Reply to Wright
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7257340 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charles N Halaby (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-35 |
| Publication date | 1993-02-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2096216 |
| OpenAlex | W2322133943 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
W right (1993) thinks that Weakliem and I (Halaby and Weakliem 1993) have challenged, even denied, the power of the class distinction between capital and labor. On the contrary, the incentive contract (IC) specification we have proposed profoundly respects the distinction. Furthermore, the IC model is rooted in and derives much of its power from the very earnings-generating relational properties that Wright correctly argues are at the heart of the notion of class, but that he faults us for obscuring. The crux of Wright's criticism applies with greater force to his own CLASS and ASSETS typologies. Both of these typologies dilute the capital-labor distinction and ultimately sap class models of their potential explanatory power because they rest partly on arbitrary differences among jobs. Wright has elevated such differences to the status of class with little external evidence that these boundaries matter anywhere but in his own mind. Wright pays a price for using rhetorically correct but crude qualitative categories in place of a more quantitative rendering of the class properties of jobs. Empirical applications of the typologies are inelegant they produce many pairwise mean differences whose interpretation is muddied and awkward. More important, his typological specifications do not fully account for the explanatory power attributable to the earnings-generating relational properties of capital and labor classes. I will elaborate on these issues as I address each of Wright's seven key criticisms. (1) Wright portrays us as pursuing a in contrast to his typological strategy. However, the text explaining our equation 5 makes it clear that this characterization ignores the mixed nature of the IC model. The strategy Wright criticizes would, for example, score capitalists on the authority and autonomy scales by the same criteria used for labor. But such a specification which rejects both of Wright's typologies (Halaby and Weakliem 1993, fn. 19) was tested against and rejected by the IC model.The IC model actually maintains the qualitative capital-labor distinction while quantifying within-class earnings-generating properties. Quantifying class properties can hardly be objectionable: This is how Wright arrives at his own typologies. (2) At various points, Wright puts forward as his own the rhetorically powerful capital-labor classification and contrasts it with the IC model. This is not the relevant contrast, because the capital-labor class model is not a Wright typology. Rather, Wright transformed this traditional classification into more elaborate typologies to capture important sources of heterogeneity within the major capital and labor groups. The IC model is an alternative means of incorporating withinclass heterogeneity. The question, then, is whether heterogeneity should be dealt with by inventing more classes, as Wright does, or by quantifying earnings-generating relational properties, as we do. The evidence at this point indicates our way is better. This may not be surprising. Wright has never demonstrated empirically that the distinctions he draws to demarcate his typological categories actually represent class that are best treated qualitatively. If these distinctions represent class that must be respected regardless of their empirical relevance, why does Wright ignore them in favor of a simpler class scheme whenever it is analytically or rhetorically convenient? (3) Wright claims that a typological strategy is better for representing differences in the mean earnings of classes, while a scalar strategy is better for explaining variation. Yet for both tasks the mixed IC model is better and more elegant than either of Wright's typologies. What Wright views as the strength of the typological strategy can be easily accomplished using the IC model with the appropriate conditional expectations. For example
Art history · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Wright · History · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.19 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1994 - 2016 (23) |
| Highly cited | No |