Work, Employment, and Society
Опубликовано на портале: 18-10-2004
Muriel Egerton, Mike Savage
Work, Employment, and Society.
2000.
Vol. 14.
No. 1.
P. 23-49.
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.

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.

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.
