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Book Reviews
alienation, and the treatment of struggle as something which is only introduced at the end of the analysis, as something which may only happen as a result of class, should be clear, especially to readers of Capital & Class. Suffice it to say that, unfortunately, E.P. Thompsons two paragraphs contribution to this book, dismissed so decidedly by the authors, remain for me one of its highest points. Following chapter 1, Pakulski and Waters argument proceeds by taking their idea of class and showing how it is no longer applicable to contemporary society. Thus, for example, they cite evidence which suggests a dissolving connection between class and voting behaviour: i.e., the British working class is less likely to vote for the British Labour Party than it once was, with similar results for other industrial countries. But quite apart from the problems with class, this evidence would also be consistent with a lessening of the (working-)class nature of the Labour Party, as well as with the reduced signicance of class. Pakulski and Waters do not mention, let alone explore, this alternative explanation. Other patterns of human behaviour which class is no longer helpful in accounting for, thus adding more nails to its own coffin, include: marriage-partner choice, interior-design tastes, occupational (im)mobility and home-ownershipI nd it amazing that Pakulski and Waters can seriously put forward the argument
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that increasing home-ownership is evidence of redistribution of property and therefore of the decline in class (p.76). Any notions of class composition, reand de-composition, of class/labourpower distinctions are missing in Pakulski and Waters text. Thus they nd Bowles and Gintis suggestion that schooling reproduces class by fragmenting it (in Schooling in Capitalist America) bizarre (pp.102-3). Later they suggest that [w]ithout institutionalized means of social reproduction, classes cannot survive! (p.133, my emphasis). In the books final chapters Pakulski and Waters suggest alternative social referents. For example, generations : [t]he carrier of new values in the developed West is the post-war generation that shares the formative experience of the long boom (p.142). But these experiences, the long boom and so on, can (must) be explained in terms of struggles over money and work which of course takes us back to class. Pakulski and Waters suggest the explanatory deficiency [of class] is particularly apparent when we try to understand changes in work structure and employment, post-Fordism and exible specialization, globalization and the so-called Asian tiger economies, the history of the welfare state and the changing political landscape (p.151). Again, I am amazed. I do not understand how these things can be explained without class.
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