Class Schema Research Articles

Measuring inequalities in health: an analysis of mortality patterns using two social classifications

AbstractThe paper investigates relationship between mortality and social class as measured by the Erikson‐Goldthorpe schema, a validated measure of employment conditions, and compares this with differentials found using the Registrar General's social classes. Two cohorts of men aged 15/16–64 were drawn from the OPCS Longitudinal Study for 1971 and 1981. Mortality differences between social classes were estimated using deaths occurring between 1976 and 1980 in the first cohort and 1986 and 1989 in the second. The two classification were formally compared by means of the Relative Index of Dissimilarity and a likelihood‐based statistic. Similar mortality differentials were found using both classifications in the two time periods. The Erikson‐Goldthorpe schema showed a clear pattern of higher mortality in those groups without a career structure and with lower discretion over their work. The paper concludes that inequalities in health are seen when a validated social class schema based on employment conditions is used. The use of validated measures will make it possible for health differences to be more clearly interpreted in policy terms.

Comments on Gallie

Duncan Gallie's paper returns to a subject which has been at the centre of David Lockwood's work: the extent to which there has occurred convergence in class position between lower white-collar workers and manual workers. After a briefreview of work on the impact of (rigid) automation on the work and class situation of workers during the 1950s and 60s, Gallie systematically addresses the claims of both the proletarianization and embourgeoisement theses in the context of a radically changed technological environment. Gallie employs the Goldthorpe class schema and follows Lockwood's theoretical approach, developed in the Btacksoated Worker study, of conceiving class position in terms of market and work situation. To measure the two, he develops indicators of market and work situation which follow Lockwood quite closely. Gallie uses data from a recent large-scale suivey on the association of aspects of work and market situation with new technology to test some of the central claims of both the proletarianization and the proletarianization thesis. The paper analyses the work situation of both types of workers by assessing the following aspects: trends in skill development; control over the work task; and relations with superiors. Assessment of market situation covers the components of income, payment systems, promotion chances and job security. Apart from the theoretical concerns shared with David Lockwood, Gallie's approach differs from that of Lockwood in a number of respects. In substantive terms, the inteivening thirty-eight years have demanded a stronger focus on technology as a decisive influence on both market and work situation, as well as a consideration of the different location of men and women with respect to many aspects of their work and market situation. The difference in research method is equally marked. Lockwood's qualitative study consulted a wide range of secondary sources and was able to study both the content and the context of clerical work in great depth, giving due weight to the considerable diversity between different groups of clerical workers. Whereas for Lockwood technology was only one variable among others, in Gallie's work it becomes the central variable, and environmental influences like degree of bureaucratization, size of work group and competitive position of employing organizations remain unconsidered. Even the notion of management policy, which is crucial to Gallie's definition of the effect of new technology and which has been found to be a

Putting Men and Women into Classes: An Assessment of the Cross-Sex Validity of the Gold Thorpe Class Schema

The Goldthorpe class schema has been criticised as being unsuitable for assessing women's class positions. This paper tests the cross-sex validity of the employee classes within the schema by examining their within-sex association with measures of theoretically relevant occupational characteristics relating to employment and payment conditions, and promotion prospects. Using data from the Social Class in Modern Britain survey, it is shown that class divisions are operationalised similarly among men and women. The only difference of note is a slightly weaker overall association between class position and certain job characteristics among women, which results from the allocation of large numbers of women to class IIIa. With this class excluded from the analysis these differences are removed. It is further shown that the clustering of women in the category of routine non-manual workers stems not from deficiencies in the logic of Goldthorpe's conceptualisation of class, or from limitations associated with its operationalisation using OPCS occupational codes, but from the reality of occupational sex segregation. The analysis thus provides evidence to support the use of the schema as a measure of class position for both women and men.

Effects of Behavioral and Social Class Information on Social Judgment

Social class schemata appear to affect perceivers' judgments of targets under conditions of stimulus ambiguity. In 1990 E. E. Jones noted that there are insufficient data to determine the effect of clearly disconfirming behavioral information and that the limits on social class schema effects are in need of investigation. This was the focus of the present research. Guided descriptively by a Bayesian model of social perception, the authors predicted and found that unambiguous, relevant stimulus information influenced judgments whereas social class information had no effect. Social class information did, however; affect judgments in a no-information condition. This basic result replicated in two experiments among populations that themselves varied in social class composition, thereby demonstrating the generalizability of the findings. Implications of these data for social perception in a stimulus-rich context are discussed.

Patterns in Class Voting in Norway 1957-1989: Decline or 'Trendless Fluctuations'?

The purpose of this article is to study patterns of relative class voting in Norwegian Storting (parliament) elections in the period 1957 to 1989 as they appear in the Norwegian Election Studies. The study is based on seven social classes simulating the Erikson and Goldthorpe class schema. To represent the Norwegian multi-party system, three different aggregations into two-, three- and four-party groups are used, although the final analysis is confined to the three-category version (Socialist, Centre, Conservative). A multi layered topological model with eight class voting parameters was developed to allow for a disaggregated analysis of trends. Although the changes in the parameters are not consistent, the overall picture is that of a decline in relative class voting.

On the Relevance of Classification Theory to Database Design

This paper discusses a stream of research which applies some classification principles to database design. We present a data model explicitly based on classification research. Subsequently, we examine implications of th'e model for flexibly handling diverse views of the class requirements for a domain, for developing methods and techniques to design databases, and for implementing data structures which support dynamic classification. The paper concludes by proposing that applying classification research to database research can lead to advances in the former, as well as in the latter. A widely used technique for data modeling, the Entity-Relationship (ER) model, uses diagrams to express data requirements in terms of classes (termed entity types in ER jargon), relationships among classes, and attributes, which jointly are referred to as a conceptual schema. Conceptual schema diagrams provide the basis for designing the files that will store the data. The primary implementation technologies for databases today are relational and object-orienteddatabase systems, both of which are also based on organizing data according to a fixed schema of classes. In a relational database system, each file (called a relation) is defined in terms of a numberoffields Data modeling and database design have emerged as a collection of techniques for determining, verifying, and codifying data requirements for various information systems applications or uses. One key element of data modeling is identifying the classes or categories of things about which data are to be kept, which attributes of those things must be kept track of, and what relationships exist among instances of different classes. For example, an application to maintain course registration records at a university might identify relevant classes of things such as students, instructors, sections, and rooms. Relevant attributes of might include name, address, date of birth, year, and major. Important relationships among classes might include: students enroll in'courses, insttuctors teach courses, and courses have multiple sections.

Rational Choice Marxism and Social Class Boundaries

Rational Choice Marxism (RCM) is an increasingly influential strand of thought in an increasingly post-Marxist world. Part of its interest is the attempt of some thinkers to move beyond the exegetical debates that have often passed for Marxist social science. This article attempts an assessment of how fruitful this shift of focus has been in one area where there is significant overlap with the interests of more mainstream social scientists, the conceptualization of social class boundaries. The conclusions are mainly negative and it is pointed out that rational choice discussions of class need not necessarily take an explicitly Marxist form. The article ends with a construal of a relatively familiar sociological class schema in terms that should be congenial to rational choice theorists.

Techniques for process model evolution in EPOS

The authors categorize some aspects of software process evolution and customization, and describe how they are handled in the EPOS PM system. Comparisons are made to other PM systems. A process model in EPOS consists of a schema of classes and meta-classes, and its model entities and relationships. There is an underlying software engineering database, EPOSDB, offering uniform versioning of all model parts and a context of nested cooperating transactions. Then, there is a reflective object-oriented process specification language, on top of the EPOSDB. Policies for model creation, composition, change, instantiation, refinement, and enaction are explicitly represented and are used by a set of PM automatic tools. The main tools are a planner to instantiate tasks, an execution manager to enact such tasks, and a PM manager to define, analyze, customize, and evolve the process schema.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The CASMIN project and the American dream

In this paper the AA. respond to the critiques of their work undertaken under the auspices of the CASMIN project that are presented by Hout and Hauser and by Sorensen in preceding papers in this number. They treat in turn issues concerning data comparability and the class schema that the AA. use as the basis for their analyses of mobility; their model of « core social fluidity »; and empirical results relevant to the evaluation of the FJH-hypothesis. In conclusion the AA. point to certain conceptual presuppositions and related research interests which they would see as deeply rooted in the American tradition of work in the field of social stratification and mobility and which, they suggest, throw light on the nature of the reaction that their work has provoked

Testing the validity of the Goldthorpe class schema

Testing the validity of the Goldthorpe class schema

Making Sense of Middle-Class Politics: A Secondary Analysis of the 1987 British General Election Survey

In the past decade the Nuffield class schema has become the established way of operationalising social class measures in survey analyses. This paper carries out secondary analysis of the 1987 British General Election Survey to analyse the relationship between voting patterns and middle-class groups. It argues that the Nuffield class schema actually obstructs a proper understanding of the relationship between class and politics, and that in order to develop an adequate account of middle-class politics it is necessary to develop an alternative theoretical perspective drawing on the new sociology of the professions, and on the sociology of state formation. The paper concludes with some tentative remarks on the changing characteristics of middle-class politics.

Class and Income in Australia

This article presents the findings from an analysis of the rela tionship between class location and income. The class schemas employed in these analyses derive from the work of Wright, Poulantzas, Carchedi, Barbara and John Ehrenreich and Gold thorpe. In the context of the Australian workforce, individual class location is found to be significantly related to income level. A properly specified causal model incorporating class and other relevant factors can explain between approximately 33 and 37 per cent of the variation of income among Australians in the workforce.

Classes in Britain: Marxist and official

This paper reports some of the central findings of a British project on class structure and class consciousness, and relates these to the results of comparable studies in other countries, particularly those for Sweden and the United States. It raises conceptual, operational, and substantive problems with regard to the neo-Marxist class theory of Erik Olin Wright by contrasting his class schema, which forms the principal comparative tool for the studies in question, with an alternative in which routine clerical workers are distinguished from proletarians.

Young Workers in the Class Structure

The sociological study of youth has tended to focus on either age and generation, or class and gender. Attempts to integrate the two approaches have been largely unsuccessful. This paper explores the longitudinal and cross-sectional dimensions of stratification and produces a framework for examining class differences in youth. Analysis of the inter-generational and intra-generational mobility of young workers, using two large national data sets, the General Household Survey and the National Child Development Study, leads to the identification of a typology of `Youth Class'. This empirically-based typology incorporates the notions of process and structure in a longitudinal class schema appropriate to the study of young people.

Goodbye to Supervisors?

Liberal theories of post-industrial society and Marxist theories of the labour process tend to converge in their respective accounts of the place of supervisors in relation to putative changes in the organisation of work. A common conjecture is that supervisors are progressively being denuded of their powers and functions within industry. This paper uses data from a national sample survey of Britain to discuss the substance of the supervisory role in modern capitalist enterprises. The conclusion reached is that direct supervision in the workplace is not obviously in decline. The data also raise issues about the categories of employment status used in official statistics as well as those of the Goldthorpe class schema.

The Class Structure of Metropolitan Adelaide

This article offers an empirical class map of the Adelaide metropolitan area, replicating the original version of the class schema developed in the USA by Erik Wright. This schema sets out ways of constituting unambiguous and contradictory class locations by measuring aspects of the social relations of production. The resultant class map emphasises the complexity of modern class structures. It examines some problematic relationships between . class and occupation, class and gender, and class in the public and private sectors. The argument is that Wright's schema is more successful as a theory of authority relations than as a property- based theory of exploitation.

The Breadth, Depth, and Utility of Class, Partisan, and Ideological Schemata

Given the complexity and ambiguity ofthings political, there are many ways to think about government and politics. The authors compare class, partisan, and ideological schemata in terms of cognitive content and utility in discriminating among political policies and President Reagan's positions on the issues. The rich-poor class schema is found to provide most respondents with a mechanism for dealing effectively with type issues, while both the Republican-Democrat partisan schema and the liberal-conservative ideological schema provide sophisticated respondents with an effective cognitive framework for dealing with both spend-save issues and the more abstract noneconomic policies. It is fast becoming an article of faith in the groves of academe that God so loved physicists She gave them all the simple problems, leaving the rest of us with what are called interesting questions, the hallmarks of which are disagreements over concepts, disputes about measures, and counterarguments to every interpretation. Nowhere is the controversial nature of political science more evident than in the literature on belief systems, in particular the role of ideology. Although the conceptual and methodological problems with ideological belief systems are serious enough for Bennett (1977) to have called for a moratorium on empirical research pending the

Integrating Women into Class Theory

A theoretical framework is proposed by which women as well as men may be included in class theory, and a methodology is suggested by which one aspect of women's class location, their relationship to the labour market, may be measured. It is argued that social class in a Weberian sense may be seen as comprising two distinct although related dimensions. Firstly, that based upon relationship to the labour market, measured at the level of the individual; and second, that represented by patterns of consumption (in terms of goods and services), measured at the level of the family. All those with a direct relationship to the labour market may be allocated to an occupational class position, irrespective of position within the family. Data from the General Household Survey are used to produce a preliminary occupational class schema for women which does not depend upon assumptions of skill or the manual/non-manual nature of the work.

Networking

Volume 19 Number 3 of Sociology contains two articles of interest. In the first, entitled “Integrating Women into Class Theory”, Angela Dale, G. Nigel Gilbert and Sara Arber propose a theoretical framework by which women as well as men may be included in class theory, and a methodology is suggested by which one aspect of women's class location, their relationship to the labour market, may be measured. It is argued that social class in a Weberian sense may be seen as comprising two distinct although related dimensions. Firstly, that based upon relationship to the labour market, measured at the level of the individual; and second, that represented by patterns of consumption (in terms of goods and services), measured at the level of the family. All those with a direct relationship to the labour market may be allocated to an occupational class position, irrespective of position within the family. Data from the General Household Survey are used to produce a preliminary occupational class schema for women which does not depend upon assumptions of skill or the manual/non‐manual nature of the work.

Women's Jobs do Make a Difference: A Reply to Goldthorpe

This paper uses fresh data to confirm and extend our original findings (Britten and Heath, 1983) which were criticized by Goldthorpe ( Sociology, November 1983). Given that the manual/non manual divide has little relevance for women's jobs, we demonstrate that office work and sales work entail very different conditions of employment for women, although the market situation of both groups is inferior to that of men in manual work. The career paths for women across three distinct labour markets (semi-professional, office and unskilled) demonstrate women's attachments to particular kinds of work in spite of interrupted employment histories. It is concluded that the intermittent nature of women's employment does not detract from our approach. In fact we show that women's qualifications have a more significant association with their careers than do their husbands' class positions. Using a new class schema, we confirm the importance of women's jobs in explaining their voting and fertility behaviour.