Suchergebnisse

A discussion of the "Artistotelian fourth option," which is used to explain US sociopolitics in the 1980s. Traditional Aristotelian thought posited that the middle class acts as a social balancer between workers & capitalist elite, &/or aligns with the poor & working class. The Marxist/Engelian response to this premise would be that the middle class (& shortly thereafter, property) would disappear. However, there exists a fourth alternative not popularly debated, ie, that class division becomes middle & upper classes vs working-class poor, with ensuing conflict between the middle & the working class. Discussed are the characteristics of the various classes, & the economic & social differences between the worker-capitalist relationship from that of the middle element-capitalist relationship. It is argued that this fourth option assessment is unpleasant to envision & therefore has not been properly considered. 29 References. C. Grindle

If progress is to be mode towards the more widespread development of class consciousness, socialist theory and practice needs to take account of class aspirations expressed through new social movements. In opposition to post Marxist' perspectives, Wilde argues for the relevance of class analysis to an understanding of the emancipatory potential of the new social movements.

The relationship between gender and professionalisation is a neglected one, and female professional projects have been overlooked in the sociology of professions. The generic notion of profession is also a gendered notion as it takes what are in fact the successful professional projects of class-privileged male actors at a particular point in history and in particular societies to be the paradigmatic case of profession. Instead, it is necessary to speak of `professional projects', to gender the agents of these projects, and to locate these within the structural and historical parameters of patriarchal-capitalism. Professional projects are projects of occupational closure, and a model of occupational closure strategies is needed which captures both the variety of strategies that characterise these projects and the gendered dimensions of these strategies. Such a model is set out and distinguishes between exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual strategies of closure. This model is substantiated with material drawn from the emerging medical division of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.