CLASS AND OTHER AXES OF DIVISION

One strand of change within class analysis over the years, and one that is widely if not universally reckoned to have represented “progress”, has been the increasing attention paid to the intersection of class with, or its incorporation of, other axes of social differentiation and inequality. […]

It also seems clear […] that the debate over what one might call the “depth” of the relationship between class and other axes, has shifted. On the whole, it seems, the claims now being made are for a deeper level of interaction. At a number of points it is argued, for instance, that not only are social classes in their social outcomes empirically gendered or racialized but so too are the processes of class formation themselves. Thus Anne Witz, focusing on gender, provides a detailed explication of this in her examination of occupational structures, arguing that “gender matters in a further, more embedded, sense that has much more to do with the processes and mechanisms … underlying the historical specificities of forms of the social division of labour, of which occupational structure is one aspect” (p. 43). In other words, the construction of occupational positions must be taken to be part of class theory, and not assumed to be pre-given to it, and moreover that process of construction is itself gendered. For these reasons, she argues, “we need a new concept of class formation in order to describe the processes and mechanisms whereby occupational structures of ‘places’ emerge and gendered ‘persons’ come to be associated with them over time and, indeed, how these two processes are not necessarily sequential” (p. 43). Now, there are a number of ways in which such processes and mechanisms may operate, and both Witz and other authors in the collection engage with a range of them. There is, for instance, the way in which the bureaucratic career has been constructed as a male career. There is the dependence of career jobs on the existence of routine and non-career jobs, the former held more by men, the latter more by women.