Chapters 1 and 2 dealt with some general issues of stratification: how people get occupational positions, and from them, the financial and material rewards that make up the distribution of wealth. The question then arises, Who gets what out of this process? The technical–functional theory by which the prominence of education has been explained offers a general perspective on this process of occupational stratification: People obtain positions by competing on a market for skills, and they are paid in proportion to the marginal return upon the products of their labor. Those whose labor skills are relatively most productive of highly desired goods and services receive the greatest returns. Yet the evidence amassed in the previous chapters against the meritocratic interpretation of education in careers also casts strong doubts upon the more general formulation.
This same evidence suggests an alternative explanation. People are actively concerned with the process of gaining and controlling occupational power and income, not merely (or even primarily) with using skills to maximize production. This is not to say that no one is involved in productive work, but as we have seen, it is difficult to assess merit in most organizations, especially at white-collar levels, and the social organization of workers operates fairly deliberately to prevent accurate assessment. The workers with the greatest technical skills are not the best paid, but they are found mainly in the lower-middle levels of organizations (and side branches of the middle levels); the most important routes to power and income are through the realms of organizational politics and administration.
That is to say, there is not only productive labor, but there is also political labor. By the latter, I mean primarily efforts within the maneuverings of organizational politics. Productive labor is responsible for the material production of wealth, but political labor sets the conditions under which the wealth is appropriated. To the extent that one is paid for one’s productive contribution, this does not happen automatically but because political labor has shaped the organizational structure and the labor market to make this possible. More generally, just how occupational incomes are distributed depends upon the political labor surrounding the work process.
Political labor is above all a matter of forming social alliances within and sometimes across organizations, and of influencing others’ views of the realities of work. Both processes go on together, and via the same means: Social networks are formed by the process of communications, and the constructing of social realities is also a matter of communications. Both are crucially determined by cultural resources. The outcomes of organizational politics are the shaping of incomes, jobs, and the structures of organizations themselves.
This is done in three ways: First, as we have seen, there is the control of gatekeeping—the entry requirements into an occupation. Second, there is the structure of the career channel within the organization—whether it is a dead end, promotes in a self-contained branch, allows for transfers and rotations, allows potential promotion to the top level of authority, and so on. Third and most generally, there is the shaping of the “position” itself—what kinds of work are grouped together or separated as distinct duties of an individual worker; how many people are deemed necessary at such positions; what degrees of tenure and what method of pay is adopted (piece rate, hourly, monthly, commission, etc.).
In all of these, the political process may involve several groups within the organization. Most obviously, there is the interest of the managers themselves in formulating entry requirements, career sequences, and positions. They do this not only with an eye for costs and productive efficiency, but also for the utility of various arrangements in controlling their subordinates.1 Managers are concerned with shaping their own positions and careers as well. Since they are involved in a political process within the organization, managers must do this shaping in alliance with others, and often in opposition to rival individuals and groups. Hence much of position shaping may be complex and reactive, with results unlike what any particular party to the struggle intended.
This is all the more true when we consider that not only managers with line authority, but also other participants in organizations engage in shaping positions. Professional and technical specialists, even without explicit decision-making authority, have considerable influence by their ability to “expertly” define what technical problems exist or will be encountered, and hence what numbers of specialists with what qualifications are needed. Officially powerless manual workers demonstrate an even more potent weapon for position shaping: Their informal organization of the work group controls how hard they will work and hence their rate of output, thus indirectly determining how many workers of a given sort are “needed.” Formally, unions and professional associations can demand certain entrance requirements and job descriptions, and sometimes even career channels; informally, workers can control selection by ostracizing or subverting members of particular groups, either influencing entry requirements or creating further subspecialties within the organization for undesirable workers.2 And all these processes interact, so that the shape of an organization and the distribution of income it generates is the result of a complex of struggles.
This process is hidden if we view organizations and occupations through the lenses of the ideological categories used in struggles within them. Organizations are commonly defined as places where work is done; their structure is regarded as a way of dividing the labor, and occupations are considered to be work roles. But the work that is done and the way it is divided up are not the neutral bases of positions and structures; rather they are to be appropriated or shunted off to others as power resources permit.
Consider the blue collar–white collar distinction. This actually means the distinction between wage and salary modes of payment (as technicians and even “professionals” on the “white-collar” side may do most of their work with their hands), which is to say, a difference in degrees of job tenure. Wage positions are explicitly more short-term, salary positions more long-term, and they thus differ in lesser or greater protection from the vicissitudes of the employment market. The distinction also reflects different career channels; usually each is a separate employment sector with entry jobs at the bottom and no provision for promotion from one sector to the other. Given the existence of this organizational divide, subsequent maneuverings for advantage tend to reinforce the structure, as when long-term blue-collar employees press for seniority rules governing promotion into protected jobs just below this line. The fact that certain organizations (such as U.S. police departments) promote from the bottom up shows that an alternative structure is possible (Skolnick, 1966) and that the particular kinds of power arrangements produce the prevailing dichotomous pattern. Similarly, the separate hierarchies for clerical workers in most modern organizations are based on little more than sexual segregation, usually with a separate pay scale; under different power conditions these could be organized into quite a different set of career channels and work responsibilities. In fact, before the introduction of female secretaries in the late nineteenth century, secretarial positions were not differentiated from other administrative jobs and had the promotional possibilities of the aide-de-camp or the apprentice.
The distinction between productive and political labor, then, is crucial for understanding how organizations are shaped and, as a result, how people are stratified. The distinction separates the two major social classes: the working class engaged in productive labor, and the dominant class engaged in political labor. Both classes expend energy, but it is the subordinate class that produces the wealth, whereas the dominant class determines its distribution.
Yet the division between productive labor and political labor is an abstract one; in empirical reality, the same person may do both. Consider the range of modern occupations. Some are almost completely devoted to material work, producing food, housing, clothes, and other essentials. Others are devoted entirely to activities of domination, exercising or threatening the use of force (the military, the police). Some concentrate on acting to gain and defend political offices and sinecures (which may exist widely in nongovernment organizations as well as in government ones) and others on producing cultural resources (as in the educational and communications industries). Other occupations are in an intermediate zone, for material production involves not only the physical labor of production, but also the labor of transportation and distribution, and the lighter talking-and-paperwork labor of planning both production and distribution. The people who carry out these activities, though—the white-collar sector in organizations—are not engaged in these activities alone. We must not be misled by our everyday definitions of what a job is, for the sole legitimate definitions are in terms of productive labor. In fact, many white-collar activities involve the political labor of attempting to control others and defending one’s own autonomy from their control. Probably the greater part of clerical activities are devoted to communications of this sort—conferences, paperwork, reports, records—that bear little relation to material production but are part of the incessant political maneuvering, under the guise of planning and distributing (but also often called “personnel administration”), to take the initiative in the realm of domination, or simply to fill time with the appearance of working.
Thus we have an analytical distinction between the two kinds of activities, productive and political. Any job may be apportioned between the two in varying degrees. The “working-class” aspect (productive labor) and the “dominant-class” aspect (political labor) may both appear in the same job. It is the relative mixture of class conditions within each individual’s daily life that produces various forms of class cultures and attitudes toward authority; as the evidence indicates (Collins, 1975: 61–87), individuals vary across the range of attitudinal mixtures according to their particular cases. Hence the actual population does not necessarily fall into clear-cut class-wide allegiances but rather into much smaller local interest groups. It should be borne in mind that even positions toward the core of the materially productive sector have their political elements. Important sectors of blue-collar workers (especially the upper working class) have cultural and organizational resources that they use to influence their situations, both formally through unions and even more importantly, informally in the social relations of the workplace. As a result, they can introduce some nonwork into their job time by collectively controlling the work pace; they can monopolize to some degree the easier or more remunerative jobs; or they can increase their security of tenure.
The overall structure of the modern occupational world may be conceived as a range of variations in the possession of “political” resources for controlling the conditions of work and appropriating the fruits of production; hence it can be seen as a range of mixtures of productive work with political work. At one end are relatively unprotected laborers, subject directly to the market for productive labor; at the other are pure political laborers engaged in the activities of the ideological, financial, and governmental superstructure. The upper ranges of the working class and the middle ranges of the administrative class contain mixed activities, the former using the resources of organizational politics to reduce the strains and reap the benefits of productive work, the latter building an elaborate screen of administrative politics around a productive core of planning and distributive activities.
Social classes may be distinguished by the amount of property they possess, but the most important form of such “property” is not limited to the traditional notion of material and financial possessions. Rather it is how “positions” are shaped that constitutes the most immediate form of property in the labor market, and it is by the shaping of such positions that income is distributed. The term position is only a metaphor (although it is widely accepted and taken for granted) for the seemingly object-like immutability of a collection of behavioral patterns that are reserved for particular individuals under particular conditions of tenure. Indeed, material and financial property is a similar metaphor, for the property relation is a behavioral one, a particular degree of tenure of action toward certain objects and persons, not a physical relationship of owner to thing. It is property in positions that is crucial in determining most of class organization and class struggle in everyday life. For material and financial property (if we except home ownership) is concentrated within a quite small group, but property in positions shapes class relations throughout the population and has a wide range of variations. The actual details of economic conflict are carried out on this level.
Technological change, within this context, has a peculiar result. It does not raise the skill requirements of most jobs very much; the great majority of all jobs can be learned through practice by almost any literate person. The number of esoteric specialties “requiring” unusually extensive training or skill is relatively small. The “system” does not “need” or “demand” a certain kind of performance; it “needs” what it gets, because “it” is nothing more than a slipshod way of talking about the way things happen to be at the time. How hard people work, and with what dexterity and cleverness, depends on how much other people can require them to do and on how much they can dominate other people. What the advance of technology does do, rather, is increase the total wealth produced and lead to intense struggles over the shaping of property in occupational positions, not because of the necessities of production but because of the struggles over the distribution of the increased wealth.
We live in an era in which our machinery and our organizational techniques are very powerful, capable of supporting everyone at a comfortable standard of living with relatively little physical effort.3 This prospect has been contemplated for quite some time, sometimes with hope, sometimes with anger against the forces impeding it, sometimes with fear of ensuing boredom and purposelessness. But in fact, the shift toward a predominantly leisure society does not seem to be happening, or at least it is happening so slowly that it seems like little has changed. Most people still work a fairly long work week—at the highest job levels, very long work weeks (over 55 hours in a substantial portion of this group); a large proportion of married women work; and many people hold several jobs (Wilensky, 1961).
Why? The paradox is resolved if we recall that the most prominent form of leisure in our society is the most undesirable: unemployment. People work because that is the main way that wealth is distributed. The welfare system for the support of nonworkers, despite the outcries of its opponents, redistributes very little (Pilcher, 1976). The reason some people are wealthy is that they or their families have jobs that control the biggest organizations with the most money. Others have at least a middling foothold in the system of organizational property that supports us. People without jobs (or with a succession of marginal positions) are without power over the main property resources of our society (and usually without political influence as well), and that is the reason they are poor.
In relation to our hypothetical high-leisure technocracy, then, the crucial question becomes: Who would control it? The answer is clear: Those few who did work in a mass-leisure society would get most of the wealth. Michels’s (1949) discovery that the persons who control the administrative machinery of a political party get most of the benefits from it is paralleled here on a larger scale. It is for this reason that we have not moved toward a high-leisure society, despite our technological capacity for doing so. We have elaborated a largely superfluous structure of more or less easy jobs, full of administrative make-work and featherbedding because modern technology allows it and because of political pressures from the populace wanting work. Thus we have the enormous structure of government employment (including education), the union sector protected by elaborate work regulations, and the huge work forces of our corporate oligopolies keeping themselves busy seeking new products to justify their jobs. In effect, leisure has been incorporated into the job itself. Advanced technology, far from demanding hard work and long training from everyone, has made occupational demands more and more superficial and arbitrary.
Bensman and Vidich (1971: 5–31) have given one set of reasons why it has been possible to move toward this “sinecure society”: The very productivity of our technology has created the now widely recognized “Keynesian” problem of keeping up consumer demand and thus fending off economic depression. The massive expansion of government employment is one way in which this has come about. The support given by government to the tertiary sector by dispensing an increasing number of licenses for franchises and professional monopolies is another. Private sinecures also exist within the biggest manufacturing corporations, with their extensive educational requirements and staff divisions and their leisure perquisites in the forms of sales conventions and motivational and retraining programs. Much of the control apparatus of big organizations, even if it is established in the name of productive efficiency, increases the nonproductive sinecure component. Elaborate planning and cost-accounting divisions add their own expense to the organization and transfer wealth to their own members; so do agencies for compliance with insurance regulations and law enforcement. In all these areas, the struggle for control, both from above and from below, elaborates the political sector of organizations at every step. The more claims made upon insurance companies, the more union grievances or minority discrimination complaints, the larger becomes the institutionalized sector of positions that deal with such matters, adding yet more members of the organization who struggle to enhance their own positional property. The sinecure sector feeds upon struggles over control of itself.
One might ask why the rationality of the economic market does not drive out such wastefulness, forcing the organizations that engage in it out of business. In major sectors of the economy, this process does not hold. Government organizations are not subject to competition and are seldom subject to effective political pressures for economizing. And the large corporations are the very organizations that can best afford such internal redistribution, for they hold oligopolistic controls over their markets, often supported by favorable governmental policies; external competition does nothing to make them reduce their internal costs, while the scope of bureaucratic complexity and the separation of stock ownership from direct control make them accountable to no one but themselves. Ironically, it is these highly protected organizations that technocratic apologists like Galbraith (1967) think are prosperous because of their technological advance, whereas the smaller organizations that are not protected from the market are consigned to insecurity and relative poverty because of their technological backwardness. This is only repeating the gloating of the sinecure sector in the terms of its own ideology.
To speak of the prevalence of sinecures and of essentially “luxury” or “waste” production in a time of economic downturn may seem incongruous, but only from the point of view of a technocratic ideology. Economic crises due to inflation and deficiencies in aggregate demand may, in fact, be the very results of the inequality of a sinecure system. The coexistence of material wealth and leisure for some, with economic hardships for others, and perhaps anxiety for all, is hardly unprecedented in economic history. The high productivity of the technology does not disappear in an economic crisis, for crises are ultimately in the sphere of distribution, not of production.
The “political” realm, then, is found within all organizations and occupational networks, not merely in the formal government structure, and the major part of the redistribution of wealth, under the pressure of intermittent overproduction crises, has taken the form of reshaping property in occupational positions. This has come about both by expanding the numbers of people allowed into the political superstructure, especially the governmental and culture-producing sides of it, and by increasing the amount of nonwork within the occupational structure generally.
Weber would no doubt agree with this line of analysis. Although he had no opportunity to observe the power relations of advanced industrial society, his historical work makes abundant use of the concept of prebends—positions distinguished for the purpose of monopolizing their incomes. With the greater honesty of societies belting an industrial-style technocratic ideology, these were simply referred to as “livings,” and often were openly bought and sold, combined or subdivided, purely for fiscal considerations and under the shifting conditions of power. In the twentieth century, the market for such positions had disguised its nature, without undergoing a fundamental change; instead of direct purchase of office, one invests in educational credentials, which in turn (subject to the “monetary” vicissitudes of this cultural currency system) are used to purchase a job protected from various aspects of labor market competition.
The term sinecure itself had a respectable tone in medieval society, for it indicated the ideal “living” one could purchase from the pope or king.4 Today the term becomes disreputable, for it offends the notions of meritocracy by which the modern system of monopolization is legitimated. But the importance of this structural arrangement is, if anything, even more important in a wealthy industrial society where leisure has migrated into the interior of virtually all jobs to a greater or lesser degree; it is most obvious in the slow pace of government bureaucracies, less so in the competitive grind of some schools and in the political infighting over monopolistic privileges themselves. But this kind of effort—the work put into creating or defending conditions to avoid work—is analytically distinct from the work that leads to material results. The distinction of preindustrial societies is still in evidence, between the aristocracy, fighting or politicking to maintain or enhance their position, and the commoners, whose materially productive work the aristocrats are struggling to dominate. In industrial America, aristocrats and commoners still exist, sometimes within the compass of a single job.5
The principal questions for us then, are as follows: What determines how people in organizations can shape positional property? What are the resources of organizational politics, and above all, on what basis can we predict how such resources will be distributed both in space and in time? The major weapon of any form of politics is the capacity to form alliances and to impress others with a given definition of reality. These are the effects of culture, and these effects form their clearest pattern when culture is distributed by its own structure of exchange. We have, then, two important market realms instead of one: the market for economic goods and services, and the market for culture. Economic and cultural markets are not separated as base and superstructure; they are distinguished only as ends and means, and it is the means—the resources of group organization and struggle—that create the lineups in struggles for advancement. Cultural weapons penetrate the economic sphere at an intimate level, shaping the behavior patterns and barriers that constitute “positions.” The appropriation of incomes is determined by where these barriers are formed. Stratification, on its most material level, is shaped by the cultural market, and it is to this that we now turn.
Culture is both a good in itself and a social resource. In everyday life, it takes the form of the style of physical appearances and the expressions of thoughts and emotions through communications and especially in conversation. Culture thus serves to dramatize one’s self-image, to set moods, to mentally re-create past realities and to create new ones. Whatever subject holds the floor in a conversation, however fleetingly, has a corresponding degree of shared mental reality. As such, it provides the temporarily dominant definition of the social situation and hence of operative social structure.
Conversation may be conceived as cultural exchange, the negotiation of partners to talk with and topics to be given sway. The empirical details of social relationships of different sorts come down to the different sorts of conversation that people carry out with one another: purely external relationships confined to minimal exchanges upon practical matters, or more significant ties based upon talk containing larger proportions of discussion, ideological debate, entertainment, gossip, or personal topics (Collins, 1975: 114–152). The consequences of everyday cultural exchange, then, are the formation and reproduction of social groups and formal organizations. In different terminology, cultural resources are the basis of associational communities, which Weber called status groups. They might also be called consciousness communities, since their distinguishing feature is the expression of utterances in shared symbols with reality-defining effects for the persons involved.
One advantage of calling them consciousness communities rather than status groups is to remind us that such communities take a variety of forms. They range in duration from brief, temporary relations to continually repeated ones, and they range in intensity from weak to very strong interpersonal commitments. The size of the community can vary from small local groups up through larger communities in which most individuals have direct contacts with only a relatively few others, but who have the bond of being potential friends because of a common culture. The usual conception of a status group, or more loosely, of a social class, actually fits this latter case: This is not to say that everyone in the group knows everyone else, but their commonalities make their association easy when they do encounter one another. Ethnic groups are generally status groups of this kind. And finally, consciousness communities may vary in degree of self-consciousness, from associations carried on without explicit self-definition, through the self-consciousness that comes with the giving of group names, to the highly formalized group identity when a group institutionalizes itself with periodic meetings, regulations, and legal charters.
Cultural exchanges are the empirical means by which all organized forms of stratification are enacted and by which the class struggle over work and material goods is carried out. Culture produces both horizontal and vertical relations. Persons with common cultural resources tend to form egalitarian ties as friends or co-members of a group. Such groups, as we have seen, are major actors within the struggles to control organizations, whether over work pace, gatekeeping criteria, the definition of positional duties and perquisites, assessment of merit, or personal advancement. Such struggles need have little of a clandestine or conspiratorial tone to them; informal groups are manifested simply in casual conversation, usually without great self-consciousness or deliberation, but nevertheless can add up to very strong consensus about common courses of action. Formal and self-conscious versions of associational communities are also important in maneuverings for material advantage, as in the case of occupations that have organized themselves into professional or commercial associations or trade unions.
The ability of occupational categories to form consciousness communities of one degree or another is determined by how similar their cultural resources are, whereas the scope and power of the community thus formed depend in part upon the nature of their resources for defining reality, as well as upon the other resources that these mediate. Cultural resources enter into the process of stratification in another way as well. Hierarchical relations among nonequals are also immediately enacted in face-to-face conversational exchanges. Although background resources ultimately tend to determine domination and subordination in such encounters, they do so mainly by being brought to bear through the symbolic interchange of the moment. Cultural expressions are a way of defining reality and may define both a horizontal bond among equals and a vertical relation among unequals. Usually this is done by the dominant person controlling the conversational interaction, picking the topic and influencing what is said about it, affecting the underlying emotional tone, and thus controlling the cognitive and moral definitions of reality. Among the resources for doing this successfully are access to channels of information and other social networks and the vocabulary and rhetorical style to impress others with allegedly superior (and possibly esoteric) knowledge and power. Thus cultural resources not only form the groups that struggle over control of social organization, but also tend to determine the hierarchic relations among these groups.
Indigenous and Formal Production of Culture
Culture is produced in two different ways: in the experiences of everyday interaction themselves or by specialized culture-producing organizations. Indigenous cultural production goes on all the time in the worlds of work, home, and leisure alike. Every experience is potential conversational material, and every conversation generates further capacities to speak in certain styles and to peddle one’s acquired information, entertainment value, and emotions in further exchanges. Much of these conversational resources, though, tend to be specific to particular individuals and situations. Information about one’s own experiences or about the practical matters at hand, gossip about one’s acquaintances, standing jokes and styles of joking—these are resources for local barter markets for culture. Such resources are not readily transferable to other situations; if cultural resources mediate group ties, indigenously produced resources produce local ties among limited numbers of specific individuals. If cultural resources construct shared social realities, the realities these create are inextensive and fragmentary.
Moreover, such resources may cumulate, but they tend to do so in a circular flow. Personal experiences and conversational contacts generate conversational resources, which can be used to keep up existing social relations and negotiate new ones of the same type. It is possible that individuals may move on the borderlines of their usual contacts and thus encounter new situations, thereby generating new conversational resources, which could be used to build different social ties. Such cultural and associational movement, though, is likely to be slow and sporadic when based only on purely indigenous cultural resources derived from the immediate situation. Thus indigenously produced culture tends conservatively to reproduce itself and a given pattern of social relations. Such cultures as a whole tend to change only when some exogenous processes, such as political or economic catastrophes, radically change the conditions of life. But even here, the circular flow of culture and group structure tends to stabilize any new developments. This kind of culture is not a force for change, or strictly speaking, an independent causal factor in its own right.
Culture may also be produced by specialized organizations. Churches and other religious associations were historically among the first such organizations in which full-time specialists devoted themselves to symbolic expressions. Professional entertainers constitute another type of specialized culture producer, as do, especially importantly for our purposes, schools. Such specialized agencies of cultural production have several effects. By comparison with indigenous cultural production, they can much more readily generate new forms of culture—partly because the internal exigencies and struggles over control within culture-producing organizations tend to shape their products in new directions, and partly because their members’ full-time and self-conscious absorption with culture gives them much more refined skills. And cultural innovation, especially vis-à-vis any particular indigenous culture, is likely to be especially strong the more that specialized culture-producing organizations constitute a larger network or market among themselves. Such formal culture-producing agencies, then, become exogenous sources of change within the cultural sphere, and by extension, in the realm of group structures.
Thus developments of religious culture have been crucial in forming new political and economic organizations at various times in world history. In Weber’s (1961) fully developed historical theory, the culture of the universalistic world religions transcended the family and tribal–ethnic base of organization, made possible the rise of the bureaucratic state, and eventually led to the “rationalized” capitalist economy. Similarly, it can be argued that the mass news media of the industrial era generated a new form of politics based on the ideologically oriented group (Gouldner, 1976) and that the popular music media were a crucial organizational basis for the youth revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Schools have been especially important for forming new group structures, ranging from the creation of the gentry class of traditional China to the formation of specialized occupational enclaves in contemporary America.
Formally produced culture is not only more innovative than indigenous culture, but it also allows the creation of much larger and more self-conscious communities. This type of culture is propagated more widely across different local situations, tends to be made up of more abstract concepts and symbols, and creates more generalized references. Formally produced culture deals less with specific individuals and situations and more with the commonalities across many situations. Its images, even if concrete, tend to symbolize every individual or to symbolize the aggregate of individuals as an organized unit. Formal culture is more widely useful than indigenous culture; it can relatively quickly negotiate ties among individuals who otherwise have little in common to exchange. Thus formal culture has been the basis for impersonal bureaucratic organizations, for generating political loyalties to an overarching state, for mobilizing mass occupational groups and large-scale social movements.
If indigenously produced culture supports local barter markets, formally produced culture operates more nearly as a monetary currency. It is more widely negotiable (i.e., it is a medium of exchange) and can be used on a much wider basis for assessing reputations (i.e., it acts as a store of value). A true currency-like system of cultural “money” only comes into existence with a further transformation, however: when formal culture-producing organizations not only broadcast their cultural products, but also give formal summary announcements of the quantity of cultural goods an individual has acquired from them (i.e., to develop the monetary analogy further, they act as measurable units of account). Thus religious attainments have sometimes been summarized by titles of sainthood and other distinctions, and the culture acquired in schools has been summarized by grades and certificates. Once these formal summaries are available, they may be substituted for the full display of the culture itself. In a further transformation, they may become subject to their own high-level economy, just as the value of organizational incomes can be transformed into stocks, which themselves are bought and sold on a specialized stock market subject to its own market forces. Once this occurs, the purely quantitative relations among these second- or third-order currencies become major determinants of their value and can affect their use in more primitive markets irrespective of their actual underlying content.
In other words, the more formalized the culture-producing organization, the more its culture tends to resemble a currency, and the more the cultural economy becomes subject to specifically monetary effects. The “price” of the social memberships that culture can “buy” may undergo inflation, due to an exogenous increase in monetary “supply”; conversely, price deflation is also conceivable. The conditions and effects of these, and their interdynamics with the material economy, will be considered next.
Determinants of Cultural Currency Production
How much cultural currency is produced is determined by several causes. First, it depends on how much material wealth is siphoned into specialized culture-producing organizations: that is, how much of the material economy is invested in the cultural economy. Thus richer societies in world history have generally been able to afford more churches and monasteries, more professional entertainment, and more schooling. Rich societies have not necessarily done this; the mobilizing and innovating effects of cultural organizations have sometimes been resisted by traditional rulers (as in various periods in the history of China and Russia, for example), and in some situations the populace has preferred to spend its wealth more heavily on direct material consumption. Wealth is a facilitating factor, not a determinative one.
Second, culture-producing organizations have been affected by inventions of special technologies for cultural production and transmission. The invention of writing itself, improved implements and paper, book printing, and the modem media of electronic communications and information storage have all affected the specialized production of culture. These effects, though, have not all been uniformly in the direction of increasing the amount of formal cultural production. Some of them (such as modern television broadcasting), because of their concentrated pattern of ownership, may have tended to keep cultural production within quite narrow limits and even to reduce the overall variety and amount of culture in society as a whole. Such technological changes have been relatively infrequent in world history and hence have operated primarily as background for more dynamic factors within any given historical time.
The major determinant of the amount of formal cultural production, and especially the determinant of relatively short-run variations in it, has been the degree of competition among cultural producers and also among cultural consumers. Both the history of religions and the history of education show the pattern: Religious movements and schools have proliferated where governments were relatively weak and decentralized; they have been kept under stricter limitations where centralized governments were strong (Collins, 1977). This is so even though centralized governments have often adopted a state religion, or, in modern times, a compulsory public school system, as a basis for bureaucratic administration and control of the population. But such governments have usually favored a single religion and repressed its rivals; their educational policies as well have tended to keep the educational system small. In contrast, it has been weak governments, unable to intervene to control the cultural market, that have allowed competitive cultural production to expand on its own.
In preindustrial times, the greatest proliferations of culture production have been in situations where an economically prosperous society was nevertheless politically fragmented or decentralized. Under these conditions, the potential consumers of a specialized culture were free to compete among themselves culturally and were indeed motivated to do so in the absence of an all-determining state that set the forms of stratification.6 Although participation in schooling in such societies was generally confined to the aristocracy, the ideal of the cultivated gentry was most widely emulated in the decentralized rather than in the centralized dynasties of Chinese history, in the weaker rather than in the stronger Islamic states, and by the burgher-aristocrats of the fragmented competing city-states of Renaissance Italy rather than by rulers of the Roman Empire. The decentralization of demand for cultural resources thus tended to bring forth a corresponding supply of cultural producers, although in a variety of forms: private teachers in China, religious madrasas (mosque schools) in Islam, and private, sociable academies in Italy.
These decentralized conditions have had especially strong effects upon cultural production where a politically decentralized but economically mobilized society has been multiethnic. Ethnic groups are cultural groups a fortiori, constituted as identifiably distinct communities precisely because they have come into a situation of contact with other groups while continuing the indigenous cultures of their previous isolated situations. The struggle for economic and political domination in such a multiethnic situation focuses questions of social inclusion and group prestige on the most obvious cultural distinctions. Culture, even if only indigenous (rather than formally produced), thus becomes the object of self-conscious reflection, and ethnic groups become concerned over questions of cultural superiority or inferiority to each other. In this situation, groups are likely to welcome a generalized cultural currency by which to improve or consolidate their position, whether in the form of a new religion or a new educational system. Once such competition gets under way, it is likely to lead to mutual emulation by all parties and to a corresponding expansion of the set of culture-producing organizations.
Thus religious sects and their accompanying schools have proliferated throughout the prosperous periods of the history of India, especially in the decentralizing reaction to the crumbling centralized dynasties that had attempted to impose Buddhism as a single dominant religion (Weber, 1958: 123–133; Thapar, 1966: 136–166). Underlying this religious expansion was the enormous multiethnic diversity of India, channeled into a single system of economic domination and cultural prestige by the caste system. The system was rendered dynamic rather than static because political decentralization allowed castes to attempt to raise their status by emulating the higher culture. This fostered a large market for cultural entrepreneurs, in this case religious and secular teachers of all kinds. Similarly, the specialized culture of classical Greece was quite narrowly confined and informally taught during the earlier period, but it became transformed into a formal culture taught by a large network of schools established during the Hellenistic period when the Greeks had become the administrators of a number of conquest states around the eastern Mediterranean (Marrou, 1964). The multiethnic situation of the Hellenistic empires made the question of Greek identity versus the “barbarians” (who might just as well have been cultivated Syrians or Egyptians, for example) an especially salient one and made formal education an indispensable possession of the higher social classes.7 Finally, it is worth recalling that Europe of the High Middle Ages was also a multiethnic society. Before the rise of the strong national states, the political unity of Europe was largely the business of the papacy, and the higher culture of Christianity, taught in church schools, provided a common cultural currency (and even a common language, Latin). The great proliferation of universities was a result of this situation, as different parts of Europe competed with one another in founding their own universities and drawing students from other ethnic locales.
In each of these multiethnic situations, cultural currencies became widely and increasingly produced and became significant bases for the formation of new group structures. In India, the successive transformation of the occupational castes was the result (Srinivas, 1955: 1–45); in Hellenistic Greece, the gradual development of governmental quasi-bureaucracies (Marrou, 1964: 400–418); in medieval Europe, the proliferation of specialized religious orders of papal and secular bureaucracies and of guilds and corporations organized under religious auspices (Rashdall, 1936; Southern, 1970). In several of these historical cases, an inflationary pattern resulted, and in at least one, an ensuing crisis of the currency system. These topics lead us more generally to consider the effects of cultural currency expansion.
Effects of Cultural Currency Production
A large-scale production of formal culture transforms the whole society. In effect, the populace invests large quantities of the goods derived from the material economy into the cultural economy with the hope of bettering their social position in all spheres. The struggle to control the occupational realm, whether by the direct shaping of positions, as in the modem world, or by building control over the economy through the development of a strong state (as is generally the case in the preindustrial world), can be carried on most effectively by groups that control superior organizational resources. A large and widely dispersed supply of cultural currency makes resources available to many groups in the population for organizing themselves in this struggle, which may then result in the proliferation of monopolized occupational enclaves. We see this tendency especially in late medieval Europe, as the expansion of formal religious currencies was followed by considerable organization building, both by local princes and by monopolizing guilds within an ever-increasing number of occupational specialties. Similarly, the continued expansion of religious sects in India fostered a long-term tendency for castes to split into subcastes, as larger occupational groups split into religiously sanctioned subgroups. We shall see later in this book the way in which the increasing access to formal educational credentials has shaped numerous occupational enclaves in the modern American economy.
But the outcome of such a process of widening educational opportunities may bring little or no change in the order of stratification among groups. If previously dominant groups maintain a head start in the race for cultural resources, they may well end up with just as commanding a position in a culture-based stratification system as in a more primitive economically or politically based one. Moreover, the expansion of the entire system of cultural production, without a commensurate expansion in the number of desirable occupational positions, brings about an inflation in the cultural price of the older positions. For example, expanded numbers of students presented themselves for the civil service examinations in China from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but the number of government positions was kept virtually constant. Hence the cultural price rose—an examination system was elaborated, eventually becoming a series of examinations that might take a scholar 30 years to pass (Franke, 1960). Another period of credential inflation occurred around 1800 in Germany when a mass of applicants for government positions crowded the universities; the pressure resulted in a reform that extended educational requirements to more positions (Brunschwig, 1947; Schnabel, 1959, Vol. 1: 408–457). And Weber (1968: 998–999) noted the inflationary tendency in bureaucratic employment requirements in Europe in his day. In other words, the fact that cultural goods are resources for struggle over positions in the material realm means that there may be limits upon what various groups can buy, and hence overproduction crises are possible within purely cultural markets as well.
To study these sorts of possibilities, we must turn to the interaction between cultural markets and the economy of material production.
1. Increasing investment in cultural goods can bring about an expansion in material production. This can happen where cultural goods are used to build larger social networks of coordination and domination in such a way as to make possible greater economic exchange; thus the investment of cultural goods in building the superstructures of horticultural, agrarian, and the beginnings of industrial societies often tended to help expand the material economy and increase its productiveness. Or, within a modern industrial economy (and within agrarian economies too), a period of expansion of cultural markets may stimulate material production by creating an atmosphere of confidence and growth; it might especially help to overcome a chronic crisis of material overproduction—underconsumption by opening up a new area of material investment (in the material basis of culture production) and by generally loosening stagnant organizational arrangements. This can happen even if the interaction between cultural supply and demand is the “inflationary” equilibrium noted above, in which the payoffs in domination that cultural investors seek do not come about because the relative standing of the investors does not change.
Such stimulating effects on the material economy depend upon there being unused material capacity for expansion. The potential resources and markets must be there; the situation should lack only the organizational interconnections or the wave of psychological confidence necessary to bring them together. Lacking this, an expansion of the cultural economy will have entirely different effects.
2. Increasing investment in cultural goods may bring about an increase in the degree of domination in a society. In one sense, this tended to be true in the long run for all the shifts from hunting and gathering, to primitive horticultural, to advanced horticultural, to agrarian types of societies; all of these, although they probably experienced an initial growth in material production through the organization of religious, or otherwise culturally cemented superstructures, ended up with a typical structure of material distribution that was markedly more unequal than the previous type (Lenski, 1966). Probably each went through an initial period of expanding overall production; then the investment of portions of this in a cultural and military superstructure resulted in greater inequality than before, and eventually the society settled into a pattern of economic stagnation. This was certainly the difficulty experienced by most agrarian societies in breaking through into industrialization; the structure of domination was such that markets were generally limited to luxury goods for the elite, and the mass consumer markets required to make mass production worthwhile had little chance of being established.
The shift to industrial society required that some pressures for redistribution take place in a prior agrarian society, and it is possible that cultural markets had a place in this. (Weber’s thesis about Christianity might be interpreted in this sense.) In the long run, though, it is likely that industrial societies also undergo at least the structural possibility of repeating the earlier patterns: Cultural resources can become structured in such a way that they enforce economic domination and inequality rather than economic expansion, and hence they can contribute to economic stagnation. Industrial societies have not really existed long enough for us to have much evidence on these possibilities. One thing that seems clear is that the level of inequality enforced in industrial societies is lower than that in agrarian societies; but it is also clear that the new level does not recede constantly but reaches a plateau at which it remains fairly stable (Pilcher, 1976). For the United States, that plateau was reached by the time of World War II; the massive expansion of the cultural market since then has had little effect on the overall pattern of inequality. (This also seems to be the case in the histories of other twentieth-century industrial societies.)
Within the context of the material economy of material production, the growth of a cultural economy that settles into a constant level of domination will tend to exacerbate the underlying problem of overproduction—underconsumption. (In an agrarian economy, the similar use of culture for domination will block the growth of any mass market and hence any shift to industrialism; there are important elements of this in the stagnant quasi-agrarian–quasi-industrial economies of Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World today.) Thus we find that expanded cultural economies can result in economic growth or economic stagnation or even crisis. If the cause of the first alternative is the existence of unused material capacities and readily accessible markets, the cause of the second alternative may be the nonexistence of such conditions; or it may be a particular way in which the cultural economy is structured. About this second possibility, we know little as yet.
3. The cultural market might result in some redistribution of material goods. This seems to have been true in the early phase of industrialization and perhaps in some periods in earlier societies as well. This comes about first by the redistribution of goods to the segment of the middle class that is involved in cultural production; a growth in the number of teachers (or priests, monks, etc.) is itself a widening of the number of people employed in the superstructure. The general expansion of the culture-producing industries throughout most of the twentieth century in the United States is thus one element in redistribution of material resources that otherwise would have gone to the previously smaller group of dominants in the political sector. Furthermore, educational credentials have been invested in expanding autonomous professional enclaves, as well as the productively superfluous component of the administrative sector, and have helped shape occupations in such a way as to help leisure migrate into the interior of jobs. The growth of the nonproductive, white-collar sector has been achieved above all through the mechanism of investing cultural resources (educational credentials) in occupational property. Thus an expansion of the cultural market, even though it has not changed the overall proportions of the distribution of wealth, has led to an expansion in the number of people who are dependent upon the “political” sector (the “sinecure sector”), who receive their material goods by way of the structure of domination rather than the structure of production.
Once that revolution was carried out, it has seemingly had no further effects. Yet the number of people employed in the sinecure sector has constantly risen, even during the period when the degree of inequality in distribution has changed little. There are probably two offsetting processes going on simultaneously here: (a) the shift into the sinecure sector has brought about a continuous redistribution; and (b) at the same time, the tendency of the sector of domination as a whole versus the sector of production has been to create greater inequality. The continuous process of technological overproduction and financial centralization has kept the economy in a chronic state of operation below capacity, since it has kept down overall consumer demand. The growth of the sinecure sector has been just enough to offset this, to maintain a rough equilibrium around a constant degree of inequality. Short-run shifts in employment in either sector, wars, and other such phenomena have moved the economy briefly and marginally on either side of this equilibrium, but the long-range pattern is remarkably constant.
4. Finally, we may imagine the possibility of an extreme redistribution of material goods brought about by an expansion of cultural markets. This might happen, for example, if cultural movements became so widespread that they mobilized virtually the entire active population. The organizations that would be built upon these cultural resources could no longer be so hierarchic; cultural resources would be so common that no one would be unduly impressed by those held by others. This tendency might be considered to be a revolutionary one. But any revolution that maintained a centralized organization would itself be antithetical to the centripetal tendencies of universal cultural equality and would either act to set up a new cultural elite (for example, by establishing new standards of culture, such as revolutionary party membership, whose eliteness is upheld by the resources of domination) or would fail to maintain its own centralization. For the interests of individual investors in cultural resources are always in the direction of inflating their own subjective prestige; this is done, if possible, by trying to dominate others in the objective world, but lacking that, it is done by creating one’s own autonomous enclave in which one’s personal cultural standards alone have to be noticed. In a situation of mass mobilization (one that is more than an ephemeral episode), individuals might come to see that their increase in relative status vis-à-vis the previous dominants is no longer of any value except to make the former elites equal to the majority; the tendency would then be to withdraw into private spheres in which their own personal idiosyncracies make the best subjective impression. Under these conditions, we may expect that the social organization would tend to fragment. There would no longer be any dominant cultural currency; ethnically or religiously heterogeneous empires would fall apart into monoethnic states;8 modern status groups would go their private ways and ignore the prestige claims of others. A true cultural revolution is inherently anarchistic; the attainment of any very high degree of equality of cultural resources tends to result in social decentralization.
The various material results of cultural markets, then, are often likely to be disappointing for the investors. Sometimes, if excess material productive capacity is there to be brought into action, an expanding cultural market will help the overall productiveness of the economy. But cultural goods are above all resources of domination; especially in an inflationary cycle of relative status competition, the result is likely to be the crystallization of a pattern of domination at a level of relative material inequality that cannot be broken. It is possible that at some periods the cultural market does bring redistribution, at least for those who can use it to enter fully into the “political” sinecure sector, but this redistribution is likely to be episodic, limited to shifts in goods from the higher to the middle sectors of the elite, and offset in modern economies by a countervailing tendency for economic processes to increase inequality. Finally, in the areas and cases where a truly equal distribution of cultural goods is approached, the result is likely to be the destruction of the standardized currency and a dissolution of the system into many smaller parts.
Sensing these various outcomes, various groups may attack, withdraw from, or try to limit or destroy the cultural market. Dominant elites, fearing redistributive consequences, may attempt to hold down cultural production; ironically, however, it is often their own policies of external military expansion that force them to rely on cultural mobilization of their own population as a motivational and economic fund-raising device (as in nineteenth-century Russia), and thus bring about their own downfall. It sometimes happens that a new internal middle class, heavily investing in the means of cultural mobilization, has displaced an older upper class by instituting a regime of their own domination. Sometimes there has been a popular revulsion against an inflationary credential market, leading to a refusal to buy any more cultural goods and even leading to a violent destruction of the culture-producing agency. In its most extreme form, this is exemplified by the Protestant reformation; in milder forms, it is exemplified by a somewhat earlier reaction in medieval Europe against the selling of credentials by the universities, and a similar development in America in the early 1970s.
The underlying cause for this revulsion against an inflationary credential market is probably to be found in the interaction between the cultural market and the material market. Perhaps the short-term cycles in the material economy and the more long-term cycles of the cultural economy coincide at particular points that makes it no longer materially promising, or even bearable, for people to invest very heavily in cultural goods. A downturn in the material economy coinciding with a point of particularly obvious overinflation of the costs of cultural prestige may be the formula for an anticultural revolution. And since cultural resources are the crucial building blocks of what is distinctive about societies, these crises may be very important indeed. Given a reaction of sufficient proportions, these may turn out to be the major turning points in history.
The cultural market, then, is a key to the class struggles over control of material production. To the extent that competitive cultural and economic markets exist at all, the success of any particular contenders in these struggles is determined not so much by their own resources as by the relationships between production and consumption of all groups in both the cultural and economic spheres. The differences between an expanding cultural market that leads to material expansion and one that leads to crisis or fragmentation are largely quantitative variations depending on the interplay among a number of conditions. In general, one might suppose that simultaneous crises of cultural and economic markets would be the equivalent of the epoch-making revolutionary crisis in Marxian theory. This may be true, although a theory of revolutions of this scope has hardly begun to be worked out.
But in more limited ways, the expansion of the cultural economy seems to move counter to the Marxian model of increasing class mobilization. The Marxian model proposes the development of a homogeneous culture among workers, brought to self-consciousness of a common interest through participation in a common economic struggle against a single enemy. The culture that is thus elevated into a general proletarian consciousness is not an abstract and externally imposed one, but is based upon the commonalities of the everyday experience of the worker. In this sense, as Lukacs (1971) stated, the proletarian class consciousness is the destruction of abstract and reified consciousness. But the expansion of formal cultural currency has precisely the opposite effects. A formal currency is doubly abstract—both as a specialized set of symbols transcending ordinary local experience and in the cryptic marks of cultural attainment summarized in educational degrees. Consciousness in a cultural currency system of this degree of formalization is directed away from the material realities of work experience and into the purely relative values of the cultural currency at that point in its market’s history.
The effects of widespread cultural currency upon the occupational realm are not to unify it, but to divide it. Specialized occupational groups come increasingly into possession of resources for monopolizing positions for their own local advantage. At most, cultural currency leads to the development of self-conscious and organized groups of workers within particular specialties. This, too, is a form of class conflict, for the workers can be seen as struggling in the throes of a capitalist economy for economic survival, as well as for economic advantage. The difference is that a cultural currency makes the conflict irreparably multisided, each occupational group against the other, and tends toward increasing fragmentation rather than toward consolidation into two opposing blocs. A common cultural currency, while it may reduce ethnic differences, thus reproduces the equivalent of an ethnically segregated division of labor. Education, as I have argued elsewhere, might very well be called pseudoethnicity.
A theory of cultural markets, then, may prove relevant to salvaging Marx’s insights on class conflict and revolution, although in a far more cynical form. Class conflict may be even more pervasive, and less historically revolutionary, than had been supposed.