Anthony Giddens
Sociology Fifth Edition
Marx believed that the working class --poeple in manufacture as blue-coller labour--would bocome proglessively larger and larger. That was the basis for his view that the working class would create the momentum for a revolutionary transformation of society. In fact, the working class has got smaller and smaller. Only quarter of century ago, some 40 percent of the working population was in blue-collar work. Now, in the UK, only about 18 per cent is, and this proportion is still dropping. Moreover, the conditions under which working-class people are living, and the styles of life they are following, are altering.
British society, in common with most other industrialized countries, has considerable numbers of poor poeple. However, the majority of indivisuals working in blue-collar occupations no longer live in poverty. As was mentioned earlier, the income of manual workers has increased considerably since the turn of the century. This rising standard of living is expressed in the increased availability of consumer goods to all classes. About 50 per cent of blue-collar workers now own their own homes. Cars, washing machines, televisions and telephones are owned by a very high proportion of house-holds.
The phenomenon of working-class affluence suggests yet another possible route towards a more 'middle-class society'. Perhaps, as blue-collar woerkers grow more prosperous, they become more middle class. This idea, with the sociologist's characteristic fondness for cumbersome names, came to be known as the embourgeoisement thesis. Enbourgeoisement means 'becoming more bourgeois', a Marx-style term for 'becoming more middle class'. In the 1950s, when the thesis was first advanced, its supporters argued that many blue-collar workers erning middle-class wages would adopt middle-class values, outlooks and lifestyles as well. There was a widely held belief that progress within industrial society was having a powerful effect on the shape of social stratification.
In the 1960s, John Goldthorpe and his colleagues carried out what came to be a very well-known study in order to test the embourgeoisement hypothesis. In undertaking the study, they argued that if the embourgeoisement thesis was true, aflluent blue-collar employees should be virtually indistinguishable from white-collar employees in term of their attitudes to work, lifestyle and politics. Based on interviews with workers in the car and chemical industries in Luton, the research was published in three volumes. It is often referred to as the Affluent Worker study (Goldthorpe 1968-9). A total of 229 manual workers were studied, together with 54 white-collar workers for purposes of comparison. Many of the blue-collar workers had migrated to the area in search of well-paid jobs; compared to most other manual workers, they were in fact highly paid and earned more than most lower-level white-collar workers.
Goldthorpe and his colleagues focused on three dimensions of working-class attitudes and found very little support for the embourgeoisement thesis. In term of economic outlooks and attitudes to work, the authors agreed that many workers had acquired a middle-class standard of living on the basis of their income and ownership of consumer goods. Yet this relative affluence was attained through positions characterized by poor benefits, low chances for promotion and little intrinsic job satisfaction. The authers of the study found that affluent workers had an instrumental orientation to their work: they saw it as a means to an end, the end of gaining good wages. Their work was mostly repetitive and unintersting, and they had little direct commitment to it.
Despite levels of affluence comparable with those of white-collar employees, the workers in the study did not associate with white-collar workers in their leisure time, and did not aspire to rise up the class ladder. Goldthorpe and his colleagues found that most socializing was done at home with immediate family members or kin, or with other working-class neighbours. There was little indication that the workers were moving towards middle-class norms and values. In terms of political outlooks, the authors found that there was a negative correlation between working-class affluence and support for the Conservative Party. Supporters of the embourgeoisement thesis had predicted that growing affluence among the working class would weaken traditional support for the Labour Party.
The result of the study, in the eyes of its authors, were clear-cut: the embourgeoisement thesis was false. These workers were not in the process of becoming more middle class. However, Goldthorpe and his colleagues did concede the possibility of some convergence between the lower-middle class and upper-working class on certain points. Affluent workers shared with their white-collar counterparts similar patterns of economic consumption, a privatised home-centred outlook and support for instrumental collectivism (collective action through unions to improve wages and conditions) at the workplace.
No strictly comparable research has been carried out in the intervening years, and it is not clear how far, if the conclusions reached by Goldthorpe et al. were valid at the time, they remain true now. It is generally agreed that the old, traditional working-class communities have tended to become fragmented, or have broken down altogether, with the decline of manufacturing industry and the impact of consumerism. Just how far such fragmentation has proceeded, however, remains open to dispute.
労働者階級が豊かになった結果、彼らが中流階級に上昇するのではないかという、「ブルジョワ化説」があらわれた。これを検証したGoldthorpeとその同僚達は、この説を否定せざるをえなかった。豊かな労働者階級は、ただ単に手段として労働し、豊かさを享受しているだけで、その労働に喜びを見出せず、いぜんとして人間関係も労働者階級のうちで取り結んでいる。今日、彼らの研究がどれほどの妥当性を持つかは未知であるが、労働者階級は断片化されているとも言われている。
