The Salaried Middle Class in the Corporatist Welfare State

While I recognise that there are many problems involved in defining what I choose to call the salaried middle class (SMC), I will take its constituent elements to be those non-manual career hierarchies which we tend to associate with private and public bureaucracies. Galbraith’s definition of a large corporation’s technostructure comes nearest to what I mean. ‘It extends from the most senior officials to where it meets … the blue and white collar workers whose function is to perform more or less mechanically to instruction or routine. It embraces all who bring specialised knowledge, talent or experience to group decisionmaking’. My renewed interest in this class has arisen because recent Marxist studies of social policy and the welfare state have left me dissatisfied with the constant emphasis upon capital and labour. It may be, as Parkin has pointed out, that non-Marxist sociology made too much of the manual/non-manual distinction in the past and relegated private property ‘to a theoretical limbo’ .But the reverse is now equally true. Although Marxists often refer to the new middle class and the ‘new petit bourgeoisie’ their analysis of capitalist society is based upon a dual model of class conflict.