Recast Dreams: Class and Gender Consciousness in Steeltown 9781442602908

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada
1. Men's Employment Glasses and Glass Consciousness: An Empirical Comparison of Marxist and Weberian Class Distinctions
2. Glass, Gender, and Expanding Conceptions of Class Consciousness
3. Feet in Both Gamps: Household Glasses, Divisions of Labour, and Group Consciousness
4. Gender Consciousness at Work: Modification of the Male Breadwinner Norm
5. "Down to Earth People": Revising a Materialist Understanding of Group Consciousness
Appendix: Notes on the Hamilton Families Questionnaire
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Recast Dreams: Class and Gender Consciousness in Steeltown

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Recast Dreams: Glass and Gender Consciousness in Steeltown

edited by D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

GARAMOND PRESS

To Angela, Lynn, Michael, Paul, Jan, Michelle, and Helena, who did more than their share in our households so the five of us could finish this book

© The Authors 1996 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Printed and bound in Canada Copy Editor: Robert Clarke Typesetting and Design: Robin Brass Studio Publisher: Peter Saunders Garamond Press 77 Mowat Avenue, Suite 403 Toronto, Ontario M6K 3E3 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title : Recast dreams : class and gender consciousness in Steeltown Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55193-007-3 (bound) ISBN 1-55193-001-3 (pbk.) 1. Sex role. 2. Class consciousness. 3. Working class. 4. Sexual division of labor. I. Livingstone, D.W., 1943- . II. Mangan, John Marshall, 1947- . HQ1075.R43 1996

305.3

C96-930752-7

Garamond Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canadian Studies Program, Department of Canadian Heritage.

Contents

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

vii ix 1

D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

1

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness: An Empirical Comparison of Marxist and Weberian Class Distinctions

15

D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

2 Class, Gender, and Expanding Conceptions of Class Consciousness

52

D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

3 Feet in Both Camps: Household Classes, Divisions of Labour, and Group Consciousness

72

D.W. Livingstone and Elizabeth Asner

4 Gender Consciousness at Work: Modification of the Male Breadwinner Norm

100

D.W. Livingstone and Meg Luxton

5 "Down to Earth People": Revising a Materialist Understanding of Group Consciousness

131

Wally Seccombe and D.W. Livingstone

Appendix: Notes on the Hamilton Families Questionnaire

195

Notes References Index

203 219 239

List of Tables 1.1

Proportional Frequency Distributions according to Weberian Class Schemes 1.2 Proportional Frequency Distributions according to Marxist Class Schemes 1.3 Correlation Matrix for All Class Schemes 1.4 Groups Most in Conflict: Multiple Response Analysis 1.5 Perceived General Character of Class Relations 1.6 Respondents' Class Position in Own Class Scheme by "Imposed Choice" Class Identity 1.7 Results of Logistic Regression of Class Identification according to Weberian Class Schemes 1.8 Results of Logistic Regression of Class Identification according to Marxist Class 1.9 Proportional Frequency Distribution Oppositional Class Consciousness Composite 1.10 Oppositional Class Consciousness (Mean Scores) according to Weberian Class Schemes 1.1 Oppositional Class Consciousness (Mean Scores) according to Marxist Class Schemes 2.1 Class Distributions for Hamilton, Ontario 2.2 Class Identity by Husband's Class Position 2.3 Hegemonic Class Consciousness by Husband's Class Position 2.4 General Oppositional Class Consciousness (Mean Scores) by Own Class and Spouse's Class 2.5 Gender-Referenced Oppositional Class Consciousness (Mean Scores) by Own Class and Spouse's Class 3.1 Household Class Distribution, 1984 3.2 Partners' Incomes by Household Employment Statuses 3.3 Selected Household Classes by Partners' Income 3.4 Domestic Division of Labour by Household Employment Statuses 3.5 Domestic Division of Labour by Selected Household Classes 3.6 Class Identity by Selected Household Classes 3.7 Opposition to Men's Priority for Jobs in Hard Times by Household Employment Statuses and Selected Household Classes 4.1 Survey Question: "In times of high unemployment, men should have priority for jobs." 4.2 Survey Question: "The proportion of women in traditionally male occupations should be increased through special training and hiring initiatives." 5.1 Oppositional Class Consciousness in Hamilton, 1984

32 33 35 36 37 40 41 42 45 47 48 61 63 64 66 69 80 83 84 86 87 91 93 118

119 150

Acknowledgements

C

lass. Gender. Class consciousness. Gender consciousness. In this book we attempt to take up the challenge - declared by many to be needed, but so far rarely attempted - of a conceptually and empirically grounded, integrated study of all four of these issues. Many people have encouraged our efforts, while warning us of the great difficulties involved. The book is a result of more than a decade of collaborative research on two endeavours - the Steelworker Families Project and Hamilton Families Project - both supported by research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our deepest gratitude goes to our co-investigators, June Corman, Meg Luxton, and Wally Seccombe, for their countless contributions and persistent commitment to completing the general project in spite many obstacles. This book is part of the project trilogy, which also includes Recasting Steel Labour (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1993), which deals with restructuring in the steel industry; and Working Class Families in Hard Times: Gender and Class Relations in Steeltown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming), which addresses the coping patterns of daily life. Many members of United Steelworkers Local 1005 at Stelco's Hilton Works and their spouses, as well as many members of the general Hamilton public, willingly participated in our surveys, in-depth interviews, and numerous other discussions, providing an exceptionally rich information base. The sample surveys were administered by Social Data Research of McMaster University and the Institute for Social Research at York University. Laszlo Gyongyossy, Ester Reiter, and Rhona Shaw assisted in the initial round of in-depth interviews. Elizabeth Asner conducted the first round of supplementary in-depth interviews. The most recent follow-up interviews were conducted by Belinda Leach, who is continuing to extend this data base in her own current research. Important technical and research assistance was also provided by Andrew Clement, Doug Hart, Niamh Hennessey, Matt Sanger, and other graduate research assistants at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). vii

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Numerous colleagues have commented on the respective chapters, including especially Joan Acker, Pat Armstrong, Doug Baer, Robert Brym, Val Burris, Bob Connell, Mike Donaldson, Alan Jeffrey, Mary O'Brien, Susan Prentice, Norene Pupo, Dorothy Smith, George Smith, Julian Tanner, and Erik Olin Wright. We also acknowledge Bernard Blishen, William Carroll, and Catherine Moore for their aid in clarifying correct use of the Blishen scale. Text processing has been assisted at various times by Vivian Chiang-Ako, Richard Cope, Jill Given-King, Karen Keohane, Kristine Pearson, Michelle Robidoux, and Lucy Tantalo. Peter Saunders of Garamond Press supported the idea of this book from its early days, and Robert Clarke provided superb copy-editing. Our thanks to them all. DWL/JMM - March 1996

viii

Contributors

Elizabeth Asner is a college professor of sociology at the University College of the Fraser Valley in Chilliwack, British Columbia. Her doctoral thesis at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, both drew upon and extended the original database compiled by the Hamilton Families Project. Her publications include "Farewell to the Angel in the House: Middle Class Families in Steeltown," in Voices: Essays on Canadian Families, edited by Marion Lynn. D.W. Livingstone is a professor and chair of the Department of Sociology in Education at OISE, University of Toronto, and one of the co-investigators on the Hamilton Families Project. His publications include: Class, Ideologies and Educational Futures', Social Crisis and Schooling, Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power, Working People and Hard Times\ Stacking the Deck', Public Attitudes Toward Education in Ontario 1994: The Tenth OISE Survey; and The Education-Jobs Gap. Meg Luxton is a professor in the Women's Studies and Social Science departments at Atkinson College, York University, in North York, Ontario, and one of the co-investigators on the Hamilton Families Project. She is the author of More than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women's Work and co-editor of Feminism and Political Economy and Through the Kitchen Window. J. Marshall Mangan is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, The University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, where he is cross-appointed to the Division of Policy Studies and the Division of Curriculum Studies. During and after his doctoral studies, he worked on the Hamilton Families Project as a research assistant and consultant. He is co-author, with Dr. Kenneth Banks, of The Company of Neighbours: Community * Development * Action * Research (forthcoming). Wally Seccombe is an associated instructor in the Department of Sociology in Education at OISE, University of Toronto, and one of the co-investigators on the Hamilton Families Project. His publications include A Millennium of Family Change and Weathering the Storm. ix

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Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

D

uring the post-World War II period of economic expansion, many unionized male workers in heavy industry came to think of themselves as part of the comfortable middle class, with secure, well-paying jobs. As John Porter (1961) observed, most people in Canadian society during that period thought of themselves as "middle class" in this comfortable sense. The men were unquestionably the primary breadwinners, and their wives' proper place was widely presumed to be in the home, caring for the needs of the male breadwinners and the children. This worldview of "middle-classlessness" and male prerogative is now a faded memory. Since the 1960s, women have entered the paid labour force in ever-increasing proportions. Female-led and dual-earner households are now more common than those with a sole male breadwinner (see Statistics Canada 1995b: 71, 88). The last bastions of male exclusivity have been corporate boardrooms and the shop-floors of heavy industry, but the realities of dual-earner living have now penetrated even the most male-dominated plants. Listen to a thirty-something male steelworker: 1

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There's quite a few guys in my age bracket and then there's those over forty. And it's like two different species. We sit around the lunch table and we're talking about who's got what on sale and where you get fabric softener and what kind of fabrics and what we're making for supper. And the above-forty crowd is looking at you like, you know, "What are you guys doing, my wife does all that." Two different animals. For us there's no problem changing diapers, washing floors, shopping and cooking. I love to cook. I do most of the cooking in the house. A lot of us are the same. We exchange recipes. So, I think the relationship between men and women in our age bracket has definitely no stereotypical roles. Everybody just does what has to be done, more or less, eh?

Most men may tend to exaggerate their domestic labour contributions, but this account indicates a shift away from the patriarchal views of the prior generation of industrial workers. The decline of assumptions of classlessness has been even more dramatic during the past generation of economic stagnation and downsizing. Class polarization has become much more evident, perhaps most graphically in the ever increasing numbers of unemployed and destitute people. Until the early 1980s, many workers in heavy industry could assume that they, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, had a "job for life" that would provide a secure future for their families. This assumption no longer holds. As a steel-mill industrial mechanic puts it: I think the classes thing sure is growing in Canada. There's a greater gap between the poor and the well-to-do. It's definitely starting to grow now. Before, everybody was kind of moderate, like there wasn't a real high end and low end. But now I'm really seeing that it's really starting to develop in Canada. I've seen guys lose their jobs, lose their homes and go down the tubes, have whole families splitting up, you know. I've seen that happen a lot, and you read about it in the papers all the time. The Restructuring of Paid and Unpaid Work

The expressions of change in perceptions of class and gender relations are surely connected with very substantial changes in the actual composition and distribution of paid and unpaid work in Canada over the past generation.1 In terms of paid employment, the major shift has undoubtedly been the increasing participation of women who have household partners. The growth of women's employment has been centred in clerical, sales, and service jobs, many of them low-paying, part-time, and temporary. The manufacturing sector, which had been typified by relatively high-paying, full-time, secure jobs, primarily for men, has experienced sharp declines in employ2

Introduction: The Chanzins. Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

ment. In aggregate terms, men's employment prospects have worsened considerably. While many women have continued to be relegated to service job ghettos, married women's employment prospects are now quite different than they used to be. The general occupational composition of the labour force has also undergone striking changes. The old middle of the occupational class structure is disappearing. The proportions of self-employed proprietors, especially farmers, have generally declined throughout the century. Over a third of the preWorld War II generation came from self-employed origins, but we are now a country of employees. In spite of a recent resurgence, less than 10 per cent of the paid workforce is now self-employed. A "new middle class" of professional and managerial employees has taken the place of the self-employed in the occupational class structure. However, there is recent evidence that this new middle class is itself declining in numbers and relative earnings (see Myles and Turegun 1994). Structural unemployment is growing. According to official statistics, the portion of the labour force actively seeking paid work and not finding any has been chronically around 10 per cent for over a decade, and a new category of "discouraged workers" may now be almost as large. In addition, the proportions of the employed labour force that can only find jobs that are beneath their qualifications and needs, the "underemployed," have also been growing quickly (see Livingstone 1996). The highest incidence of underemployment is generally among women and people of colour, especially recent immigrants. The bottom line is that, as a consequence of employers' "cheap labour" strategies, there are clearly not enough decent jobs in the Canadian economy for all the men and women who now need and seek them. These changes in paid work have had significant, if more gradual, consequences for unpaid work. Many women have been forced into a never-ending double day of labour. Not only have they been compelled to try to find paid employment in order for their households to make ends meet, but they have also generally been expected by their husbands to continue to do nearly all the important domestic labour, especially childcare. As women's earnings have become more critical for household survival, women's bargaining power with their husbands has increased, and husbands have become more willing to help out with what was previously regarded as "women's work." In young dual-earner families, men now do about a third of the housework by some estimates - a sizable increase over the previous generation (see Carey 1995; Clement and Myles 1994, ch.7). Some distinctions between men's and women's work are blurring. Negotiations over many households' sexual divi3

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sions of paid and domestic labour are altering both the gendered character of occupational class relations and class-specific forms of gender relations. 2 If she's now helping to "bring home the bacon/' he'd better be helping to cook it, or else both she and the household may be in danger of collapsing. Most of these tendencies in the restructuring of class and gender relations in Canada are similar to those documented in comparative studies of other advanced industrial market societies.3 But, perhaps most importantly, all of these societies have also seen a dramatic decline in upward economic mobility and a growing polarization of incomes (Myles and Turegun 1994). The illusion that everybody is living in, or is on the way to, the old "middle class" of comfortable consumption is no longer sustainable in any of these countries.4 The Hamilton Study This book documents and interprets how men and women in wage-earning families have made sense of the changes in class and gender relations over the past generation in Canada. The primary sources of evidence are studies beginning in the early 1980s, continuing for over a decade, and conducted in Hamilton, Ontario: "Steeltown," an urban Canadian setting widely regarded as a working-class city (see Appendix for details). From its origins in the early nineteenth century Hamilton has been an industrial centre, and since the late nineteenth century the city has been one of Canada's leading manufacturing centres, based primarily on its iron and steel industries (Weaver 1982). That industry has remained the driving force of the Hamilton economy throughout this century, accounting for over half of Canada's steel production during the postwar period (Anderson 1987). "Blue-collar" manufacturing jobs centred in steel have long been relatively highly represented and concentrated in the Hamilton workforce (Webber and Storper 1986). Accordingly, the historical development of the Hamilton working class has probably been more extensively documented than any other urban class grouping in the country (see Heron et al. 1981; Palmer 1979; Roberts 1978). In related studies, we and our colleagues have tried to record how steelworker families, as a core group of the Hamilton working class, have coped with the economic hard times of the 1980s in their paid workplace, household, and community relations (see Gorman et al. 1985, 1993; Seccombe 1987). In the late 1970s, employment in the Canadian steel industry was at an all-time high. Hamilton was the undisputed centre of the industry, with Stelco and Dofasco's downtown integrated plants producing most of the 4

Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

country's steel. A manufacturing job in Hamilton, particularly in the steel industry, appeared to offer both security and good wages - enough that male manual workers could continue to be the sole breadwinners in many wageearner families for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the steel industry has long been widely regarded to be one of the strongest preserves of traditional white working-class masculine identity and opposition to women trying to do a "man's job." But, with the first round of massive steel layoffs in the early 1980s, the conditions in Hamilton were severely challenged, among even the most secure core of industrial wage workers. Long-established employment relations were abruptly destabilized. Contemporary Hamilton is not simply an "industrial working-class town." Corporate and organized-crime interests have played dominant roles in shaping political and cultural life in the city (see Freeman and Hewitt 1979). While the majority of workers were in manufacturing and construction up to the late 1950s, the regional economy now has a more diversified sectoral structure; the majority of both male and female employees are in sales and services, and there are substantial numbers in both small business and professional-managerial occupations (Badenhorst 1977). However, the traditionally poor economic position of employed women in heavily industrialized regions persists. Hamilton women remain significantly more underrepresented in the manufacturing and construction sectors and have lower labour-force participation rates and lower incomes relative to men than do women provincially or nationally; and all of these relative indices worsened during the early 1980s (Csiernik and Cain 1985). Thus, while a wide array of household classes can be found there, Hamilton may represent a relatively conservative test case of class and gender patterns in contemporary Canada. Still, we based our choice of Hamilton as a site for the present study in part upon the expectation that such a setting would provide optimal conditions for the formation and expression of working-class consciousness. Our Hamilton Families Project began just after the longest ever Stelco strike, in 1981. We followed the transitions of the steel industry and the coping activities of steelworkers and their families until the mid-1990s.5 Throughout the period of the study Hamilton continued to experience the destabilizing impact of large plant layoffs, especially in the steel industry (Anderson 1987; Webber and Storper 1986). In 1983 the project team drew a representative, matched-pair sample of about 200 steelworkers and their wives or partners using the membership lists of Local 1005 of the United Steelworkers of America - lists that contained over 13,000 hourly rated workers at Stelco's Hilton Works. (Notably, 5

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in this random sample less than 2 per cent of the steelworkers were women.) At the time Stelco was the largest industrial worksite in the country, with the biggest union local. We gave respondents an extensive questionnaire covering their paid work, domestic labour, and community experiences as well as a wide array of social attitudes, and followed up, in 1984, with in-depth interviews of a subsample of over 40 respondents - one man or one woman in each household, with the respondent asked to provide information about his or her partner. 6 The interviews covered their coping strategies since the beginning of the layoffs and restructuring and provide further data on paid workplace, household, and community activities, attitudes on a variety of social and work-related issues, and other background and biographical variables (see chapter 2). We also did separate interviews with over 20 of the women who were among the female steelworkers hired at Stelco in 1980, as a result of the "Women Back into Stelco" Campaign. In 1984 we also drew a random sample of households containing two cohabiting adults of opposite sex, aged 18 to 65, from the general population of the greater Hamilton metropolitan area, stratified by census tract. The respondents to this survey (N - 798) answered a questionnaire containing many of the same questions as the prior steelworker questionnaire. One unusual feature of these questionnaires was that they went into much greater depth than most such surveys about both the actual working conditions and the workplace authority relations of respondents, as well as various facets of their social and political attitudes. Because of the specific design of the original questionnaires, we were able to assign individual respondents to class locations and measure their class and gender consciousness, with greater sensitivity than has usually been possible in the past. We continued to follow changes in the Hamilton steel industry over the course of the next decade, primarily via analysis of union and management documents and key-informant interviews. In 1994 we carried out follow-up in-depth interviews with a range of the people we had interviewed a decade earlier, including over 20 couples. We believe that this data base, which combines survey and statistical analyses, documentary analysis, case studies, and in-depth interviewing, offers a unique source of insight into how people at the previously secure core of industrial wage-earning households in this country have been making sense of changing class and gender relations. Our data base is limited, though, in two important ways. First, it includes only people living in co-resident heterosexual couples and thereby excludes a substantial variety of other types of households (Luxton and Gorman 1991). Clearly, co-resident heterosexual households are only one of several 6

Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

current household forms. In Canada during the 1980s, about two-thirds of all households were of the "husband-wife primary family" type. Other types all of which increased relative to the "husband-wife primary family" form were "lone parent primary families," which constituted nearly 10 per cent, "single-person households," which were around 20 per cent, and various households of "non-family persons," which made up the remaining 5 per cent (Statistics Canada 1990: 32). Certainly, a thorough analysis of household classes would consider all these forms, but our focus here is necessarily on clarifying patterns of relations among co-resident heterosexual primary family and non-family couples. While we feel this focus is justified by our main interest in changing gender and class relations within households, it also follows that none of our empirical generalizations about gender relations extend beyond co-resident heterosexual couples. Most evidently, the study excludes single-parent and singleperson households, because its primary interest was in class-specific gender relations in the spheres of paid workplace, the household, and the community. Also, in common with most household-based surveys, it underrepresents those "underclasses" of people without regular accommodations. The second limitation of our data base is that much of the empirical analysis may appear to be colour-blind. This is because the people of Hamilton in general, and steelworker couples in particular, were almost exclusively white in the early 1980s (Statistics Canada 1990). Indeed, because of the racist hiring practices of Stelco management (which are of course embedded in racist immigration policies and systemic discrimination against Aboriginal peoples), the Stelco workforce was almost entirely white and of Western European descent.7 As a consequence, a weakness of this study is its inability to show how the class and gender consciousness in this particular case is culturally specific and race specific. This factor has to be placed alongside the reality that in ethno-linguistic terms Canada has been one of the most heterogeneous countries in the world. As later chapters document, most Canadians have expressed greater ethnic/nationalist consciousness than class consciousness. But, as many Hamiltonians admit, their awareness of racial conflicts is often based more on accounts from external sources than on direct experience of ongoing substantial relations with groups of people of colour. This book, then, provides an account based on the changing class and gender consciousness of white co-resident heterosexual couples, a very large and important grouping but certainly not representative of the entire Canadian adult population. 7

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Conceptual Strands in the Analysis of Class Consciousness Theorizing about classes in advanced industrial societies has long been dominated by Marxist and Weberian approaches. In the first chapter we summarize the major types of class models currently associated with these two traditions and offer an extensive empirical comparison of the predictive capacities of respective Marxist and Weberian theories of class structure in distinguishing levels of class consciousness, as defined in traditional terms. Our Hamilton surveys contain enough measures to allow for a wide array of different class models and to adjudicate among them in their own terms, that is, by focusing on men's employment classes and on differences among men in expressions of class consciousness. Traditional conceptions of class consciousness have distinguished three general levels: identity, sense of conflict, and visions of the future. The identity level involves awareness of the existence of classes, images of the class structure, and personal identity in class terms. The sense-of-conflict level revolves around the extent to which people perceive classes in general, and their own class in particular, to have opposing interests and to act on those interests. Visions of the future of class relations may either accept current class structures or prefer more or less egalitarian alternatives. People deemed to have high levels of class consciousness express definite personal class identities, strongly support the interests of this class against those of another class, and hold a clear vision of future class relations. The Marxist terms in which these distinctions have been most fully developed presume that the bourgeoisie or capitalist class regards itself as the superior class. That class expresses a pervasive antipathy to workingclass demands and is firmly committed to maintaining a hierarchical class structure and market-based economy. Conversely, the proletariat or working class lives with at least a diffuse sense that it is the most exploited class. It opposes bourgeois owners' exploitative demands most effectively when it is organized in trade unions and its own political parties, and when it has the capacity, with revolutionary leadership, to overthrow capitalism and create a more egalitarian socialist regime, and ultimately a classless communist one. Our analysis of the classical models of class and class consciousness, when applied to working men as their traditional population of concern, confirms that there are significant empirical as well as conceptual differences among the models. But our major finding is that both Marxist and Weberian class models are remarkably similar in their capacity to predict traditional forms of class consciousness. Chapter 2 attempts to expand upon the findings of chapter 1. Marxist in-

8

Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

tellectuals have devoted a great deal of effort to rationalizing why the working class has generally failed to sustain a revolutionary fervour, either because of material inducements ("embourgeoisement"), poor organization, retrograde leadership, or bourgeois dominance or manipulation. Empirical researchers have conducted extensive surveys of various aspects of class consciousness, especially class identity, often discovering mixed patterns. But little attention has been paid to how people in subordinated class locations make sense of class relations in their own terms. This situation has arisen for a number of reasons. First, both theorists and empirical researchers of class consciousness have tended to treat the phenomenon generically, that is, as sex-blind and colour-blind. Second, they typically regard class consciousness as a linear sequence of levels or stages, with oppositional or visionary forms (that is, hegemonic or counterhegemonic class consciousness) attainable only after the achievement of a clear bourgeois (upper class) or proletarian (working-class) identity is achieved. Third, at least in classical Marxist formulations, class consciousness is considered to be determined primarily by the material conditions of objective class locations, ignoring any more complex mediations. Chapter 2 begins to address these concerns about the character of class formation by considering the possible contributions of both spouses within working couples to the constitution of each other's class consciousness. We propose an expanded conception of class consciousness, one including gender-referenced class consciousness, as well as the three aspects of general class consciousness discussed in chapter 1. Drawing on the survey of Hamilton couples, we identify the class positions of both men and women. Then, focusing on employed couples only, we examine the effects of both partners' class positions on both general and gender-referenced class consciousness. The results of this analysis confirm the continuing influence of men's class positions on both their own and their partners' general class consciousness, but they also suggest distinctive relations between employed women's own class positions and their gender-referenced oppositional class consciousness. Thus, chapter 2 argues for and applies an expanded conception of class consciousness, which begins to take account of gender and ethnic divisions and solidarity potentials across those divisions. We also explore the complex determination of multiple forms and sequences of class consciousness by historical and mediational factors.

9

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Gendered Class Structures and Gendered Consciousness Chapters 3 and 4 look at the relationships between forms of class and gender consciousness, beginning with the recognition that classical Marxist and Weberian theorizing about class relations has generally failed to take feminist challenges to class theory into anything more than perfunctory account. Feminist perspectives on class relations typically insist on comprehending both relations of production and reproduction (e.g, Delphy and Leonard 1986). That is, in advanced capitalist societies, life is constituted in two major spheres, the paid workplace and the household. Both class relations and gender relations are constituted in both spheres. Most male-centred class theorizing has been fixated on paid work relations - the point of production for Marxists, and the labour market for Weberians. One dismissive response to the increasing intrusion of women into paid work has been to argue that since men in the vast majority still maintain economic dominance in the household, empirical class analysis that only considers his occupational status remains adequate for the entire household on grounds of parsimony and predictive capacity (Goldthorpe 1983, 1984). Other class analysts have attempted to add women in to paid-work-centred analyses through the construction of various combinatorial models of household classes (Sorenson 1994). The most evident problem with most such models is that they have failed to take distinct account of differences in unpaid work in the household. Some models only include dual-earner households. Others conflate sole male-earner and dual-earner households. Still others impose a sex-blind criterion of definition by the higher status partner regardless of gender. In chapter 3, Livingstone and Asner develop a model of (co-resident heterosexual) household classes that begins to take systematic account of both partners' locations in paid and unpaid work relations. A number of feminist historiographic and ethnographic studies have begun to document the gender-specific character of class consciousness among both the capitalist and working classes, in household and community spheres.8 Our analysis asserts that unless models of the class structure incorporate profiles of work relations in both spheres, those models will fail to detect some of the most important asymmetries in class and gender relations. Women will never be able to engage fairly in the sphere of paid work as long as a highly disproportionate share of their labour remains hidden in the household. While household class models are necessarily more complex than male employment-centred ones, they appear to have more sensitive predictive capacity for the class consciousness of both men and women. 10

Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada

A more nuanced model of household classes serves to identify differences in class and gender consciousness better than models that ignore or conflate gender differences, and what we propose is an approach to identifying household classes that begins by recognizing, but not reifying, systematic power asymmetries between men and women in both paid workplace and household spheres. Chapter 3 thus develops a number of alternative ways of defining household classes and draws upon both quantitative and qualitative data in examining the implications of those conceptualizations. This view of the household class structure, it seems to us, has begun to reveal important distinctive patterns missed by prior production-centric and/or sex-blind combinatorial approaches. We find that dependency status has significant effects on household activities and social attitudes for both women and men in different household classes, and that to effectively explain the variations in some aspects of both women's and men's class and gender consciousness across households we need to look at the class positions of both partners. While the power asymmetries between men and women generally remain great in both spheres, Hamilton couples in all household classes do appear to have their collective feet and minds now guardedly but firmly planted in even the most historically sex-segregated preserves of both paid workplace and household camps. The substantial changes in the gendered distribution of work roles, increased economic empowerment of women, and the sustained presence of the women's movement have clearly provoked and interacted with changes in both women's and men's gender consciousness. There is now a rich and growing corpus of feminist critiques of the severe limitations of patriarchal modes of thought and malestream philosophies (e.g., Harding 1986; O'Brien 1981). Numerous empirical studies have documented differences and recent changes in men's and women's perceptions of their appropriate gender roles and gender-related political preferences (e.g., Boyd 1984). Some feminist writers have begun to conceptualize levels or types of gender consciousness in terms of such differences in perceived roles and political attitudes (e.g., Petchesky 1984; Rinehart 1992). In chapter 4 Livingstone and Luxton continue this line of inquiry by suggesting that an understanding of social consciousness from a Marxist feminist perspective can be explicitly based on an expanded conception of the capitalist mode of production, which recognizes the family household and the paid workplace as two equally important points of production (Seccombe 1980, 1993; Goldberg 1984: 76). They assert that class and gender relations in 11

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capitalist societies, as well as race and ethnic relations, are constituted through practices in three primary spheres of activity: paid workplaces, households, and communities. These spheres can be thought of as constituting a hierarchy of determination, such that paid workplace production relations tend to constrain the autonomy of household activities more than vice versa, while communities extending from both household and paid workplace spheres take up residual and more discretionary parts of people's time and energies. This in turn implies that - in addition to family householdbased relations - class-specific, gender-based changes in contemporary paid workplace relations are critical to understanding both women's resistance and the gender consciousness of women and men in contemporary capitalist societies. As a starting point for thinking about these changes, the authors suggest that it may be fruitful to think of gender consciousness along the lines of distinctions similar to those previously used to understand class consciousness, namely gender identity, sense of gender conflict, and visions of future gender relations. Any approach to conceptualizing and studying gender consciousness along these lines should, of course, be wary of making the same sorts of errors found in studies of class consciousness. Through an analysis based more upon the interview data than the statistical evidence from the Hamilton studies, the findings of chapter 4 show that white male steelworkers, widely regarded as occupying one of the strongest bastions of working-class masculinist ideology, strongly supported a general rhetoric of gender equality as well as giving formal support through their union to the campaign to hire women. However, many men continued to believe that steelmaking should be men's work and that men should be primary breadwinners. Those male steelworkers who were ambivalent about asserting the validity of the male breadwinner norm and those who, despite massive layoffs in Stelco, expressed support for women's equal right to scarce jobs tended to have had direct experiences of women's employment. As Livingstone and Luxton document, significant and often progressive changes are occurring in gender consciousness, even in prior male-chauvinist bastions like steel mills. But even more importantly, these findings underline the importance of continuing to develop not only gendered conceptions of the class structure but also more nuanced understandings of the mediational processes involved in the creation and change of both gendered class consciousness and class-specific gender consciousness.

12

Introduction: The Changing Context of Class and Gender Relations in Contemporary Canada Beyond Class Reductionism and Postmodernist Challenges

Our final chapter attempts to offer an overview of where subordinate-group consciousness of social differences, and the analysis of those differences, may be headed. In recent times conventional class analyses of contemporary society have come under withering critiques as anachronistic and irrelevant. Many intellectuals, including influential former Marxist thinkers, herald the death of the proletariat and class struggle in "postindustrial" society (Gorz 1982; Fukuyama 1992). Legions of postmodernist scholars celebrate the previously subordinated voices of women and people of colour but perceive little resonance in these popular discourses with any specific class issues.9 The most vitriolic attacks dismiss Marxist approaches for their class reductionism (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In chapter 5, Seccombe and Livingstone concur that orthodox Marxism is vulnerable to the charge of class reductionism, of viewing the world too narrowly through a class lens. But the death of class has been "greatly exaggerated," as the Hamilton working-class voices in our studies amply demonstrate. The appropriate response from a Marxist perspective to this valid critique is not to forego class analysis, but to develop a more inclusive materialist theory of group relations in contemporary societies. What is needed is a theoretical perspective that recognizes the irreducibility of sexual, racial, and generational differences as well as class differences. We suggest some specific reformulations of the classical Marxist theory of consciousness in this direction. There is little evidence of class reductionism in the worldviews of either the Hamilton population or the core of its working class. Class is rarely seen as the most central factor in social conflict. People typically see themselves in multidimensional terms (that is, in class, gender, race/ethnic, generational identities). As the case-study profiles in chapter 5 show, men and women within the shrinking core of the industrial working class often hold subtle and nuanced views of class and gender relations, mediated by different life histories and current situations. These dimensions of group consciousness need to be understood simultaneously. Both chapter 5 and the book as a whole try to reconceptualize group consciousness on the basis of materially grounded experience - and to move on from there to examine class and gender identities and political views, interactively, in a predominately white population. In doing this we attempt to set an example for a kind of grounded critical research on group consciousness that recognizes the complexities and difficulties of studying such a 13

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broad area of social life; and we hope that readers will gain a deeper understanding of how and why people everywhere are frequently recasting longstanding dreams about the places of men and women in paid and unpaid work.

14

1 Men's Employment Glasses and Glass Consciousness: An Empirical Comparison of Marxist and Weberian Class Distinctions

D.W. Livingstone and J. Marshall Mangan

I

f social classes exist in any political sense in contemporary societies (and the number of sceptics who deny their relevance is mounting), locations in a socially constructed class structure should be related in some discernible fashion to differences in expressions of class consciousness. This reasoning is grounded in a general epistemological perspective of "constructivist realism," a theoretical position that "recognizes both that there are 'deep' structures that constrain social practices and representations and that the practical perceptions and actions of agents contribute, via individual and collective struggles, to change or preserve these structures, to produce the facticity of the objective world" (Wacquant 1989: 173).1 As Marx put it, "Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past" (Marx 1977: 300). Ever since Marx made this observation, much of class theorizing and analysis has been effectively preoccupied with either class structures or class 15

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practices, rather than with their interaction. As Rosemary Crompton (1993) extensively illustrates, most post-World War II class analyses have focused either on developing conceptual class schemes and categorical aggregates or on documenting actual processes of class formation and collective action. Class-scheme approaches have tended to regard class consciousness as a derivation of an imputedly objective class structure, whereas class-formation approaches have generally been inattentive to the enduring deep structures that constrain subjective class relations. The intent of this chapter is to contribute to an exploration of the interaction between class structure and class consciousness through a limited but systematic comparison of the efficacy of a variety of class schemes in distinguishing local community patterns in the expression of class consciousness. More specifically, we will offer an empirical assessment of the discriminating power of several Marxist and Weberian class schemes with regard to some widely recognized dimensions of class consciousness (that is, general images of class relations, personal class identity, and oppositional class interests). The relationship between class structure and class consciousness has long been a central problematic within both the Marxist and the Weberian paradigms of social inquiry. Marx viewed the class struggle between owners and direct-producer classes as the primary driving force of history. He posited the formation of a revolutionary class consciousness among proletarian workers as an essential ingredient of the transformation from capitalism to socialism. For Weber, the very existence of social classes was contingent upon a process of identification among people with a common market situation, which could lead them to organize and act together to further their interests as a status group. Although Marxist and Weberian-based approaches to class analysis share an interest in the subjective understanding of class relations, and the consequences of those relations for class action, the differences in their theoretical and political agendas have frequently set them at odds. There are fundamental differences in Marx's and Weber's respective conceptions of the primacy of exploitation or domination in the constituting of classes and societies, the posited influences of determining structural factors versus contingent collective action, and the potential for a transformation of capitalism. They also differ regarding the persistent primacy of class determinacy in social relations, as against a more variable pluralist view of social causation, and in the relative importance they assign to productive and market relations in delineating classes. Their current interpreters differ profoundly over the possibility of convergence between the Marxist and Weberian approaches to 16

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

class (e.g., Bums 1987; Crompton 1993; Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992; Wenger 1987). Our primary interest here will be in class theorists who have developed class schemes starting explicitly from either a Marxist or a Weberian basis, and with a focus on the sphere of employment. Unfortunately, neither Marx nor Weber elaborated class-structural schemes in explicit terms. 2 Adherents of both Marxist and Weberian perspectives whose main research interest has been to distinguish class groupings have generated a variety of class typologies and status scales. Much attention has been devoted to posing solutions to "the boundary problem," that is, the specification of dividing lines, especially between middling or intermediate groups with distinct enough attributes to warrant the label "class," "class fraction," or "status group" (see Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Gilbert and Kahl 1982; Mackenzie 1982; Matras 1984). Theorists of class structure have typically given only the most perfunctory attention to either conceptualizing class consciousness or studying its expressions in its own right. In striking contrast, students of class consciousness, who also typically espouse Marxist or Weberian perspectives, have generally displayed an indifference to how different structural constraints distinguish the expressions of class consciousness among the specific social groups they focus on from the expressions of those in other class locations (e.g., Bulmer 1975; Fantasia 1988; Lasch 1984; Leggett 1968). Some of these researchers differ greatly on how to conceptualize and study class consciousness (Jackman and Jackman 1983; Marshall 1982; Oilman 1987; Wolpe 1970). A balanced empirical assessment of the interaction of class structure and class consciousness should attempt to avoid a priori biases towards "reading off either the extent of class consciousness from an imputed class structure or the existence of classes from expressions of particular dimensions of class consciousness. Such an assessment requires at least four conditions: (1) a sample including significant numbers of people in all posited structural class positions; (2) adequate empirical measures of two or more distinct class schemes; (3) indicators of widely recognized dimensions of class consciousness, which are presented in their own right, prior to the analysis in conjunction with structural categories; and (4) tests of association that are sufficiently sensitive to both patterns of central tendency and dispersion in class structure/class consciousness relations. Although the Hamilton Families Project could not completely fulfil these requirements, it was able to come closer than most previous studies. Our focus in this chapter is on adult male respondents in the employed workforce, the group that has been the traditional population of interest in 17

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most Marxist and Weberian class schemes. In fact, these class maps have tended to be either avowedly male-centred or sex-blind (e.g., Carchedi 1977; Erickson 1992), in spite of the starkly sex-segregated character of employment categories in advanced capitalist societies (Armstrong and Armstrong 1983; Crompton 1993). Recent gender-specific class analyses, including those based on the Hamilton Families sample, have documented that women express distinctive patterns of class consciousness, that there are different relations between employment class and class consciousness for employed women and men, and that employment classes are quite inadequate to account for the class consciousness of many women (see Anderson 1994; Crompton 1993). Nevertheless, a comparative assessment of the relevance of established class schemes can most fairly begin by examining these schemes through their own primary empirical terms of reference. The complexity of the issues involved in comparative assessment of interaction between the class schemes and class consciousness recommends proceeding a step at a time and, therefore, excluding women from this preliminary analysis. Measuring Class Position and Class Consciousness

The class schemes selected for empirical assessment here include orthodox interpretations of Marx's and Weber's original formulations (Giddens 1973; Loren 1977; Meiksins 1986), several internationally prominent neo-Marxist variants (Carchedi 1977; Poulantzas 1975; Wright 1978, 1985; Wright and Shin 1988), and one developed in Canada (Livingstone 1983). In addition, we will examine a prominent neo-Weberian class scheme (Bourdieu 1979, 1984, 1987), and the two dominant Canadian examples of socio-economic stratification scales based on Weberian criteria (Blishen 1967; Blishen and others 1976, 1982, 1987; Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts 1977). The Hamilton Families interview schedule was designed to provide an exceptional level of detail regarding criteria for these respective class schemes and thus offers an opportunity to perform more extensive and precise comparisons than has generally been possible in prior studies. The most widely recognized aspects of perceptions of class are probably images of the class structure and personal class identity. In addition, most class consciousness researchers recognize the existence of opposed class interests, at least between polar class positions. The Hamilton Families survey probed all three commonly recognized dimensions of class consciousness: class imagery, class identity, and oppositional consciousness. We also recognize, as do most class analysts, that the relations between class position or situation and class consciousness are influenced by a number of interacting 18

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

or mediating factors (see Burris 1987). Without denying the importance of such factors, our focus here will be on the basic relationship between class positions and class consciousness. We will explore the particular capacities of both Marxist and Weberian-based class schemes to discriminate patterns in these different aspects of class consciousness. Marxist and Weberian Class Schemes During the 1980s we saw the development of a substantial literature devoted to conceptual comparisons of class schemes. Many contributions focused on Marxist variants, either from a neo-Marxist vantage point (Carter 1985; Cottrell 1984; Wolff and Resnick 1986; Wright 1980), or from more convergent or critical Weberian perspectives (Clegg et al. 1986; Parkin 1979). Comparative discussions of Weberian-based socio-economic status scales have also been frequent (e.g., Blishen and Carroll 1982; Powers 1982). Comparative discussions of both specific Marxist and Weberian class schemes also increased (e.g., Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Barbalet 1987; Burris 1989; Grabb 1984, 1990; Waters 1991; Wiley 1987). Val Burris (1987: 87), for example, provocatively concludes: "The difference between contemporary Marxist (or neo-Marxist) theory and Weberian theory [of class relations] has become more a matter of the relative weight accorded to different explanatory concepts than a qualitative difference between distinct modes of explanation.... It is no longer possible to draw a sharp line between opposing theoretical schools." Rather than presuming such a synthesis here, we will offer synopses of the selected Marxist and Weberian class schemes, with some brief comment on the conceptual similarities and differences among them. Marx's Original Class Scheme As Marx saw it, the primary class dynamic of the capitalist mode of production was the continual reorganization of separated units of social production by competing private employers, in order to appropriate unpaid surplus value from hired wage labourers, who create increasing amounts of vendible commodities per unit of labour time. Marx discerned a number of basic historical tendencies in capitalism's specific form of surplus extraction relevant to constituting class relations: the concentration and centralization of enterprises; the commodification of all forms of labour power, and the associated growth of specialized skill divisions within the workshop; and the emergence, with the increasing scale of enterprises, of "a special kind of wagelabourer" whose exclusive function was the supervision of other workers. 19

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However, his own explicit identification of classes on the basis of the specific economic form of capitalism was never completed (Marx [1867] 1967: 88485). Later Marxist and non-Marxist scholars alike have selectively elaborated on his general remarks concerning central tendencies into a variety of detailed formal class schemes. Certainly, the form of surplus extraction and distribution has become considerably more complex since Marx's day, with the proliferation of joint stock companies, extended authority hierarchies, and growing proportions of workers in circulation and state sectors rather than directly engaged in producing commodities. Within the Marxist paradigm, analysts have variously emphasized the importance of property, power, surplus labour, or composite criteria as primary determinants of the class structure of advanced capitalism (Wolff and Resnick 1986). The most common distinction is between orthodox Marxists, who focus on the general exploitation of all wage labourers by capitalist owners, and neo-Marxists, who attend to more detailed divisions of labour among employees to distinguish "middle-class" positions. At the most abstract level of analysis of the capitalist mode of production, Marx recognized two fundamental groups: wage labourers or proletarians, who are dispossessed of the means of production and compelled to sell their labour power to capitalist enterprise, subordinating themselves to formal capitalist control within the production process in order to obtain means of subsistence; and capitalists or bourgeoisie, who own the means of production and are obliged to hire wage labourers and organize their co-operative labour process in order to appropriate the surplus product as profits. He also generally recognized the continuing existence of a third distinct class, the petty bourgeoisie, who own their own means of production without employing paid labour and who, through working for themselves, appropriate their own surplus labour in the subsumed form of capital (Marx [1867] 1967: 875-76). For much of the past century, orthodox Marxist class analysts have stressed the basis of capitalist exploitation in the ownership or dispossession of the means of production. Various Marxist scholars have recently reasserted the primacy of this tripartite class scheme in critical reaction to neoMarxist attempts to divide the proletariat into several distinct class groups (Graham 1989; Loren 1977; Meiksins 1986, 1987a, 1987b). Neo-Marxist Class Schemes What distinguishes "neo-Marxist" approaches to class analysis is a concern with both appropriation (social relations in which economic resources are extracted and distributed) and domination (social relations in which the activi20

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

ties of one person are controlled by another). As Erik Olin Wright (1985: 300) puts it: workers "are systematically related to the capitalist class not only via the exchange relation in the market, but via the domination relation within production. Classes are thus neither simple categories defined by the social relations which distribute economic resources, nor by the relations through which one group dominates another; they are defined by those appropriation relations which are simultaneously domination relations." Neo-Marxist class schemes vary primarily in terms of their differential emphases on aspects of domination relations within production, as a brief review of selected theorists of this school will illustrate. Poulantzas. Nicos Poulantzas (1975) begins with the orthodox Marxist distinction between an exploiting and an exploited class at the abstract level of the capitalist mode of production. But he argues that a more complex amalgam of "economic" ownership relations with relations of "political" and "ideological" domination, largely within the workplace, defines class positions in concrete social formations. He suggests that the bourgeoisie has expanded to include managerial personnel who possess the means of production in the sense of making major resource allocation and investment decisions. Between the bourgeoisie and proletariat stands a new petty bourgeoisie, distinguished from the bourgeoisie by its lack of any real ownership and from the true proletariat by either performing unproductive (or non-material) labour or dominating supervisory or intellectual labour. These criteria reduce the proletariat to those engaged directly in the manual transformation of raw materials into finished products. While Poulantzas recognizes the "old petty bourgeoisie" in terms of economic ownership, he sees great similarities between the old and new petty bourgeoisies in terms of political and ideological relations. Thus, while he also observes the occurrence of further class fractions, Poulantzas identifies four basic classes in advanced capitalist formations: capitalists, the old petty bourgeoisie, the new petty bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Carchedi. Guglielmo Carchedi (1977, 1983, 1987) bases his class scheme on three dichotomous criteria: ownership or non-ownership of the means of production, performance or extraction of surplus labour, and the functions in practice of the "global capitalist" or the "collective worker." Like Poulantzas, Carchedi recognizes an expanded bourgeoisie, including upper managers, which exercises real ownership of the means of production, appropriates surplus value from subordinate workers, and performs the global capitalist function. Unlike Poulantzas, he regards not only wage labourers 21

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who create material commodities but also all workers who do not own means of production, and who perform surplus labour and have that surplus labour expropriated, as part of the proletariat. In addition to the traditional petty bourgeoisie, Carchedi sees a large new middle class arising as a result of capitalist development - positions in complex organizations composed of a mixture of the functions of capital and labour. While he recognizes several aspects to these functions and their differential expression in different professional and supervisory jobs (surveillance and co-ordination, production and extraction of surplus labour), Carchedi concludes that all those who simultaneously exploit and are exploited share a common "new middle class" position. Hence, for Carchedi, the basic classes are the bourgeoisie, the traditional petty bourgeoisie, the new middle class, and the proletariat. Wright. In his early work, generated directly as a critique of Poulantzas, Erik Olin Wright (1978) began from the fundamental Marxian three-class distinction, placed the petty bourgeoisie outside the basic polarity between capitalists and the proletariat, and added "contradictory class locations" between each pair of original class positions. More recently Wright (1985) critiques his own prior work as being based primarily on relations of domination rather than exploitation, and he asserts that it is possible to exploit others not only through real economic ownership but also through the effective control of organization or skill "assets." On the basis of these criteria and the assumption of three levels of control for each type of asset, Wright generates a map containing 12 distinct class strata. (See Wright 1985: 88, for a concise graphic presentation.) These class positions are: bourgeoisie, small employers, andpefty bourgeoisie (based on ownership of the means of production); expert, semi-credentialled, and uncredentialled managers; expert, semi-credentialled, and uncredentialled supervisors; and expert non-managers and semi-credentialled workers (all based on the extent of control of organization and/or skill assets); and proletarians: Thus, Wright's new class schema has become even more complex, especially in the differentiation of the "new" middle class or contradictory class locations within exploitation relations. This scheme is not specific about a hierarchical ordering among the intermediate classes, except to note that the central contradictory location within capitalism is constituted by managers (Wright 1985: 89). For the purposes of our empirical investigation, we have ordered the Wright categories as listed above, in a sequence that gives priority first to property relations, then to organizational assets, and finally to skill assets.3 22

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

Livingstone. The class scheme developed by D.W. Livingstone (1976, 1983, 1985) and his colleagues at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education similarly begins with consideration of both appropriation and domination aspects of production relations. The major criteria are ownership of the means of production and exercise of control over the labour process in terms of authority over others and of discretion in the technical design of production. Livingstone identifies capitalists by their exploitation of wage labourers through ownership of the means of production, and they are internally differentiated by the extent of their control over the labour process. He distinguishes corporate capitalists, who individually or collectively hold controlling ownership of large enterprises and exercise ultimate control over hired personnel, as well as over resource investment and product design policies, from small employers, who own sufficient private means of production to hire wage labourers to work along with them, and from rentiers, who live off stock investment or rental income without more direct participation in running the workplace. At the other class pole within production relations, he identifies proletarians by their engagement in wage labour without proprietary claims beyond their own labour power, and with no real control over either other workers or the technical design of their work. He distinguishes between industrial proletarians, who immediately produce vendible material commodities and are therefore directly exploited, and non-industrial proletarians, who are engaged in recording or distributing goods and services. In between capitalists and proletarians, there are several other class locations. Most distinct are the self-employed or petty bourgeois class, who own their own means of production without employing other paid labour (except, perhaps, family members) and who appropriate their own surplus labour. Finally, there are three strata of intermediate wage-workers who have some control over other employees' labour power and/or discretion over the use of their own labour, but are subordinated to capitalists' ownership claims and production decisions. These strata are: managers or technocrats, those employees with day-to-day general responsibility for disciplining other employees and for the conduct of technical design and planning; professionalemployees, who are responsible for the detailed problem-solving involved in the design of production systems, but have no direct role in supervising other workers; and supervisors, who are assigned no control over production design, but exercise immediate disciplinary control over proletarian workers. Thus, the Livingstone class scheme is similar to the original Wright scheme of class relations in production, differing from Wright mainly in the 23

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identification of rentier capitalists, the incorporation of the petty bourgeoisie within capitalist production dynamics, and the differentiation of an industrial grouping (in empirical terms, similar to Poulantzas' entire proletariat) and a non-industrial, or subordinated service worker, grouping, within the proletariat. In addition the Livingstone scheme emphasizes the importance of class groupings excluded'from production relations, including homemakers, temporarily unemployed workers, pensioners, students, and lumpen-class elements. 4 Weber s Original Class Scheme For Weber, the central animating feature of social life was not exploitation but the striving for power or domination over others. He understood economic power in modern capitalism as the capacity to control and benefit from exchange of goods and services within an increasingly rationally calculated and routinely administered system of production. He regarded economic classes primarily as common situations within market-exchange relations, rather than in terms of relations of production. However, Weber's original conception was similar to Marx's in the sense that the basic categories of all class situations were "property" and "lack of property." He further differentiated these categories as "the kind of property that is usable for returns" and "the kind of services that can be offered in the market" (Weber [1928] 1968: 928). Weber later suggested that under capitalism this multitude of possible market positions tended to cluster together into four main social class groupings. Each of these groupings shared a generally similar type of property or marketable skill, which was not commonly changed into the other types. Within these groupings cultural traditions tended to encourage some degree of shared class consciousness. These social classes were: large property owners or capitalists, who own sufficient property to have disposition over the products of other people's labour; small property owners or petty bourgeoisie, who only own enough property to dispose of the products of their own labour; propertyless white-collar workers, who have specialized marketable skills; and the manual working class, who tend to have only their general labouring capacity to sell (Weber [1928] 1968: 302-7; cf. Giddens 1973: 41-52; Grabb 1984:51-55). This later conception of social class tended to blur Weber's original division between, on the one side, economic classes as an array of market situations and, on the other, class-based status groups that are normally communal action groups (Weber [1928] 1968: 926-40; Giddens 1973: 78-80). 24

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

Nevertheless, it is clear from Weber's own empirical writings that he came to regard these social class distinctions as basic starting points for the development of class consciousness and class action in capitalist societies. Our present empirical assessment will include Weber's original social class divisions, as articulated by the most thorough recent critical interpretation (Giddens 1973). Neo-Weberian Occupational Groupings Weber's observation that, in stable economic times, stratification by status is favoured over "naked class situation" (Weber [1928] 1968: 937) proved prophetic for North American sociological research in the postwar expansionary era. This research became preoccupied with consumption-based "styles of life." Economic inequalities came to be regarded primarily in terms of a loosely ranked hierarchy of occupational roles within an imputedly shared value system (e.g., Parsons 1953). Weber's own fundamental class distinction between property owners and the propertyless was typically effaced in an array of status-based occupational scales, using specific criteria such as occupational prestige ratings or levels of education and income. Our empirical assessment will focus on the two occupational status scales that have dominated mainstream Canadian sociology's class analysis for the past generation. Comparable occupational scales based on national census data have been developed in most other industrial market societies (e.g., Goldthorpe etal. 1980). The Pineo-Porter and Blishen scales, as used in a wide number of Canadian investigations of stratification, have been related to ethnicity, mother tongue, period of immigration, region of residence, country of birth, and sex, as well as other variables. As Bernard Blishen and William Carroll (1982: 43) note, "In the construction of these socioeconomic measures in Canada the influence of Weber's conception of class is clear." Both of these scales begin from a position that occupation is "the most feasible single indicator of relative position in a multiple social stratification system" (p.44). Thus, although acknowledging that other factors can influence an individual's social position, they take occupation as the prime indicator. To the extent that these schemes treat class explicitly, it is to see social classes as arising among groups similarly situated on the scales. Pineo-Porter Prestige Scale. The Pineo-Porter scale began as a list of job titles ranked according to prestige scores, "on the basis of the average evaluation of each title made by a national sample of the population" (Blishen and 25

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Carroll 1982: 45; Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts 1977). A later development of this scale is a ranked grouping of Census Canada job categories, based loosely on the scores from the earlier survey. As the authors state, "One could call the criterion [for ranking] an informed assessment of the social standing (or occupational prestige) of the occupation," as performed by the researchers themselves (Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts 1977: 97). The result is an ordered list of 16 occupational groups. Although this system is intended as a status scale, there are allusions to its possible use as a measure of social class. For instance, the authors suggest, "The top three categories can be combined to form a managerial and professional group" (Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts 1977: 101). Following this suggestion, we have collapsed the 16 listed categories into 5 "classes" that preserve the original order of the scale (as indicated in Table 1.1). This five-class regrouping allows us to compare the Pineo-Porter scale more directly to the other schemes and to test it as an ordinal variable representing social class. Blishen Socio-economic Status System. The Blishen index of socioeconomic status is partially derived from the Pineo-Porter scale, and closely associated with it. The two systems have evolved together over the past 25 years, and the originators of the Pineo-Porter categories explicitly state that their coding "is not meant to compete with, but rather to complement the Blishen scale" (Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts 1977: 100) There are, however, several important differences in the scales that warrant examining them separately. Working once again with occupation codes as the only employment data (excluding ownership or control considerations), Blishen and his colleagues determined a measure of status for each occupation by using a regression equation, which incorporated aggregate measures of education and income as predictors of the Pineo-Porter prestige scores. In this procedure, each occupation is a "case," and the predicted prestige value that results from applying the derived regression weights is that occupation's index score (Blishen 1967; Blishen and McRoberts 1976; Blishen and Carroll 1982; Blishen, Carroll, and Moore 1987). The result may be considered a continuous scale of socio-economic prestige, with each of the approximately 500 occupations having a unique score (see Blishen and McRoberts 1976; and Blishen, Carroll, and Moore 1987, for complete listings). Some authors have criticized the Blishen index as overly empiricist (see, e.g., Fox and Suschnigg 1988), and in one article Blishen and his colleagues 26

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

have acknowledged other criticisms concerning the methodology of the scale's construction (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore 1987: 466-67). The result has been a considerable moderation of the authors' claims for this index as a predictor of class effects. For instance, the article presenting the previous version of the index had suggested: "A final step in the construction of this scale is the determination of class intervals. A simple method ... is based upon the use of the tens digits of the individual index values" (Blishen and McRoberts 1976: 73). When the sparsely populated extremes of the scale are further collapsed, six "classes" are defined. The presentation of the most recent version states, however, that "socioeconomic strata cannot be considered proxies for class categorizations" (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore 1987: 472). Our approach in using this scale will be to adopt the grouping procedure suggested in the earlier article for tabular presentations.5 Bourdieu. Some recent neo-Weberian class theorists have attempted to define class divisions by reference to their mode of collective action and have suggested the similarity of these divisions to ethnic, sex, and other communally based processes of social closure (Parkin 1979). Such a conception serves to obscure Weber's starting point in the underlying exclusionary structure of property-based class relationships (see Murphy 1987). Other recent neo-Weberian reconceptualizations have reclaimed the property distinctions, but collapsed Weber's social-class division of white-collar employees and manual workers into several divisions based on status groups (for example, trade union) within a single propertyless class (Barbalet 1986). Pierre Bourdieu (1979, 1984, 1987) provides one of the most influential recent reconceptualizations of the relationship between class and status, building on Weber's property and status distinctions. Bourdieu (1984: xi-xii) has developed a complex model of the relationships between socioeconomic conditions and cultural lifestyles, a model explicitly based on rethinking Weber's distinction between class and status in the context of contemporary France. He identifies as many as 24 objective class fractions with similar conditions of existence and access to goods and power, as indicated by occupational groupings (Bourdieu 1984: 504). These class fractions are located in social space according to the established volume and composition of their mixture of economic and cultural capital, and by the reproduction strategies that individuals and families tend to use to maintain or improve their positions in the class structure (p. 125). These dynamic structures, or class "habituses," generate systemic perceptual schemes of classification and appreciation that result in discrete lifestyles, or classifying; practices (p. 171). 27

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In his general treatment of class habituses (pp.257-396), Bourdieu focuses on three basic class positions and their characteristic lifestyle dispositions: the dominant class, which authoritatively asserts the sense of cultural distinction; the petty bourgeoisie, which assumes a tone of cultural compliance to maintain the goodwill of the dominators and to distinguish themselves from the working class; and the working class, which out of necessity rejects such pretensions for more practical and convenient tastes. He further distinguishes major class fractions within both the dominant class (employers and intellectuals) and the petty bourgeoisie (the old declining petty bourgeoisie, new petty bourgeoisie, and executant petty bourgeoisie), in terms of the volume and economic/cultural composition of their capital. Class Consciousness in Marxist and Weberian Theory According to Marx, the dynamics of the exploitation of wage labour in capitalist production provided the basis for the formation of antagonistic and revolutionary forms of class consciousness among the proletariat. Marx was aware of the considerable mitigating influence on proletarian class consciousness stemming from bourgeois control of the dominant means of mental production, as well as the need for positive mediating vehicles such as trade unions and socialist political parties (see Draper 1978). But he frequently presumed a growing polarization of views between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the increasing centralization and concentration of capitalist production. Later Marxist theorists have distinguished several different aspects of class consciousness and treated the connections between them as more problematic than Marx apparently did (see Oilman 1972; Therborn 1986). The most commonly recognized aspects of class consciousness are: awareness of the existence of classes; personal class identity; oppositional class consciousness, which expresses sentiments of support for rights associated with either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, and hostility towards those of the other polar class; and hegemonic (or revolutionary) class consciousness. Hegemonic class consciousness is an acceptance of a distinct class interest as universally valid, and a readiness to act to maintain (or achieve) a definite form of society based on this class interest. Our comparative empirical assessment will consider only class awareness, class identity, and oppositional class consciousness - the aspects that are also addressed in Weberian theories of class consciousness. All neo-Marxist class schemes agree with Marx in predicting that the greatest differences in class consciousness are found between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, however these two polar classes are defined. But 28

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

Poulantzas suggests that there will be no substantial difference in class consciousness tendencies between the old and new petty bourgeoisie, whereas Carchedi, Wright, and Livingstone all intimate that the traditional petty bourgeoisie will hold somewhat distinctive views. Wright and Livingstone suggest that there will tend to be significant differences within the groups that Carchedi lumps together as the new middle class, and Livingstone further indicates the likelihood of greater oppositional consciousness among industrial workers (Poulantzas' entire proletariat) than within the rest of the proletariat. Weber was generally much more emphatic than Marx about the mediation of class situations by status group and party-based forms of domination (Weber [1928] 1968: 926-40). But he also recognized that, in his own times, economic class situation was the predominant factor in the formation of status groups as communal associations with consciously shared styles of life. Weber felt that price wars between direct participants in capitalist labour markets (between business executives and workers, for example) generated the strongest class antagonisms and potential for conflict. The emergence of such a "class struggle" was contingent on general cultural conditions, including ideologies, as well as on the transparency of contrasting life chances in different class situations. In general, Weber was more interested in statusgroup awareness of issues of exclusionary privilege, across a range of social classes, than in more antagonistic forms of conflict consciousness. But in both respects he believed that capitalists rather than propertyless workers held the greater potential for coherent class consciousness. More recent analyses of class consciousness from Weberian perspectives have typically focused on issues of class awareness and identity in relation to occupational status hierarchies (e.g., Jackman and Jackman 1983). Because they begin with measures of the subjective perception of job status, both the Pineo-Porter and Blishen systems logically imply that those in high-status occupations will be more likely to express upper-class or middle-class identities than those in low-status jobs. If empirical data were to indicate otherwise, it would signify that respondents expressed different beliefs about their own occupational status than they did about others. For Bourdieu, class awareness is deeply implicated in forming the habitus of the major class fractions, a point that highlights the difficulties in making direct comparisons across competing theoretical frameworks. The notion of habitus is a conscious attempt to transcend earlier conceptions of an objective social position that conditions a subjective form of consciousness (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Thus, Bourdieu does not deal explicitly with subjective class identity in his main work, although he strongly implies that 29

RECAST D R E A M S

those with more capital will tend to perceive of themselves as being of a higher class standing. But he does argue that the distribution of political opinions should correspond fairly closely to his schema of major class fractions, with "the propensity to vote on the right" increasing "with the overall volume of capital possessed and, secondly, with the relative weight of economic capital in the capital composition" (Bourdieu 1984: 438). Prior Empirical Comparisons of Class Schemes There have been several prior empirical attempts to compare the capacity of Marxist and Weberian-based class schemes to distinguish expressions of class consciousness. On the basis of early 1970s U.S. surveys, and a 1964 British national survey, Robinson and Kelley (1979) concluded that the Blau and Duncan (1967) status model, as well as Marxian ownership classes and Dahrendorf (1959) authority classes, have statistically significant links with both class identity and selected political attitudes. They also found evidence that "class" is more pertinent for British men and "status" for U.S. men; and that - since such class and status models are only modestly intercorrelated and have significant independent effects - both should be incorporated in further stratification research. Drawing on a 1972 U.S. national election survey, Goertzel (1979) made rough estimates of several Marxist class schemes using census occupational classifications, and he assessed their differentiation of class identities and expressions of "warmth" towards big business and working men. He tentatively suggested that an orthodox Marxist class model (Lumer 1973) is inadequate for approximating empirical lines of class cleavage; that Poulantzas' scheme and Wright's original approach did not differ greatly; and that, as conceived by Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich (1978), the distinctive views of professional and managerial workers should be more fully recognized. Woolwine (1983) used a 1967 Australian national survey to compare an aggregated version of Wright's original class scheme with Gagliani's (1980) model, which is very similar to Weber's original social class divisions. He found both systems to be significant predictors of both class identity and an array of class-related attitudes, with Gagliani's model being consistently stronger. R. O'Brien and Val Burris (1983) compared three neo-Marxist models (from Poulantzas, Carchedi, and Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich), and Anthony Giddens's Weberian model of the "middle-class/working-class" division among wage and salary workers. Basing their analysis on five occupational groups from a 1977 U.S. national survey, O'Brien and Burris examined subjective class identification and various political attitudes using more di30

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness

verse statistical measures (that is, absolute difference between class means and mean intraclass homogeneity), as well as the more conventional variance. Their analysis found relatively small statistical differences among the four class models. Wright (1985; see also Pawson 1989) used personally designed surveys of the United States and Sweden, conducted in 1980, to compare Poulantzas' scheme with his own revised approach. Wright found his own scheme to be a superior predictor of both class identity and class-related political attitudes, particularly in terms of treating uncredentialled, non-managerial white-collar employees as part of the working class rather than as a new petty bourgeoisie. Subsequent empirical assessments of Wright's class scheme with Goldthorpe's Weberian model of occupational classes have concluded that Goldthorpe's framework is analytically superior in explaining variation on a "class consciousness index" including class identity and several political attitudes (Marshall et al. 1988: 179-95). Most recently, Burris (1989) has developed his earlier work with O'Brien into an overview of five basic strategies used by both Marxist and Weberian analysts for identifying the boundary between working-class and middleclass positions. These are: mental versus manual occupations; supervisors versus non-supervisors; productive versus non-productive labour; professionals and managers versus routine employees; and credentialled versus uncredentialled workers. Again using a 1977 U.S. national survey and statistical measures based on absolute differences between class means, he found relatively less correspondence of measures of class identity and political opinion with the manual/non-manual or productive/unproductive divisions. The supervisory/non-supervisory, credentialled/uncredentialled, and professional-managerial/routine employee distinctions, all of which cut through the middle of the white-collar ranks, provided a better fit with indicators of the class consciousness of employees. There have been at least two prior comparisons of Marxian and Weberianbased class schemes using Canadian national survey data. William Johnston and Michael Ornstein (1985) used a 1977 national survey to compare the capability of the class schemes developed by Poulantzas, Wright, and Carchedi, as well as versions of the Pineo-Porter and Blishen scales, to predict a variety of class-related and more diffuse political attitudes. They found that, while the differences were of fairly small magnitude, class effects predominated on most class-related political issues (rights of workers, social welfare, redistribution of income). Johnston and Ornstein also found that the predicted polarity between the bourgeoisie and working class was evident; 31

RECAST D R E A M S Table I.I Proportional Frequency Distributions according to Weberian Class Schemes Weber (Giddens) %

Pineo-Porter

Capitalists

Self-employed professionals 2.0 Employed professionals 10.7 High-level management 5.5

70+

Semi-professionals Technicians Middle management

2.7 3.3 4.0

60-69

Supervisors Foremen

2.0 3.6

50-59

Petty bourgeoisie

6.7

4.4

White-collar workers 42.6

Skilled clerical Skilled craft Farmers Manual workers

Valid N

46.5

317

Semiskilled clerical Semiskilled manual Unskilled clerical Unskilled manual Farm labourers

%

5.5 20.8 1.7 5.7 13.5 3.1 15.0 0.8

313

Blishen %

7.3

5.5

19.7

Bourdieu

%

Employers

6.6

Intellectuals

14.9

Old declining petty bourgeoisie

3.8

New petty bourgeoisie 3.6 Executant petty bourgeoisie

21.2

40-49 26.0

30-39

34.1

1-29

7.0 317

Workers

49.9

317

Notes 1. All figures in all tables are based on the 1984 All-Hamilton Survey, restricted to male respondents who were either employed for a wage or self-employed, full-time, or part-time at the time of the survey. 2. The Pineo-Porter scale is presented here in its full form. In subsequent tables it is collapsed into five "classes," denoted by the lines separating groups. 3. The Blishen socio-economic scale (which theoretically could range from 0-100) is shown only in its six-category collapsed form in the comparative tables.

the traditional petty bourgeoisie was more distinct than Poulantzas presumed; and Wright's original scheme seemed to identify other intermediate class groups with distinctive political attitudes. Finally, M. Nakhaie (1987) used the 1984 Canadian Election Survey data to compare an amalgam of Poulantzas' and Wright's original class schemes with a version of the Blishen scale and a conventional census grouping of occupational categories. He found that the occupational status scales were better predictors of class identity, while the Marxian class scheme was somewhat better at distinguishing differences in attitudes concerning income distribution and workers' right to strike. 32

Men ys Employment Classes and Class Consciousness Table 1.2 Proportional Frequency Distributions according to Marxist Class Schemes Marx Poulantzas (Meiksins) % Bourgeoisie

6.7

Bourgeoisie

Valid N

19.2

Bourgeoisie

% Wright

% Livingstone

%

2.4 Corporate 19.2 Capitalists capitalists 0.2 Small employers 5.6 Small employers 6.6 Rentiers 0.2

Petty bourgeoisie 3.7 Petty bourgeoisie 4.3 Expert managers 4.1 Managers 11.5 Skilled managers 5.6 Uncredentialled managers 3.0 10.7 Expert supervisors 2.9 Professionals New petty New middle bourgeoisie 42.8 class 16.8 Expert workers 6.5 Supervisors 18.1 Skilled supervisors 3.9 Uncredentialled supervisors 9.1 88. 9 Proletariat 32.9 Proletariat 58.9 Skilled workers 14.9 Non-industrial proletariat 15.5 Workers 38.1 Industrial proletariat 32.7

Petty bourgeoisie 4.4 Old petty bourgeoisie

Proletariat

% Carchedi

318

S.I

318

Old petty bourgeoisie

5.1

318

314

318

The Hamilton Survey

A central purpose of the Hamilton Families Project has been to examine recent relationships between class structural positions and expressions of class consciousness in an urban Canadian setting. (See the section "The Hamilton Study" in the Introduction, as well as the appendix, for details on the project.) In this chapter, our empirical analysis focuses on the employed adult male respondents (N = 318) in the study. The interview schedule contained items designed to facilitate accurate coding of each of the previously described class schemes, including detailed questions regarding ownership and authority relations as well as occupational titles and other variables. (See the appendix for the questionnaire items and measurement procedures.) Tables 1.1 and 1.2 present the relative frequency distributions for all of the defined class schemes. In presenting these tables, we have attempted to make visual comparisons easier by arraying the various schemes in roughly 33

RECAST D R E A M S

parallel groupings. All of the Marxist and Weberian schemes that recognize ownership distinctions identify a traditional self-employed petty bourgeoisie of about 4-5 per cent of employed Hamilton men. The main difference here is that the bourgeoisie class groupings are much larger (about 20 per cent) in the Poulantzas, Carchedi, and Bourdieu schemes, which expand dominant class membership beyond legal ownership of the means of production. There are larger differences among these schemes in their respective estimates of the sizes of the working class/proletariat and other employee groups. According to P. Meiksins, the proletariat would make up almost 90 per cent of the Hamilton male workforce, whereas for Poulantzas the proletariat would be only about one-third of the male workforce. Conversely, Poulantzas' scheme identifies a new middle class of over 40 per cent, while other neo-Marxist schemes generate smaller middle-class groupings, and Meiksins denies their existence entirely. With regard to the Pineo-Porter and Blishen scales it is difficult to establish comparability with the other class schemes by simple inspection, because these two scales have largely ignored property ownership distinctions in their focus on specific types of occupations within the labour force. The correlation matrix in Table 1.3 summarizes the paired associations for all class schemes in our sample.* The four neo-Marxist schemes are all very highly intercorrelated (r > .80). The Pineo-Porter and Blishen occupational scales are similarly highly correlated (r > .84). These two occupational * Throughout this book, we make use of statistical analyses when they seem particularly important for advancing our argument, although we endeavour to avoid overwhelming readers with an avalanche of numbers. For readers without extensive statistical training, we try to describe the basic significance of the measures we are using as they are presented. While we recognize that the forms of class relations may not correspond precisely with assumptions of statistical measurement, we use several statistical measures in this and following chapters as approximate criteria to assess the existence and relative strength of patterns of association between class positions and aspects of class consciousness. For the sake of readability and consistency, all test statistics and probability figures we use will be those reported by the SPSS-PC+ analysis package, rounded to two or three digits. Probabilities reported as .000 should be interpreted as being something less than .001, and not a literal zero. Table 1.3 reports Pearson correlation co-efficients, denoted "r." These coefficients can be interpreted as a general indication of the degree to which two numerical measures vary together in a sample. Pearson's r has a theoretical range from -1.0 to +1.0, representing perfect negative and perfect positive relationships, respectively. Within social-science research, correlations as low as .20 are often considered 34

Men's Employment Classes and Class Consciousness Table 1.3 Correlation Matrix for All Class Schemes Weber (Giddens) Pineo-Porter Blishen Bourdieu Marx (Meiksins) Poulantzas Carchedi Wright Livingstone

PineoPorter

Blishen

Bourdieu

Marx (Meiksins) Pouiantzas

Carchedi

Wright

.484 .354

.841

.818

.728

.567

.473

.334

.671

.497

.465 .562

.315

.637

.380 .434

.795 .821

.526 .699

.923 .846

.685

.850

.822 .669 .649 .796 .863

.611

.582

.895 .815

.920

Notes 1. For the sake of consistency, the Pineo-Porter scale used in these calculations is in its collapsed, five-category form. Similarly, the Blishen socio-economic scale is in its six-category collapsed form. 2. "..." represents a correlation that did not meet the criterion significance level of .01. All other correlations are significant to at least the .001 level.

scales are not significantly related to Meiksins's class scheme, because the scales suppress the property ownership distinctions that are central to this basic Marxist scheme, while Meiksins ignores the multiple statuses among employees, which are stressed by the occupational scales. But all of the other Marxist and Weberian class schemes use enough similar distinctions to be significantly related. In fact, the basic Marxist model is more highly correlated with the original Weberian model (r = .82) than it is with any of the neo-Marxist schemes. The basic Weberian model is also much more strongly associated with the neo-Marxist class schemes (r = .67 to .86) than it is with the Pineo-Porter or Blishen status scales (r = .35 to .48). Bourdieu's neo-Weberian scheme has the highest minimum correlation across all schemes, including the status scales (r > .56). The results indicated in Table 1.3 suggest that Marx's and Weber's class distinctions shared more than most neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian class re-

an indication of a weak but potentially important relationship; correlations above .70 are generally considered to be fairly strong (see Blalock 1979). We also make reference in the following tables to "statistical significance," which refers to the probability (p) that a given statistic would occur by chance, given the sample size. By convention, p values