Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1970.tb00589.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1970 |
| Date | 01 November 1970 |
BOOK
REVIEWS
Marshall, Marx and Modern
Times
by Clark Kerr. Cambridge University
Press, London,
1970, 138
pp.,
35s.
The Afluent
Worker
in
the
Class
Structure
by John
H.
Goldthorpe, David
Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, London, 1969,
239
pp.,
45s.
CLARK KERR’S Marshall lectures must have been lively to hear: they are
certainly gripping to read. Whoever is interested in industrial relations
will find the first reading engaging to the point of exhilaration. For this
they owe much to their style, which lifts the reader lightly and rapidly
over
a
sweep of country where the going is often heavy on foot. Economy
of diction and
a
rapid play
of
ideas are achieved by the use of
a
Latin kit
of concepts that seem to need no teasing out of the flummox of the facts
but present themselves from the first as comprehensive and luminous.
In the first half Clark Kerr compares Marx and Marshall as analysts
and seers-analysts of the economic and social systems of their day, seers
who envisaged better working lives in a better world to come. In the second
half he assumes both mantles himself: as
a
pluralist he presents his own
analysis of contemporary society and its tendencies, as a liberal pluralist
he evaluates them. ‘The coming struggle for power’, he holds (p.
80),
will
be between the proponents
of
liberal and of three other types
of
pluralism
-‘coordinated pluralism’ as in Yugoslavia; ‘managerial pluralism’
as
in
the United States; and syndicalism.
‘
‘‘Pluralism”,
or
more precisely “pluralistic industrialism”, is another
way of describing modern society’ (p.
77).
There seems to be an ambiguity
here that arises out of the very ease
of
the style: is pluralism
a
new way of
understanding society or
a
new society to be understood? There seems to
be little that is new in its characteristics as Clark Kerr sets them out.
Societies converge towards pluralism, towards a reliance
on
markets and
plans and group bargaining; towards several or
even
many
centres
of
power rather
than
none
or
only one; towards infinitely complex
mixtures
of
rationality and irrationality, morality and immorality, principle and
pragmatism towards many managers and even more
who
are
managed;
towards
many
conflicts over rules and rewards (p.
78).
Much of this is
a
very fair account
of
mediaeval society; perhaps of most
past societies. If there is something new in
our
own times it is-as Clark
Kerr recognizes-the power of modern methods of communication to
impose
a
far more pervasive regimentation, centralized conditioning and
unitary command of human affairs than was ever possible before.
435
436
BRITISH JOURNAL
OF
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
However this may be, it is from the prospective development of
a
pluralist society that Clark Kerr derives his view of the prospects of class
conflict and industrial relations. Class conflict is disappearing-not
be-
cause class collaboration
is
taking its place, but because the working class
is merging, in the United States at least has already merged, in ‘the great
productive “middle” segment’ of society
:
‘evolution is leading towards an
all-pervasive middle class-a middle class that expands its coverage
so
widely that it is no longer
a
class
at
all’
(p.
37).
This middle class consti-
tutes the inner-society. ‘This inner-society includes what was once identi-
fied as the working class, by now an increasingly conservative element of
the inner-society. Caught below this inner-society is an “under-class”
;
and standing outside
it
are the “outer elements” of students and some
intellectuals, and
of
the aged’ (p.
82).
In this setting, industrial relations appear as only some among the
many processes of accommodation by which working compromises are
arrived at between groups whose interests conflict in part but which
accept the overriding need to work together, and which share
a
common
stock
of
ideas. ‘We inhabit.
. .
an in-between world
of
contained con-
flict-contained by law, contained by the moderation of the parties, con-
tained by the mechanism for conflict resolution, contained by the limited
aspirations of the claimants, contained by the willingness to compromise’
(p. 43). The difficulty
of
cost inflation is noted; but-again
at
least in the
United States-an evaluation
of
the trade unions would lay its emphasis
on the contribution of the unions
to
a
sense
of
consensus in industrial
society,
to
the sense that the rules and awards are just and acceptable, and
to
how they thus lead
to
social tranquillity. This may well be their one
great justification. It
is
easier to get the appearance
of
economic justice
than to be certain about its reality-and the unions give the appearance
All this implies some form of
embourgeoisement.
Clark Kerr does not
define class, and though he lists the changes that have occurred to the
working class in its ‘second transformation’-‘Jobs get better. Income rises
.
. .
Unions attain power’ and
so
on
(p.
96)-he does not specify the
effects on class attributes. This, the four Cambridge1 sociologists say in
their third report2 now before us, is usual.
(P.
48).
It
is
scarcely ever made explicit whether
embourgeoisement
is being taken
to
refer simply
to
the acquisition by manual workers of incomes and living
standards that
are
comparable to those
of
many white-collar groups; or,
further,
to
their adoption
of
a
new
social
outlook and
social
norms that
are
of
a
distinctively middle-class kind; or, further still,
to
their general accept-
l
Cambridge at least when their inquiry was instituted.
a
The
two
previous reports by the same authors were
The
Aflwnt
Worker: Industrial Attitudes
and Behauiour,
and
The
Aflunt
Worker: Political Attitudes and Behauiour
:
both Cambridge University
Press,
1968.
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