CLASS

Social inequalities are ancient, but the concept of class evolved only in the nineteenth century with the increasing division of labor accompanying industrialization. Karl Marx (1818–1883) sometimes wrote as if there were just two distinct, inherently antagonistic classes—the bourgeoisie owning the means of production, and the proletariat working for them. Class structures actually were more complex than that even in prerevolutionary Europe, and are all the more so in a global technological civilization. Class is thus a special form of inequality tied to the development of modern science and technology; it is of ethical significance because the costs and benefits of innovation tend to be distributed along class lines.

Sociology of Class

Sociologists studying class tend to categorize households by the male breadwinner's occupation. John H. Goldthorpe (1987) uses eleven categories ranging from professionals, administrators, and corporate managers at the top, to small proprietors, farmers, and personal service workers in the middle, to unskilled manual and agricultural workers near the bottom. Using this and other measures, it becomes apparent that there is substantial variation in distribution of what Max Weber called life chances: The United States has much greater income inequality than most other affluent nations, and low-income American families have worse access to health care, education, and other desired social outcomes (Lareau 2003, Hofrichter 2003). Intergenerational social mobility turns out to be poor just about everywhere, however, with the odds of a middle-class child remaining in that class as an adult about fifteen times greater than the chances of a working-class child moving into the middle class (Marshall et al. 1997).

Increasing participation of women in the workforce means that spouses may work in different job categories, which makes the above classification scheme harder to apply. Two-income households can afford different lifestyles than single-income households, moreover, so categorizing by occupation has become less meaningful. Parents' education may matter more than their occupations in determining a family's Internet usage, leisure activities, nutrition and health, and aspirations for children's futures. More fundamentally, conventional depictions of social class capture rather poorly the creative destruction that technological innovation brings, creating new types of careers while undermining older occupations. The winners celebrate, but several hundred million worldwide have been displaced from farms, factories, and other workplaces in the past generation at considerable personal and social cost.

Likewise being reconstructed over time are the everyday lives of various social strata. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the affluent enjoy transportation, communication, medical care, food, and leisure opportunities superior to what has previously been available to anyone. Even persons of comparatively modest means have access to television, refrigeration, T-shirts, plastic bags, and other manufactured artifacts. Their shared participation in a consumer class may be a more salient social fact than their occupational or even income differences. Because people's realities are substantially structured in relationship with material things, class warfare arguably has become less a conflict among classes than one between the consumer class and the planet.

International Dimensions

Older understandings of class are challenged as well by international stratification. Most of the affluent live in the northern hemisphere, and a working-class household in Europe or Japan is well above average for the world as a whole—and may include a comfortable dwelling, reliable electricity, convenient mass transit or automobile, and government-funded medical care. Peasant farmers and stably employed urban dwellers in poor countries have far less access to technological benefits, and yet they are well above the billion or more persons living in absolute poverty.

Possibly on the lowest rung of the ladder are those who speak one of the 3,000 languages likely to become extinct in the twenty-first century. For example, in 2003 the Danish Supreme Court turned down the final appeal of 150,000 indigenous peoples forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands in northern Greenland during the Cold War to make way for a U.S. missile base. "The Inuit will, in all likelihood, join other indigenous peoples globally whose language, culture, and presence are no longer with us" (Lynge 2002, p. 103).

Thus conventional depictions of social class are too nice, and fail to convey the raw power and powerlessness that often accompany technologies deployed in contexts of socioeconomic inequality. Large dams that flooded villages while failing to deliver the promised irrigation benefits displaced millions. Millions more have been dislocated, maimed, or killed in civil wars fought with helicopter gun ships and automatic weapons. Subsistence farming was undermined by the imposition of export-oriented monocultures and European and North American scientific agricultural methods. International financial markets enabled by computerized data processing have caused ruinous fluctuations in local currencies. Toxic wastes and environmentally hazardous manufacturing processes have been transferred to poor countries (Clapp 2001).

Even within affluent societies, technological bads tend to follow class lines. As environmental justice advocates point out, those with less capacity to buy their way out or to organize politically often get stuck living near noisy factories, polluted waterways, traffic noise and exhaust fumes, hazardous waste dumps, landfills, and other noxious facilities (Bullard 2000). Those with less power in the labor market often find themselves disadvantaged by technological changes in the workplace (Wyatt et al. 2000)

The Future of Class

In sum, an adequate understanding of social class requires dealing with the ugly realities of power, gross international inequalities, post-industrial socioeconomic issues going well beyond occupational stratification, consumers as a new kind of class, and upheavals in work roles and lifestyles associated with technological innovation. The technoscientists' predicament is that their findings and innovations enter a highly stratified world; although few technologists might be comfortable acknowledging it, in effect they work for some social classes much more than for others. Class consciousness has long been weak in the United States, and has diminished even in European social democracies; many social observers speak as if inequality were unimportant. Yet the pervasive, harmful effects of inequalities are well documented, and one need not return to simplistic notions of a ruling class in order to think that ethically charged questions about who gets what deserve the same careful attention accorded to technical aspects of innovation.

E. J. WOODHOUSE

SEE ALSO Affluence;Citizenship;Marxism;Money;Race;Work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullard, Robert D. (2000). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Clapp, Jennifer. (2001). Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gibson-Graham, J. K.; Stephen A. Resnick; and Richard D. Wolff, eds. (2000). Class and Its Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. A feminist, cultural studies approach to the subject of class.

Goldthorpe, John H. (1987). Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hofrichter, Richard, ed. (2003). Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lareau, Annette. (2003). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lynge, Aqqaluk. (2002). The Right to Return: 50 Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland. Nuuk, Greenland: Forgalet Atuagkat.

Marshall, Gordon; Adam Swift; and Stephen Roberts. (1997). Against the Odds?: Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wyatt, Sally; Flis Henwood; Nod Miller; and Peter Senker, eds. (2000). Technology and In/equality: Questioning the Information Society. New York: Routledge.