Middle-Class Formation and Class Alliance

Abstract

The fact that white-collar workers share relatively similar experiences of economic hardship and proletarianization across nations but develop clearly different types of trade unionism renders the theoretical relevance of formalist and economist approaches to the class location and class character of whitecollar workers questionable. According to this perspective, notwithstanding ideological and logical variants, social class reflects an occupational conglomerate, and class constituents' consciousness, disposition, and action are determined by their position in the social structure. Analysis of social class becomes a simple task of filling empty strata with workers and debate centers on the demarcation lines within the occupational structure, generating theories of class structure without attention to class agents (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, historico-cultural, ethnographic approaches to social class, pioneered by E. P. Thompson's monumental work in 1963, turn formalist, economist theories on their head by bringing class agents back in. The process by which workers become class members is considered complex, contingent, and relational: lifestyles, dispositions, modes of collective action, and political orientations blend at a historical juncture in such a way that a class character substantially distinct and sustained enough forms and becomes an important dimension of social structure.