The Petite Bourgeoisie: Comparative Studies of the Uneasy Stratum

219 Pages·1981·22.832 MB·English

by  Frank Bechhofer, Brian Elliott (eds.)

THE PETITE BOURGEOISIE
EDINBURGH STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
General Editors: Tom Burns, Tom McGlew, Gianfranco Poggi
The Edinburgh Studies in Sociology series publishes sociological works
from the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. The
majority of the books in the series will be founded on original research
or on research and scholarship pursued over a period of time. There will
also be collections of research papers on particular topics of social
interest and textbooks deriving from courses taught in the Department.
Many of the books will appeal to a non-specialist audience as well as to
the academic reader.
Titles already published
Tom Burns: THE BBC: Public Institution and Private World
John Orr: TRAGIC REALISM AND MODERN SOCIETY: Studies
in the Sociology of the Modern Novel
Anthony P. M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones: THE IMAGES OF
OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE: A Study in Social Cognition
Anthony P. M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones: CLASS AND
HIERARCHY: The Social Meaning of Occupations
Anthony P. M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones: MEASUREMENT AND
MEANINGS: Techniques and methods of Studying Occupational
Cognition
Forthcoming titles
Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott: THE SMALL SHOPKEEPER IN
THE CLASS STRUCTURE
John Orr: TRAGIC DRAMA AND MODERN SOCIETY: Studies in
the Social Theory of Drama from 1870 to the Present
Brian Elliott and David McCrone: PROPERTY AND POWER IN A
CITY
Kathryn Hackett: THE NEGOTIATION OF PARENTHOOD
Harvie Ferguson: CONFINEMENT AND CHILDHOOD: Two
Essays in Experimental Psychology
THE PETITE
BOURGEOISIE
Comparative Studies of the Uneasy Stratum
Edited by
Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott
pal grave
* © Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott 1981
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Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Agrarian Petit-Bourgeois Responses to Capitalist
Industrialisation: The Case of Canada: J. F. Conway
2 Farming for Survival: The Small Farmer in the Con
temporary Rural Class Structure Howard Newby, David
Rose, Peter Saunders and Colin Bell 38
3 The Uses of the Traditional Sector in Italy: Why Declining
Classes Survive Suzanne Berger 71
4 The Petite Bourgeoisie in Socialist Society Bronislaw
Misztal 90
5 The Petite Bourgeoisie and the New Middle Class: Differen
tiation or Homogenisation of the Middle Strata in
Germany Franz Urban Pappi 105
6 The Petty Commodity Producer in Third World Cities: Petit
Bourgeois or 'Disguised' Proletarian? Chris Gerry and
Chris Birkbeck 121
7 Artisanal Bakery in France: How it Lives and Why it
Survives Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame 155
8 Petty Property: the Survival of a Moral Economy Frank
Bechhofer and Brian Elliott 182
Author Index 201
Subject Index 204
v
Notes on the Contributors
Frank Bechhofer was Junior Research Officer in the Department of
Applied Economics, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1965. He then became
Lecturer in Sociology at Edinburgh University until 1971 when he
became Reader in Sociology. He has written several articles on research
methods, industrial sociology and stratification. He is co-author of The
Affluent Worker and editor of Population Growth and the Brain Drain
and is preparing The Small Shopkeeper in the Class Structure (with Brian
Elliott).
Colin Bell is Professor of Sociology at Aston University. In addition to
the works with Howard Newby he is author of Middle Class Families;
co-author with Margaret Stacey, Anne Murcott, and Eric Batstone of
Power, Persistence and Change, and co-author with Sol Encel of Inside
the Whale.
Suzanne Berger is Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts
Institute of Sociology. She is the author of Peasants against Politics, The
French Political System, and Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial
Societies (with Michael Piore). She is also editor of Organizing Interests
in West Europe.
Daniel Bertaux is Charge de recherche au Centre National de Ia
Recherche Scientifique. He works at the Centre d'Etudes des Mouve
ments Sociaux in Paris and is the author of Destins personnels et
structure declasse and numerous papers. He is also editor of Biography
and Society.
Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame is Attachee de recherche au Centre National
de Ia Recherche Scientifique and works in the Groupe de Sociologie au
Travail, Universite de Paris VII. Trained as an historian she is now using
an oral history approach to the dynamics of socio-historical change and
has published articles in this area.
Chris Birkbeck graduated in Geography from Oxford University and is
now Research Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies. He is
author of various articles on crime and employment in Colombia.
J. F. Conway is Associate Professor of Sociology and Head of the
Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina,
vii
viii Notes on the Contributors
Saskatchewan. Originally trained as a psychologist he obtained his
Ph.D. in Political Science and Sociology at Simon Fraser University. He
is the author of a number of articles on Populism.
Brian Elliott was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow
from 1963 to 1965. He then moved to Edinburgh University where he
was Lecturer in Sociology until 1979 when he became Senior Lecturer.
He was also Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the
University of British Columbia, 1973-74. He has written several articles
on urban sociology and social stratification and is currently writing
Property and Power ina City and The Modern City(with D. McCrone)and
The Small Shopkeeper in the Class Structure (with Frank Bechhofer).
Chris Gerry is Lecturer in Development Studies at the Centre for
Development Studies, University of Swansea. An economist, he has
written on petty production and capitalism and is editor (with Ray
Bromley) of Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities.
Bronislaw Misztal is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy
and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. He is the author of
four books in Polish 'Peer groups in Urban Culture'; 'Problems of Social
Participation and Co-operation'; 'Urban Sociology'; and 'Changes in
Small Town Communities under Urbanization and Industrialization'.
Howard Newby is Reader in Sociology at the University of Essex. He is
the author of The Deferential Worker and Green and Pleasant Land?;
editor of International Perspectives in Rural Sociology; co-author with
Colin Bell of Community Studies; co-editor with Colin Bell of The
Sociology of Community and Doing Sociological Research; and co
author with Colin Bell, David Rose, and Peter Saunders of Property,
Paternalism and Power.
Franz Urban Pappi is Professor of Sociology at the Institut fiir
Soziologie der Christian-Albrechts-UniversiHit 'at Kiel. He is co-author
with Edward 0. Laumann of Networks of Collective Attion; editor of
Sozialstruktur-analysen mit Umfragedaten; and author of numerous
articles on social stratification, voting behaviour, methodology and
survey research.
David Rose is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex and co
author of Property, Paternalism and Power.
Peter Saunders is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. He is
author of Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation and co-author of
Property, Paternalism and Power. ·
Preface
This book has been a long time in the making. Not so much in the
business of commissioning the papers, reworking some of the trans
lations and generally editing-though that has taken long enough. But
in a sense this book dates back to 1968 when we published a paper on
small shopkeepers (Bechhofer and Elliott, 1968). At that time we were
planning an empirical study-which we subsequently carried out- in
which we construed them as 'marginal' members of the middle class. The
rather sparse literature on retail trade and indeed on small business in
general available at that time led us to identify a difficult market
situation, unpleasant work situation redeemed only by independence,
and a status situation which located shopkeepers shakily in the middle
class. As we subsequently wrote 'the shopkeepers' claim to be middle
class rested upon peculiar features of their market and work situations.
In particular, the ownership of modest amounts of capital and the
element of autonomy at work seemed to provide the major reasons for
distinguishing them from manual workers and placing them with the
traditional bourgeois elements of our society. At the same time, it was
obvious that the self-same factors marked them off from most of the
other groups conventionally labelled "lower middle class"' (Bechhofer
eta!., 1974). A decade ago at the time of the publishing of the Affluent
Worker studies and before the Marxist revival changed the face of
British sociology, it seemed a reasonable strategy to further the study of
the British class structure by examining a group which lay close to the
'margin' of the middle class in the same sort of way as affluent workers
were said to lie close to the 'top' of the working class. Even today this
notion does not seem entirely silly, as the debate on the labour
aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain shows.
In the course of that decade, both everything and nothing has
changed. We have come to see our problem somewhat differently, no
longer in terms of marginality but as the location, composition and
political significance of the petite bourgeoisie in capitalist and state
socialist society. By 1974, when we wrote the paper from which the
previous quotation was taken, we had already moved most of the way
towards such a conceptualisation. The small shopkeeper was now
interesting not because of his marginality but because shopkeepers
represented a significant group within the petit-bourgeois stratum and
one which seemed to encapsulate many of the most traditional features
ix
X Preface
of that stratum. Those interested in that process of reconceptualisation
should compare our paper of 1968 with a subsequent paper on the petite
bourgeoisie in the same journal some eight years later (Bechhofer and
Elliott, 1976). In the Spring of 1977 when we first started making plans
for this book, the petite bourgeoisie was beginning to appear once more
on the sociological agenda. Of course, there had been the rather specific
interest in the part they played in National Socialism, Poujadism and
McCarthyism evident in the political and sociological literature, but
now for the first time since the 1930s there was emerging a much more
general curiosity about the part they were playing in contemporary
societies. In particular, Marxist writers such as Poulantzas (1975) were
making a great deal of the importance of this stratum in capitalist
orders. Thus, for a long period it had seemed rather eccentric to be
interested in such a small and insignificant group which was supposedly
disappearing by the hour and, in any event, doomed to extinction. Apart
from a very small number of people, notably the members of the SSRC
Stratification Seminar, our sociological colleagues seemed less than
enthusiastic about the petite bourgeoisie as an object of study. Suddenly,
or so it seemed to us, things changed, and from being virtually alone in
this rather specialised sub-field, we found ourselves part of a minor
fashion.
Yet in another sense very little has changed in the past decade. The
petite bourgeoisie may have been put back on the theoretical agenda,
but the dearth of empirical material is still evident. It is as if theoretical
fashion is almost unaffected by the extent of empirical knowledge. It was
this strange disjunction between a reviving theoretical interest and the
lack of ethnographic detail which prompted the compiling of this book.
At the time of writing, there are some signs that things may be changing.
Small business has shown a new political vigour, the new Tory
Government is pledged to re-establish the spirit of entrepreneurship and
to re-create what to a jaundiced observer seems like the worst aspects of
mid-nineteenth-century Britain. There is a corresponding stirring
among sociologists which seems likely to produce empirical research. In
1977 it seemed to us that a book which tried to pull together some
empirical work would attract some interest; now it looks positively
topical. We were personally aware of a good many of the existing studies
and ongoing studies, and with the help of friends we were able to trace
some more. We eventually decided on a strategy of soliciting pieces from
different countries, not because this would permit serious comparative
study (the essays are far too disparate for that) but because we hoped to
show that the petite bourgeoisie still plays a role in many very different
societies, and because such a strategy might be helpful in posing
problems which further research could attack. These essays then are not
representative of this field of study, nor are they in any sense meant to ,be
definitive accounts of the place of the petite bourgeoisie in these various