Ontario Teachers' Deprofessionalization and Proletarianization

Abstract

professionals and those who consider them mental laboring proletarians, this split is not neatly coterminous with the boundaries of the four major theoretical perspectives in the sociology of occupations and professions. While most recent attempts to identify teachers' class location are essentially Marxist or Weberian, most status-gradational and postindustrialist approaches agree with the former group of theorists who consider that teachers' income, status, and autonomy separates them from the proletariat. Status-gradational accounts of occupations, such as Pineo and Porter's, conceptualize class predominantly in socioeconomic status (SES) terms based on such criteria as prestige, education, and income, invariably concluding that teachers are middle class.' Such approaches, however, fail to account either for domination or appropriation relations between and among social classes. Exploitation, the appropriation of the results of surplus labor, is oppressive but not all domination or oppression is exploitative. Exploitation entails the appropriation of surplus labor, whereas oppression does not necessarily involve surplus appropriation.2 Postindustrialist theorists such as Bell and Lenski are cognizant of exploitation,3 though they see it as attenuating as we move to postindustrial job sharing and leisure activities. Yet postindustrialists fail to acknowledge the alienation and domination that also characterize advanced capitalist societies. And Weberians like Giddens make domination relations within