In defence of class analysis: a comment on ROE. Pahl

GORDON MARSHALL

Ray Pahl’s (1989) admittedly polemical paper on the adequacy of theory in urban and regional research displays all the characteristics usually associated with that particular mode of argumentation. Sweeping charges are levelled against targets who are never clearly identified. All of the substantive propositions are asserted rather than demonstrated. Many of his detailed allegations are actually open to empirical test - although most of the evidence known to me contradicts Pahl’s conclusions. His account of class analysis is alternately misleading and fanciful. And, finally, the paper is impenetrably vague about what, if anything, provides a more satisfactory alternative. (All those mischievous hints towards consumption are, of course, so spectacularly at odds with the evidence that I cannot believe we are intended to take them seriously.)

A very peculiar sort of critique

Consider, for example, the curious structure of the argument itself. The introductory and concluding sections of Pahl’s article are a condemnation of the editors and contributors to this journal, who stand collectively accused of a lack of imagination, of dozing in the midst of a theoketical crisis, and of a host of lesser intellectual misdemeanours. The middle sections offer a critique of class analysis. One immediately puzzling thing about the piece is therefore the relationship - or rather the obvious lack of a relationship - between its constituent parts. Careful examination of the back numbers confirms that class analysts have rarely contributed to the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - at most a dozen or so articles in as many years. Why then blame us for its alleged shortcomings?

Leaving this preliminary matter aside, however, the treatment of class analysis itself is both marvellously inconsistent and impenetrably vague. Thus, for example, Pahl reports earnestly that the links in the structure-consciousness-action chain are rarely seen as problematic among class analysts. This trichotomous sequence has, instead, attained the status of a mantra. He now questions the determinism implied in this theoretical sequence - stimulated, that is, by David Lockwood’s well-known article on ‘The weakest link in the chain’ (1981). Note, however, that this is the same David Lockwood who has also written at length in defence of class analysis (see, for example, his contribution to the Crompton and Mann volume on Gender and strati$cation). A very peculiar sort of logic is surely at work here. But there is more to come. As Pahl himself states clearly, Lockwood’s paper (subtitled ‘some comments on the marxist theory of action’) is a critique of specifically marxist social theory; that is, Pahl continues, a critique of precisely the lund of mechanistic reasoning that underpins class analysis, as exemplified in Gordon Marshall et al., Social

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class in modern Britain (1988). Note, this is the same Marshall et al. who devote more than half of their volume to systematic criticism of marxist theories of class, and who reject these theories principally because of their ‘sociological reductionism’. In other words, we condemn the tendency to reduce ideological and political developments to putative changes in the class structure, and include no less than five chapters exploring the contingent relationship between structure, consciousness and action. I find this all very confusing. Nor does it help to be told that Pahl’s preferred alternative to class analysis is a position ‘broadly similar to that put forward by E.P. Thompson a quarter of a century ago’ - since Thompson is, of course, an avowedly marxist social historian.

Class analysis - who are these people?

I could continue at length, documenting the strange inconsistencies and elusive logic of what I take to be the first draft of two separate articles, inadvertently spliced together by the machinations of Ray Pahl’s word processor. Instead, I would like simply to ask him the following questions, to which I can find no answers whatsoever in his paper.

First, and most importantly, he insists that ‘class as a concept is ceasing to do any useful work for sociology’. In reply, I want to know how long it has been since he read anything about social mobility, health and illness, or voting behaviour (to take but three obvious examples). Mobility research (such as the Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations Project) has documented empirically, in great detail and using a variety of techniques, the extent to which access to privilege is structured as much by class today as it has been throughout most of the twentieth century, in most industrialized societies. The Black Report and any number of quite uncontroversial social surveys show clearly that (literal) life chances are massively associated with social class. (Much of this material is summarized in the new edition of Ivan Reid’s Social class diflerences in Britain, 1989.) The British General Election Studies and British Social Attitudes Surveys demonstrate forcefully that social class remains the single most important variable in British psephology (see, for example, the series of papers by Anthony Heath and his colleagues). In each of these three areas the influence of class is unmistakable and substantial. Are we to believe that the findings from all of these projects (and numerous others one might easily mention) are wholly fictitious?

Second, who are these people who mindlessly incant the conceptual mantra of structure- consciousness-action, as a substitute for critical analysis? The one substantive literature which Pahl specifically characterizes in this way (that dealing with explanations of revolutionary action within nation-states) is actually distinguished by its failure to adhere to the rituals of class determinism and reductionism. I am thinking here of the work of, for example, Theda Skocpol, Jon Elster, Charles Tilly , Pierre Birnbaum, Barrington Moore, Michael Mann and Adam Przeworski. These authors offer rather different perspectives on collective action, yet each deploys the conceptual apparatus of class analysis, but without endorsing the alleged mantra of structure-consciousness-action.

Third, of what precisely do class analysts stand accused? The core of Pahl’s critique seems to consist of three allegations. As he puts it (p. 715):

class as a force for political and social change is problematic, since the links in the SCA chain are inadequately theorized and there is little empirical indication that the model has much relevance in practice. Secondly, as a classificatory device class does little to help us understand the life styles of the privileged and adds nothing to the brute facts of poverty when considering the other end of the social structure. Finally, it is apparently well-nigh impossible to operationalize the concept in order to make international comparisons.

All three of these accusations are groundless. Class analysts have endlessly theorized, but more importantly empirically investigated, the links in the SCA chain. Social class in modern Britain, the single exemplar of the genre anywhere actually identified by Pahl,

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deals with little else. Lifestyles are not class-determined because they are in fact aspects of the status order in society (see, for example, the studies by Tom Marshall, Geoff Crossick and Bryan Turner). Similarly, poverty is associated with class, but not exhausted by it. The relationships between unemployment, inadequate housing, ill health, ethnicity and so forth are an empirical issue; indeed, one much explored by class analysts (including, to mention but a few, John Goldthorpe and Clive Payne, Ira Katznelson, Robert Erikson and Rune Aberg), who have established that at least some of these correlates of poverty are class-related phenomena. Which class analyst ever claimed more? Finally, not only is it possible to operationalize class in order to make intelligent international comparisons, but some class analysts have actually done this, and offered some rather impressive data about the similarities and differences in the class regimes of different societies, and then used these conclusions to test larger theories of social order and change. I could mention here works by (among others) Rudolf Andorka, Richard Breen, Wolfgang Konig, David Featherman, Natalie Rogoff-Ramsoy , Hiroshi Ishida, Robert Hauser, Tamas Kolosi, Lucienne Portocarero, Uli Mayer and Seppo Pontinen. Some of us, indeed, incline to the view that it is difficult to keep abreast of the literature on international comparisons. (Most of these authors, and a good many more besides, are discussed in the 1987 review article by Karin Kurz and Walter Muller.) So my question to Pahl is, simply, why does he discount all of these sources in framing his critique?

Critics who live in glass houses . . . Of course, as Pahl insists, the structural element of the SCA model ‘may or may not have consequences for consciousness and action’. Precisely. But class analysts have been saying this for as long as I can remember. Exploring this relationship empirically, Heath and his colleagues have arrived at an ‘interactionist’ theorization of the relationship between class, party and voting, while the notorious Marshall et al. have emphasized the importance of organizational variables in explaining the impact of class on British history since the mid-nineteenth century. Why does Pahl ignore these (and many other) examples of non- deterministic class analysis? One can only assume that he is discomfited by the fact that they so obviously contradict his argument.

Moreover, and developing this point further, what precisely are these ‘other forms of identity and social consciousness’ that are ‘coming to have greater practical relevance’ than the identities of social class? The final section of Pahl’s paper speculates about the importance of ‘common dependence on access to credit’ - which, according to him, ‘may provide a possible base for the emergence of common consciousness and putative action’. Well, I suppose Switzerland may apply to join the Warsaw Pact. Margaret Thatcher may be a KGB agent. Colchester United may win the FA Cup. But I would not like to put money on any of these. And, more importantly, the extant evidence suggests otherwise. Class voting actually exists, and class as a meaningful category of everyday culture and discourse is both understood by the vast majority of people in this country, and demonstrably shapes some important aspects of their lives. By contrast, we have yet to see what social consequences will ensue from the cry, ‘Visa Card holders of the world unite!’ Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is there a statistically significant association between morbidity rates and shopping at Marks and Spencer. More seriously, it is now clear that the strongest candidate offering a rival source of such identity and consciousness (the theory of so- called consumption sectoral cleavages) is not supported by the evidence, as even a leading proponent of this thesis (Peter Saunders) himself now acknowledges.

Finally, lest it be thought that I am simply over-reacting to a few incidental weaknesses in Pahl’s critique, here is a selection from the whole catalogue of details about class analysis which he has got hopelessly wrong. Class theories (p. 715) do not rest on a nineteenth- century model of manufacturing industry. Most are based on the contemporary occupational

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structure (Goldthorpe) or on some functional (Carchedi) or positional (Wright) model of contemporary capitalist economies. That, of course, was the whole point of the much maligned boundary debate: that the economy and division of labour had indeed changed. Similarly (pp. 715-16), class analysts have never denied the articulation of class (in all its aspects) with the nation-state. Carolyn Vogler’s The nation state, to take but one example close to home, deals almost exclusively with the empirically complex and historically changing relationship between class and nation, class consciousness and nationalism. Moreover, while I agree (p. 716) that we need to understand the precise relations between income, housing situation and particular conditions of employment, on the one hand, and on the other, the host of dependent variables, such as mortality rates and poverty, with which class is conventionally associated, that is precisely what an army of class analysts have attempted during these past decades. For example, George Brown and his colleagues have devoted more than 20 years to a theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous and empirically exhaustive analysis of the precise effects of social class on schizophrenia and clinical depression. My final question to Ray Pahl, therefore, is why is he so intent on tilting at windmills?

Conclusion

These observations may seem unduly harsh, but they are a fair reflection of my frustration at what I take to be the erroneous premises and muddled analysis of Pahl’s paper, and at least I do him the courtesy of taking his assessment seriously. Naturally, they should not be interpreted as a blanket defence of class theory wherever it occurs, since this area of sociology, like any other, is subject to rational debate and critical appraisal. However, controversy about class seems to have stepped beyond the bounds of scholarship, and into the realm of politics. I have elsewhere argued that the philosophy of the new right - of individualism and the entrepreneurial culture - seems to have had little effect on the attitudes, values, and behaviour of the majority of the UK population. The UK is a society still structured by class and having a national culture informed by class. Perhaps I should now add a footnote to the effect that the only people fooled by the rhetoric of the ‘social class is dead’ lobby have been sociologists themselves. Or at least a few sociologists. Why, I ask myself, are some of my professional colleagues so intent upon endorsing the ideology of the new right? I had always understood that sociology was an attempt to demystify the social world, by debunking ideology, and throwing down the challenge of science.

Gordon Marshall, Department of Sociology, University of Bath, BA2 7AY

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