I have written a few blogs about the work of Erik Olin Wright, and here’s another, although this time it arises out of an earlier collection of essays of his entitled Understanding Class (published by Verso in 2015). I focus here on his distinctions between three different approaches to class within sociology: (1) class as individual attributes – the stratification tradition; (2) class as opportunity hoarding – the Weberian tradition; and (3) class as exploitation and domination – the Marxist tradition. He argues (against his earlier self) for a synthesis of these approaches via what he terms a ‘pragmatic realism’.
Wright’s explication of this triad of approaches and traditions will be bread and butter sociology to many of my colleagues (who may in consequence want to skip this particular blog). But I shall reproduce his account anyway – I hope in an accessible manner – since non-sociologists also read my blogs on occasions.
Class as individual attributes (the stratification tradition)
People have a variety of attributes, some attained at birth, others acquired during the lifecourse, some stable, others in flux. People can also be characterised by the material conditions in which they live. Class in this context is a way of addressing the connection between individual attributes and material life conditions: ‘class identifies those economically important attributes of people that shape their opportunities and choices in a market economy.’ Wright continues: ‘class should neither be indentified simply with the individual attributes nor with the material conditions of life of people, but with the interconnections between these two.’
When the different attributes of individuals and material conditions of life ‘broadly cluster together’, these clusters are called ‘classes’. For example, the ‘upper class’ identifies people whose wealth, high income, social connections and ‘high talents’ enable them to live their lives apart from ‘ordinary’ people. The ‘middle class’ identifies people – in the middle, economically – who have enough education and money to participate fully in what is often referred to as ‘the mainstream’ way of life. The ‘lower class’ identifies people who lack the necessary educational and cultural resources to live securely above the poverty line. Finally, the ‘underclass’ identifies those who live in extreme poverty, marginalised from mainstream society by a lack of educational and other skills required for stable employment.
Wright gives as an exemplar of the individual attributes approach Mike Savage’s analysis of the Great British Class Survey. Drawing on Bourdieu, this analysis defines the abstract concept of class in terms of three dimensions of economically relevant resources: economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. The question of how many classes was empircially distinguished based on the ways in which indicators of these three dimensions of individual attributes cluster together. Seven classes emerged from the analysis: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, energent service workers, and precariat.
Wright sees as especially problematic the fact that the individual attributes approach focuses on the acquisition of telling attributes for attaining economically advantaged social positions, but neglects consideration of inequalities in the positions themselves.
Class as opportunity hoarding (the Weberian tradition)
Associated with the studies of Weber, the opportunity hoarding apporoach hinges on the notion of social closure. The idea is that if jobs confer on their occupants high incomes and special advantages it is important that the incumbents of those jobs have means at their disposal to exclude others from accessing them. Educational credentials come into play here, as well as admission procedures, tuition fees and other blocks to higher education. Credentialing and licensing are notably important tooks for opportunity hoarding, but other devices include colour bars, marriage bars and gender exclusion, as well as religion, cultural style, manners and accents (I recall being on a selection panel for a London Medical School when a candidate was denied a place because, based on a lack of cultural and social capital, plus a ‘deviant accent’, it was judged that ‘it wouldn’t be fair to expose a working-class lad to the very middle-class world of medical school and medicine because he wouldn’t be happy’).
Wright highlights too the salience of ‘private property rights in the means of production’. He regards these as ‘the pivotal form of exclusion that determines access to the ‘job’ of capitalist employer’: ‘the capacity of owners to acquire profits depends upon their defence of this exclusion, which we call ‘property rights’.’ Wright goes on: ‘the core class division within both Weberian and Marxian traditions of sociology between capitalists and workers can therefore be understood as reflecting a specific form of opportunity hoarding enforced by the legal rules of property rights.’
Sociologists who adopt the opportunity hoarding approach to class in societies like the USA tend towards three broad categories of class. These are: ‘capitalists’, as defined by private property rights in the ownership of the means of production; the ‘middle class’, defined by mechanisms of exclusion over the acquisition of education and skills; and the ‘working class’, defined by their exclusion from both higher education credentials and captial.
The principal difference between the individual attribute and opportunity hoarding approaches is that opportunity hoarding ‘means that the economic advantages people get from being in a privileged class position are causally connected to the disadvantages of people excluded from those class positions’ (the rich are rich because the poor are poor).
Class as exploitatin and domination (the Marxian tradition)
Domination, for Wright, refers to the ability to control the ‘activities’ of others; and exploitation refers to the acquisition of economic benefits from the labouring activity of those who are dominated. Thus all exploitation implies some form of domination, but not all domination implies exploitation. ‘In relations of exploitation and domination it is not the case that one group simply benefits by restricting access to certain kinds of resources or positions. In addition, the exploiting/dominating group is able to control the labouring effort of another for its own advantage.’
Within the domination/exploitation approach, the central class division in capitalist society is between those who own and control the means of production in the economy – capitalists – and those who are hired to use those means of production – workers. Capitalists, within this framework, both exploit and dominate workers.
Other kinds of positions within the class structure get their specific character from their relationship to this basic division. Managers, for example, exercise many of the powers of domination but are also subordinate to capitalists. CEOs and top managers of corporations often develop significant ownership stakes in their corporations and therefore become more like capitalists. Highly educated professionals and some categories of technical workers have sufficient control over knowledge (a critical resource in contemporary economies) and skills that they can maintain considerable autonomy from domination within work and significantly reduce, or even neutralise, the extent to which they are exploited.’
Integrating this triad of approaches (traditions)
In sum, the exploitation and domination mechanisms identify the fundamental class division connected to the capitalist character of the economy, namely, the class division between capitalists and workers. The opportunity hoarding mechanisms identify the central mechanism of exclusion that differentiates ‘middle-class’ jobs from the broader working class by creating barriers for recruitment. The individual attributes/life conditions mechanisms identify ‘a key set of processes through which individuals are sorted into different positions in the class structure or marginalised from those positions altogether. Opportunity hoarding identifies exclusionary processes connected to middle-class jobs. The individual attributes and life conditions approach helps specify what it is in the lives of people that explains who has access to those desirable middle-class jobs and who is excluded from stable working-class jobs.’
At this point Wright adds an important rider: structures of inequality are dynamic systems, so basic power relations are themselves shaped by class processes and class conflicts.
Adopting an integrated standpoint, Wright suggestions the following class structure for the USA at the beginning of the 21st century:
- An extremely rich capitalist class and corporate managerial class, living at extraordinarily high consumption standards, with relatively weak constraints on their exercise of economic power. The US class structure is the most polarised class structure at the top among developed capitalist countries.
- A historically large and relatively stable middle class, anchored in an expansive and flexible system of higher education and technical training connected to jobs requiring credentials of various sorts, but whose security and future prosperity is now uncertain.
- A working class that once was characterised by a relatively large unionised segment with a standard of living and security similar to that of the middle class, but which now largely lacks these protections.
- A poor and precarious segment of the working class, characterised by low wages and relatively insecure employment, subjected to unconstrained job competition in the labour market with minimal protections by the state.
- A marginalised, impoverished sector of the population, without the skills and education needed for jobs above the poverty level, and living in conditions that make it extremely difficult to acquire those skills. The US class structure is the most polarised at the bottom among developed capitalist countries.
- A pattern of interaction of race and class in which the working poor and the marginalised population are disproportionately made up of racial minorities.
I have only a few brief comments to make on Wright’s characteristically elegant statement in this piece. First, I am entirely sympathetic to his insistent privileging of a Marxian understanding of social class, which I agree has tended to ‘go missing’ in much of contemporary sociology. Second, I am also inclined to believe that my own dabblings in class theory are consonant with Wright’s Marxian analysis, though I have personally focused on the – to my mind neglected – critical, focal power of the capitalist executive (a fraction of the top 1% of the UK population). Third, I have also emphasised that I accept the sociological relevance of alternative concepts/operationalisations of class. It’s a matter of horses for courses (for example, a Weberian approach has proved appropriate and useful in social mobility research). Having said this, I also think that many of the more crudely positivistic applications of the individual attributes approach are merely grist to the sociological mill.
Let me close by joining many other colleagues in commending the writings of Erik Olin Wright, especially, on class, Understanding Class and How to be Anticapitalist in the 21st Century. His recent death leaves sociology much the poorer.