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Social Inequality and the Sociology of Life Style: Material and Cultural Aspects of Social Stratification - Focus on Economic Sociology
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Oct, 2001 by Dieter Bogenhold
Max Weber described the Janus-faced nature of a formally "free" contract form of wage labor in his socio-legal observations: a contract that obeys the law of the most powerful on the labor market (Weber 1972:Sec. VII). The process of continuing proletarianization and the accompanying development of an objectified world in an "iron cage" (Weber 1979: Sec. 188) must indeed be seen as one of the most important innovations of this century. (2)
In the history of social thought, many well-known positions on the issue of social stratification can be interpreted as a constant dialogue with the epochal Marxist theses. The works of authors such as Max Weber (1972), Emil Lederer (1912), Werner Sombart ([1927]1987), Theodor Geiger (1932, 1949), Ralf Dahrendorf (1959), Stanislaw Ossowski (1963), Goldthorpe et al. (1968), Anthony Giddens (1973), and Daniel Bell (1974) are cases in point. It was above all the dichotomous and bipolar division of society into blocks of uniform individuals (bourgeoisie and proletariat) that Gotz Briefs described as "sweet simplicity" in his article "Proletariat" (Briefs 1931:458) at the beginning of the 1930s. This conception is too simplistic to characterize a society that is ever becoming more and more differentiated.
Regarding the analysis of social stratification in the 20th century, it seems that the occupational and economic differentiations within society have become too complex to be able to reduce these distinctions to a single common denominator. Geiger referred to this problem in one of his later works, "Die Klassengesellschaft im Schmelztiegel" ("The Class Society in the Melting Pot") published in 1949. He expressed it as follows: "Everything seems to be gliding now, a clear definable structure is hardly to be found. However, certain tendencies toward a shift in class can be seen ... which lately seem to stretch right through the Marxist class ranks" (Geiger 1949:147). Geiger explicitly characterized this stratification that stretches straight through these Marxist class ranks as "horizontal stratification." This type of stratification is "first and foremost of the utmost socio-cultural importance" (p. 146).
Geiger's view of a "horizontal stratification" is the essence of the following considerations. My thesis is that Geiger's analysis was already conceptually drawn up by Georg Simmel ([1900] 1978), Thorstein Veblen (1899), and Max Weber ([1921] 1972). The present discussion on so-called individualization and pluralization that is popular in Germany has been built on this earlier literature and has not made reference to Geiger's work. (3)
III
The Analysis of Life Styles
CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION of the pluralization of life styles reflects the fact that the level of vertical differentiation in terms of financial resources has little to do with the level of cultural expression as a form of individual life practice. Ulrich Beck's (1986) book Risk Society holds the view that the evidence within life practice for bonding in a specific class constellation has disappeared. His opinion is that biographies are becoming even more "open." Societies that are becoming increasingly complex multiply the possible life courses of individuals and thus, due to institutional handicaps and handicaps in life-history, result in "kits for possible biographic combinations" (Beck 1986:217).
