Why "Class" still matters

Perhaps my question whether the PMC notion is a useful one was not the right one. Perhaps the more appropriate question is whether it matters - does it change anything? I've just done a Ngram on "class" - to discover that (in the English-speaking world at least) its use peaked in 1914 but stayed reasonably high until dropping significantly after 2000 and is now at the levels last used in 1860!! Use of "Working class" peaked in 1970 and is now at 1955 level with references to the "ruling class" being fairly similar. But the notion of there being a "professional - managerial class" seems confirmed – there being almost no of the term until 1966 and then a huge rise peaking in 1997 but still holding up. And it was a new phrase for me – but one that made sense given the increased awareness of the blight of managerialism which has been evident in posts over the past decade.

My initial thought is that class DOES matter – I’ve been floundering in the attempts I’ve been making since 2000 to make sense of what seems to be a new system of capitalism – with the decline of industry and financial services and monopoly rents (in the sidest sense of that word) now making the running. We all know that inequality is at obscene levels which have rarely been experienced – but the world seems just to accept that.

I’ve now downloaded various books and articles on the subject of CLASS – most of which I find tortuous and unreadable. Most of the writing is by sociologists such as Ralf Dahrendorf (much more accessible), John Goldthorpe, Ray Pahl, Goran Therborn, John Westergaard and Erik Olin Wright. One of few readable (and mercifully short) pieces was Therborn’s tribute to the life and work of EO Wright. And Therborn’s New Left Review articles – such as here and here – are highly readable presumably because of the high editorial discipline NLR imposes. But I simply don’t have the patience to wade through the 30 pages of Jakovich’s 2014 paper on The Concept of Class or even the 21 pages of Goldthorpe's 1992 The Promising Future of Class Analysis.

This Swiss economic sociologist's Contemporary class analysis (EC 2022) for me cut through the guff with his blistering 27 pages critique of some of the nonsense recently produced by economists on the subject. The last decade has seen a lot of talk about the "squeezing of the middle-class" and the purpose of Daniel Oesch's paper – commissioned by the EC – is to demonstrate that it is the working-class which has suffered the decline. Although noone knows how AI will in the future impact the middle-class, some dire predictions have been made about the scale of its impact on many traditional professions - with only those in the "personal care" system likely to benefit. 

So noone can really anticipate how our social structures will develop and how wealth will be distributed- about the only thing I can say is that

• "middle class" has little meaning – it's vasically an aspiration

• PMC is also vague – straddling those who command both deference and power

• working class power seems suddenly to be alive and kicking - with the "public" amazingly supportive

Gluttons for punishment might look at a couple of books about "class"

• Approaches to Class Analysis ed by Erik Olin Wright (2005) - probably the best on offer with each chapter being written from a different perspective – whether neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian, neo-Durkeimian, Bourdieu, "post-class" or Wright's synthesis

• Anthropologies of Class – power, practice and inequality ed by Carrier and Kalb (2015) a collection of anthropological essays on the subject which I suspect might offer more insights than the sociological?

UPDATE; Have just read a fascinating article in the current NPlus by Gabriel Winant - the Professional-Managerial Chasm which contains this superb quote from EP Thompson

Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion—not this and that interest, but the friction of interests—the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time—that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.

Is the notion of a professional-managerial class (PMC) a useful one?

George Kerevan I know as a leftist Scottish economist and nationalist politician in whose tribute to Tom Nairn on the excellent Conter site - Tom Nairn – globalisation and the new middle class - I found this intriguing passage

“The last few decades saw the incorporation of China into the global market and the final victory of commodity production as a world system. But the failure to replace capitalism historically has resulted in a massive excess of surplus value that cannot find investment outlets. One result is the emergence of a super layer of unessential functionaries, pseudo managers, financial service employees, academics and pampered cultural workers, otherwise known as the New Petty Bourgeois or the New Professional Middle Class.

This parasitical layer is funded by the excess surplus value the global capitalist system cannot use productively, hence its massive growth in numbers in the West. At one end (eg computer programmers and IT engineers) it clearly merges into the proletariat. And at the upper end (financial executives) it is clearly bourgeois. But in the mass, this group has all the unstable characteristics of any middle social layer: individualistic, narcissistic and devious.

In Scotland the rise of modern nationalism stems from the 1970s and was (crudely) a working class response to regional economic decay and the failure of the Labour Party to do anything about it. As a result, the SNP has become politically hegemonic. But this very hegemony – including the SNP’s total domination of the local state and civil institutions – has now attracted the attention of the New Petty Bourgeois. Effectively, this social layer has colonised the SNP and the Scottish national movement, serving to align independence with neoliberal values and policies – including uncritical support for EU membership, economic policies fixated on supporting foreign capital, and an emphasis on personal identity politics.

My understanding of class is, I grant you, quite rudimentary.

• I know that there are owners (the “ruling class”), workers and managers

• that Marx assumed a state of bitter conflict between owners and workers

• that the German marxist theory of scientific socialism led to fatalism

• Berle and Means set off in the 1930s a profound debate about managers beginning to get the upper hand over owners

• which persuaded “revisionists” such a Anthony Crosland in the UK in 1956 that capitalism had reformed itself

• but that in the late 1970s Milton Friedmann’s espousal of “shareholder value” transformed thinking dramatically about the purpose of the company

• with senior managers often becoming owners

• and the development of services and of “financialisation” altering the very nature of the economy

I had been transfixed in the early 1990s by John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West which argued that figures such as Robert McNamara (of Ford, Vietnam, World Bank infamy) revealed the evil embedded in what we knew as western civilisation. But the book somehow seemed too far-fetched to make the necessary connections in my mind to the real world. But I’ll readily confess that I’ve been floundering in the attempts I’ve been making since 2000 to make sense of the new system of capitalism.

Kerevan’s article persuaded me to google the phrase “professional-managerial class” which unearthed a fascinating if motley crew – Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Chris Hedges, Ralson Saul and Sheldon Wolin. Ehrenreich seems to have been the first to use the phrase – as far back as 1977 which “Dissent” wrote about recently but which hyperlink doesn’t allow me to access https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/on-the-origins-of-the-professional-managerial-class-an-interview-with-barbara-ehrenreich. But it’s the first half of David Graeber’s short 2014 essay Rise of the professional-managerial class which made the most sense to me when I read it yesterday

Job security made it easier for all employees to identify with the company. As a result, both workers and management tended to see financiers and financial interests as outsiders, even interlopers. In the 1970s and 1980s, all this began to change, and the upper echelons essentially shifted their allegiances and realigned with the financial classes. The notorious boom in mergers and acquisitions, and asset-stripping, and the like, so widely remarked on at the time, the abandonment of former guarantees of lifetime employment, the use of stock options to pay executives and increasingly even skilled workers, were all manifestations of this shift of allegiances. But in fact it ran deeper. During this period, financial elites and corporate bureaucrats essentially merged: the two classes began to intermarry; their careers tended to move back and forth between the different sectors; they came to speak the same language, share the same tastes, and see the world in identical terms. This gradually had profound cultural effects, at first in North Atlantic countries, and then among wealthy countries everywhere. Here I will just single out two.

First, it seems to me that the profound bureaucratization of almost every aspect of social life that has marked the neoliberal era (see The Utopia of Rules 2015) - a bureaucracy in which it is increasingly difficult to even distinguish public and private elements - really traces back to this period.

Second, the political dominance of this new financial-bureaucratic class was cemented by bringing on board large sectors of the middle classes (the professionals and managers again: essentially, by encouraging them to see the world from the perspective of investors).

Graeber writes that "As the middle classes are being pulled upward to identify with the perspectives of the financial sector, the actual operations of financialization are pulling down in such a way as to make it increasingly difficult for many to see themselves as middle class at all.

The neoliberal age was initiated, in the 1980s, by an attack on the political place of labor—the breaking of the miner’s strike in the United Kingdom, the air controllers’ strike in the United States, the rail strike in Japan—followed by an eventual purging of any working-class influence over any mainstream political party. This was accompanied by an idea that mass home ownership, access to consumer credit, and the like, would allow the bulk of the population to identify themselves no longer as working class but as middle class. But there is, I think, a catch here. “Middle classness” is not really an economic category at all; it was always more social and political. What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit”.

To be continued

Swallowed by the Internet

These last few days, I’ve had the feeling of being completely inundated by the freebies and goodies available on the internet. My interests – as readers know – are rather weird things such as the process of change; the machinery of government; the strange fixation anglo-saxons have developed over the past 40 years or so for “reforming” it; and the mental maps we use to make sense of all these things. 

At the weekend, I cam across a couple of items which took me back some 5 years to the 

point at which I realised I had become totally confused by all the talk about “systems 

thinking” and “complexity” and developed one of my famous tables to encourage me to get some clarification. 
Here I am some 5 years later still confused – so that clearly didn’t work. 

But a couple of items looked promising – first Systems thinking for social change by David Stroh (2015) 

which offered 2 pluses. 

• It’s a lot clearer than the books I listed in 2018 and 

• it’s in the field of social change which is one which has long fascinated me. 

Sure it’s a bit repetitive – if not formulistic in that American way – but its clarity and optimism 

encourage forgiveness. There’s an interview with him here. 
His approach has been much influenced by the work of Donella Meadows and, if you read 

just one thing about systems theory, I strongly urge you to read her short paper on Leverage Points which just might take you to her “Thinking in Systems – a primer”; Donella Meadows (2008) 

That then led me to a little 2017 publication from the OECD – "Complexity and Policymaking” and another intriguing pamphlet Building Better Systems; Charles Leadbetter (2020) which is certainly formulaistic as indicated by this excerpt

One simple way to sum this up as a rule of thumb is to remember that 3 x 4 = 12.

• System innovation involves work across three levels, the macro, meso and micro;

• Change is unlocked using the four keys: purpose, power resources and relationships;

system innovation involves people playing 12 roles

But that led me to a highly readable book which has just been published in open edition Wicked Problems in Public Policy by Brian Head (2022) and "Complexity and the Art of Public Policy – solving society's problems from the bottom up" David Colander and Roland Kupers (2014)

As if that wasn't enough, I was then sucked in by Martin Stanley's brilliant website named simply UK Civil Servant by a QUITE BRILLIANT summary of the various recent disasters which have struck the UK. Surfing brought me material I only vaguely knew about.

Radical Visions of Future Government (NESTA 2019) Some zany ideas 170pp

Windrush Lessons Learned (2020) an independent report ordered by the Home Sec of the time. It’s 280 pages long!

Civil Service-Ministerial Relations (Bennett Institute 2022)

Reimagining the State – an essay (Reform 2022) 15pp

Reimagining whitehall (Reform 2022) 20pp

By that stage, I just wanted to shoud out "Stop the World, I want to get off!

Confessions of a reformed managerialist

I have to confess to an enthusiastic managerialist youth, most evident in the paean to corporate management in my article What Sort of Overgovernment? in the 1975 Red Paper on Scotland (when I was 32) edited by the even more youthful Gordon Brown. The "management of change" literature which flooded the market in the 1990s was even the subject of a chapter in my In Transit – notes on good governance in 1999 but the experience of New Labour's Performance targeting began to raise doubts in my mind - crystallised by "The Audit Explosion" pamphlet which had been published a few years earlier

Most of us are aware of the new managerial layer which blocks us all – in one way or another. It’s become the butt of comedy and is our everyday experience whether as consumers being frustrated by call-centres; as office-workers angered by managerial pretensions and bullshit or as doctors, nurses, teachers and academics reporting to new managerial levels who complete the forms to keep the audit machine ticking over. 

But I want to understand how on earth we’ve allowed this to happen… to explore, in my own case, how I become first enthused, disappointed and, ultimately, disillusioned. After all, I had been exposed in the early 1970s both to the anarchical element of Ivan Illich’s philosophy and to the practicalities of community action. How on earth could I fall prey to the seductions of managerialism?

And what do I mean by the term, anyway? What exactly is this "managerialism"

Stewart Clegg is one of the most experienced writers on management and wrote a decade ago a marvellous little article called "Managerialism – born in the USA" which begins with the words of the Bruce Springsteen song. It's actually a review of a couple of important books on the subject and starts with their attempts to define managerialism. According to one, it is

what occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systematically in an organization and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emoluments)—and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group’s education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organization, (2009: 28).

By contrast, Thomas Klikauer emphasizes ideology:

Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systematically in organizations and society while depriving owners, employees, (organizational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies …

Basically therefore it's

• a claim to special knowledge (similar to that made in medieval times by priests!)

• a successful attempt to muscle ahead in the status stakes

Those of you interested in pursuining these issues further should look at this list 

I should emphasise that these are not management textbooks – or the pop-management 

stuff you buy in airports. They are rather critical reflections on this body of thinking. 

Key
Articles

The Managerialist Credo; Glover, McGowan and Tracey (2021) A quite excellent overview of the topic

The Political Economy of Managerialism; Eagelton_Pearce and Kanfo (2020) which explores why pol econ seems to have ignored this issue

Managerialism – an ideology and its evolution; Christine Doran (2016) A very clear and useful overview of the literature

Managerialism and the continuing project of state reform Janet Newman and John Clarke (2016) A rather more academic treatment of aspects of public sector reform

NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment; Thomas Diefenbach (2000) Focused on the issues raised by the market-based new public management.

Books

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology by Willard Enteman (1993) rather pedantic treatment by a US academic focusing more on socialism, capitalism and democracy than on managerialism

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003)

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2004) I didn’t find this book all that interesting when I first skimmed it quite a few years ago – but that probably says more about my impatience with a lot of sociologists

The Making of Modern Management – British management in historical perspective Wilson and Thomson (2006) Very thorough and u8seful treatment by 2 British economic historians

The Age of Heretics – a history of the radical thinkers who reinvented corporate management Art Kleiner (2008) a US journalist examines the past half century for key moments in a racy read.

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This google excerpt is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences ; Chris Mowles (2011) A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender (2011) Locke is an American Prof who has been very critical of managerialism

Managerialism – a critique of an ideology Thomas Klikauer (2013) written by a German who started as an engineer and trade unionist and now teaches Australian MBA students, this is a superb and comprehensive attack on the pretensions of managerialism.

The Silo Effect – the peril of expertise Gillian Tett (2015) Tett is a financial journalist and anthropologist and this is a very practical attack on groupthink

Strategic management and organisational dynamics Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles (2016) a very thorough and critical assessment which contrasts “realist” and “postmodern” approaches and suggests a better, more reflective way

The Triumph of Managerialism? New Technologies of Government and their implications for value edited by Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea (2018) Have only google excerpts

Anarchism, organisation and management Martin Parker (2020) This is an update to his 2004 book – he’s also published an interesting Dictionary of Alternative Organisations