so-called . . . pro etarlanlzatlon .