Читать книгу Social Class in Europe - Étienne Penissat - Страница 15

Assigning Europeans to a social class on the basis of their occupation is nevertheless still a risky business. It is debatable whether occupations can be equated – a French and a Hungarian nursing assistant, for example – when their characteristics (qualifications, position in the hierarchy, tasks undertaken) may vary from one country to another. In view of this, we use a classification of socioeconomic groups in which occupations may be classified in slightly different ways in different countries: depending on the country, nurses may be classed among intellectual and scientific professions, or with associate professionals – but the social hierarchies derived from these categories are similar across the different European countries.³² The second problem is that European data on the most recent job held by unemployed people or by pensioners are usually lacking, with the result that our argument is necessarily based on people in work.³³ This restriction of the analysis to people in work under-represents the groups that are economically and socially most vulnerable,³⁴ but it offers an overarching frame of reference for social inequality that opens new avenues for research, particularly for observing the way in which class configurations are constructed in relation to the division of labour in Europe.

Moreover, thanks to two new sources of empirical data, it is now possible to make a statistical study of inequality in terms of class. First, the fact that European studies of employment and standard of living based on large samples have become stably established over the last ten years means that individuals’ occupational status can be correlated with a whole range of indicators without losing the statistical representativeness of the results. Second, the standardised socio-economic classification for Europe, known as the European Socio-economic Groups (ESEG), devised in 2014 and adopted by Eurostat in 2016, has the virtue that it can be used in studies throughout Europe.³⁵

This classification divides people who are in work into seven socio-economic groups and thirty subgroups. We use these as a basis for separating the European social space into three classes: the working class, the middle class and the dominant class. Besides being useful pedagogically, this tripartite division of the European social space is built by weaving together a conceptual approach to social class with the results of the various surveys on which we drew. The method by which these classes were identified (described in Appendix 2) is based on observation of the income, qualifications, standard of living and conditions of employment and work of the thirty socio-economic subgroups. The working class incorporates unskilled white-collar workers and manual workers (cleaners, farm labourers, those employed in the retail and service industries, etc.), skilled workers (those employed in craft; in the food and drink industry; in construction, metallurgy and electronics; and drivers), nursing assistants, childcare workers, home-care assistants, craftsmen and farmers. Those identified as members of the middle class include shopkeepers; skilled white-collar workers (office workers, police officers, receptionists, and customer service clerks, etc.); associate professionals such as IT engineers and technicians health associate professionals (for example, nurses); finance, sales and administration associate professionals (accountants, etc.), teachers, etc.; and self-employed hotel and restaurant owners or managers. The dominant class incorporates most of the intellectual and scientific professions (doctors and healthcare specialists; managers in administration, finance and business; engineers and specialists in science, engineering and information technology; lawyers and judges; journalists; artists; etc.), senior managers and CEOs.

In the French edition of the book, we use the plural to highlight the internal diversity of these three major social classes. Here, we chose the singular following the usual term in English. We take up the expression ‘working class’, which refers to a broad social group including blue-collar workers, unskilled employees and small-scale self-employed. In the same way, we also use the expression ‘middle class’ that includes the petty bourgeoisie and the lower middle class. To identify the top of the European social space, we choose the term ‘dominant class’, which encompasses all workers who have the power to impose rules in professional, social and even political life.³⁶

Combining the use of data from large-scale European statistical surveys with a division of the space into three social classes makes it possible to sketch an initial response to questions that are never posed in debates on Europe: how are inequalities of class manifested in terms of physical strenuousness of work, unemployment and precarity, access to new technology, choice of place of residence, housing conditions, cultural practices and access to health? This set of factors can be used to piece together the jigsaw of classes in Europe, and to understand the political movements and splits that run through the continent.