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The Classless Society, by Paul W. Kingston. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 258 pp. $49.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-8047-3804-1. $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8047-3806-8.
The basic thesis of this book, and thus the title that seems at first misleading, is that Marxian class concepts no longer fit modern industrial and postindustrial societies. Rather, Kingston argues for greater recognition of what he calls "stratification theory," which is basically Weberian. While Kingston has given us an exceedingly well-written critique of "class theory" and has provided a good, though often dated, summary of survey research related to the meaning and impact of class in the United States, several flaws in the analysis will render this book less than convincing to most sociologists concerned with the issues of inequality and social stratification.
After a general introduction to the main arguments of the book, Kingston presents chapters on his "realist" view of class, the standard "class maps" he believes to be flawed or no longer useful, and then chapters summarizing research on social mobility pattems, class identification, class political action, class subcultures, and class communities. These chapters are central to Kingston's argument, and focus on Giddens' suggested requirements for "class structuration" in modem societies: social mobility patterns that indicate barriers between classes, class social interaction patterns that suggest at least some degree of "real" class groupings perceived by the humans involved, some shared elements of class subcultures, a minimal level of class identification, and a minimal level of collective class political action. Using mostly survey research from the last several decades in American sociology, Kingston claims in every case that there is almost no support for the reality of a class structure in the United States today. The reader is repeatedly told that, while findings are often significant, the r2s reported in this research...