Essay About Analysis Of Class And Professional Group

The Division of Labor in Society by Durkheim Case
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In “The Division of Labor in Society”, Durkheim mainly argues that the only way to
overcome the anomie between employers and employees is the creation of “professional
groups” which constitute by participants in a certain industry. Durkheim predicts that such
local groups would become the dominant unit of social organization as industry continues to
expand. Effective regulation between employers and employees can only be made by those
who work in the certain industry and come together to form a “corporation”. However, the
absence of sustained interaction between participants in a certain industry disables the
emergence of such a corporation in modern society. Also, the professional group should serve a
moral role, in creating solidarity as well as preventing excessive exploitation in industry. In a
primitive society, people acting and thinking similarly and with a collective conscience and this
similarity allows social order to be maintained but it is very unstable. While in an industrial
society, division of labor turns out to be more complicated. People are allocated in society
according to merit and rewarded accordingly: economic life decides the organizational
structure of a professional group. Thus regulations of economic activities are necessary to
maintain solidarity. Meanwhile, as the expansion of industry and its complexity, the
corporation would expand as well and gradually become the essential foundation of political
organization in future.
Based on Durkheims prediction and the argument of two groups: critics of class
analysis who advocate ceasing the analysis of class and Marxists who nominally apply class to
large groups but without little empirical evidences, Grusky and Sorensen bring out the concept
“disaggregation” which is about maintaining class analysis, but shifting the unit of analysis to
much smaller “occupational associations”. They state the virtues of disaggregation in four
aspects: class identification, social closure, collective action, and class outcomes. Workers
probably would have trouble to identify with aggregated Marxist classes while it is much more
convenient for them to identify with occupational groups which are formed by functional
positions. The aggregated class model does not have any empirical support about social closure
but actual exclusionary practices occur within smaller scale professional associations. And
collective action often happens among occupational associations, not aggregate classes.
Local associations prefer to pursue specific occupation benefits rather than large scale Marxist
objectives. The outcomes prove that Marxists status-based structuration has proceeded at the
wrong level, in fact, socialization processes are consistent within occupational groups. Grusky