The Politics of the Service Class. The homology of positions and position-takings

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.