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Abstract
The changing structure of employment classes in Canada is documented. Growing proportions are found in professional occupations generally. Four different professional classes are distinguished: professional employers, self-employed professionals, professional managers, and professional employees. Nonmanagerial employment classes include increasing proportions of professional employees. Professional employees’ perceived working conditions and economic attitudes are coming closer to those of traditional working class employees, suggesting increasing proletarianization. Implications are suggested.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Livingstone and Guile, The Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning.
2 Reader, Professional Men.
3 Drucker, Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management.
4 Adams, “Profession: A Useful Concept for Sociological Analysis?,” 49–70.
5 Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts, “The 1971 Census and the Socioeconomic Classification of Occupations.”
6 Wilensky, “The Professionalization of Everyone,” 137–58.
7 Clement and Myles, Relations of Ruling.
8 Livingstone, “Exploring the Icebergs of Adult Learning,” 49–72.
9 Livingstone, “Probing the Icebergs of Adult Learning,” 47–71.
10 Livingstone and Raykov, “The Growing Gap Between Post-Secondary Schooling and Further Education,” 1–23.
11 Boyd, “A Socioeconomic Scale for Canada,” 51–91.
12 Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts, “The 1971 Census and the Socioeconomic Classification of Occupations,” 91–102.
13 Clement and Myles, Relations of Ruling.
14 The 1971 occupational data used in this paper are based on the 1971 census population while data for later years are based on sample surveys.
15 Levine and Lewin, “The New ‘Managerial Misclassification’ Challenge to Old Wage and Hour Laws or What is Managerial Work.”
16 Wilensky, “The Professionalization of Everyone,” 137–58.
17 Katz and Krueger, “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015.”
18 Livingstone and Raykov, “Interest in Unions and Associations in a Knowledge-Based Economy,” 3–23.
19 Wright, “Class and Occupation,” 177–214.
20 Johnson, “The Professions in the Class Structure,” 93–110.
21 Wright, Approaches to Class Analysis.
22 Carter, “A Growing Divide,” 33–72; Neilson, “Formal and Real Subordination and the Contemporary Proletariat,” 89–123.
23 Livingstone and Scholtz, “Reconnecting Class and Production Relations in an Advanced Capitalist ‘Knowledge Economy,’” 469–93.
24 Wright, Approaches to Class Analysis.
25 Livingstone, “Interrogating Professional Power and Recognition of Specialized Knowledge,” 13–29.
26 Grusky and Weedon, “Decomposition Without Death,” 203–18.
27 Livingstone, “The Pivotal Role of Professional Employees in Emergent ‘Knowledge Economies.’”
28 It should be noted that middle managers, as well as supervisors and forepersons, are included in the following tables only in the overall averages. These groups are located marginally in relations between capital and labour, and their working conditions and economic attitudes may generally be posited as intermediate.
29 Harley, “The Myth of Empowerment,” 41–66.
30 In all of these surveys, those being surveyed were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: “It is possible for a modern economy to run effectively without the profit motive.” In addition to agree and disagree options, respondees to the post-1982 surveys also had “neither” as a middle option. The small numbers in this category have been omitted in this table for comparability.
31 Ehrenfreund, “A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows.”
32 Seccombe and Livingstone, Down to Earth People.
33 Curtis, “Middle Class Identity in the Modern World,” 203–26.
34 Oppenheimer, “The Proletarianization of the Professional,” 213–27.
35 Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society.
36 Savage, Webber, and Butovsky, “Organizing the Ivory Tower,” 293–310.
37 Wikipedia contributors, “Affiliated Unions of the Canadian Labour Congress.”
38 Livingstone and Raykov, “Interest in Unions and Associations in a Knowledge-Based Economy,” 3–23.
39 Drucker, Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management.
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Funding
Notes on contributors
D. W. Livingstone
D.W. Livingstone is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)/University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Brendan Watts
Brendan Watts is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.