David Robbins - Diversity and Decomposition in the Labour Market

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: BRITISH SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Volume 7

DIVERSITY AND DECOMPOSITION IN THE LABOUR MARKET

First published in 1982 by Gower Publications Limited

This edition first published in 2018

by Routledge

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1982 British Sociological Association

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ISBN: 978-1-138-49942-3 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-351-01463-2 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-47807-7 (Volume 7) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-10320-6 (Volume 7) (ebk)

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GRAHAM DAY

LESLEY CALDWELL, KAREN JONES, DAVID ROBBINS and HILARY ROSE

British Sociological Association, 1982

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Diversity and decomposition in the labour market.

1. Industrial sociology - Great Britain

I. Day, Graham

306.3 HD6957.G7

ISBN 0-566-00556-5

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Robert Hartnoll Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall.

We would like to acknowledge the enormous assistance given to us by Anne Dix and Mike Milotte in the preparation of this volume and in the organisation of the BSA 1981 Conference on Inequality which gave rise to it. We would also like to thank all those who contributed to the conference and those students at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth who helped to run it. Finally, we would like to thank Adrienne Lee and Jane Watts for their good-humoured and efficient efforts in typing barely readable manuscripts, often at short notice.

Lesley Caldwell

Graham Day

Karen Jones

David Robbins

Hilary Rose

March 1982

Few would dispute the centrality of the labour market as a feature of capitalist society. The selling of labour power, the variation in the terms on which it can be sold, and the social regulations surrounding the contract of employment define a large part of the field of industrial sociology (Brown, 1980). These issues have assumed a growing importance within what has been termed the new industrial sociology (Hill, 1981) as sociologists have belatedly begun to give sustained attention to the operation of the labour market, and to the linkages between career and employment patterns and class formation. This reflects an awareness that more general theories and concepts of stratification in contemporary capitalism need to be tested and refined through the examination of detailed and often local variations. This volume brings together a number of contributions to the 1981 British Sociological Association annual conference, on the theme of inequality, which continue this emphasis. The papers provide a range of insights into the empirical reality of particular labour market sectors and the complexity of different employment situations. At the same time, their authors share a concern with theoretical relevance that leads them to enter into several of the important debates which have been taking place, often without sufficient reference to one another, around the central question of how sociology can best capture the differentiation of the various classes, and the composition of the working class in particular.

A great variety of positions now exist which stress the existence of a fragmented working class; they assign differing weights to the impact of a number of sociological fault lines which are said to split the class, inhibiting the development of a unified class consciousness and preventing mobilisation for action around supposedly shared interests. Opinions differ as to the depth and permanence of these fractures, as well as to the extent to which differentiation and diversity in the labour market is to be seen as the major element producing such divisions. The tendency has been to seek to handle diversity through a set of simplifying assumptions or categories which can be accepted as having universal validity, within at least the capitalist mode of production; characteristically, one recent text, drawing its empirical material from Britain, maintains that although our argument takes its specificity from this instance, its general theme is universally applicable to trends in advanced capitalist societies, notwithstanding local variations (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980, p.402). This belief, which is widely prevalent, had encouraged a readiness to transfer models developed in one society to others with relatively little alteration. There are however considerable dangers in this: as Parkin has commented, analyses formulated too specifically for one society can resemble theories of capitalism in one country; so, he contends,

in the sociology of the working class, the terminology of affluent and traditional, old and new, rough and respectable, secular and deferential, and so forth, sets up distinctions that appear to derive more from the peculiarities of British society than from the universal, systemic features of capitalism (Parkin, 1979, p.29).

In practice, lately, the temptation has been to import American models into Britain, without always scrutinising them carefully enough to assess their applicability. This is something called into question by several of the papers which follow.

Where systemic properties of capitalism have been indicated, they have often been oversimplified to provide excessively generalised explanations both for the internal divisions in the working class, and for processes which might be expected ultimately to transcend them; examples of such one dimensional, single process accounts would include the notion of embourgeoisement, widely discussed in the 1960s and (as the other side of the coin) some accounts of proletarianisation, and the more recent deskilling thesis, as formulated by Braverman, in which a more or less constant, uniform thrust towards the homogenisation of work by the elimination of skills is asserted (Braverman, 1974). The closer the attention paid to specifying actual, historical class fractions, or the more detailed the investigation of market processes and work organisation, the more critically either abstract a priori categorisations or simplified empirical descriptions tend to be viewed: the market is more complex and less orderly, and the differentiation within the class less easily constituted, than the models tend to suggest.