Once More Unto the Breach: In Defence of Class Analysis Yet Again

Abstract

I am grateful to Blackburn and Prandy for their responses to the book Constructing Classes (Rose and O'Reilly 1997) and the paper ’Changing Employment Relations...?’ The former reported on progress made by mid-1997 in producing a new official social classification schema for the U.K. As such it offered only an interim version of the proposed new schema. The WES paper, using this interim schema, was intended only as a modest contribution to the debate on labour market ‘flexibility’ and its supposed effects. As is made clear in the conclusions to the paper, we do not regard the data presented there as providing anything other than prima facie evidence that, notwithstanding recent labour market changes, classes can still be distinguished using employment relations criteria. I readily concede that neither the individual level survey data used in the paper nor its very simple analyses could possibly provide conclusive evidence.