Language and Social Structure in Urban France

David Hornsby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351560948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachen

The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high degree of linguistic levelling, that is, the elimination of marked regional or local speech forms? And why does French appear to abound in 'hyperstyle' variables, which show greater variation on the stylistic than on the social dimension, in defiance of a well-established theory than such variables should not occur? This volume brings together leading variationist sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides of the Channel to ask: what makes France'exceptional'? In addressing this question, variationists have been forced to reassess the accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts and definitions have been transposed in a way which meaningfully preserves their original sense and, crucially, takes account of recent developments in sociology. Sociologists, for their part, have focused on the largely neglected area of language variation and its implications for social theory. Their findings therefore transcend the case study of a particularly enigmatic country to raise important theoretical questions for both disciplines.

Part I
Language and Social Class

Chapter 1
Instruments de travail and the Travails of Instruments Reflections on the Cross-national Measurement of Social Class

ERIC HARRISON
City University London

This chapter offers some reflections on the 'exceptionalism' of French society and culture. In order to do so it draws upon the experience of working within a cross-national consortium to develop a socio-economic classification for use by academics and national statistical offices. The chapter is structured as follows: first, it describes the nature and aims of the project; second, it details a number of disagreements within the consortium about the approach taken and its applicability to a French context; third, it evaluates these disputes and examines their roots in differences of language, methodology and history; a final section concludes that France remains exceptional among European countries, but not necessarily in terms of its language or social structures.

1. The European Socio-economic Classification (1999–2006)

In 1999, as part of its Statistical Harmonization Programme, Eurostat (the Statistical Office of the European Union) commissioned an expert group to make recommendations for the development of a new statistical tool for understanding differences in social structures and socio-economic inequalities across the European Union. The group recommended the development of a common socio-economic classification for all European Union member states based on the concept of employment relations. Between 2004 and 2006, a research project to deliver a prototype of a harmonized European Socio-economic Classification (ESeC) was undertaken by a consortium of six academic institutions and two National Statistical Institutes (NSIs): the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). In addition representatives from most NSIs across Europe contributed to the project through written feedback and attendance at workshops and a conference; academics from many countries outside the consortium also provided their input to the process.

While one would expect a degree of debate and disagreement within any group of academics, the ESeC project was defined from the start by a clear breach between INSEE and the other partners over the shape the classification was taking. The French institution — and it behaved corporately throughout, regardless of its changing cast of representatives — was less enthusiastic about the theoretical underpinning of the project, namely the concept of employment relations as developed and operationalized in the previous thirty years as the 'EGP class schema' (Erikson, Goldthorpe & Portocarrero 1979). The proposal that successfully won Sixth Framework Programme funding had made its intentions pretty explicit: it would use the recent development of the NS-SEC classification in the United Kingdom as its point of departure, and seek to extend and adapt this more widely across the European Union. However, it became apparent at an early stage that this assumption was not fully shared by the French group within the consortium. Their view was that the EGP-inspired approach, based on the theory of employment relations, should be just one of many possible models available for consideration, and the aim should be to produce a number of possible prototypes, rather than a single prototype, for presentation to Eurostat. This increasingly became a sticking point between the French team and the rest of the consortium, with the latter content to settle for a single classification in the interests of harmonization, and the former reluctant to impose a 'one size fits all' model on countries with distinctive patterns of social and economic organization. Initially this meant France, but as the project neared its end INSEE was keen to highlight the cultural specificity of class structure in southern and eastern European countries too.

At a meeting at Eurostat in September 2006, it was recommended that National Statistical institutes should seek to implement the classification, subject to the resolution of a number of outstanding statistical issues, primarily the need to align ESeC with the revision of the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO08). However, as months passed, and turned into years, it became apparent that the adoption of ESeC in the form presented at the meeting had been shelved. In 2009 Eurostat's task force on core variables decided to invite bids to develop a new socio-economic classification as part of its ESSnet initiative. In October 2011 a project got underway to create and test a number of prototypes using output-harmonized datasets such as the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the European Union's Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The project team comprises the statistical offices of Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the co-ordinating institution, INSEE.

The project to develop Eurostat's new socio-economic classification ('the ESeG') is ongoing, so it is hard to predict what form the final result will take, and whether it will be able to overcome the obstacles that prevented the official adoption of the ESeC. In addition to implacable opposition from France, there were two issues that challenged the classification from the start. First, the ESeC was a victim of the enlargement of the European Union at the start of the twenty-first century. At the time ESeC was conceived, the European Union comprised fifteen western European countries, only recently expanded from twelve. By the time the project started, the community had undergone the most substantial enlargement in its history, and in the process become more socially heterogeneous than ever before. This meant that creating a single classification that could stretch across twenty-five countries became a still greater challenge. The second issue that to some extent hampered ESeC was the uneven quality of the available cross-national datasets. As we shall see, the construction of a full ESeC classification requires a good deal of information about the labour market activity of respondents, and — where they are not currently economically active — their partners and/or parents. In many cross-national surveys these variables are either not collected or not made available with sufficient precision (for reasons of data protection). In these cases there are provisions to make simplified versions of the classification, but the existence of these multiple versions, while offering flexibility, does reduce its ease of implementation and comparability.

In the remainder of this chapter, I outline for non-specialists the main principles behind the construction of socio-economic classifications, describe the features of the ESeC that caused disagreement within the consortium and explain why specifically these have so far failed to take root in France.

2. Measuring social class

In the first section I introduced the European Socio-economic Classification as a project, and indicated that it was the stimulus for a series of debates and controversies. In this section I explain further by setting out the main principles of the ESeC and what is at stake in the measurement of class more generally.

Class is a unique concept in sociology: it is at once perhaps the most disputed but also the most powerful in the discipline. Above all it has great predictive ability: it has strong and enduring relationships with a series of correlated outcomes, to do with health, educational attainment, and access to opportunities and resources. If we do wish to use class to examine life-chances across countries, and show what these patterns mean, then it must be clear exactly what it is measuring (Rose et al. 2010: 9). Some writers characterize this as a contrast between induction (working from observations, placing these into groups and then developing hypotheses) and deduction (working from hypotheses, creating groups and then confirming these through observation). While the inductive approach allows us to describe variation, it offers no scope for analytical clarity. To put it another way, without a clear concept of what class is measuring, we have little chance of explaining these differences and — in policy terms — knowing which levers to pull to change or influence these outcomes. Equally, only a conceptual rationale — knowing what a classification ought to predict — can allow us to validate and maintain it.

Given the criticism in France of 'Anglo-Saxon' class schemas, it is worth briefly rehearsing the main features of such schemas. The main distinction in the labour-market is between employers (those who buy labour), employees (those who sell labour), and the self-employed. However, in most modern economies employees will make up between 85 and 90 per cent of the workforce, so we need a secondary means of differentiation, and this is where the concept of employment relations comes in. Drawing on Lockwood's distinction between work situation and market situation, Goldthorpe (2000) has reworked this idea in terms of 'contractual hazards for employers', and redrawn the distinction as being between asset specificity —the degree of difficulty an employer has in replacing an employee's skills — and monitoring problems — the difficulty an employer has in controlling the labour process. It is employers' response to these problems that determines both the quality of the employee's contract and their working conditions.

These responses give rise to a variety of models of employment relations along a continuum (or more strictly speaking along a diagonal line passing through the two-dimensional space created by two axes measuring monitoring problems and asset specificity). At one end — with high-end employment relations — there is the 'service relationship'. This can be best described as 'a contractual exchange of a relatively long-term and diffuse kind in which compensation for service to the employing organization comprises a salary and important prospective elements, such as salary increments, occupational pensions, expectations of continuity of employment (or at least of employability) and promotion and career opportunities' (Rose et al. 2010: 11). This is typical of managerial and professional occupations. Employees with low asset specificity and few monitoring problems can be dealt with relatively easily through a 'labour contract', in its purest form a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of (unskilled manual) work. Both the service relationship and the labour contract come in pure and modified forms. Skilled craft workers have higher asset specificity than the unskilled and will thus have better contracts and conditions. Lower level or junior professionals and managers will have attenuated versions of the service relationship compared to their superiors, and are likely to be subject to greater work monitoring. In addition to these two contrasting approaches to labour management, there also exist 'mixed' forms of employment regulation, where employers face one problem to a significant degree but not the other. Many technical workers have highly specific skills, but their tasks and work flow are easy to monitor. In many administrative jobs and those allied to professional work the level of asset specificity is low, but monitoring progress is more problematic for employers.

This is the briefest of expositions of the concept of employment relations as underlying social class. The combination of employment status (in Marx's terms, the relationship to the means of production) and, for employees, the form of employment regulation, determines the allocation of individuals to class positions. The distinction between these two phenomena — 'individuals' and 'class positions' — is a crucial tenet of occupation-based class schemas. 'Social relationships within markets, especially within labour markets, and within firms define these po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL CLASS
• PART II: LANGUAGE, SPACE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
• PART III: RENVOIS
• Bibliography
• Index