citekey: wrightClassStructureIncome1979
aliases:

• Wright (1979) Class structure and income determination
  title: Class structure and income determination
  authors: Erik Olin Wright
  tags:
• SocialClass
  year: 1979
  publisher: ""
  doi:

Class structure and income determination

Key takeaways

content: "@wrightClassStructureIncome1979" -file:@wrightClassStructureIncome1979

Reading notes

• Class, defined as positions within the social relations of production, plays a central role in mediating income inequality in capitalist society
• Sociologists within the Weberian tradition see classes as groups of people with common economic 'life chances' (Weber 1927; Giddens 1973)
• Marxists have defined classes primarily in terms of common structural positions within the social organisations of production (Bukharin 1921; Lenin 1914)
• Marxist concepts of class must come through a demonstration of its capacity to reveal the underlying dynamics of social processes and not simply through a conceptual argument
• Gradational versus Relational
• The class division is conceieved as a division into groups differentiatied according to the degree in which they possess the charatcteriestic whcih constitutes the criterion of division as for instance income-level (Ossowski 1963: 145)
  • gradational view
• Hallmark of gradaition view is that classes are always characteristed as being 'above' or 'below' other classes
• most populat gradational division is in the form of either income or status
  • Sociology adopts the latter. Class distinctions reflect common positions within a status hierarchy
    • Williams writes "The distribution of privelages... begins to take on full sociological meaning only when it is related to prestige rankings, social interaction groupings and beliefs and valies held in common... "Social Class" to refer to an aggregated of indiviudals who occupt a broadly similar position in the scale of prestige" (1960: 981)
  • Relational notions of class are defined not simply relative to other classes, but in a social relation to other classes
    • lower classes are defined as having less of something that upper classes have in a gradational view. Within a relational view the working class by its qualtiative location within a socail relation that simultanesouly define the capitalist class. They occupy a specific qualtitative position within a social relationship which defines both the capitalist and the worker: the social relation of exchange on the labour market
  • The key issue is whether the operative criteria for class are based on the qualitiative social relations which define such relative positons, or on the quantaitive dimensions whcih are genreated by such positions
  • structures of interets are the basis for collective social action
  • the decisive actors are people defined by their position within qualtiative relations not by their lcoation on a simple quantatiative dimension (like CAMSIS)
• Market Relations vs Production Relations
• Market relations are defined by the relations of exchange between the selelrs and buyers of various kinds of commodities
• production relations comprise the relations between actors within the production process itself
  • "we may speak of a "class" when 1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances in so far as 2) this component is represented exclusively by economic itnerests and 3) is represetned under the conditions of the commodity or labour markets..."
  • But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class; that the kind fo chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individuals fate. "Class situation" is, in this sense, ultimately "market situation" (Weber 1968: 927)
• One implication of this is that classes only exist in capitalist societies
• Giddens (1973) emphasises that Weber's argument that "market capacity" is defined not simply bt the possesion of capital or labour power, but also by the poessesion of market-relevant skills
• Giddens exteneds Weber. Linking the cocnept of classes defined by market capacities to ana analysis of social relations within the production process itself. A number of social processes are labelled as "proximate structuration" of class relationships
  • two of these: division of labour within enterpreise and authority relations within enterprise
  • theories of production argue that the location within production defines deceivably the command over social resources and social action
    • market relations are still important. 1) helping to understand how actual individuals are sorted into the production positions themselves. 2) important areas within which classes engage in struggles
• Technical Divisions vs Authority Relationships vs Exploitation
• 1. Based on categories of occupations. Occupations are typically seen as status categories mostly assuming a gradational nature.
• Since occupations represent similar locations within the technical division of labour, occupations should be considered the structural basis for classes
• the logic is that unequal rewards are needed to induce people into filling the functionally most important positions, and that the functional importance is derived from the technical imperatives of productive systems. With minimal extension, this can become an argument that the class structure is ultimately based on the functional imperatives of the technical organisation of production.
• 2. Classes as based on domination and subordination, and whilst shaped by technical constraints, classes themselves cannot be defined in terms of the technical division of labour
• "Classes are social conflict groups the determinant of which can be found in the participation in or exclusion from the exercise of authority within any imperatively coordinated association" (Dahrendorf 1959: 138)
• authority definitions of class tend to treat all organisations as conceptually equivalent
  • tend to see authority itself as unidimensional relation of domination/subordination within a given organisation
  • generally do not provide a sustained account of why social conflict should be structured around authority relations
• 3. Class and Exploitation
• exploitation within Marxist theory denotes a relation of domination within which the people in the dominant position are able to appropriate the surplus labour of people within the subordinate position
  • in many instances the expression "surplus product" is used as an equivalent to "surplus value"
• control over the social surplus product gives the dominant class the capacity to shape the direction of social change, social development
• when class is understood in terms of exploitation, the initial task is to understand the social mechanisms by which surplus labour is appropriated
• the heart of an analysis of class structure, revolves around defining, for every class the content of the "different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy"
• exploitation incorporates both technical and authority definitions, but subordinate them to the dynamics of control over the surplus product
• 2 Classes in Advanced Capitalist Societies
• classes within Marxist theory are more than just positions within social relations: they are positions within contradictory social relations. To say that a relationship is contradictory implies there is an intrinsic antagonism between the positions determined by that relation
• capitalist social relations of production can be broken down into three interdependent dimensions or processes:
  • social relations of control over money capital
  • social relations of control over physical capital
  • social relations of authority
• there is no hierarchy over the three forms of control
• the three processes of control do not perfectly align and coincide. This fact is key to understanding the class position of the social categories that are labelled "middle class"
  • occupy social categories that occupy contradictory locations within class locations
• the final assault on remaining control of the labour process continued in the form of technological innovations which fragmented the production process and which progressively "deskilled" the labour force (Braverman 1974)
• the close supervision of the labour process is much easier when tasks are simple and routinised and their pace is determined by machinery rather than the worker
• legal ownership constitutes the various forms of flea title to property in the means of production
• possession designates "the ability to put the means of production to work. It thus pertains to the management of the capitalist factories" (de Vroey 1975: 3)
• economic ownership "the power to assign the objects on which it bears to specific uses and to dispose of hte products obtained through these means of production" (Bettelheim 1975: 58)
• Marx recognises the dual quality of the capitalist as both owner and manager of capital
  • "the employer of capital, even when working with his own capital, splits into two personalities - the owner of capital and the employer of capital; with reference to teh categories of profit which it yields, his capital also splits into capital-property, capital outside the production process, and yielding interest in of itself, and capital in the production process, which yields a profit of enterprise through its function" (Marx 1967: 375)
• de Vroey (1975) "Rather than seeing the dispersion of stock as an obstacle to concentrated control, Marxism interprets it in exactly the opposite way: as a means for reinforcing the actual control of big stock holders, who thus succeed in commanding an amount of funds out of proportion to their actual ownership. Paradoxically, dispersion of stock thus favours the centralisation of capital"
• the same process of concentration of capital that differentiates econoic ownership from possession also generates various forms of differentiation within each of thes dimensions of ownership
• relations of possession involve two separate analytical aspects
  • direction and control of the physical means of production
  • direction and control of labour
• in the modern corporation, different levels of economic ownership can be distinguished
• social relations of control over investment and accumulation, over the physical means of production, and over labour are essential underlying dimensions of class relations and that they will help us to understand classes in advanced capitalism
  - two key contradictory locations within class relations:
  between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
  between the petty bourgeoise and both the proletariat and bourgeoise
• these contradictory locations constitute very real social relations - they are not analytical
• "because the platypus has webbed feet and a bill, the concept of "mammal" is useless"
• the contradictory locations are not "half-way" between other locations, rather they are internally incompatible combinations of the interests of different classes
• Contradictory locations between proletariat and Bourgeoise
• Weber put it, foremen increasingly become the administrators of impersonal rules rather than the dispensers of personal fiats
• Dunkerly (1975) summarises the change in authority relations of foremen as "a change from a fairly central and important composite managerial role to a more peripheral and less important specialist and dependent role outside the mainstream of management decision"
• both middle managers and technocrats have, in Braverman's words, one foot in the bourgeoise and one foot in the proletariat
• Contradictory locations between petty bourgeoise and others
• In simple commodity production, there is no exploitation; whatever surplus is produced is generated by petty bourgeoise producers themselves. Though surplus is likely to be small and thus little if any accumulation is likely to occur
• the contradictory location between petty bourgeoise and proletariat is best understood by returning to the historic process of proletarianization. The central dynamic underlying this transformation was the need by capital to increase its control over the labour process
• those individuals that are located in a position that has some control over what is produced (Engineers) are typically in semi-autonomous employee class locations
• the notion of semi-autonomy is note equivalent to skills
  • control over what is produced generally implies a certain degree of broad control over how production takes place as well
  • the notion of semi-autonomy refers to individual control over the labour process, not collective control
  • even though we have given content to the notion of autonomy, it is still somewhat ambiguous how much control is needed for a position to be considered a semi-autonomous class location
  • the central purpose of a class analysis is not to describe class structure but to use a structural analysis of class relations in order to explain some historical or theoretical problem
• 3 Theoretical perspective on Income Inequality
• core of Marxist analysis of worker's incomes is that:
  • workers income comes from the sole of a particular commodity, labour power
  • the price of wages is determined by the level of productivity in the wage goods sector of the economy
  • variability in the magnitude of the wage goods in real terms is determined by
    • variability int eh costs of producing and reproducing skills within the working class
    • "historical and moral" factors in particular the capacity of the working class to struggle collectively for higher wages
  • Marxist theory involves three basic, dialectically related units of analysis: social structures, classes, and individuals
  • has been argued that social structures are simply aggregations of individual behaviour and have no ontological status in their own right
  • any fully developed theory of income determination must involve at least an implicitly account of the specialties of the social structure within which that income is determined
  • income determination differs from one social structure to another as well as from one class location to another within a given social structure
  • social relations constitute the essential social environment for individuals
    • socials structures are made up of social relations
    • classes are determined within social relations