The Politics of the Service Class

ABSTRACT

Claims of the demise of class were in part fuelled by problems facing a class analysis of contemporary politics. Central to this was the emergence of the ‘new middle class’. Debates revolved around whether it would constitute a source of radicalism or conservatism. John Goldthorpe's concept of the service class has proven to be the most enduring contribution to these debates. The service class, Goldthorpe held, would constitute an essentially conservative element in contemporary society. Deviations from this expected conservatism were supposedly an intermittent, transitory phenomenon, devoid of structural basis. In this paper, I investigate the political attitudes of the Norwegian service class. Adhering to Clark and Lipset's insistence on the need for a more complex analysis of both class and politics, I take a multidimensional approach: political attitudes are seen within the two dimensions of economic and ‘post-materialist’ issues, and class divisions in terms of the two dimensions of volume and composition of capital, following Bourdieu. By applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis, I uncover a significant political heterogeneity with a structural basis in the different forms of capital, pace Goldthorpe. The fractions relying on cultural capital are markedly leftist, while their counterparts possessing economic capital constitute a right-wing. Also, service-class members with the most capital are more liberal than their counterparts with less overall capital. I argue that this points to the significance of a multidimensional concept of class, which in turn necessitates further work on how ‘Bourdieusian’ concepts can be synthesised with class analysis.

Key words:

• class analysis
• forms of capital
• politics
• service class
• social space
• cultural capital

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marianne Nordli Hansen and Vegard Jarness for important comments on the paper, and Johs Hjellbrekke for crucial critical feedback on the analysis. I am grateful to the participants at the SCUD workshop on Field analysis, boundary drawing and socio-cultural inequality in York 23–25 May 2011 for comments on an earlier version. Gitte Sommer Harrits and Tor Bjørklund gave generous advice on literature. I would also like to acknowledge the crucial inspiration from Harrits, Annick Prieur, Lennart Rosenlund and Jakob Skjøtt-Larsen.

Notes

1. The data applied in the analysis in this publication are based on ‘Electoral Survey 2009’. The data are provided by Statistics Norway (SSB), and prepared and made available by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). Prof. Bernt Aardal and the Institute of Social Research (ISF) were responsible for the original studies and Statistics Norway collected the data. Bernt Aardal, ISF, SSB and NSD are not responsible for the analyses and interpretation of the data presented here.

2. The number of axes is determined by inspecting a scree plot of eigenvalues. This indicates that relatively little information would be gained by focusing on an extra dimension. Explained variance refers to the rates of modified eigenvalues, since ordinary eigenvalues underestimate the variance accounted for (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 39).

3. In terms of variance, a third axis should be included, but this has proven difficult to interpret.

4. The t-test is used to test whether the class fractions constructed have statistically significantly different political opinions on both axes of the political space. Two t-tests are therefore done: one where the nine fractions are tested against the economic left–right axis, and one where the nine fractions are tested against the liberal/anti-liberal axis.

5. This includes votes for Red Election Alliance, which announced it would support the establishment of the Red-Green government. Please note, however, that we are dealing with a small number of respondents here.

6. As noted above, he does not retreat from this position in the 1995 paper – nor in any other publication that I know of.

7. This emerges from projecting indicators of social position onto the political space (not shown).

8. I shall not revisit the debates as to what extent self-selection creates this pattern – i.e., whether socio-cultural professionals are leftist because leftists take these jobs, or whether people in these jobs become leftist (see Parkin 1968; Bagguley in Heath and Savage 1995). There is nothing in the data to investigate this. Furthermore, the way in which the homology comes about is not crucial to the present theme: the affinity between positions and position-takings is still the case.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magne Flemmen

Magne Flemmen (b. 1980) is Researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen. His research interests are in class theory, social stratification and sociological theory.