This paper examines the relationship between processes of demographic class formation, gender inequality and age stratification in England and Wales between 1971 and 1991. Existing research shows that the complex process of class restructuring which took place in these years is linked to considerable changes in the position of women, especially related to their growing numbers in professional and managerial occupations. We seek to show that changing processes of age stratification were also related to the remaking of class and gender relations in these years. Data from the Longitudinal Study (approximately 193,000 men and 203,000 women aged 2357 in two age cohorts; 1971 and 1981), Samples of Anonymised Records (approximately 121,500 men and 126,000 women aged 2357 in 1991), General Household Survey 19831992 (32,609 men and 16,191 women aged 2357 in fulltime employment) and from the National Child Development Study, 1981 and 1991 (2205 men and 887 women aged 23 and 33, in fulltime employment) were used to examine the movement of individuals through changing opportunity structures over the twenty-year period. We found a distinct hardening of the relationship between age and class in these two decades for men, with a marked increase in social polarisation between young men and older men, but for women this relationship was very different, with young women seeing considerable evidence of an improvement in their fortunes.

The Crucial Aspects of Class: An Empirical Assessment of the Relevance of Class Analysis With Swedish Data Covering the Late Twentieth Century [статья]

Опубликовано на портале: 19-05-2004

Erik Bihagen, Bjorn Hallerod Work, Employment, and Society. 2000. Vol. 14. No. 2. P. 307-330.

Class structure and class formation are two crucial aspects of class. The former relates to differences in market positions and the latter concerns social factors such as interaction, mobility and class action. This paper is based on Swedish data covering the period from 1975 to 1995. Analysis reveals a persistent class hierarchy and that there is no trend towards declining class differences regarding market position. The situation is better described as being in a state of non-linear flux. However, one persistent trend is discernible; class explains less and less of the variance in wage income. Looking at class formation there is a decline over time in class-homogeneity. Most Swedes are mobile in the sense that they end up in a class position different from their father's. A growing majority of all marriage is also class mixed. However, although classes generally lack homogeneity, social boundaries still exist, i.e., tendencies for immobility and class homogeneous marriage. In relation to the Фclass-is-dying hypothesis, the results generally indicate the continuing relevance of class, although the view of classes as homogenous social groups is increasingly troublesome over time.

The Role of Social Capital in Developing Czech Private Business [статья]

Опубликовано на портале: 23-12-2005

Ed Clarke Work, Employment, and Society. 2000. Vol. 14. No. 3. P. 439-458.

The development of new private business has both economic and social significance for the post-communist transition. New business firms offer industrial dynamism and flexibility to former command economies typically dominated by gigantic monopolies, while, unlike privatised enterprises, not reproducing formerly institutionalised practices. They further presage the rise of new social groups and values with direct implications for civic, social and political renewal. The author argues that conventional economic theories of business foundation, which presume the stable institutional conditions of Western-style capitalism, are by themselves poor explanations of the development of private business in transitional conditions. The paper proposes instead a social-institutional approach, in which small firms are examined as a socially constructed process undertaken by business founders within ambiguous institutional circumstances characterised by historical legacies and simultaneous discontinuities. The empirical findings allow the exploration of the process of business founding by former nomenklatura. Their stock of inherited social capital gave them a privileged position in the contest to construct new firms and thereby access to the legitimate accumulation of economic capital, which completed their personal assimilation to the emergent form of market-economic capitalism. The paper concludes by assessing the social implications of these observations.