ABSTRACT
The papers brought together in this book take forward some of the ideas introduced in an earlier work by Savage and his colleagues (1992), which originated as an investigation of the “service class”. This term was coined by Renner, but given a much sharper meaning and applicability by Goldthorpe’s (1982) widely influential hypothesis that professional, managerial and administrative employees constitute a class because they share a distinctive employment status, whose principal feature is the “trust” that employers necessarily have to place in these employees whose delegated or specialized tasks give them a considerable autonomy. This concept, developed in connection with the study of social mobility, which revealed the remarkable intergenerational staying power of the upper service class, quickly became the major reference point of further investigations of the middle class as a whole. It has also been the focus of much fruitful debate, well represented in the work in this volume, in which a chief issue is the usefulness or otherwise of counterposing to the idea of a unitary service class that of there being three middle classes – namely, the entrepreneurial, managerial and professional, differentiated mainly by their respective command of property, organizational and cultural assets. Nevertheless, both parties to this dispute agree that the question of the terms by which this subject matter is defined is less important than their relevance to the understanding of whatever may be established through systematic research into the process of the formation of the middle class; or, as it might be, the middle classes. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Goldthorpe, as a true Popperian, is quite willing to have the service class relabelled as the “salariat” – if only to avoid confusion with the service sector of employment. 1 It is also generally agreed that the self-employed groups of the petite bourgeoisie are a distinctive section of the lower middle class, socially quite separate from the class, or classes, of managerial, administrative and professional employees. This means that the debate has come to centre on the question of whether the latter form a unitary class or one divided into professionals on the one hand and managers and administrators on the other.
