Key Variables in Social Investigation by Robert Burgess

Author:Robert Burgess [Burgess, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815346999
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

7 Authority and autonomy

Marx’s opposing camps of bourgeoisie and working class are not differentiated by occupation but by the ownership/non-ownership of capital. In most capitalist countries, the effective ownership of capital is in such a few hands, and those who are forced to sell their labour power to the corporations and institutions of modern capitalism are in such an overwhelming majority, that the usefulness of Marxist class categories might appear small.

In recent years, however, sociologists have attempted to adopt some of Marx’s insights about how the ownership of capital gives the bourgeoisie power over people and things to develop class schemas which move away from divisions in the technical division of labour towards the division of power, authority and control at the workplace. These schemas have then been applied to some of the traditional concerns of sociologists with inequality, social stratification and political and work attitudes. Robinson and Kelley made an explicitly revisionist attempt to adapt Marxist class to the critique of Dahrendorf and others who argued that authority can gain independence of ownership and become the more important factor in class formation. Erik Olin Wright and his colleagues developed a scheme which concentrates on authority and autonomy at work, and so argue that no such revision has taken place. Claims that a ‘capitalist class’ can be identified in this way are highly problematic but, rather than engage in essentialist debates about what a unitary concept of class is ‘really’ about, it is preferable to take the two proposed schemas as hypotheses concerning the role of social relations at work in structuring people’s social experiences and beliefs.

Researchers from Yale and the Australian National University have collaborated on a project covering the USA and Britain (Robinson and Kelley 1979). The central claim in this research is that there are two different dimensions of class - control and authority. The control dimension is operationalized as whether or not one has a supervisor. This dimension is claimed to derive from Marx on the basis of a dubious assertion that ‘those who have no supervisor control the means of production while those who are not supervised do not’ (p. 44). The incumbents of occupations which are not supervised on performance are deemed as members of the capitalist class, a decision that is particularly weak for women; female capitalists include restaurant, bar and cafeteria managers, cooks and registered nurses! The authority dimension is measured by the existence and number of levels of subordinates: if a person supervises anyone, they are deemed to be in a position of authority.

These operationalizations are best understood as locating individuals in a hierarchy of supervision at work. There are no theoretical grounds for the authors’ contention that they constitute a bringing together of Marx’s and Dahrendorfs theories; membership of Robinson and Kelley’s ‘capitalist class’ increases income expectations by only $4,000 for men and actually decreases them for women. Nor can we accept the conclusion that the two dimensions of authority and control are ‘empirically as well as conceptually distinct’ (p.

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