Reconnecting class and production relations in an advanced capitalist ‘knowledge economy’: Changing class structure and class consciousness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent approaches to class analysis in advanced capitalism have been largely disconnected from the capitalist labour process. This paper has three basic goals. First, we suggest a composite Marxist model of current class structure grounded in ownership, managerial authority, specialized knowledge and value relations in the capitalist labour process. Secondly, this model is used for an empirical assessment of continuity and change in class structure, based on a series of national surveys in Canada in the period 1982–2010. Thirdly, using the same series of surveys, we use this model of class structure to evaluate the extent to which employment class positions are relevant for understanding shifting expressions of class consciousness. Within the employed labour force in this particular advanced capitalist country, we find a generally declining conventional working class and expanding proportions of managerial and professional employees. Connections between employment class positions and class consciousness can involve complex mediations. Evidence for the persistence of strong hegemonic consciousness among corporate capitalists is provided by an additional unique series of surveys. This persistence contrasts with declining working class identity and increasingly mixed class consciousness among most other employment class positions. However, pro-labour oppositional consciousness is found to dominate among unionized industrial workers and professional employees in the private goods-producing sector, who may be among the most directly exploited workers in value terms in an emergent ‘knowledge economy’. The findings suggest the continuing relevance of pursuing class analyses based on production relations in advanced capitalist economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".