Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janeen Baxter is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Work at Home: The Domestic Division of Labour. Mark Western is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Class and Class Stratification in Australia.

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RECONFIGURATIONS OF CLASS AND GENDER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Contributors..........................................................................................................................................................................ixList of Tables and Figures....................................................................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................xiiiCHAPTER ONE Introduction Mark Western and Janeen Baxter.....................................................................................................................................1CHAPTER TWO Foundations of Class Analysis: A Marxist Perspective Erik Olin Wright...........................................................................................................14CHAPTER THREE A Conceptual Menu for Studying the Interconnections of Class and Gender Erik Olin Wright......................................................................................28CHAPTER FOUR The Gendered Restructuring of the Middle Classes Rosemary Crompton.............................................................................................................39CHAPTER FIVE Who Works? Comparing Labor Market Practices Wallace Clement....................................................................................................................55CHAPTER SIX The Links between Paid and Unpaid Work: Australia and Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s Mark Western and Janeen Baxter..............................................................81CHAPTER SEVEN Employment Flexibility in the United States: Changing and Maintaining Gender, Class, and Ethnic Work Relationships Rachel A. Rosenfeld........................................105CHAPTER EIGHT Gender and Access to Money: What do Trends in Earnings and Household Poverty Tell Us? Paula England...........................................................................131CHAPTER NINE Women and Union Democracy-Welcome as Members but not as Leaders? A Study of the Scandinavian Confederation of Labor Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund and Siv vers.....................154Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................167References....................................................................................................................................................................................179Index.........................................................................................................................................................................................199

Chapter One

Mark Western and Janeen Baxter

As the title suggests, this is a book that argues that class and gender processes in contemporary societies are currently being transformed. It is also a book that asserts the basic empirical interconnectedness of social relations of class and gender. Both the transformation of class and gender relations and their empirical interconnections have their origins in a basic shift in the institutional characteristics of the advanced societies, a shift that is captured by the move from talking about industrial societies to postindustrial ones.

As several commentators have argued (e.g., Block 1990: chap. 1; Esping-Andersen 1993b), much social analysis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was underwritten by a master concept of "industrial society" or "industrial capitalism" within which social processes were played out. From this perspective, industrial society provided the organizing context for undertaking sociological analysis, and the characteristics of industrial society informed the development of concepts and theories within sociological research. The industrial society framework had a number of characteristics that implicitly informed orthodox Marxist and Weberian class analysis. Economic activity was based on the production of goods, not services. Work was organized along Fordist lines, with mass production, a hierarchical division of labor, and highly routinized blue- and white-collar jobs with predictable careers and life chances. Male participation in wage labor was almost universal, and the male life course consisted of an orderly progression of education, full-time continuous employment, and eventual retirement. Within the household, women were responsible for the private provision of services and the reproduction of wage labor (Esping-Andersen 1993b; see also Clement and Myles 1994: chap. 1).

Within a theoretical framework defined by the concept of industrial society, it was reasonable to pursue class analysis in a highly specific way. Most notably, the "industrial society model" of class analysis tended to focus only on those who were currently in paid work, to emphasize the experiences and attributes of men rather than women, to use blue- and white-collar or manual and nonmanual distinctions to index differences between the working and middle classes, and to treat work and family as distinct and nonoverlapping realms of social life. Men carried out public sphere activities in the world of paid work while women were responsible for the private sphere. For our purposes, probably the most pertinent attribute of this industrial society model is that it allows class analysis unproblematically to ignore gender (and, more particularly, women). Within industrial capitalism, women do not "work," at least to any significant extent, and therefore can be safely ignored in class-analytic accounts of social action and inequality.

Industrial society was clearly the economic and social context informing class analysis throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. However, residues of this approach still persist today. When researchers argue that class membership can be defined solely in terms of a snapshot of current job characteristics of the "head of household" or that a white-collar/ blue-collar distinction maps directly onto a middle-class/working-class one, they are drawing on ideas that made sense within the institutional framework of industrial society. However, the advanced capitalist societies today are characterized not by the social and economic conditions of industrialism but by the conditions of postindustrialism. For this reason, class analysis can no longer assume the economic and social conditions of industrial society as a basis for social analysis. For our purposes, postindustrial societies contain a number of key features that problematize aspects of traditional class analysis. These features include the shift by core economies from manufacturing to services, the increasing entry of married women into the labor market, the rise of part-time employment and the associated polarization of working hours, changing patterns of family formation and an increasingly diverse range of household types, and enduring persistent unemployment. Some of the chapters that follow describe these trends in more detail, and all are concerned with clarifying the implications of these processes for class and gender relations.

The impact of postindustrial social change has been reflected in a number of recent theoretical and empirical debates in class...