Thought
Wright has been described as an "influential new left theorist." His work is concerned mainly with the study of social classes, and in particular with the task of providing an update to and elaboration of the Marxist concept of class, in order to enable Marxist and non-Marxist researchers alike to use 'class' to explain and predict people's material interests, lived experiences, living conditions, incomes, organizational capacities and willingness to engage in collective action, political leanings, etc. In addition, he has attempted to develop class categories that would allow researchers to compare and contrast the class structures and dynamics of different advanced capitalist and 'post-capitalist' societies.
Wright has stressed the importance of
- Control over and exclusion from access to economic/productive resources,
- Location within production relations,
- Market capacity in exchange relations,
- Differential control over income derived from the use of productive resources and
- Differential control over labor effort in defining 'class', while at the same time trying to account for the situation of expert, skilled, manager and supervisory employees, taking inspiration from Weberian accounts of class and class analysis.
According to Wright, employees with sought-after and reward-inelastically supplied skills (due to natural scarcities or socially constructed and imposed restrictions on supply, such as licensing, barriers to entry into training programs, etc.) are in a 'privileged appropriation location within exploitation relations' because, while they are not capitalists, they are more precious to the owner of the means of production than less skilled workers and harder to monitor and evaluate in terms of labor effort. The owner(s) of the means of production or their employer in general therefore has to pay them a 'scarcity' or 'skill/credential' rent (thus raising their compensation above the actual cost of producing and reproducing their labor-power) and tries to 'buy' their loyalty by giving them ownership stakes, endowing them with delegated authority over their fellow workers and/or allowing them to more or less be autonomous in determining the pace and direction of their work. Thus, expert, executive manager, and expert manager employees tend to be closer to the interests of the 'bosses' than other workers.
Erik Olin Wright's work includes Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997), which uses data collected in various industrialized countries, including the United States, Canada, Norway and Sweden. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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