Embourgeoisement is the process by which the values, ideas and lifestyles of the
bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted wi ...
or
middle class
The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. C ...
are adopted by non-bourgeois groups, primarily the
working class
The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...
and the rural population. The opposite process is
proletarianization
In Marxism, proletarianization is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer.
Marx's concept
For Marx, the process of proletarianization was th ...
. Sociologist John Goldthorpe disputed the embourgeoisement thesis in 1967.
A suggested example resulting from their own efforts or collective action is that taken by unions in the United States and elsewhere in the 1930s to the 1960s that established
middle class
The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. C ...
-status for factory workers and others that would not have been considered middle class by their employments. This process allowed increasing numbers of what might traditionally be classified as working-class people to assume the lifestyle and individualistic values of the so-called middle classes and hence reject commitment to collective social and economic goals.
History
Although
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
foresaw a polarization between those who had control over the
factors of production
In economics, factors of production, resources, or inputs are what is used in the production process to produce output—that is, goods and services. The utilised amounts of the various inputs determine the quantity of output according to the rela ...
and those who did not, with the disappearance of all intermediate classes, already he and
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels" ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.period of long prosperity after the Second World War and the construction of the
welfare state
A welfare state is a form of government in which the State (polity), state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal oppor ...
brought a growth in prosperity for the working class.
Fordism
Fordism is an industrial engineering and manufacturing system that serves as the basis of modern social and labor-economic systems that support industrialized, standardized mass production and mass consumption. The concept is named after Henry ...
'','' with its rise in wages, had made workers into consumers. With the advancing
mechanization
Mechanization (or mechanisation) is the process of changing from working largely or exclusively by hand or with animals to doing that work with machinery. In an early engineering text, a machine is defined as follows:
In every fields, mechan ...
and
automation
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...
, more and more
manual labor
Manual labour (in Commonwealth English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. It is most literally work done with the hands (the word ''manual'' ...
disappeared. As a result, the work began to resemble that of the middle class. In addition, the working-class neighborhoods began to fall apart and workers and the middle class increasingly lived together. This also meant that mutual
solidarity
Solidarity or solidarism is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes. True solidarity means moving beyond individual identities and single issue politics ...
mass media
Mass media include the diverse arrays of media that reach a large audience via mass communication.
Broadcast media transmit information electronically via media such as films, radio, recorded music, or television. Digital media comprises b ...
and
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
.
Nevertheless, the theory of the embourgeoisement of the working class turned out not to be entirely correct and there remained a difference in, among other things, lifestyle, social participation and political ideology.
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (, ; ; ; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influ ...
deduced from this that the class structure continually reproduces itself. In a meritocratic society, intelligence and education should determine one's place in society, but in reality it remains difficult to climb the social ladder. This social reproduction is linked not only to
economic capital
In finance, mainly for financial services firms, economic capital (ecap) is the amount of risk capital, assessed on a realistic basis, which a firm requires to cover the risks that it is running or collecting as a going concern, such as market ...
such as money and real estate, but also to
cultural capital
In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, social capital, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital functions as ...
(knowledge, skills, education) and
social capital
Social capital is a concept used in sociology and economics to define networks of relationships which are productive towards advancing the goals of individuals and groups.
It involves the effective functioning of social groups through interper ...
(relationships, networks). The individualisation thesis and the reproduction thesis are the two extremes and although both contain useful elements, research shows a more nuanced picture.
Background
Charles E. Hurst describes this change to be a result of the post-industrialization of society, in which there are far fewer manual labor jobs, which is the main classification of blue-collar work. With post-industrialization, former upper-level blue-collar workers are moving to white-collar work because of the decreased availability and prestige of manual labor jobs. Even when their actual jobs do not change, their lifestyles based on their job situation often change into a lifestyle that according to Mayer and Buckley, more closely resembles the lower-middle class than the rest of the lower blue-collar workers. The result of this idea of embourgeoisement is that more people are incorporated into the middle-class. As a result, there is decreased
class consciousness
In Marxism, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that persons hold regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their common class interests. According to Karl Marx, class consciousness is an awa ...
and declining working class solidarity. This in turn could lead to less group action among the lower class if trying to get more rights or changes within their job field. The topic was widely discussed in academic circles in the 1960s following the publication of ''The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure'' by John H. Goldthorpe in 1963.
The situation in
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-west coast of continental Europe, consisting of the countries England, Scotland, and Wales. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the List of European ...
at the time is described in the book ''Must Labour Lose?'', written by
Mark Abrams
Mark Abrams (27 April 1906 – 25 September 1994) was a British social scientist and market research expert who pioneered new techniques in statistical surveying and opinion polling.
Background and education
Mark Abrams was born Max Alexander ...
Classless society
A classless society is a society in which no one is born into a social class like in a class society. Distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience an ...
*
Class consciousness
In Marxism, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that persons hold regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their common class interests. According to Karl Marx, class consciousness is an awa ...
Proletarianization
In Marxism, proletarianization is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer.
Marx's concept
For Marx, the process of proletarianization was th ...