The new squirearchy and emergent cultures of the new middle classes in rural areas

In part prompted by a recent spate of media reports this paper explores the emergence of a ‘new squirearchy’ in the English countryside. In doing so, it aims to both illuminate a particular facet of rural social life and help reignite interest in the cultures of rural class. Whilst relationships between rural class and culture were a source of excitement during the 1990s, much of this interest has apparently spluttered if not died, despite class itself remaining very much a live issue for rural dwellers. The paper draws on the findings of an in-depth ethnographic study to highlight the significance of performance and symbolic boundary-marking in the construction and reproduction of social identity. The focus is the activities and sites of ‘the pub’, ‘the hunt’ and ‘the shoot’, which have been key in the emergence of the new squirearchy in the study area. The paper shows the importance of lay classifications based on evaluations of cultural (in)competence and morality, and suggests that the performance and boundary-marking of the new squirearchy in tandem with other identities is evidence of a more extensive, complex and ambiguous ‘culture of middle-classness’ in rural areas.     

The new populism and the new Marxism

Theory and Society -     

Transnational mobility and rootedness: the upper middle classes in European cities

Some authors argue that ‘mobilities’ form the distinctive feature of late modern societies and represent a new social cleavage between cosmopolitan mobile élites and urban residents more rooted in their local neighbourhoods. One assumption in contemporary discourses of rootedness is that this new transnational or global society entails an ongoing process of uprooting individuals and a mainly mobile élite packing up and relocating. In this article, we draw on empirical comparative research to examine the patterns and dynamics of mobility and belonging across European borders among upper‐middle‐class managers in four cities – Paris, Madrid, Milan and Lyon. We suggest that these new urban upper‐middle‐class managers display flight responses, or ‘partial exit’ strategies, which operate at various levels to enable them to protect and control their interests while holding onto the reins of power in their local communities. Our study adopts a micro‐level perspective to explore individual experiences, strategies, motivations and values based on interviews with 480 managers in these cities.     

Living in the city: school friendships,diversity and the middle classes

Much of the literature on the urban middle classes describes processes of both affiliation (often to the localities) and disaffiliation (often from some of the non‐middle‐class residents). In this paper, we consider this situation from a different position, drawing on research exploring whether and how children and adults living in diverse localities develop friendships with those different to themselves in terms of social class and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interviews with the ethnically diverse, but predominantly white British, middle‐class parent participants, considering their attitudes towards social and cultural difference. We emphasize the importance of highlighting inequalities that arise from social class and its intersection with ethnicity in analyses of complex urban populations. The paper's contribution is, first, to examine processes of clustering amongst the white British middle‐class parents, particularly in relation to social class. Second, we contrast this process, and its moments of reflection and unease, with the more deliberate and purposeful efforts of one middle‐class, Bangladeshi‐origin mother who engages in active labour to facilitate relationships across social and ethnic difference.     

Exploitation in the new Marxism of collective action

The ‘new Marxism of collective action’is a term Lash and Urry have recently used to describe a new intellectual current in Marxism which seeks to apply rational choice theory, and particularly game theory, to key Marxian concepts like collective action, class, revolution and exploitation. This current is seen as part of a general shift within social science away from structure towards agency. This paper focuses on a concept which Lash and Urry's outline ignored: namely, exploitation. Granting the concept this attention is useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, by summarizing the general debate on the concept, both within the new Marxism of collective action and outside, the paper allows the discussion of exploitation to be placed in the context of the more general debate between structuralist and humanistic versions of Marxism; especially in the context of the debate about whether there can be a Marxist theory of ethics and injustice. Secondly, by outlining how the concept is understood by advocates of the new Marxism of collective action, the paper accords the concept the central status which advocates reserve for it. In consequence, the paper identifies differences between advocates of the new Marxism of collective action with respect to how exploitation is to be understood, which suggest that the intellectual current is not as homogeneous as Lash and Urry imply. Moreover, the paper stresses that the differences between them with regard to exploitation are more than just unhelpful disagreements over matters of definition, but represent fundamental disagreements about the validity of Marx's original formulations in contemporary society.     

Investigations of the British rural middle classes — Part 2: Fragmentation, identity, morality and contestation

This is the second of two papers concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of middle class presence in rural areas. This paper draws on the notion of an interpretative approach to class analysis as outlined in the first paper and, in particular, addresses the issues of power, difference and identity discussed, in a theoretical manner, in that paper. The focus of this paper is, however, more substantive in that it draws on research conducted in five rural areas of Britain as part of two research projects. The paper is structured into three parts. The first outlines the nature of the research projects and the forms of research conducted within them. The second part of the paper explores the issue of whether there are significant class differences within the middle class, and indeed within the service class. Attention is drawn to how the class classifications of John Goldthorpe and Erik Wright appear to cross-cut each other in ways which are suggestive of the presence of what may be termed a ‘service proletariat’. The significance of gender and other lines of social differentiation within the formation, as well as fractionalisation, of class relations is highlighted. The third part of the paper addresses the inter-relations between socio-economically established differences and those constructed through notions of culture and morality. It is argued that rural residents commonly evaluate people and places through notions of cultural competence and morality, as well as through constructions of socio-economic differences. The roles of both general and localised/ruralised constructions of cultural and moral differences are highlighted, as is the way that these constructions are used to contest, symbolically at least, the socio-economic construction of difference.     

Investigations of the british rural middle classes — Part 1: From legislation to interpretation

This is the first of two papers concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of middle class presence in rural areas. This paper explores debates over the future of class analysis and in particular whether it is possible to avoid a dualistic choice between a ‘modernist class analysis’ or a ‘postmodernism’ where class has completely receded from view. Attention is drawn to notions of an ‘interpretative approach’ to class, which while accepting many of the claims of postmodernism still sees value in the notion of class and in conducting class analysis. Drawing on a number of recent discussions of class within and beyond rural studies it is argued that class analysis should be seen as an ‘interpretative accomplishment’ and that attention needs to be paid within it to at least four issues: (i) the processes of knowledge construction and communication; (ii) differences in conceptualisations of power and related concepts such as domination and exploitation; (iii) differences within the processes of class formation; and (iv) the impact of identity recognition on class analysis, class relations and classes practices. In a later paper these issues will be explored in a more substantive manner through consideration of some of the results of research conducted in five locations in rural Britain.     

Marxism and Feminism in the USSR:

This paper examines recent efforts to introduce a feminist movement in the USSR in the context of the historic interpretations of Marxist-Leninism on "the women's question." The author argues that the USSR has focused on some parts of Marxism and ignored others in defining its position on women's issues. Recent movements, both feminist and protofeminist, are described and analyzed in this study.     

Marxism and capitalist possession

This paper evaluates marxist attempts to identify a ‘class of possessors’ under capitalism. It suggests that such attempts are unsuccessful for three reasons. Firstly, marxism wrongly equates the agent of possession with the human individual. Secondly, its conception of the capitalist economy rests upon teleological assumptions. Thirdly, it wrongly asserts the priority of capitalist relations of production over and above their legal conditions of existence, causing it to misrecognise corporate forms of possession. After considering marxist attempts to theorise possession through the analysis of management and monopoly we consider a more fundamental question: whether it is possible to analyse possession/separation in conventional marxist class terms at all.     

Marxism and methodological individualism

Conclusion Analytical or rational choice Marxism explicitly proposes to synthesize non-Marxist methods and Marxist theory. It is therefore in-appropriate to attack it solely by demonstrating that the methods advocated were not Marx's: this is, after all, acknowledged at the outset. (For this reason I have tried to show that both the assumption of MI and the process of reduction are problematic on their own empiricist or positivist terms, and have therefore largely been discarded as viable projects by philosophers of science.) Any attempt to synthesize two such distinct research traditions nonetheless demands some consideration of the metatheoretical problems that one might expect it to encounter, and this is particularly so if Marxist theory is to be recast on the basis of the positivist and empiricist assumptions explicitly rejected by Marx. Curiously, however, the analytical Marxist literature does not address such problems: indeed, metatheoretical considerations are notably absent. Discussions focus instead on particular tools of analysis, e.g., rational choice theory and game theory, as if these were neutral with respect to the underlying philosophical commitments of the two traditions. In fact, of course, these methods do reflect such commitments; after all, the justification for rational choice Marxism, infusing Marxian analyses with scientific rigor, reflects the rejection of the conception of science embodied in the Marxist tradition. By way of a conclusion I therefore briefly discuss the uneasy relationship between rational choice Marxism and classical Marxist theory. I argue that this relationship cannot be one of synthesis because the empiricist assumptions of rational choice Marxism violate the hard-core of the Marxist research tradition in at least three important ways: 1) most generally, its atomistic ontology directly contradicts the relational ontology of Marxist theory; 2) the empiricist conception of science undermines the Marxist conception of social science as critique; and 3) more specifically, rational choice and game theory mark a retreat from the social and relational philosophical anthropology of Marx back to the liberal individualist tradition initiated by Hobbes.The most fundamental incompatibility between analytical Marxism and classical Marxism resides in the differences dividing the atomistic or individualist ontology underpinning empiricism and MI from the relational ontology on which Marxist theory is based. The incompatibility of these commitments demands that a choice be made between them: either only observable individuals exist and are explanatory, or unobservable social structures and relations also exist and have explanatory import, but not both. The commitment to incompatible ontological assumptions prevents the rational choice Marxist project from initiating a progressive problem-shift in the Marxist tradition because these ontological positions form part of the hard-core of each tradition, and as such are irrefutable by [prior] methodological decision. Although changes in some of the assumptions of a research tradition are necessary to stimulate a progressive problem-shift, these changes may not occur in the hard-core, which remains by definition inviolable. That is, an ontological shift indicates not a change of direction within a research tradition, but a change from one research tradition to another. The adoption of a competing ontological stance thus results not in the reinvigoration of Marxist theory, but in its replacement with a competing research tradition. Rational choice Marxism thus cannot, as its practitioners would wish, be the means by which what is true and important in Marxism [can] be more firmly established.A second fundamental difference between choice-theoretic and classical Marxist theory concerns the status of critique in their conceptions of social science. A central component of the Marxist problématique and its notion of science is the critique of existing social structures and institutions with an eye to their (usually revolutionary) transformation. Marx believed, for example, that from the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognized as historical, the delusion of regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic social formation, to which capitalism is only the transition.A critique of existing social forms, however, requires both a critique of central explanatory concepts and an ontology in which the social structures and relations to be transformed are real and thus amenable to investigation. Because social relations are themselves the result of human practices, rather than natural, this critical perspective provides an understanding of the options available for radical system transformation. An individualist framework, by denying reality to social structures and relations and taking certain social institutions as natural, relegates social change to piecemeal engineering or incrementalism because it prestructures both the nature of the questions that can be asked about change and the answers that are possible. And in fact, the conservative implications of such a framework were an explicit objective of its proponents. Major structural changes are considered illusory, at best, because they presuppose a holistic or structural, and thus meaningless, conception of society. An empiricist and individualist conception of science therefore produces problemsolving theory rather than critical theory. Individualism subverts the critical element so central to Marxist theory.Finally, rational choice and game theory violate a third element in the hard-core of Marxist theory - its social or relational model of man. For Marx, the essence of man is the ensemble of social relations that are spécific to particular historical social formations. These relations constitute individuals; they confer onto them definite characteristics, motives for action, and so on. Marx thus conceived of human nature as social and mutable, rather than natural and fixed, and rejected the notion of abstract individuals considered in isolation of the social relations in which they are embedded. In fact, the idea of isolated, individual human beings is itself the product of a particular historical context. Rational choice and game theory, however, rest upon just the liberal model of man that Marx rejected. In this model, each person is assumed to be an immutable, isolated (atomistic), and self-interested calculator whose rationality is defined instrumentally. As with their respective ontological commitments, each of these contradictory conceptions of man forms part of the irrefutable hard-core of a distinct research tradition, and thus cannot be altered without stepping outside of that tradition. How, if at all, these two incompatible conceptions of human nature can be fused is thus a problem that must, at the least, be addressed by rational choice Marxists.All this does not mean, however, that game theory is completely incompatible with Marxist analysis. There clearly exist, within the purview of Marxist theory, situations of strategic interaction that would benefit from a game-theoretic representation. The issue of class compromise examined by Przeworski is a good example, as are the collective action problems faced by the capitalist and working classes. There is room here for game theory for two reasons. First, these are situations in which the context and rules of the game, the actors, and the preferences have been established by prior theoretical analyses. Secondly, they occur in societies, specifically modern, western, capitalist ones, in which actors are constituted as reasonable approximations of the rational, calculating maximizers assumed by the liberal model of man underlying rational choice and game theory. Game theory can thus provide a more or less precise representation of, and rigorously clarify the logic of, situations of strategic interaction in particular modern societies. This, however, makes it viable as an end-point of, but not as the foundation for, certain narrowly defined aspects of Marxist analysis.The role of choice-theoretic methods in Marxist theory is thus necessarily limited. The reason is simple - the Marxist problématique revolves around more general, structural questions that precede choice-theoretic analyses because these presuppose the structures and relations underlying the manifest forms of historical social formations and the behavior of individuals within them. That is, Marxist theory is concerned primarily, although not exclusively, with structural analyses, and these must necessarily be completed prior to the analysis of the intentional behavior or interactions of specific individuals. As Oilman says: In history, conceived of as history of the species, [man] is abstracted as a human being as distinct from other animals. In history, conceived of as history of classes, man is abstracted as a class being, the real subject of history on this dimension being classes. In history, conceived of as the history of capitalism... man is abstracted as the typical subject of capitalism... In history, conceived of as the history of modern English (or French or American) capitalism, man is abstracted as particular nations, religions and parties as well as factions of classes, and has begun to acquire the distinguishing qualities that justify individual names and domiciles. Only on this level of abstraction of history can we begin to speak about motivation and choice.Exaggerated claims for the use of game theory (or rational choice theory) thus neglect the fact that all inputs into a choice-theoretic analysis have in fact been established, prior to that analysis itself, by an unreduced structural theory, in this case Marxism. The context of the game, the rules of the game, the preferences of the players, and even the production and identification of the relevant actors all presuppose the structural analysis provided by Marxist theory. Logically, the game starts only after the actors have been constituted, and their order of preferences has been formed as a result of processes that cannot be considered as part of the game. Indeed, not only are these processes not part of the game, but, as was discussed earlier, they cannot be understood within a strictly individualist approach. In additon, as is evident in Elster's own discussion of the solutions to the collective action problem of the working class, the analysis of social change so central to Marxist theory cannot be grasped by game theory. Elster claims that this collective action problem can be surmounted either through a change in the preferences of the working class or through the effective exercise of leadership, thus producing a shift from a prisoner's dilemma to an assurance game. The change that produces either of these shifts is, however, clearly located outside of the game itself. That is, the PD or assurance games do not explain or contribute to our understanding of the actual change that produced the shift to class consciousness and effective collective action. At best, these games function as tools that can highlight the fact that a change has occurred; an additional explanation of that change is still required. Game theory therefore cannot provide solid microfoundations for any study of social structure and social change because all of the traditional givens of game-theoretic Marxism must be established outside the boundaries of game theory by an unreduced, relational Marxist theory that is recognized as meaningful on its own terms.     

Soviet Marxism and population policy

American demographers have maintained that Marxism, notably Soviet Marxism, is consistently pronatalist. The Soviet view is said to be that population growth is not a problem and that birth control policies in either developed or developing societies are to be rejected; the “correct” (i.e., socialist) socio‐economic structure is the true solution to alleged population problems. Such representations of Soviet thought greatly oversimplify the Soviet position as well as fail to discern the changes in Soviet thought that have been occurring. Since the 1960's Soviet writers have increasingly acknowledged that population growth is, to a considerable degree, independent of the economic base of society and that conscious population policies may be needed to either increase or decrease the rate of population growth. Even socialist societies can have population problems. And where population growth is too rapid, as in the developing countries, policies to slow such growth are needed because of the threat to economic development. However, the Soviets continue to stress that birth control policies must go hand‐in‐hand with social and economic development policies if they are to be effective.     

A relational study of the Black middle classes and globalised White hegemony: Identities,interactions, and ideologies in the United States,United Kingdom,and South Africa

In this paper, I explore the experiences of the Black middle classes across the United States, United Kingdom (UK), and South Africa. I argue that the similar experiences the Black middle classes face across these nations are not coincidental but represent the process of globalised White hegemony. Globalised White hegemony refers to how the middle class, transnationally, is often understood as a symbolic category informed by specific White norms, identifications, and practices. I explore globalised White hegemony through three areas of Black middle‐class experience: identity, interactions, and ideologies. Thus, I examine how across the UK, United States, and South Africa, the Black middle classes construct public identities according to White norms, encounter interactions through which their blackness negatively trumps their middle‐class status, and confront classed‐racialised ideologies, which construe the Black middle class as inauthentic. I argue in this paper that central to fleshing out the similarities in Black middle‐class experiences across the globe is engaging in relational sociology, which stresses the globalised nature of contemporary raciality.     

Latent classes and group membership

A technique for analyzing group membership data, such as interlocking directorates, based on the assumption of latent classes of individuals, is described and illustrated with two data sets. The technique partitions individuals and/or groups into homogeneous sets and can be used to create measures of structural centrality for groups and for individuals.