As an undergraduate I was introduced to theories and concepts of social class that took off from Marx and Weber. But while I absorbed this ‘classical tradition’ I also became familiar with the Registrar General’s (RG’s) ‘Classification of Occupations’, which purported to operationalise class. It amounted to a ‘best guess’ at the differential prestige associated with different occupational groups. A hierarchy of occupational or socio-economic groups summed it up better than a hierarchy of classes. But what the RG’s Classification did do was expose a remarkably consistent series of ‘demi-regularities’. In the health domain for example, the prestige associated with your job seemed almost unerringly to anticipate your future health prospects and longevity.
Acknowledging the RG schema’s limitations around validity, a team of scholars came up with the (neo-Weberian or Goldthorpe-oriented) National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC), also based on occupational groupings. The final version – above all epitomizing employment conditions/relations – was more satisfactory by a number of criteria. The most advantaged of the NS-SEC ‘classes’ typically exhibit personalized reward structures, have positive opportunities for promotion and enjoy high levels of autonomy and security relative to those least advantaged. Using the ONS figures for ‘usual residents’ aged 16-74 in the 2011 Census for England and Wales, I have calculated the NS-SEC (updated in 2010) breakdown as follows: higher managerial, administrative & professional (10%); lower managerial, administrative & professional (21%); intermediate (13%); small employers & own account (9%); lower supervisory & technical (7%); semi-routine (14%); routine (11%); never worked & long-term unemployed (6%); unclassified (9%).
I entirely accept the value and explanatory potential of socio-economic classifications (SECs) like NS-SEC; but their positives trail negatives in their wake. Where did the classical tradition go? Some sociologists have openly eschewed social class as a concept with explanatory power. Others have put class on a level with other factors like gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality and so on. My own view is that classical (Marxian) relations of class: (a) have more not less explanatory power in the post-1970s world of financial capitalism, but (b) play a reduced role in both identity-formation and as what David Kelleher and I once called a ‘mobilizing potential’ for collective action. So class relations are more salient objectively, but less salient subjectively. If I am right in judging its objective relevance to have grown over the last generation, then what does this mean for the theorization of classical (Marxian) relations of class today? I return to this question towards the end of the blog.
The headline-hitting by-product of the ‘Great British Class Survey’ (GBCS), the BBC’s ‘class calculator’, may seem a bit of fun, but I doubt that it is entirely harmless fun (you only have to complete it to have concerns). The research study on which is based is explicated most comprehensively in Mike Savage et al’s paper in Sociology. This paper promises ‘a new model of social class’, one that incorporates social and cultural as well as economic capital. It is a very strange hybrid in many ways. In terms of methods, the web-based GBCS, though large (161,400 respondents) was (predictably) so skewed as to be inadequate to the task, so a national study of 1026 respondents recruited using quota sampling techniques was appended (called GfK by Savage et al after the survey firm used). The ‘corrective’ GfK seems to drive the GBCS in much of the analysis.
The measures of social capital (how many people one knows socially from a list of occupations), cultural capital (which of a series of high- to low-brow activities one likes/engages in) and economic capital (one’s household income, household savings and house price) seem oddly fashioned (and inevitably one wonders how accurately questions were answered). Subsequently, a latent class analysis of social class was conducted
‘to most parsimoniously differentiate between our measures of economic, social and cultural capital to assess where the main class boundaries are placed’ (p.11).
While latent class analysis is primarily used for the analysis of categorical data, the authors claim that it can also be used for clustering with continuous variables.
The results are as follows: elite: very high economic capital (especially savings), high social capital, very high highbrow cultural capital (6%GfK, 22%GBSC); established middle class: high economic capital, high status of mean contacts, high highbrow & emerging cultural capital (25%GfK, 43%GBSC); technical middle class: high economic capital, very mean social contacts, but relatively few contacts reported, moderate cultural capital (6%GfK, 10%GBCS); new affluent workers: moderately good economic capital, moderately poor mean score of contacts, though high range, moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital (15%GfK, 6%GBCS); traditional working class: moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable house price, few social contacts, low highbrow and emerging cultural capital (14%GfK, 2%GBCS); emergent service workers: moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable household income, moderate social contacts, high emerging (but low highbrow) cultural capital (19%GfK, 17%GBCS); and precariat: poor economic capital, and the lowest scores on every other criterion (15%GfK, 1%GBCS).
I forego comments on the acquisition of the two samples and the chosen mode of statistical analysis, which have been covered in other blogs, and merely mention Standing’s objection to the misappropriation of his term ‘precariat’. My main concern is that the classical notion of social class once again goes missing. It no longer explicitly underpins SECs, and in this new model it is meshed in with possession of economic, social and cultural capital. For me, the strength of flow of material, social and cultural assets tend to vary with class location, but do not themselves comprise relations of class.
I have in the past expressed a preference for Clement and Myles’ typology of classes. They draw on Carchedi to re-emphasize that classes are formed at the point of production and reproduced throughout social life. Central to class formation are the ‘criteria of real economic ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of surplus value through ‘control and surveillance’ of the labour of others’ (the ‘global function of capital’). This exercise of control and surveillance in relation to the labour process is distinct from the accomplishment of ‘co-ordination and unity’, which is part of the ‘creating surplus value/labour’ (the ‘global function of the collective worker’). They distinguish four classes: capitalist-executive: those who have specific economic powers of real economic ownership, the power to direct production to specific purposes and to dispose of its products (ie command over ‘strategic decision-making’); new middle class: those who exercise ‘control and surveillance’ as an extension of real economic ownership (ie command over ‘tactical decision-making’ about administrative processes affecting others or control/surveillance over the labour power of other employees; old middle class: those who own their own means of realizing their labour, but work outside the dominant relations of production; and working class: those who have no command over the means of production, the labour power of others, or their own means of realizing their own labour. The primary relationship is between the capitalist-executive class and the working class.
For all my preference for Clement and Myles operationalisation of class over SECs like NS-SEC and the new model of Savage et al, it could do with ‘refining’ for financial capitalism. Moreover it shares a fault with its rivals: it does not permit the identification of a ruling class. John Scott’s 20 year old estimate of a ruling class comprising 0.1% of the adult population falls well within the Occupation Movements’ 1% (‘against’ the 99%). I have argued that a hard core or cabal of increasingly transnational CEOs, directors, financiers and rentiers within the capitalist-executive (CCE) have come to hold more sway over a more national but nevertheless more regulatory and repressive power elite at the apex of the state apparatus (PE). Thus: CCE + PE = OLIGARCHY. We are now ruled by a barely accountable oligarchy (with little prospect of a crisis of legitimation). How can we as sociologists embrace SECs and other conceptualizations of social class like Savage et al’s new model that sidestep these issues?
Perhaps Mike Savage and co have more to offer. These are early days and they seem to have plenty of data at their collective disposal. Moreover they have made impressive research contributions in the past. Maybe they will cause me to rethink my provisional sense that they may have been tempted by the BBC collaboration to deliver pop rather than public sociology and that they have deflected attention from the reality of class even as the word ‘class’ crosses more people’s lips.
About the Author: Graham Scambler is a sociologist at UCL with research interests in social and critical theory, the politics of protest, health and healthcare, stigma and deviance, sex work and sport. He has his own blog and can be found on twitter @grahamscambler.
8 Responses
Graham Martin on May 10, 2013
Great piece. Seems to me that the GBCS has produced a very rich and interesting description of the material *products* of early 21st century capitalism as they manifest in one particular post-industrial country, but with no explanatory/analytical value in understanding how these are *produced*. The latter requires what Scambler calls a class analysis in the classical tradition, and one which, as he intimates, accounts for the increasingly globalised nature of class relations.
Is the GBCS ‘harmless fun’? Yes, if we take it for what it is. But if it is presented and understood as an ‘updating’ of class that displaces social theoretical analysis premised on an understanding of the relations of production, then it becomes much less benign.
David Rose on May 10, 2013
I have great respect for Graham’s work, but obviously can’t agree with all he says here. The NS-SEC does owe a great deal to the classic sociological tradition but of course it isn’t intended to say all that can be said about class. It is designed for particular empirical purposes such as those which GS acknowledges. In terms of those purposes, not only is it revelatory but also has some explanatory potential. That cannot be said for the old RGSC, let alone the GBCS. Try using the latter to describe and explain health inequality or social mobility! ‘Classes’ partly determined by age and life cycle stage are not real social classes. And ‘classes’ determined inductively will expand in number the more data one has. Thank God they could only create ‘classes’ on the basis of 1026 cases and not over 160,000!
Leaving aside the more obvious objections to Myles’ schema, similar problems for analysis would surely arise with that. Has anyone tried to use it for analyses of inequality? What would the size of the four classes be? How might that have an impact in terms of its utility in empirical research?
As for whether an elite can be identified by SECs, the NS-SEC Class 1.1 (higher managerial and administrative) identifies a much smaller elite than the GBCS (about 3%), but still one that is far larger than the real elite. And we showed, for example, that it was this class that was most privileged in health terms rather than the class of professionals identified by the RGSC Class I. However, when creating a classification for empirical research using survey and admin data, the 0.1% elite that GS quite correctly identifies (and I would say it is closer to 0.01%) disappears in almost all datasets. Nevertheless, health researchers seem to have been slow to take advantage of the flexibility of the NS-SEC to look within classes by using the operational groups.
Pauline McGovern on May 13, 2013
This is a very interesting article and comments.
I agree with Graham that social class should include a measure of occupation. Bourdieu would recognise the importance of position in the relations of production. Unlike social class as derived in the Class Calculator, Bourdieu included both primary (occupation) and secondary (capitals) elements. For Bourdieu active social class is ‘constructed’ in vitro and has a mixture of attributes and properties that have efficacy that varies contextually within fields and is a function of their relation as well as their weights (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 106). So occupation is important – at least to me and Bourdieu!
David Rose on May 19, 2013
Pauline, much as I agree about the importance of occupation to class position, may I have a translation of this into plain English for a bear of little brain, please? 🙂
“For Bourdieu active social class is ‘constructed’ in vitro and has a mixture of attributes and properties that have efficacy that varies contextually within fields and is a function of their relation as well as their weights”
Pauline McGovern on May 20, 2013
Hi,
I’ll try!
For Bourdieu, the extent to which people can achieve their goals in social interaction at a particular point in time, in a particular setting is a function of their attributes (their habitus and capitals) but the mix of attributes that is relevant in any context varies. This mix of attributes is highly affected by the occupations that people have and can roughly be summed up as objective ‘social class’ or socioeconomic status (as Bourdieu did in Distinction). However, this does not describe the specific attributes from this mix, their weightings and how they relate together to social positioning that are relevant in any particular circumstance.
An example of how social class is constructed in vitro (I mean in life) might be, that the social position of a professor in a classroom of his students is possibly higher (but anyhow different) to his social position when a spectator at a football match or in a pub. Of course, it would still depend contextually on who he is with, what football match or pub etc.
I hope this makes sense to you. For me, this is relevant in research. It means I choose to look empirically to discover what capitals (personal attributes) are relevant to the power dynamics within a particular social context rather than working within the basic definitions of cultural, social and economic capitals that so many researchers seem to use.
p.s. no one would call you a bear of little brain although you may like honey.
Colin Mills on May 20, 2013
Hear hear to DR’s comment.
Not ruling out the possibility that with more elbow room it might be possible to render into some sort of intelligible English prose. But without an effort in that direction the possibility of meaningful conversation is pretty limited.
David Rose on May 23, 2013
Thanks, Pauline. It makes sense in that I understand what you are saying. However, I didn’t need Bourdieu to tell me what you say in your first para. To me it’s just old wine in new bottles. Your next two paras I don’t find as sociologically interesting as you do. In saying that, I am not intending to be offensive. I just find some aspects of class more important and worthy of study than others; and therefore I find some theories of class more useful than others as a consequence.
Colin mills on May 29, 2013
So, the translation is: people have different sorts of resources; the resources that are relevant in some circumstances are not the same as the resources that are relevant in other circumstances; the set of resources that people have is related to their occupation. Put like this I can’t see any objection, in fact I believe this to be true. But stripped of the flowery terminology isn’t it a bit, well, banal? Or in the process of translation has something subtle & vital got lost? If so, what is it? Surely given the widespread reverence for Bourdieu’s profundity, he was saying something deeper than this, or was he?