Relations of Ruling: Class and Gender in Postindustrial Societies by Wallace Clement and John Myles (review)

194 Canadian Review of American Studies as comprehensive an account of the personal, domestic, and international features that drove the top ranks of U. S. foreign policy decision making. Christopher Kirkey Bridgewater State College Wallace Clement and John Myles. Relations a/Ruling: Class and Gender in Postindustrial Societies. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 303. The Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness, initiated by Erik Olin Wright of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has produced a mountain of comparative, cross-sectional survey data. The book, Relations of Ruling by Wallace Clement and John Myles, makes use of data for the five countries which first carried out the survey: the Nordic countries Sweden, Finland, and Norway; and the North American countries, the United States and Canada. Clement and Myles were the principal investigators of the 1982-1983 Canadian survey, and this volume has been long anticipated by Canadian sociologists. Often long anticipated works disappoint. I am happy to report that the first part of Relations o/ Ruling is a wonderfully written, empirically grounded, and theoretically relevant discussion of class relations in postindustrial societies. It represents the most interesting use of data from Wright's project to date and should find a keen audience beyond the ranks of Canadian sociology, both because it is comparative in focus and accessible to non-sociologists. Unfortunately, the second part of the book on gender relations in postindustrial societies is (for reasons outlined below) of narrower interest and lower quality. Postindustrialism is characterized by two changes in the material division of labour: productivity increases in manufacturing and resource extraction which have enabled a major shift of employment from goods production to consumer services; and a change in the mix of labour used in goods production, with different sorts of producer services on the rise (26). The first part of Relations of Ruling considers the impact of postindustrialism on class relations in each of the five countries. The argument builds upon Gosta Esping-Andersen's notion of postindustrial trajectories, demonstrating that the mix of postindustrial services in the two North American countries is quite similar, and yet quite different from Sweden where a higher percentage Book Reviews 195 of the labour force is employed in health, education, and social services. The difference between these trajectories is particularly salient for gender relations since "variations in postindustrial employment patterns are experienced mainly by women" (35). The analysis proceeds by showing that "differences in 'postindustrial trajectories' tell only part of the story" (79). This is demonstrated by the finding that Canada mirrors the Nordic pattern of having a higher percentage of skilled workers in postindustrial services than the U. S., despite the fact that the material division of labour in the North American countries is identical. Clement and Myles conclude that Harry Braverman's thesis of the ongoing separation of conception from execution in the postindustrial economy fits the U. S. pattern but does not describe a general tendency of capitalist development (82). There is much more of theoretical interest in the first part of Relations o/ Ruling. Followers of the literature on Canada-U. S. value differences will be particularly interested in the chapter on the political culture of class, wherein evidence is marshalled in favour of the thesis that radical democratic populism is the common fountain for oppositional discourse in both countries. At the outset of their work on this project, Clement and Myles were concerned with the relations of ruling in households, the link between domestic and public spheres, and how men and women differed in class outcomes (286). In step with the evolution of feminist theory over the past decade, their thinking on gender now encompasses the view that a "logic of patriarchy" underlies class relations. In a brief chapter which bridges the two parts of the book, they establish that "a class description without reference to gender is 'fundamentally flawed'" but note that their survey data do not allow them to ascertain the role of gender processes in subordinating women in production relations (140). Theirs is a sophisticated treatment of gender which goes far beyond the norm in class analysis. Nevertheless, there are shortcomings with the remaining...