A Note on the Declining Relation between Subjective and Objective Class Measures

Abstract

The future of class consciousness has interested many students of social class. It has been suggested, for various reasons, that the long term trend is a continuous decline in class consciousness. For Robert Nisbet, classes along the model of the nineteenth-century English landed class ceased to exist around I 9 I 0. For him, class has been replaced by various status hierarchies, having only a rough correspondence with social classes.l In both the manual and non-manual sectors class lines are thought to have become vague. The thesis of embourgeoisement predicts a decline of working-class consciousness as workers rise to the material level of the middle class.2 C. Wright Mills noted the difficulty of classifying the growing group of salaried white collar workers into social classes.3 Along with these structural trends, Daniel Bell saw a growing disenchantment, in the post-war period, with the nineteenth-century class ideologies.4 The need for a quickly administered, standardized, indicator of the subjective aspect of social class has produced self-evaluative questions measuring 'class identification'. The frequent use of these instruments in surveys has resulted in the accumulation of considerable data spanning the post-war years. Many of these data are American. If the predictions of a long term decline in class consciousness are correct, one should expect an increasing refusal rate on class identification questions, a decline in working-class identifications, and a decline in the relationship between objective indicators of status and class identification. In a review of post-war trends, Robert Lane has suggested that ;. . . it may be that class identification is slowly assuming a new meaning, a lack of intensity, a different reference'.5 These trends have yet to be demonstrated though. The baseline for such comparisons, in the United States, has been Richard Centers'