You will need to know how different systems of stratification see this group.
- Marxists would say that they are part of the proletariat.(In Marx's day, they were the proletariat, but the growth of the middle class since then means that the proletarian class also consists of a large proportion of white collar workers now.)
- Weberians would say that a separate identifiable working class exists IF manual workers have a similar market position, similar life chances, etc. And do they? This in itself is an interesting debate...
- The Registrar-General would put them in classes IIIm, IV, & V.
- The O.N.S. would put them in...where?
What changes have taken place? What issues are there?
- Decline in Size. This is due to changes in industry; the economy has changed from manufacturing to service sector jobs.
- Internally Stratified. It could be argued that there are divisions between skilled, semi skilled, & unskilled manual workers. (Think: carpenter who has done a 5 yr. apprenticeship; forklift driver; & street sweeper. They would be different in terms of market situation, life chances, income, status, lifestyle, status, etc.) This would mean that that the W.C. is split, and not homogeneous.
- Homogeneity. Against this, some sociologists say that the W.C. is a homogeneous group. Marxists, of course, would say that they all share the same relationship to the M.O.P., so are a homogeneous class. And Runciman argues that as the W.C. has decreased in size, it has got fewer internal divisions in it.
- Vertical Cleavages. It could be argued that there are now lots of vertical cleavages (splits) in the W.C. which prevent it from being homogeneous. Feminists like Bea Campbell would point to gender (i.e. working class women have very different lives from W.C. men); Lash & Urry would point to sectors of the economy; Crewe would differentiate between the old & new working classes. Hobsbawm (spell it right, PLEASE!!) would argue that the W.C. has now split into a number of smaller groups.
The above is about the "fragmentation debate": whether the W.C. is homogeneous, or whether it is fragmented/split. A different debate is the boundaries debate: whether it makes sense to talk about the W.C., as the boundary between them is now so blurred that it is hard to tell them apart. A key issue here is embourgeoisement.
In the 1950s, the W.C. became affluent: richer, more prosperous, able to buy consumer goods rather than just necessities. So some commentators argued that this was making the W.C. similar to the middle class in terms of norms, attitudes, and lifestyle. (e.g. now we can all buy our own homes, play golf, drink wine, and have foreign holidays. Maybe we would all vote Conservative!)
This Embourgeoisement Thesis was tested by Goldthorpe & Lockwood in a famous study in Luton. They found that the embourgeoisement thesis was not proven: in terms of politics, attitudes, and lifestyle, the manual workers were still different from the M.C., and saw themselves as different.
This debate is still important, however. The economy is doing well. Mrs. Thatcher's reforms of the 1980s allowed many W.C. people to buy their own homes. Perhaps we should accept that manual workers are not so different any more from the non-manual workers; that knowing a person's job will not enable us to predict anything about their lifestyle (a po-mo point!); and that people are now differentiated according to how they consume...
As for the Middle Class, lots of the material and skills that you have learnt will be of use here too.
You will need to be able to say how Marxists view the m.c. (most of them are proletarians; there is no real distinction between the white and blue collar workers, so Marxists don't really stress this distinction...)Also, how Weberians see them (Class, status, and party, again.). And the Registrar-General, and the O.N.S. scale.
Think about internal stratification (professionals, managers, and clerical/secretarial/"routine non-manual". They differ widely in terms of market situation, status, power, life chances, and lifestyle, don't they?)
There are also vertical cleavages again. Lash & Urry (Core & Periphery) are useful again, plus the usual divisions like Gender, Ethnicity, Region, etc.
The boundaries debate is also here again. You should know about Proletarianisation: the idea that the income, conditions, and job security of m.c. workers is being eroded so that they are not much better off than the manual workers. This is an argument that Marxists would support, as it demonstrates that the m.c. are really just proletarians who get exploited by capitalism. Braverman is really important here, with his argument about deskilling. You have lots of material on this. Note that there are lots of Synoptic Links here, to Families & Households, Work & Leisure, Wealth, Poverty, & Welfare, and Methodology. A particularly rich area is the feminisation of the workplace, and how that ties in with deskilled middle class jobs like typing, clerical work, social care, etc. Then, how that might link to alienation; poverty; conjugal roles; affluence; exploitation; feminism; the Hakim Debate; family size; and so on.
