The Political Implications of Sectoral Cleavages and the Growth of State Employment: Part 1, the Analysis of Production Cleavages

Class dealignment in British politics provides a context within which existing interpretations of non-class production cleavages need to be reassessed. In Part 1 of this paper, three approaches are considered which tend to assimilate production locations into occupational or social class—empiricist analyses, Weberian accounts, and radical Weberian/conventional Marxist interpretations. All three focus primarily on unionization, which is seen either as a mediated index of occupational class or as an element of within-class variations in value predispositions also including political alignment. Conventional Marxist approaches alone consider differences between privately and publicly employed workers, but in terms of classifying the social class position of state workers. In contrast to/these approaches, a theory of production sectors is put forward. This interprets the whole range of production locations, especially union/non-union and public/private employment differences, in terms of cross-class interests generated by labour market segmentation between capital sectors. In Part 2 (next issue), this sectoral model is developed in an empirical analysis of production cleavages and party differentiation, and of sectoral influences on political alignment, in contemporary Britain.