The White-Collar Workforce: Men

Abstract

In Chapter I we have already outlined the debate concerning the ‘proletarianisation’ of clerical work. We have seen that recent refutations of the thesis of clerical ‘proletarianisation — particularly the work of Goldthorpe and Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn — have rested in large part upon the empirical fact that most men who remain in clerical work will eventually achieve promotion. As we have argued extensively elsewhere, we do not consider that such arguments effectively refute the ‘proletarianisation’ thesis. ‘Proletarianisation’, we have argued, is a concept essentially concerned with the social and technical division of labour; it is thus a process that generates proletarians through the creation of proletarian ‘places’ (Crompton and Jones, 1982).