CLASS-STRUCTURE, WAGE DIFFERENCES AND CLA SS IDENTIFICATION IN NORWAY- A COMPARISON OF WRIGHTS AND GOLDTHORPES CLASS MODELS

The utility of the concept of social class has recently been challenge d. Clark and Lipset (1991) argue for the increasing irrelevance of cla ss for understanding political behaviour and social inequality. in the book Class Society in Decline, Colbjornsen et al. (1987) concluded th at Norway in the beginning of the 1980s was clearly not a class societ y. The analysis was based on Wright's <<dominance>> class model (1982) . In this paper we set out to challenge this conclusion by replicating their analysis with the addition of another neo-weberian class schema based on Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992). We first traced the theoretic al background for Wright's Marx-inspired class schema and for Erikson and Goldthorpe's, which has its roots in the works of Weber. Both clas s schemas were then operationalized in the same data set, the survey < <Variations in working conditions 1982>>. These two theoretically quit e different class schemas also gave quite different pictures of class structure. The most striking difference was the placement of the major ity of women in class-III, routine, non-manual workers in the Erikson and Goldthorpe schema, whereas they were placed in a heavily female wo rking class in Wright's schema. The cross-classfication of the two cla ss schemas also gave indications of validity problems with Wright's sc hema, which we argue stem from the subjectivity inherent in that class measure. Next, we studied gross and net wage differences by applying the two class schemas and found the differences generated by the Eriks on and Goldthorpe class schema to be the largest. The same conclusion was also found for class consciousness. It must also be added that the marginal contribution of class to the explanatory power of the human capital variables was rather small, and the relationship between class location and class consciousness was not very strong. We concluded th at the Erikson and Goldthorpe class schema was preferable to Wright's dominance model and that the class differences we found were not insig nificant, although far from pervasive enough to satisfy the criteria f or the class society of Colbjornsen et al. (1987). We also point to re search on social mobility (Ramsoy 1977, Ringdal 1994), which shows tha t in spite of large structural changes, the mobility regime or the lif e chances of the individuals still depend very much on their class bac kground.