Relations of Ruling: Class and Gender in Postindustrial Societies

318 Pages·1994·16.325 MB·English

by  Wallace Clement, John Myles

Relations of Ruling
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Relations of Ruling
Class and Gender in
Postindustrial Societies
WALLACECLEMENT
and JOHN MYLES
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo
© McGill-Queen's University Press 1994
ISBN 0-7735-1164-4 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7735-1178-4 (paper)
Legal deposit second quarter 1994
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a
grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada,
using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Clement, Wallace
Relations of ruling : class and gender in
postindustrial societies
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-1164-4 (bound)
ISBN 0-7735-1178-4 (pbk.)
1. Social classes. 2. Sex role. 3. Power
(Social sciences). I. Myles, John II. Title.
HN17-5.C54 1994 305.5 093-090666-7
Contents
Preface vii
PART ONE CLASS RELATIONS IN
POSTINDUSTRIALSOCIETIES1
1 Class Relations in Industrial Capitalism 3
2 Filling the Empty Places: Class, Gender, and
Postindustrialism 22
3 Postindustrialism, Small Capital, and the "Old" Middle
Class/co-authored with GRANT SCHELLENBERG 40
4 Postindustrialism and the Regulation of Labour 63
5 The Political Culture of Class 91
PART TWO GENDER RELATIONS IN
POSTINDUSTRIALSOCIETIES121
6 Bringing In Gender: Postindustrialism and Patriarchy/
co-authored with CLARENCE LOCHHEAD 123
7 Household Relations: Power Divisions and Domestic
Labour 142
8 Linking Domestic and Paid Labour: Career Disruptions
and Household Obligations 175
vi Contents
9 Social Cleavages and the Political Cultures of
Gender 211
10 After Industrialism 238
Appendix 1: Methodological Notes 255
Appendix 2: Identifying Skilled Jobs 261
Notes 267
Index 299
Preface
The Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Conscious-
ness was launched under the initiative of Erik Olin Wright in the
United States and joined by Goran Ahrne from Sweden in the early
igSos. The undertaking we connected with also included the Finnish
project led by Raimo Blom and Markku Kivinen. Our affiliation was
simultaneous with the Norwegian group led by Tom Colbjornsen.
These five nations constitute the empirical core of this book. Since
the initial five, another five nations have completed their surveys and
recently produced comparative data (Australia, Denmark, Japan, the
United Kingdom, and West Germany), while several others are in
varying degrees of preparation (Greece, Hungary, New Zealand, Po-
land, Taiwan, Turkey, the Soviet Union, and Spain) and are likely to
produce data in the near future. This book is the first systematic at-
tempt to present some comparative findings from the original five-
nation data set. That data set has been made possible because of the
undaunting efforts by Erik Olin Wright to co-ordinate the dissemi-
nation of material and the extraordinary organizational skills of the
late Bonnie Amim, the former administrative co-ordinator of the
Comparative Project, who tragically died on 11 February 1990. With-
out the talents and generosity of Bonnie and Erik, the comparative di-
mension, which gives this project its essential insights, would not
have been possible.
All who approach such a challenging data set will do so in their
own way, with their own agendas, so we do not pretend to have ex-
hausted its enormous potential. Moreover, the additional countries
viii Preface
will add new dimensions. What we have done is bring to the study
our own conception of class, a sensitivity to the salience of gender,
and equal attention to the realms of production and reproduction,
especially their mutual relationships. We have chosen to "take apart"
the concept of class, examine how its components work, and then
put it back together. We have been especially cognizant of introduc-
ing our concern with ideology, culture, and the attitudes about class
and gender, all within a comparative context.
The Canadian survey added to the original questionnaire a
greater depth on the division of domestic responsibilities and their
effects on labour-force disruptions, greater complexity on authority
relationships (including the gendered structure of authority rela-
tions), and additional questions on job skills and autonomy. These
additional data permit us to pursue some of the comparative ques-
tions in greater depth for Canada.
Class analysis has at its core the relationship between capital and
labour. Within this relationship, there is a central dynamic that ex-
presses itself at the socio-economic level in the four great classes of
advanced capitalism: the capitalist-executive, working, new middle,
and old middle classes. The novelty of our analysis lies in our focus
on class structure as the object of investigation, the structured "rela-
tions of ruling" within which men and women go about reproducing
the conditions for their own material existence. Our concern has
been to identify and account for macro-structural differences in the
organization of class relations and less with their micro-behavioural
consequences. To use the language of variable analysis, class relations
provide the dependent, rather than the independent, variable
throughout most of our study. Why has the "old" middle class of in-
dependent producers and small property owners been more resil-
ient, and even resurgent, in some countries than in others? Why do
some economies devote more labour to the regulation and surveil-
lance of workers than others? These are the sorts of questions we
raise in part i.
Our title, Relations of Ruling, is a phrase borrowed from the femi-
nist scholar Dorothy Smith. Its initial appeal was the fact that it pro-
vided us with a generic concept that subsumes social relations of
both production and reproduction. Our original scheme was to de-
vote part i of our study to "relations of ruling" in the labour market
and part 2 to "relations of ruling" in the household. Part i was to be
about class relations and part 2 about gender relations. At the begin-
ning, gender relations meant the division of labour and social rela-
tions between men and women in the household. Relations of ruling
in the office or factory were "class relations."
ix Preface
We were, of course, sensitive to the fact that class relations could be
"gendered," but this meant mainly that there would be gender "dif-
ferences" in the way men and women are distributed among classes.
As our work proceeded, we began to rethink this position, a process
that led to the present version of chapter 6, which introduces part 2.
There, we revisit the "class analysis" of part i to consider the possi-
bility that there is more to production relations than class relations,
that relations of ruling in the market not only develop to organize
relations between capital and labour but also between men and
women.
We also mean to include within the "relations of ruling" the cul-
tural practices that sustain the institutions fundamental to maintain-
ing structures of control in the paid labour force and in the domestic
sphere. These we will identify as the class and gender orientations
that give meaning to people's accounts of power relations. In chapter
5, we take advantage of our comparative data to address, and to
question, long-standing views on the apparent distinctiveness of
North American class culture. We challenge prevailing views that the
apparent absence of European-like class consciousness among North
American workers is the inherited residue of a Lockean-type liberal
individualism. Instead, we argue, the cultural repertoire through
which North Americans filter their understanding of "classes" re-
flects the tradition of radical democratic populism that has infused
movements of protest against the established order in North Amer-
ica since the end of the nineteenth century. We also take issue with
conventional understandings of Canada—U.S. differences in this re-
spect. The Canadian experience has not produced a more Euro-
pean-like understanding of classes and instead is firmly rooted in the
populist legacy that has shaped the politics of class on both sides of
the 49th parallel.
In chapter 9 we extend our analysis of gender relations to an un-
derstanding that includes intranational divisions. Most of the book
uses country as a single variable, but in the final empirical analysis we
look at key social cleavages, especially in North America. These in-
clude the "national question" in Quebec, divisions based upon eth-
nicity in Canada and race in the United States, and regional divisions
in both. We choose to use the "culture of gender" as our site for in-
vestigation but maintain our focus on class and sex divisions. An issue
we concentrate on is how the trade unions have influenced attitudes
towards feminist issues.
The major tendencies that have been incorporated into our anal-
ysis include the unfolding of postindustrialism, the expanded place
of women in the paid labour force, the rise of the new middle class in