Public Employment and Class Formation

Historically oriented social science scholars point out that almost since the time of Marx there has been an ongoing controversy about the “middle classes,” that is, positions or occupations outside or in between the labor-capital polarity. In the sociological literature, it is easy to find several different ways of treating the class position of public employees, and people will start by saying a few words about the most prominent approaches in the field. The most striking feature in the majority of studies of the contemporary class structure is that public employees are not really visible. The basic assumption underlying Marxist class analysis is that the way production is organized divides people into different classes. The concept of class is thus related to the concept of the mode of production. Compared with the Marxist or Weberian theories of class, the cultural capital approach is of more recent origin. © 1991 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.