◦What is the social problem the researchers are investigating?

◦What is the social problem the researchers are investigating? ◦What is the research method (i.e.: survey, participant observation, experiment, secondary sources) used by the researchers? ◦What were the results or findings of the research? ◦What do you think would be a good solution to the social problem?

Questions to answer:

◦What is the social problem the researchers are investigating?

◦What is the research method (i.e.: survey, participant observation, experiment, secondary sources) used by the researchers?

◦What were the results or findings of the research?

◦What do you think would be a good solution to the social problem?

The Reading Material:

The Unconscious Treatment of Class Consciousness

 

For over three decades following World War II, the study of class consciousness in American society was constrained by two separate but not unrelated historical developments. The first was a Cold War imperative that rendered most Marxist-inspired theoretical conceptualization ideologically suspect and therefore unlikely to attract serious sociological treatment, particularly within the terms set by Marx’s own analysis (Bottomore 1976). The second was American sociology’s shift from its roots in Chicago School social anthropology toward the “Lazarsfeldian” research edifice that had begun to shape the discipline in profound ways (Boudon 1993).

 

In many respects Richard Centers’s classic study (1949) was emblematic of these dual processes. Initially undertaken as a challenge to the findings of an earlier Fortune magazine survey that had found over 80% of the sample population identifying themselves as “middle class,” Centers sought to demonstrate the existence of a significant working class consciousness in the United States. Adding the response “working class” to his survey of what was considered a nationally representative sample population (1097 white men), Centers found a sizeable portion (51%) registering under that label, thus offering empirical support to his euphemistically termed “interest group theory of social classes.” Though some disputed his findings and interpretations (Gross 1953, Case 1955, Gordon 1963, Wilensky 1970), Centers’s study served as a model for understanding the subjective dimensions of social class.

 

The specific methodologies have differed across a range of systematic data collection techniques, from self-administered questionnaires, to face-to-face interviews and telephone surveys, to analyses of election data. In general, however, quantitative methods that yield large data sets, utilize precise sampling techniques, and provide opportunities for statistical manipulation of the data have been strongly favored in the study of class consciousness in the United States. Though the amount of research in the United States has not been voluminous (Kerbo 1991:346-47, Gilbert &Kahl 1993:233), a substantial body of research has developed on class identification (Gross 1953, Kahl& Davis 1955, Tucker 1966, Hodge &Treiman 1968, Schreiber &Nygreen 1970, Jackman & Jackman 1983, Davis & Robinson 1988, Simpson et al 1988), on class attitudes (Eysenck 1950, Manis& Meltzer 1954, Leggett 1968, Wright 1985, Kluegel& Smith 1986), and on class political preferences and opinions (Lipset 1960, Hamilton 1972, Szymanski 1978, Weakliem 1993). Some researchers have found indications of one or another sort of class consciousness employing such methods, others have not, and still others have found it and denied it. Such differences have tended to reveal more about the preconceptions of the researchers than they have about any collective consciousness of class in the society (Marshall 1983:288, Vanneman& Cannon 1987:48).

 

Whether or not Marx’s conceptualization is posed as the key theoretical reference point (as it often is), from a basic sociological standpoint, survey research methodology embodies some questionable assumptions with regard to the study of class consciousness. The most basic criticisms have been advanced previously and summarized by Marshall (1983). They are:

 

1. Survey research acquires an individualist bias by treating the responses of isolated individuals as the primary data source. Though there is an assumption that individual attitudes can be summed to equal one or another form of collective consciousness, the intersubjective nature of meaning-construction in a class (or indeed any group) consciousness cannot easily be apprehended.

 

2. Survey responses tend to be recorded as fixed, static entities, minimizing any denotation of process, change, maturation, or ambivalence in consciousness. Contradictory or seemingly opposed meanings, oscillations, and shifts in interpretation, which are often the consequence of intersubjective processes, are ignored.

 

3. The exclusive focus on ideation and attitude significantly limits what may be considered an expression of consciousness. In standard survey research, class consciousness tends to be viewed as a fact that exists (or not) in the minds of subjects.

 

4. Such research assumes that most of what needs to be known about attitudes, conceptions, or beliefs can be learned by eliciting verbal or written responses to questions.

 

5. In the social survey, attitudes and ideation are artificially decontextualizd because they are abstracted from the class practices and social relations that give them meaning.

 

Though the implications of basing class consciousness on survey methods are considerable, they are rarely considered explicitly (Coser 1975, Vanneman& Cannon 1987). However, in one case, a pair of survey researchers decided to abandon the method when they realized the limitations that it imposed on their ability to document the ambivalences and contradictory lines of thought among workers who inhabit a world full of contradictions (Blackburn & Mann 1975). More recently, Erik Wright (1985) recognized that there is “no necessary reason to assume” that the same consciousness that would be apparent in a situation of class conflict would be evident in an interview setting. He acknowledged that class consciousness is “notoriously hard to measure” and agreed that the problems raised by critics of the survey method are significant and “potentially undermine the value of questionnaire studies of class consciousness” (1985:252-53). Yet despite his reflexivity, Wright proceeded to draw upon survey data about attitudes, offering the unconvincing explanation that “the cognitive processes of people have some stability across the artificial setting of an interview and the real life setting of class struggle, and that in spite of the possible distortions of structured interviews, social surveys can potentially measure these stable elements” (p. 253). But while they may have that potential, this cannot be known using survey methods because people are not surveyed across a range of settings (let alone in class struggles), and this represents enough of a problem that the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology devotes an entire entry (on “Dual Consciousness”) to the difficulty of assuming any such stability between the survey situation and other social settings (Abercrombie et al 1988).

 

A notable exception to this rule is represented in a recent study of the beliefs of a sample of Canadian postal workers before and after a strike (as well as their actions during it) whereby the context of the strike reportedly produced an ideological shift (toward solidarism, away from conciliation) that was sustained by only a minority of workers once the collective action had subsided (Langford 1994:126-27). It is generally a worthwhile study, and one which can be instructive to the extent that it underscores the disjunction between collective action and individual belief intrinsic to most survey research.

 

The theoretical foundations of the concept are at least as problematic as the methodological techniques used to study it. The concept of class consciousness is generally thought to have originated in the work of Karl Marx, as one of the “pivotal” elements of his theory of class and society (Gilbert &Kahl 1993:228). But I would suggest that while Marx wrote about the human consciousness that “distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees” (quoted in Bottomore&Rubel 1961:102), and while he maintained a formulation about class relations in which a working class structured “in itself” (an sich) would increasingly become a class “for itself’ (fur sich) (quoted in Tucker 1978:218), to my knowledge Marx never employed the term “class consciousness,” and certainly never to designate the ideational standing of a collection of individual workers, as much of the sociological (including some Marxist) research has sought to do. Even the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, who is probably most responsible for circulating the term, through his book History and Class Consciousness, expressly rejected reducing class consciousness to the individual, ideational level: “This analysis establishes right from the start the distance that separates class consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life,” and “…class consciousness is concerned neither with the thoughts of individuals, however advanced, nor with the state of scientific knowledge” (Lukacs, quoted in Bottomore 1973:97-100).

 

This is mentioned not to quibble or to engage in an arcane exercise in “marxology,” but to suggest that at least a share of the sociological weaponry (particularly in the United States) used against Marx himself has been based on a partial but significant misconception, particularly as it refers to something that can be understood with reference to the ideas or beliefs of individual class members at a single moment in time. Even those with friendly intent who have sought to refine the concept to bolster Marx’s perspective have helped sustain ideation as the crucial ingredient. Thus, Michael Mann’s (1973) otherwise commendable attempt to specify varying levels of consciousness–identifying oneself as a class member; perceiving opposition with other classes; understanding class as defining the totality of one’s society; and having a vision of an alternative, classless society–may have expanded the range of categories, but it did little to shift the emphasis away from subjectivity.

 

Marx himself once attempted a survey research project (Weiss 1973), and though the negligible rate of return on his survey of 101 questions would have made it a distinct failure in social scientific terms, its deviation from modern survey research on class consciousness is instructive. For his “enqueteouvriere” was not designed to elicit worker attitudes, ideas, self-identification, political preferences, or “class consciousness” but to collect concrete data on the material conditions of workers’ lives: wages, methods of payment, hours, safety conditions, etc. Though obviously such a survey would have necessarily produced subjective accounts about objective conditions, Marx’s interest was primarily didactic. He distributed the survey to French workers’ groups, socialist circles, “and to anyone else who asked for it” (Bottomore&Rubel 1961:210) in order to prompt group discussions about working conditions, as a way to inspire class action.

 

To mainstream social science, such an enterprise would appear hopelessly tainted by the subjectivity of the investigator, but the relationship between theory and method was not at all incongruent for the philosopher who hoped to change the world rather than to merely interpret it. Most of what Manr needed to learn about the militancy and organizational capacities of the French working class he had learned less than a decade before his survey, largely on the basis of its mobilization and organization during the Paris Commune, as well as from the massacre of 60,000 that followed it (Tucker 1978).

 

Though the consciousness of class members could undoubtedly be fruitfully studied outside of a Marxist theoretical framework (Goldethorpe& Marshall 1992), in much of the survey research on class consciousness in the United States there has been a preoccupation with specifically working-class consciousness, as well as an engagement, however oblique, with Marx’s supposed conception of it. The question has generally been framed by Marx’s well-known dichotomy, whereby the increasing socialization of production brings a class into being “as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle…this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself” (Marx quoted in Tucker 1978:218). But all too often, the expression “for itself” has been removed from its active, dynamic context, in which the working class is “in struggle,” “becomes united,” and “constitutes itself” in active, historical processes of struggling, uniting, and constituting. Though Marx never provided a formal definition of class, let alone class consciousness, his writings reveal an overwhelming theoretical regard for the actions, political mobilizations, organizational capabilities, and the functional cohesion (or lack of it) of classes in their relations and interaction with other classes.

 

Ideas mattered for Marx, but not in isolation from the world of action. In his formulation “objectivity” and “subjectivity” were conjoined through “conscious human activity,” but conventional sociological methods have tended to abstract ideational and attitudinal responses from the realm of lived, practical experience. Important attitudinal trends may be captured in this way, but by trimming Marx’s conception to fit a survey design, one is likely to bypass what may be the most important and interesting dimensions of class relations and experience. This is as true for those seeking to continue Manr’s project as it is for those intent on burying it.

 

While random sampling and the standardization that survey schedules afford would seem to offer methodological advantages over less systematic methodological strategies, Hodson and his colleagues have demonstrated that a large number of ethnographic accounts can be systematically coded to provide a comparative database for testing hypotheses across a range of settings (Hodson et al 1993). But I would suggest that if we are interested in the extent to which classes act in relation to other classes, as the notion of a class acting “for itself” implies, then random sampling may actually obstruct one’s view rather than illuminate it. The danger is that the search for a state of representativeness may overlook the most consequential cases, the principal players, the key institutions, and the rules, principles, and strategies that make them key. As Bourdieu has noted, random sampling can “mutilate the very object you have set out to construct,” which is particularly relevant when studying contending groups and organizations where there may very well be “positions in a field that admit only one occupant but command the whole structure” (Bourdieu &Wacquant 1992:243).

 

This problem is illusuated in a recent analysis that draws upon much of the literature on class consciousness that I am critizing, to reject the very existence of class in the United States (Kingston 1994). It is a carefully presented analysis that seeks to assess the empirical support for several class theories, including Wright’s (1985) map of the class structure and Giddens’s (1973) conception of “structuration.” Basing his assessment on a review of the quantitative literature of “recent, well conducted studies” (p. 16), Kingston finds very little evidence that “…people with a common economic position–a ‘class’–share distinct life experiences” (p. 6).

 

Though there is much worth considering in the article, after 30 pages of an unswerving offensive against the existence of class in the United States, the reader suddenly discovers the existence of not one, but two classes: “the very rich (an upper class?)” and “the poor (a lower class?)” (p. 33). In a section entitled “Neglected Extremes,” we are told that the upper class has been neglected because it is so small and can afford to defend its privacy so that it doesn’t appear in representative samples of the general population, while the lower class is neglected because the relevant research is based on occupational categories that tend to exclude the poor, by definition (p. 34). But a good deal is actually known about the upper class in America, including its historical development as a group, its political mobilization, its social networks and group solidarity, its cultural practices, its socialization, its economic locations, its institutional life, and its relations with other social classes. So a class that, according to many historical and ethnographic accounts, has been viewed as more or less dominating the major economic, political, and cultural institutions of the society, and that many would consider central in understanding class relations in the United States, is “neglected” because it is “extreme” (too rich? too powerful? too exclusive? too class-like?). By the same measure, a reliance on standard occupational categories means that the unemployed and marginally employed, those who would once have been considered classic “proletarians,” are similarly “neglected.” But it wouldn’t be necessary to neglect these groups if one would accept as valid research findings other than those based on quantitative data derived from nationally representative samples of individuals. In fact, several years earlier, a pair of researchers reinterpreted many of these same kinds of survey data and voting studies to demonstrate that when those who have been excluded from traditional samples (nonvoters, African-Americans, capitalists) are examined, and when comparative, ethnographic, and historical materials are brought to bear, an entirely different picture of class consciousness materializes (Vanneman& Cannon 1987).

 

By dismissing ethnographic and historical data because of its “one-group focus” or lack of “representativeness,” Kingston (1994:16) and others may foreclose crucial aspects of class relations and experience. When the subjects of research and the ways of treating those subjects are rendered off-limits by a methodological technique, this is a theoretical decision, because methodological strategies are not theoretically neutral. The theoretical roots that lie beneath the stratificationist conception of class stretch at least as far back as Tocqueville. His emphasis on individual striving and the obliteration of class differences between the extremes of very rich and very poor set Tocqueville’s ideas about class and class conflict off as the direct converse of Marx’s (Nisbet 1966:183-86).

 

The disparities between approaches to class consciousness reflect fundamental differences in the conceptual status of class. The Marxist conception of class encompasses a historical relationship, not a position in a hierarchy, and is therefore best understood and studied as contingent, as a process, and as an interactional phenomenon (Thompson 1968:939, Zeitlin 1980:3, McNall et al 1991:4). Classes are social configurations structured from without (in terms of the changing “bases and forms of interclass systems of material and symbolic relations”) and from within (“intraclass relations” or what is often called “class formation”), but classes are also always partial social configurations to the extent that they are constantly in a process of organization, disorganization, and reorganization in relation to their conflicts with other classes (Wacquant 1991:51).

 

Class formation has often been framed as a dual historical process comprising an objective side (in the mechanisms by which people are distributed into different economic practices) and a subjective side (ideational class consciousness). It thus tends to replicate, albeit within a historically dynamic process, a separation between objectivity and subjectivity that corresponds to the stratificationist approaches discussed earlier (Therborn 1983:39, Katznelson 1986, McNall et al 1991:7). But the view of class structure as “interclass relations” and class formation as “intraclass relations” may offer a more useful formulation (Wacquant 1991). The notion of “intraclass relations” suggests a relaxation of the subjective/objective dichotomy, thus making conceptual space for the return of “conscious human activity” in its mediating role between subjectivity and objectivity, both of which it embodies and produces.

 

A focus on class formation as intraclass relations would seem to provide an improved conceptual tool for studying the extent to which a class or class fraction acts “for itself.” It better allows for the consideration of those practices–cultural practices, collective actions, processes of organizational construction (and destruction)–that have been central to the sustenance (and weakening) of class cohesion and definition, yet that have been largely ignored in the study of class consciousness. This does not preclude the consideration of ideation but requires that it be contextualized within real (and contingent) historical processes that emerge from the interaction between groups, or classes, in their relations with one another. In other words, ideas and attitudes must be examined in the practical, institutional, and historical contexts in which they are formed, negotiated intersubjectively, and given meaning. Such an emphasis recommends that we relinquish the concept of class consciousness as the main focus of inquiry in exchange for what would seem to be an enhanced ability to comprehend class relations.

 

Of course, such a project has been under way for some time, and a significant literature exists, one that could be characterized as being, simultaneously, theoretically homogeneous and thematically heterogeneous. That is, a somewhat limited range of questions has been asked of a fairly wide range of empirical materials. Various “neo-Marxist” frameworks have predominated (which is not surprising for the study of class relations and class formation), but a Weberian influence is often present as well. In what follows I review some recent and promising examples.

 

Culture In Action

 

In his classic study, The Making of the English Working Class, EP Thompson provided a significant critique of both stratification research and Marxist determinism, by conceptualizing and demonstrating class as an active and relational historical process and class consciousness as the cultural expression of the class experience (1968:9-12). Thompson demonstrated analytically the self-activity of the working class in its construction of an independent working-class culture as well as the relative autonomy of cultural processes from material forms. His analysis made working-class culture and consciousness significant intellectual concerns for a generation of social historians. Thompson himself thus became the intellectual forebear of the interdisciplinary scholarship that has become known as “cultural studies” (Kaye 1984, Alexander & Seidman 1990, Aronowitz 1993).

 

While the leitmotif of his work was “culture,” including the study of various symbolic modes of expression (ritual practices, the evolution of customs, and the appropriation and alteration of traditional patterns by emergent social groups), Thompson was never fully at ease with the traditional anthropological conception of culture, which “…with its cosy invocation of consensus, may serve to distract attention from social and cultural contradictions, from the fractures and oppositions within the whole” (Thompson 1991:6). Instead, he viewed cultural expression as socially fragmented along rough class lines, “rough” both because modern class relations were emergent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and because historical contingencies, sectoral and regional differences, and the relational character of the class experience made searching for a “pure specimen” futile, no matter how finely meshed one’s “sociological net” (Thompson 1968:9). Thompson’s working class culture was a subculture whose products were often invested with meanings in direct opposition to the dominant cultural rules.

 

By conceptualizing class consciousness as cultural expression, Thompson’s work expanded the field of investigation to encompass a much broader set of practices, representations, and constructions than the survey instrument could ever have allowed. It inspired a large number of social historical writings on working-class consciousness and formation as it was expressed and embodied in the development of leisure activities, family rituals, neighborhoods, social clubs, mutual aid societies, trade unions, etc (Kaye & McClelland 1990).

 

A crucial aspect of this “history from the bottom up” was that it placed human agency at the center of its analysis (Appelbaum 1979, Thompson 1978). But in more recent scholarship the question has been posed: Just which humans were the historical agents in the world that Thompson recovered? This work has tended to challenge the notion that a distinctly “working-class” culture and consciousness was predominant, arguing for a more historically limited “artisanal” consciousness or a more socially encompassing “populism” (Calhoun 1982, Stedman Jones 1983, McNall 1988, Scott 1988, Joyce 1991, Orr &McNall 1991). For example, where Thompson argued for the historical maturation of eighteenth century artisanal radicalism into nineteenth century working-class consciousness (revealed in the collective cultural responses to class exploitation), Calhoun (1982) viewed the centrality of the community (rather than class) as the basis for an eighteenth century artisanal radicalism that was altogether different from (rather than contiguous with) the working-class reformism evident in nineteenth century Chartism. Whereas Thompson stressed the processes by which a shared culture and a way of life were constructed in response to the exploitive social relations in which people were embedded (class consciousness as the cultural expression of the “lived experience” of class), recent “post-structural” historical analyses have emphasized the power of language both to mold workers’ consciousness in the direction of various forms of populism and radicalism in ways largely independent of class and to accent the linguistic and discursive (and gendered) bases of the class experience (Stedman-Jones 1983, Joyce 1991, Scott 1991).

 

Though the emphasis on discourse obliges a useful rethinking of class consciousness and the role of language in shaping meaning construction, there is a danger in treating language as a “determining” force in order to beat a hasty retreat from the notion of class as an exploitive relationship (Foster 1985, Meiksins-Wood 1986). It seems less than useful to reproduce the same restrictive dependence on attitudes and ideation that has been criticized in survey research, by treating language as if it were completely disconnected, rather than as “partially autonomous,” from the socially structured processes by which some groups or classes maintain the capacity to shape dialogue, discourse, and meaning (Orr &McNall 1991, Steinberg 1993). In responding to his critics, Thompson has noted the tendency to view people as “captives within a linguistic prison,” thus minimizing the ways in which language is used creatively across different settings, particularly among subordinate groups where postures of deference and rebellion may be forced into cohabitation (Thompson 1991: 10-12).

 

Moving away from accounts that treat discourse as either disembodied or determining, Steinberg has placed analytical emphasis on the strugglee over discourse and meaning within the context of specific conflicts (Steinberg 1991, 1993). In this work, which is based on historical analyses of nineteenth century British weavers and cotton spinners, Steinberg argues that a key element in contention between groups is conflict over prevailing discourses–conflicts which, at base, are struggles over meaning and embody the potential for subversion by subordinate groups. As against the post-structural criticisms advanced by Stedman Jones, Joyce, Scott, and others, Steinberg argues that because class consciousness was constructed within and framed by a dominant bourgeois culture, the analytical focus ought to be on the processes through which the working classes used, appropriated, and placed their own stamp of meaning on bourgeois discourses, rather than on the words that were employed (Steinberg 1993:12). The search for a “pure” working-class consciousness is likely to be fruitless, he advises, for it suggests a dubious homology between social life and its representation.

 

Instead of a focus on social actors impelled by discourses and their meanings, as post-structural accounts would suggest, this view emphasizes the dynamics of the processes by which social actors struggle through meaning and language. For Steinberg, these struggles are most perceptible during strikes and other periods of intergroup conflict when discourses of collective identity and interest tend to be articulated most clearly and are subject to the sharpest challenges (Steinberg 1993:10).

 

The consideration of language is also an important element in David Wellman’s recent ethnographic account of the political culture of the contemporary San Francisco waterfront (Wellman 1995). He has analyzed the discourse of longshoremen, the practical working language of the docks, through both a textual examination of the union contract and the struggles over its interpretation, as well as in an analysis of the day-to-day language that workers create to make sense of and sustain a measure of control and dignity over their lives at work (Wellman 1994).

 

Wellman takes a different tack from the stress on strike activity that punctuates Steinberg’s analysis of language and meaning construction, as well as from Kimeldorf’s (1988) view that the political generation of “34 men,” veterans of the San Francisco general strike, has had a substantial and enduring impact on the political culture of the West Coast longshoremen. Instead, Wellman argues that it has not been primarily strike action or left-wing leadership that sustained the radical trade unionism of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemans’ Union (ILWU). Rather, his study demonstrates that the basic practices of everyday contract unionism have served as a foundation for a militant working-class culture among union members. Wellman’s work ought to prompt some rethinking of both the nature of militancy and the nature of everyday unionism.

 

Generally, a focus on “action” as an expression of “consciousness” and class mobilization has figured prominently in historical and ethnographic accounts. Though the term “action” could represent virtually all social activity, the two kinds of social action most relevant to the problem of class formation have tended to be (a) “strategic encounters” between classes, or strategic industrial conflicts or collective actions that occur outside of the normal round of everyday life; and (b) processes of “organizational mobilization (and demobilization).” The first would include those strategic encounters that have had a national impact on class relations, like the British miners’ strike of 1984-1985, or the strike and subsequent firing of 12,000 air traffic controllers in the United States in 1981 (Beynon 1985, Shostak&Skocik 1986), and would also include sociological analyses of local and regional conflicts that illustrate the dynamics of class formation at a more micro level (Fantasia 1998, Delgado 1993, Dudley 1994).

 

The concept of “cultures of solidarity” was specifically employed to avoid the ideationally bound concept of “class consciousness,” in an analysis that focused on the ways in which emergent cultural formations were constructed intersubjectively and in relation to opposition, during acute industrial conflicts (Fantasia 1988). Expressed in emergent values, behaviors, and organizational forms, these “cultures of solidarity” indicated that collective “consciousness” may be bound fairly tightly to the strategic encounter that has given rise to it, and thus such cultural processes can be seen as relatively independent of the previously existing ideas and beliefs of individual participants. This analysis was based on the notion that group beliefs are more fluid in situations of conflict, than during settled periods. The main unit of analysis was not the beliefs of individuals, but the collective action and mobilization of both sides within a strategic encounter.

 

As Delgado’s study of union organizing among undocumented immigrant workers in Los Angeles shows, while workers in such strategic encounters often draw upon the resources of existing organizations, like established unions, their emergent and grass-roots democratic character, and their ability to mobilize other social assets (ehnicity, residential community, social movements, etc), suggest that “cultures of solidarity” are not reducible to institutionalized forms of unionism (Delgado 1993).

 

The collective actions manifested within such strategic encounters have often been closely tied to processes of organizational mobilization and demobilization; this has been particularly true in recent years as employers have openly mobilized to break unions, which in the United States have traditionally represented the clearest embodiment of working-class organization (Cornfield 1986, Goldfield 1987, Fantasia 1993). Additionally, the processes of organizational restructuring might be viewed as examples of strategic encounters capable of engendering fervent class sentiments. In her recent study of the closing of an auto plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Kathryn Marie Dudley found that the workers’ “cultural solidarity” wasn’t created anew by the social crisis of the plant closing; she found that class solidarity had been largely sustained by the conditions of work. Instead, the crisis exposed existing underlying differences in cultural interpretation resulting from differences between the ways in which the town’s working-class families and middle-class professionals constructed meaning (Dudley 1994). Similarly, in her earlier study of downward mobility, Newman found strong class differences in the interpretation of job loss and economic dislocation (Newman 1988). Studies of management innovations within the workplace have sometimes been framed to suggest their relationship to class mobilization and demobilization (Cornfield 1987, Fantasia et al 1988, Grenier 1988). Moreover, recent studies of urban poverty and industrial dislocation indicate patterns of labor market cleavage, residential segregation, racial exclusion, and other forms of social closure that have important implications for intraclass relations (Wilson 1987, Kasarda 1989, Wacquant& Wilson 1984).

 

In studies of class formation, organizational mobilization and demobilization indicate the degree to which classes and fractions of classes have acted on the basis of their perceived interests; and historical and comparative analyses are notable here (Katznelson&Zolberg 1986). Much of this work demonstrates the complexities and contradictions inherent in intraclass relations, as in analyses of late nineteenth century fraternal orders, which sometimes embodied an uncertain or shifting social constitution (M Clawson 1989, Orr &McNall 1991). Similar complexities are suggested by the divergent political trajectories of different unions, even within the same industry, as in the comparative studies of the left-wing West Coast longshoremen’s union and the racketeer-led East Coast union, or of the radical Western Federation of Miners and the reformist United Mine Workers of America (Kimeldorf 1988, Reitman 1991).

 

The rise of “new social movements” would seem to represent particularly fertile ground for research on the mobilization of class organizations. Such movements tend to eschew class theories, while being largely composed of middle-class activists and informed by middle-class cultural sensibilities (Klandermans&Oegema 1987, Melucci 1989). By considering participation, mobilization strategies, ideological frameworks, coalition-building, and institutional resources from the perspective of their class bases, our understanding of the middle class might be greatly increased.

 

As I have suggested earlier, a good deal is already known about the upper class from research that has focused on the role of cultural practices, social networks, and institutions in the mobilization of political and economic resources. Some of the more recent examples of this work continue to be extremely valuable for an understanding of class relations in the United States (Cookson &Persell 1985, Domhoff& Dye 1987, Domhoff 1990, Roy 1991, Clawson et al 1992).

 

Just as important as comprehending cultural practices and collective action in the process of class formation are the ways in which various forms of social organization provide the context for shared meanings and beliefs. Here too, ethnographic and historical approaches predominate and culture is often a key focus, but the main analytical object has been to locate the roots of a shared consciousness within a particular social matrix.

 

The Social Organization of Culture and Consciousness

 

In the United Kingdom the question of the relationship between class and community has been the source of a good deal of research, partly spurred by David Lockwood’s seminal article on the “sources of variation in working class images of society” (Lockwood 1966). In it he argued that the class consciousness of particular social classes cannot be imputed, in any simple way, from their relations to the means of production, because of the extent of ideological variation within social classes (Lockwood 1966). He sought the sources of this variation in “the immediate social experience” of workers, by which he meant the patterns of work and community relationships that serve to structure particular forms of consciousness (Lockwood 1966).

 

In the United States work by Katznelson (1981) and Halle (1984) provided a good sense of direction for understanding the social organizational bases of working-class culture and consciousness. Independently, they iocated important differences in the shared meanings constructed in the workplace and in the residential community, a function of the historic division between work and home (for Katznelson), and of the mix of income level, home ownership, and occupational heterogeneity (for Halle).

 

Equally valuable was Susan Ostrander’s study of the ways in which shared meanings are constructed by upper-class women in relation to the practices and expections of upper-class family and community life (Ostrander 1980, 1984). She examined the relationship between their class activities and position in the community, where they are dominant, and their subordinate role within the family, illustrating why the former tends to define their consciousness and shape their conduct more than the latter. Other studies of gendered labor markets suggest that outside of the upper class there may be a more complicated relationship between class and gender consciousness (see Milkman 1987, Acker 1989, Yarrow 1991). When working class subcultures are divided by both racial and gender divisions, the possibilities for construction of shared meaning are rendered more complicated still, as Jay MacLeod’s ethnography of black and white adolescent males in a low-income housing project indicates (MacLeod 1987). His study vividly described the diverging cultural responses toward the future within a shared context of poverty and social fragmentation.

 

In a very different approach, Michael Burawoy’s comparative workplace ethnographies have been exemplars of a social-organizational conception of consciousness, but he argues against the view that working-class consciousness is produced anywhere but inside the factory gates (Burawoy&Lukacs 1992:4). Like Lockwood, Burawoy views consciousness not as a simple matter of workers’ relations to the means of production; unlike Lockwood, he has focused on workers’ experiences within production and on the ways that political and ideological “regimes” of production have developed to mediate between the imperatives of production relations and class consciousness.

 

Burawoy’s formulation has developed over the course of several works. The first was a participant-observation study in a Chicago machine shop, in which Burawoy showed how the games that workers played to lessen their boredom paradoxically served to “manufacture consent” with capitalist goals, while obscuring the exploitive nature of social relations in the workplace (Burawoy 1979). When worker grievances emerged, the plant’s “internal state” channeled and individualized them, instead of producing a collective response or a collective consciousness. Though the analysis may have overlooked ways in which shop floor “regimes” generate conflict as well as consent, it made an important and provocative contribution to the study of class formation by problematizing the lack of class consciousness in factory production and by offering an argument for the independent importance of factory “regimes” (Clawson & Fantasia 1983). Burawoy’s conception of “production regimes” as consciousness-structuring mechanisms was further sharpened by the use of cross-national and historical comparisons, in which he stressed the role of the state in creating the conditions for the specific forms taken by production regimes at the local level (Burawoy 1985).

 

The latest work, written with a Hungarian collaborator, Janos Lukacs, is based on his participant observation in Hungarian workplaces, affording an opportunity to compare the relationship between ideology and the politics of production in the East and the West (Burawoy&Lukacs 1992). Comparing work experiences in Hungarian machine shops with those in the Chicago factory, Burawoy&Lukacs demonstrated the paradoxical “efficiency” of socialist production and “inefficiency” of capitalist production, while drawing upon experience in Hungarian steel plants to make an important argument about working-class consciousness. They found that while ideology played only a secondary role in justifying the appropriation of surplus production in a capitalist society, in state socialism appropriation by the state had constantly to be justified as an expression of collective interests through various ritual mobilizations. Consequently, “Everyone is called on to ‘paint socialism’ as the radiant future at the same time that everyone knows that the everyday ‘reality’ is anything but radiant” (Burawoy&Lukacs 1992:20-21). Ironically then, the socialist system of production tended to give rise to a working-class ideological critique for which the view was much less obscured than in the capitalist system of the United States. Through his comparative approach to production regimes, Burawoy has grounded class consciousness in the organization and regulation of work, in the “lived experience in production” (Burawoy&Lukacs 1992:113).

 

In a theoretical analysis that links organizational and cultural factors, Stinchcombe has drawn from EP Thompson’s account of working-class consciousness to highlight the structural factors at work within Thompson’s cultural analysis, and then to suggest the possible interplay of culture and work organization within contemporary service industries (Stinchcombe 1990). He emphasizes that in the universality of labor markets (large groups of people with identical labor contracts) and the uniformity of political rights (citizenship status), along with urbanization, industrialization produced the conditions for working-class consciousness. Culture matters, for Stinchcombe, because it is through culture that the meaning of organizational structures comes to be defined and, particularly in the case of many service industries, that workers sell cultural symbols of upper-class status. From this perspective, certain groups of workers will be less class conscious than others largely because they do not work in large groups with categorical labor contracts, they have regular contact with upper-class clients, and they are attached to upper-class cultural symbols. Thus, for Stinchcombe, “while we will not expect, say, stewardesses or pilots to be as militant as mineworkers, we will expect them to be a good deal more class conscious than workers in retail jewelry” (p. 309).

 

Stinchcombe’s is a provocative formulation of the way in which social organization generates and structures consciousness. It contains a number of possibilities for interesting research, including his ideas about the place of status symbols in the collective consciousness of service workers, In addition he suggests that service workers will veer to the left (in political terms) if their work situation gives them more contact with working-class clients, while those whose contact is with an upper-class clientele may veer to the right.

 

This paper has reviewed only a portion of the relevant and recent literature on class culture, action, and social organization. A wider and deeper synthesis would surely be required to address the many theoretical and empirical gaps in our understanding of class consciousness and class formation in the United States. But with stratificationism no longer enjoying a monopoly, the scope of investigation has broadened, moving us toward a conceptualization that is collective, rather than individual, that is dynamic rather than static, and that treats class ideation in its natural (and historical) habitat of cultural practices, collective action, and social organization.

 

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