The economic basis of social class (original) (raw)
Related papers
Class structure and income detern~ ii~ ation
New York: Academic, 1979
There has been a curious gap between theoretical debate and quantitative research on social inequality throughout the history of sociology. The theoretical debates on inequality have above all revolved around the concept of class, and in particular around the adequacy of the Marxist theory of class. From Weber, to Parsons, to Dahrendorf and Giddens, the point of departure of theorizing the nature of inequality has been an assessment of Marx's contribution. Quantitative research on inequality, on the other hand, has been almost totally oblivious to the Marxist analysis of class as a structure of domination and conflict. And Marxists, for their part, have tended to be suspicious of quantitative, multivariate approaches to the study of social reality and thus have also done little to link the theoretical debate to quantitative research.
Changing Forms of Economy and Class (2016)
Arena Journal, 2016
Dealing adequately with themes as fundamental as economy and class takes incredibly systematic theoretical work. This complexity is compounded when adding in issues of changing historical context , contemporary social consequence and intersecting ontological formations — issues that writers associated with Arena have over the last fifty years sought to think through with considerable intensity. With these demands, adequately theorizing economy and class becomes a massive task. It needs to draw upon different disciplines, from anthropology and cultural theory to political economy, economic history and contemporary financial analysis. More than that, as I will argue, understanding basic themes such as economy and class requires a generalizing theory of the social. Unfortunately, however, mainstream approaches to economy and class have turned either to acting as if economy and class no longer need theorizing, or to naturalizing the meaning of both terms as simple empirical descriptors — though for apparently very different reasons in relation to each of these themes. On the one hand, while class remains a background concern in contemporary sociology and political studies, it has lost the interrogative and master-concept status that it had until as late as the end of the twentieth century. To the extent that it continues to be used academically, class is usually linked to the thin but scientific-sounding concept of ‘social stratification’. Every so often the concept surfaces as way of naming one’s relationship to felt disparities of political power or economic opportunity — for example, recently 60 per cent of Britons described themselves a ‘working class’ — but for many commentators this is seen as a quaint anachronism in a world of changing assemblages of power. With life constantly in flux, and with the lingering after-effects of post-structuralism still profoundly influencing ways of theorizing, the concept of ‘class’ is now seen as too static to be used more than casually. When the concept comes into contention it thus tends to become a shallow descriptive term: for some uncomfortably evoked in passing; for most others used loosely to signal the experience of intensifying economic inequity.
SOCIAL CLASSES AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
Bangladesh is a fast-changing society. Within a span of little more than four decades the so called "Bottomless basket" has transformed into a Low Middle-Income country and is on the way to graduating from Less Developed Country. Economic growth has also affected the polity and society, unfortunately at a price. Society is now more unequal than ever before and trends of authoritarianism and hegemony of the stronger classes are ever more noticeable. Social Class predates the exposure to sociological analysis and constructs like concepts of Social Stratification, Status, Power and how they affect Social Change. Understanding the concept of Social Class is critical for the expose of the exploitation-authoritarianism nexus. The aggression of Pakistani ideology and their attempts at imposition of Pan Islamic and Pakistani cultural and literary tradition upon the Bengalis strengthened the convictions of the Basic Structure and Super Structure dialectics and contradictions that in turn brought the importance Economics and Sociology together. This term paper focuses on Social Change that the changing Class and Stratification patterns bring about. It includes systematic and research-based writings on the topic is along with the prognosis of our society based on historical as well as empirical facts and data.
Sociology, 2014
This paper responds to the critical reception of the arguments made about social class in Savage et al (2013). It emphasises the need to disentangle different strands of debate so as not to conflate four separate issues, (a) the value of the seven class model proposed; (b) the potential of the large web survey -the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) for future research; (c) the value of Bourdieusian perspectives for re-energising class analysis, and (d) the academic and public reception to the GBCS itself. We argue that in order to do justice to its full potential, we need a concept of class which does not reduce it to a technical measure of a single variable and which recognises how multiple axes of inequality can crystallise as social classes. Whilst recognising the limitations of what we are able to claim on the basis of the GfK/GBCS, we argue that the seven classes defined in Savage et al have sociological resonance in pointing to the need to move away from a focus on class boundaries at the middle reaches of the class structure towards an analysis of the power of elite formation.