Social class is real (II)
Last note reviewed the broad outlines of how different theoretical strains identify and define social class in a realist manner. For each of them, class is real, not a nominal outcome produced by anything else apart from the operant constituents of the location of class itself. The working constituents of the location of class are transparent in Marxian and Weberian traditions, epitomized respectively by human labor and by life chance.
Although there is no need to force compiling an additional Durkheimian class scheme simply because Emile Durkheim was important, his close engagement with division of labor attracts irresistibly a speculation that Durkheim had depicted a mechanism that give rise to classes as distinct from both the Marxian political economic class and Weberian lebenchancen-based class position. Well described by Gruski and Galescu (2005), the Durkheimian classes are natural consequences of the division of labor and regulated by professional associations. But this grand narrative still adheres to Durkheim’s evolutionist and functional narrative of the emergence of classes as a whole, not very informative of how each class is produced or generated during the process. Emirbayev (2003) expounded there is a material substratum of the Durkheimian social organization. The Durkheimian class is not productive class, but associational class that built on in-group solidarity and rose from the division of labor. The ideas of self-organization, social closure and mutual reliance, and integration, were thus indispensable in a Durkheimian scheme of class.
The location of class remains ambivalent in the Durkheimian tradition as its holistic anti-reductionism frustrates most attempts to define a constituting part (e.g. a particular occupational group) in the social system (e.g. the division of labor) by the characteristics of the part. Class would too be sui generis and immune to breakdown into different mechanistic substratum parts. Wilkinson, Eaton, and most others who use the notion of income inequality in explaining the widening health disparities often assume an implicit Durkheimian measurement of social cohesion. But critiques by Muntaner (2002) have charged at the ambiguity in the application of social cohesion — a communal measurement unrelated to socioeconomic status— to income inequality, which is inherently relational and class-based. In retort, Muntaner suggested that decaying social cohesion is but an ill fate of class conflict. Cohesion seems to remain intact in the solid inner clique of capitalists even during the time of financial crisis; working class succumbed to rampant moral crisis and deviant behaviors as a natural consequence of the destruction of self-organized rural communities in face of enclosure and mass appropriation of their inherited land properties; relationship and its quality develop within each class on the basis of daily economic interaction.
An appropriate Durkheimian mechanisms for the location of class, accordingly, must distinguish the root cause of de facto interdependent occupational classes from the functional outcome of having these classes emerged out of a healthy organic division of labor. Social cohesion, integration, supportive ties, professional associations, among others, are all examples of the functional outcome of healthy division of labor. The Durkheimian social morphology with a strong hint of Montesquieu’s evolution hypothesis described the division of labor coming from increased population density and volume. Each party of human group must partake a separate productive function to avoid conflict and strenuous relationship. Each separate productive function generates material ingredients for other groups in the complex division of labor and the synergetic movement of different productive forces provides the basis for intergroup solidarity. The Durkheimian class is, therefore, conceptualized as a productive unit in such process of producing both materials and ties that relate to other classes. The location of each class is based off its own independent productive “function” and close-knit relationship within the group. Empirically, this definition requires the fulfillment of a class’ existence in realistic sense to have two conditions:
## it engages in relatively homogenous production of a highly specialized product.
## its members within the class perform relatively similar functions and recognize each other as so.
The Durkheimian class as a holistic structure enabled by socially divided labor would also require each class not to be self-sufficient but reliant on some degrees the material inputs and coordination from other classes, but we are focused solely on the location of each specific class here.
Class vs. class structure
Class is the categorizing principle that collectively separate people into different groups. The principle differs by theoretical traditions. But colloquially what people usually refer to as class actually falls in the terminology of class structure. Class structure is the aggregate, population-level, observed product of the class dividing process. Equating class with class structure commits the same error addressed by neo-Marxist EO Wright and later Muntaner that the resultant indicators of inequality, e.g. income, were mistaken as the cause of the inequality.
The class structure proposed under the Marxian tradition is best known as the conflicting classes: proletariats vs. the capitalists. In greater details, proletariats may further divide into managers, skilled workers, and lumpen proletariats, although the orthodox Marx in Das Kapital and Outlines argued all nuanced class differences will disappear and merge into the binary oppositional class structure as surplus value equalizes and exploitation exacerbates. In Economy and Society, Weber described the class structure produced by the principle of property ownership as composed by rent-extractors, rentiers, and debtors. On a separate note, many scholars who define class in a gradational manner and empirically analyze the population structure of class tend to place different occupations on a gradual ladder based on some kinds of underlying criteria that measure the hierarchical order of each occupation. The most famous of all may be the EGP scheme by Erikson and Goldthorpe. Overall, these different types of presentation of collective groups give a class structure, which emerges out of the class mechanisms that produce the concrete location of each specific class.
The fundamental difference between class as a principle and class structure as a population-level outcome demands us to consider, causally, class principle as a generator of wellbeing and goods. Unfortunately, most studies employ class structure as explananda, such as the factorial variable with categories of capitalists, managers, workers, unemployed, etc. Admittedly, class structure is the resultant social fact of class dividing principle, and acts as a carrier of the class principle. But this carrier is a necessarily reified concept, in the exact same sense that race is a reified vector of biological underlay, history, and discrimination.
However, while investigations on the wide range of outcomes outside the traditional realm of class and mobility research rarely employ the notion of class in its empirical exploration, investigations that consciously recognize the difference between class as a population-level structural outcome and class as a classifying mechanism remain an even more precious rarity. In the broad field of health research, for example, a good number of 400 thousand has returned to a Google Scholar search query on “social class+health” since 2010. Search with the same configuration for article titles and abstracts in PubMed has returnd 1600 results. But if one careful examine the content of these studies, basically all of them use the notion of class as class structure measured by factorial variables with categories of various nominal classes. Even neo-Marxian and Durkheimian class treatment that emphasizes the relational definition of class over the gradational approach still operates class as a population structure, an outcome in the population.
In the next note I will expand on why class as a mechanism means different things for health than class structure.
