as an analytic tool.
As consumer capitalism took shape, sociologists proposed new classes, such as
the ‘managerial class’ (no ownership, but control over means of production),
‘service workers’ (by income and kind of job removed from workers in industrial
production), and the ‘creative class’ (defined by lifestyle and consciousness). Of
these new classes, it was not always clear whether they described factual
dimensions of social stratification or ideologically informed constructs. In the
meantime, the question about class has been answered variously, some
sociologists arguing that class divisions still characterize advanced societies, but
are today expressed differently than a generation or two ago; others consider
class to be an obsolete category. In as much as a class consciousness did
develop, it can be said to have shaped many people’s identity, but it did not arrest
social change. The Enlightenment promise of equality implied the possibility of
social mobility, i.e. changing social identities, even under conditions of a rigid
division of labour.
Crosscurrents
The past several decades have seen changes whose gravity matches those of the
industrial revolution. Previously stable settings and relationships crumbled under
the impact of socio-economic developments that transformed the social system.
The most consequential changes have been the following.
First, while parts of the working class became more affluent, obscuring the
distinction between blue-collar and white-collar work, economic disparities
between rich and poor not just continued but widened. Privatization,
deregulation, and new forms of employment that made life courses more varied
and less predictable drove the individualization of society to new highs,
undermining the solidarity of the working class to the extent that it lost its
contours.
Second, the rising labour force participation of women reinforced this trend in as
much as it contributed to distorting the image of the proletarian worker’s
identity, which, female and child labour notwithstanding, once was decidedly
male. In many instances, more female workers also meant more double-income
households, another factor of rising inequality. Lifestyle and consumption
patterns came to supersede class as a determiner of social identity.