The Death of Class

The Death of Class, by Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters. London: Sage, 1996. 172 pages.

Criminology and criminal justice have been termed "atheoretical" (Hagan 1989), but this is no more true of these fields than of stratification, gender studies, occupations and organizations, or sociology in general. Although touched by Continental theorizing, the social sciences in this country remain empiricist and are wedded to a few key variables. They only occasionally value theorizing. "Theory" is quite often limited to a few generalizations in the opening and closing paragraphs of articles.

In The Death of Class, the authors claim that class is an outdated concept and argue that a new, status-oriented society will emerge in Western democracies. This is either a long essay or a short book. It begins and ends well; each paragraph has a topic sentence and a finishing phrase; each chapter contains an introduction and a conclusion. Pakulski and Waters, using a wide variety of materials (mostly summaries of other scholars' works) strung together with straining if not breaking metaphors, argue that class, as an explanatory system and concept, is "dead."' It is dead because of sociocultural change; witness the failure of class-based theories, they claim, to explain all modern transformations in status, lifestyle, occupation, globalization, signification, and colonialization. This funereal work is accomplished in eight chapters and 158 pages, and concludes with two figures that augur the future: "status-ownership" societies.

The authors claim that classes are dissolving and that the most advanced societies are no longer class societies (p. 4). Although inequalities and conflict do and will remain, they consider "class" the "sociologist's chimera." Their model of class relations (Fig. 1.1) connects (from left to right in four boxes arranged in a square) the structure of production, employment categories, cultural communities, and collective political action. "Class" effects tend to flow from left to right, then down and across. Political action feeds back into the structure of production.

Pakulski and Waters believe that three types of societies have evolved historically: the economic-class society, the organized-class society, and the status-conventional society. In ch. 1 they argue that Western capitalism and industrialism produced class and class communities (as well as other bases of social stratification). During the twentieth century, the base of stratification shifted from industrial...