Social class is real (III)
As elaborated in previous notes of the same series, each of the major classical theories has described the specific mechanisms that give rise to the observed class structure in the actual social world. The Marxian class scheme relies on the key assumption of exploitation, a dynamic mechanism that converts labor into surplus value and create an opposition between people who use labor for material gains and those who use capital circulation to create gains out of nowhere. The specific class mechanisms that determine one’s class location, then, include: whether one is an owner or employee, if owner — does s/he profit, property ownership, whether one controls others’ labor. The Weberian scheme can be captured by mechanisms including property factors (debt, property, etc), acquisition factors (ownership, income, skills), and status rank factors (prestige, education, etc.). The Durkheimian scheme based on the integration and independence of an occupational group is underdeveloped but may tentatively consider mechanisms on the part of whether the class is self-sufficient (credential, skill) and whether the class has good internal integration and solidarity (employee relationship and the presence of professional association). Material and economic richness are almost a non-issue for Durkheim, naturally out of his anti-reductionism and anti-utilitarianism orientation in Division of Labor in Society.
The three theoretical schemes of class may overlap as shown in the figure above. It is from the listed mechanistic factors that an observable class structure emerges. Because the underlying mechanisms in each theoretical scheme differ widely, they may not give rise to the same class structure. But whether the same class structure occurs in a given population on the basis of different combinations of class mechanisms is a pure contingency on the empirical effects of these mechanistic factors. In reality, since social phenomena tend to cluster and correlate, different theoretical groups of mechanistic factors may totally possibly generate the same class location for an individual and the same population-level class structure. For example, the owners in the Marxian scheme who supervise other employees and profit from their labor probably also have higher prestige and education, which are key mechanisms leading to better life chance in the Weberian scheme. In this case, Weberian and Marxian scheme may yield similar class location for a given person, but for entirely different reasons — at least theoretically diverging reasons.
When empirical positivist studies found certain classes have higher rates of diseases, the phenomenon being observed occurs at the population level, but the realistic cause for the observed higher rates transpires unnoticed at the level of the generative mechanism factors of each class, or at the site of class production. Mining laborers do not magically develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, they suffer because the mechanisms leading to their class location are working to make their daily job controlled and precarious (a Marxian mechanism), to suppress their chance of promoting health literacy(a Weberian mechanism), or, fail to have developed a healthy occupational standard (a Durkheimian mechanism). In this sense, a class nominalist stance may be warranted for the sake of clarifying the causative power of class (Portes 2001:259): “this approach is able to take these points as given without assuming that they lead necessarily to the same map of the class structure”.
How does class causally generate stress and affect distress then follows the same logic as answering how each mechanism is responsible for stress and ineffective coping. Leonard Pearlin’s stress process model pointed out that both stressor and its moderation have an origin in social conditions, although the social condition here refers to a generic and comprehensive status set. Depending on how stress is conceptualized, class mechanisms work differently in specific and concrete ways. Their associations with stress are not just concomitant occurrence as observed in the population-gradient in stress, but operate on stress through understandable causative pathways.
Endocrinologist Hans Seyle first but untimely proposed the notion of stress as an equilibrium within human organism. His theory was first popularized as bestseller among lay people before gaining momentum among academics. Too much or too little stress deviating from one’s homeostasis causes general adaptation syndrome that enclose a wide range of symptoms. The Seylean homeostasis is difficult to operationalize. Later on, the landmark Lazarus-Folkman model of stress along with its many variations became more adapted. Essentially, the Lazarus-Folkman model described stressor as an external negative stimulus which alone does not cause distress unless the affected person evaluates or perceives it as serious. Coping capacity was a core advance in the Lazarus-Folkman model, which highlights individuals’ variable proactive capacity in managing and coping with stressors from the environment. The diathesis-stress hypothesis (Monroe & Simons 1991) also outlines a similar procedure for stress to become distress, albeit with an inclination to emphasize people’s innate biological condition or somewhat passive total psychological structure as the diathesis.
How each of the different class mechanisms is associated with the components in the stress process as described above, then, is contingent on the empirical, etiological, and causal pathways that enabled stress components to generate sufficient and reasonable root cause in the class mechanism. Because there are several factors in each of the three main class mechanisms, and there are in tandem at least two factors in each theoretical stress process, enlisting one by one each specific causal pathway between a class factor and a stress component would tediously result in n*3*2 combinations. We may take examples in its stead. Say, how does the key factor in determining the Marxian class location — the ownership of means of production — may be associated with exogenous stressors and one’s evaluative coping as formulated in the Lazarus-Folkman model? Owning the means that produce material goods and converts raw materials by labor into financial capital allows the owner to acquire health enhancing materials and services, but at the same time may also impose attrition onto one’s stress by tear-n-wear and the excessive worry innate in market speculation. The owners of major means of production, such as farmlands and factories, may consider these stressors a natural part of their venturous lifestyle and cope with them with proper preparation. Some of the effects produced by one’s class location as a capital owner seem to balance out each other, resulting in a counter-balancing phenomenon or what Schieman refers to as the suppression effect. This is actually a natural and non-simplistic view on the class effect on stress, innocent of the overtly tyrannical assumption of certain grand theories that argue a hierarchical class structure has to be beneficial, or detrimental to people’s health.
