Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, trends such as service sector growth, welfare state expansion and rising female participation rates have promoted increasing heterogeneity within the occupational system. Accordingly, this article argues that the class map has to be redrawn in order to grasp these changes in the employment structure. For that purpose, it develops the bases of a new class schema that partly shifts its focus from hierarchical divisions to horizontal cleavages. The middle class is not conceptualized as a unitary grouping and the manual/non-manual divide is not used as a decisive class boundary. Instead, emphasis is put on differences in marketable skills and the work logic. The schema is expected to more accurately reflect the class location of unskilled service employees and to make visible the political divide within the salaried middle class. This expectation is empirically examined with survey data from Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Findings for earnings and promotion prospects indicate that the schema successfully captures the hierarchical dimension in the class structure. Moreover, results for party support and union membership suggest that the schema grasps a salient horizontal cleavage between managers and sociocultural professionals.

Migration Background and Voting Behavior in Switzerland: A Socio‐Psychological Explanation

“…Among structural variables that are not directly related to migration background but could explain variance in voting behavior between natives and immigrants, we measure occupational group applying Oesch's () 8‐class stratification scheme. This stratification scheme is well suited for our analysis since it does right to both hierarchical and segmental division of labor and has shown to be of high importance for the explanation of electoral choices among the Swiss electorate (Kriesi et al.…”

Long-term Sickness Absence Among Professionals: Investigating Gender, Socioeconomic Position and Care Work

“…There has been a call for novel and more detailed analyses of the relationship between the division of labor and individual-level outcomes in the wake of the educational expansion and the increasingly growing and heterogeneous salaried middle class (Oesch 2006). The 'occupationalization' of the labor market (Grusky 2005) has put the study of occupations on the agenda, of which professions are the most well organized (Freidson 2001).…”

Ungleiche politische Repräsentation und sozialstaatlicher Wandel

“…Neben diesen Argumenten aus dem Bereich der Wohlfahrtsstaatsforschung sind im Feld der empirischen Responsivitätsforschung in den letzten Jahren ebenfalls viele Arbeiten entstanden, die sich mit der (mangelnden) politischen Repräsentation sozial benachteiligter Gruppen befassen. So zeigen diese Arbeiten für eine ganze Reihe reicher Demokratien, dass die politischen Entscheidungen von Parlamenten oder einzelnen Abgeordneten systematisch zugunsten höherer Einkommens-oder Berufsgruppen verzerrt sind, und zwar unabhängig von der regierenden Parteienfamilie (Bartels 2008;Elsässer et al 2017;Gilens 2012 (Oesch 2006). Die einfachen Angestellten sind in Bezug auf Einkommen und Bildung den beiden Gruppen von Arbeitern bzw.…”