131

"CLASS ANALYSIS AND TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM"

Ken Campbell

The role of technology and its interaction with other elements

of social structure has been one of the least examined questions in

social theory. As Gordon (1976:35) has recently pointed out, there

is a strong streak of technological determirism in both non-Marxist

and orthodox Marxist literature. But, for numerous reasons, the

charge of 'technological' or 'economic determinism" has been levelled

far more commonly at Marxist theory. Rarely does one encounter an

equivalent assessment of Weberian theory, although it can be shown*

that the Weberian literature is heavily imbued with technological

determinist assumptions.

In large part, the assumptions of technological determinism which

underly the Weberian view have been obscured by the emphasis which

Weber and later Weberian writers place on subjective and non-economi

c

factors in social life. It has generally been assumed that this

emphasis in some way contradicts the assumptions of a technological

determinist view. In fact, this is not the case. Technological

determinism is not a theory that defines the immediate motives of men

as economic; indeed, it implies no psychological theory at all. Rather,

it assumes that technological and scientific progress exert a determining

influence over social institutions, that technological development

determines the division of labour, and that social development can best

be understood in terms of technological advance. More concretely, it

assumes that the modern organization of work — the division of labour
within industry, the existence of various levels of skilled labour and th

•The argument of this paper has been compressed from a much more lengthy

review of the Marxist and Weberian concept of class and the division

of labour. If its arguments appear assertive, rather than demons tat ivc

,

this —at least in p^rt — is due to the limitations of the present
oresentati"'



132

growth of administrative hierarchies — are determined by the exigencies
of advancing technique, i.e., by the technical requirements of modern

industrial production.

As a number of writers have observed, Weber's views on class and the

division of labour are heavily imbued with the assumptions of technological

determinism (see Johnson, 1976:5-8; also Navarro, 1976:34). Many features

of social organization (the growth of bureaucracy, for example) were viewed

by Weber as the product of technological development and the technical

demands of an industrial economy.! The concept of 'legal-rational'

authority, around which Weber's views on bureaucracy revolve, is a

typification of the type of normative (value) structure presumably imposed

by the technical imperatives of expanding technique. This concept expresses

all that is essential to the Weberian tradition: the view that social

development is a process of "cumulative technological rationalization"

(see Gerth and Mills', 1967:51). According to this principle, history can be

viewed as the gradual, if uneven, emergence of social forms corresponding

to an increasingly complex technique and its requirements.

Recent theoretical works within the Weberian tradition remain

completely wedded to this technological de termini st outlook. Two recent,

and popular works, Frank Parkin's Class Inequality and Political Order

(1972) and Anthony Giddens' The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies

(1973) exemplify the reliance upon technological determinist assumptions

which characterizes much of modern sociology. Both these writers address

themselves directly to class inequality in capitalist societies, yet fail

to adequately conceptualize their subject matter precisely because they

accept the division of labour as (technologically) given.

1. According to Weber, bureaucracy can be viewed as a technica 1
requirement of complex organization, i.e., it is technologically
determined. "The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic
organization has always been its purely technical superiority
over any other form of organization" (1968:973)



133

On an immediate level, this is evident in the inability of Parkin

and Giddens to move beyond a description of immediate market processes

in their attempt to account for class inequality. Class differences,

according to these authors, arise from differences in skills,

education, and expertise and the mannner in which these potential

resourses are actualized by the market. Parkin argues that

differences in class position (which he defines, after Weber, as

*\narket position") are determined by the skills and knowledge necessary

for performing different occupational roles.

marketable expertise is the single most
important determinant of occupational reward.
. . . the greater the skills or knowledge commanded
by an occupation, the greater is its relative scarcity
in the market place (1972:21)

Similarly, for Giddens, class differences derive from differences

in skill and education ( conceptualized as different "market capacities")

.... possession of recognized 'skills' — including
educational qualifications — is the major factor
influencing market capacity. (1973:103)

Parkin and Giddens thus offer an "explanation" of class differences

which focuses upon the occupational ly relevant characteristics

(skills, education, expertise, etc) of class agents.

The suggestion that class differences (i.e., differences in

market position) are determined by differences in skill and education

level is singularly uninstructive as an explanation of class inequality

The attempt to explain class differences in terms of differences in

skills and education merely pushes the need for explanation one step

further back. If class di f ference s are determined by differences in



skill and education, what (one must ask) are the factors that

determine differences in skill level? The existence of differentially

skilled labour-power is hardly something that can be taken for

granted in class analysis, especially when these differences are

thought to account for class inequality. Differences in skill are

not the "givens" around which the class structure is built; these

differences broadly correspond to positions in the social division

of labour, the determining conditions of which must themselves be

theorized . Concretely, it is necessary to ask what are the determinants

of the modern division of labour which requires differentially

qualified labour-power.

The failure of Parkin and Giddens to theorize the problem at

this level (i.e., to relate skills to specific positions within

production and to analyze the development and inter-relation of thes -»

positions ) is readily explained by the technological determinist

outlook which informs their treatmentss Giddens, in fact, is

reasonably clear on this point. The division of labour and the
in industry,

structure of "paratechnical relations"A he argues, corresponds to ,

the level of industrial development; under these conditions a

"wholesale reorganization" of the division of labour is quite

impossible. In an argument not fundamentally different from that

earlier advanced by Dahrendorf (19 5 9:36-41), Giddens charges Marx

with failing to recognize that many of the features of the capitalist

division of labour are, in fact, features of industrialism per se ,

not a product of antagonistic relations of production (p . 136 ),_This is

another way of saying that the modern division of labour is

technologically determined, and that Marx erred in not recognizing this,



135

Parkin is far less direct in his treatment of these questions.

Like Giddens, he is critical of so-called "technocratic" and

"convergence" writers who assume a direct and inevi table correspondence

between the level of technological development and social structure.

He argues that "rewards" within the occupational structure and

access (mobility) within the class structure are variable i.e.,

not technologically determined ( p. 140-159). Yet, as a criticism of
technocratic writers, this argument remains weak, for it fails,
in any way, to question the theoretical foundation of technocratic

theory: a technological determinist explanation of the division of

labour . Insofar as it accepts the existing division of labour

and corresponding skill differentials as given, Parkin's argument

implicitly falls back upon a technological determinist explanation

of these phenomena.

Is the division of labour in capitalist societies a product

of the technical exigencies of large scale industrial production?

Can the existing pattern of "occupational differentiation" be

taken as a given in class analysis, as neo-Weberian argument suggests?

These questions, which are central to class analysis, have been

(uncritically) answered in the affirmative by the majority of non-

Marxist sociologists. Celebrants of the technocratic thesis of

"post-industrialism", such as Bell, Kerr, Inkeles and Etzioni

(to name only a few), not only accept this technological determinism,

they relish in its implications. Although they remain critical of

some of the more egregious conclusions drawn by 'post-industrialist'

theorists, progressive Weberian writers such as Giddens and

Parkin remain captive to the technological determinism which underlies

the 'post-industrialist' view. This is a legacy of Weber that is

not easily shaken off.



136

In contrast, recent Marxist writers have tended to take a more

critical view of the relationship between technology and social

•tructure. Herbert Gintis (1976:37), for example, writes of

the "dynamic interaction" between technology and social relations

— a view quite removed from the economic and technological
determinism commonly ascribed to Marxist writers. In Gintis* view,

the division of labour in capitalist society is not technologically

determined; rather, it is the product of an interlacing set of

management priorities designed to increase worker productivity while

structuring the workplace in a manner consistent with capitalist

relations of production.

Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capitalism (1974), has tackled

the relationship of technology and the division of labour in more

depth. Braverman has argued that while the proliferation of

technical operations within production is determined by the level

of technological development, the fragmentation of these operations

(i.e., their assignment to different workers) is socially determined*

determined, more specifically, by capital's interest in maximizing

the productive output of the labour-power it employs. By dissociating

the labour process into a series of fractional operations, capital

not only gains greater control over the fragmented labour process,

it is, also, able to reduce the overall wage bill. "The labour

capable of performing the process may be purchased more cheaply as

dissociated elements than as a capacity integrated into a single

worker" (p. 81). The fragmentation and rou t in iza tion of tasks which

characterize the modern organization of work are thus explained in

terns of capital's domination over the labour process, not the

inexorable demands of technique.



137

Braverman's work offers a vivid contrast to the descriptive

and ahistorical account of class inequality presented by Parkin and

Giddens. Whereas these Weberiaft writers provide an immediate

description of stratification processes based on skill and

education differences, Braverman provides an historical analysis

of changes in the division of labour which are thought to determine

the extended reproduction of differentially skilled labour-power.

Braverman's analysis thus offers an explanation of the sourse of skill

and education differences which enter neo-Weberian analyses as "givens".

In this connection, he argues that the dissociation of the labour

process in the large scale industrial enterprise involves a gradual

destruction of general skills, and the creation of a large category

of unskilled manual labour alongside a category of technical and

scientific specialists who monopolize knowledge of the labour process.

This division of labour has all the appearances of a technically

ordained specialization; yet it expresses, above all else, the

separation of the immediate producers from control over production,

and their consequent inability to develop an alternative division

of labour. ( 'See also Poulantzas, 1975, for whom the division

between manual and mental labour represents a condition of

ideological domination of the working class; also, Gorz, 1972)

These changes wrought by capital in the labour process are

thought to be responsible for the transformation of the occupational

structure over the past century. Whereas in craft production each

worker is a "repository of human technique for the labour process

of that branch" (p. 109), the dissociation of the labour process

creates new categories of workers who perform work which is largely

mental (p. 109, 239). Braverman depicts this transformation in terms



138

of a separation between the process of execution and conception

in production:

The novelty of this development during the
past century lies not in -f.he separate existence of hand
and brain, conception a riji execution, but the rigor with
which they are divided from one another, and then increasingly
subdivided, so that conception is concentrated insofar as
possible, in ever more limited groups within management
or closely associated with it (p. 125)

For Braverman, the separation of conception from execution,

and the reduction of all labour to increasingly fragmented

elemental tasks is a product of social relations of production,

not of technica l exigency.

Experiments conducted on a limited scale, such as those at

electronics and automotive plants, have already demonstrated that

productivity is not tied to any particular form of work organization.

Indeed, as Gordon (1976:22) >. has pointed out, there

appears to be no theoretical reason why a number of alternative

organizational forms might not yield equivalent productivities.

Why then does industrial organization remain tied to the

assembly-line model? What accounts for the division of labour as

we now know it, in the factory and in society? Weberian theorists

implicitly assume that, at least in broad outline, the division of

labour is technologically determined. The general explanation offered

by Marxist writers is that the division of labour is determined by

the social relations of production, specifically, capital's interest

in increased productivity and in maintaining the authoritarian

and hierarchial structure of th'e enterprise. (Braverman, 1974;

Carchedi, 1975; Gintis, 1976; Gor don , 1976 ) . Job fragmentation and

the separation of manual and mental labour, execution from conception,

are related to political and ideological relations of production. —

not merely quantitative technical efficiencies. Technical imperatives



139

remain important, but the way these imperatives are translated

into a detailed division of labour is determined by those who

control industrial production, aot the "industrial system" itself

Quite clearly, it is impossible to establish the precise

relationship between technology and social relations at the

theoretical level. This demands a concrete study of the division

of labour and the specific influences which determine its development.

Technological determinist assumptions have long dominated theoretical

thinking in this area; these assumptions are firmly imbedded in the

dominant ideology where they serve to legitimize existing social

relations. Serious questioning of these assumptions promises

to bring sociology closer to the potential ities for overcoming class

inequality — potentialities that, to date, have been obscured by
determinist ideologies.



UK)
REFERENCES

Braverman, Harry Labor and Monopoly Capitalism
, New York

1974 Perhaps the most important
book on the development of the division of
division available .

Carchedi, G "On the Economic Identification of the New Middle Class",
1975 Science and Society , London A useful, if somewhat

laboured, discussion of the middle class written
from a Marxist perspective.

Dahrendorf, Ralf Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society ,
1959 Stanford University Press A well argued

refutation of the Marxist theory of class; widely
recognized as such

Gerth, H.H. and C.Wright Mills (ed) Introduction to From Max Weber :
1967 Essays in Sociology , New York

Giddens, Anthony The Class Structure of the Advanced Countries ,
1973 London, This work is a sophisticated Wcberian

synthesis of the major themes in the stratification
literature

.

Gintis, Herbert "The Nature of Labor Exchange and the Theory of
1976 Capitalist Production" Review of Radical Political

Economi s ts , Vol 8, No. 2, An interesting and
very readable Marxist view of the internal
structure of the capitalist firm. Gintis considers
a number of important sociological questions,
including sexual and racial stratification.

Gorz, Andre "Technical Intelligence and the Capital ist Division of
1972 Labour", Teleos , Vol 12 May usefully be

read alongside Braverman' s more detailed study.

Gordon, David M. "Capitalist Efficiency and Socialist Efficiency"
1976 Monthly Review , Vol 28, No 3 A general theoretical

consideration of the limitations of the capitalist
firm to introduce alternative technologies.
Very readable, regretably short.

Johnson, Terrence, "Professions, Class and the State", University
of Leicester (mimeo) A path-finding Marxist
analysis of the professions. Hopefully soon to
appear in print.

Navarro, Vicente "The Fetishism of Industrialism: A Critique of Ivan
1976 Illlch", Monthly Review , Vol 28, No 5 Only

tangentially related to the present discussion.
Offers a critique of counter- ins ti tut lonal is ts

.

Parkin, Frank Class Inequality and Political Order , London
1972 A very readable Wcberian survey of the stratification

literature. The central line of argument has
been considerably modified in the author's later
work .



141
Poulantzas, Nicos Classes in Contemporary Capitalism , London
1975 A theoretical re-working of the Marxist view of

class. Quite readable, and brilliantly presented

Weber, Max Economy and Society , New York
1968