the neo-marxist legacy in american...

SO37CH08-Manza ARI 1 June 2011 11:32

The Neo-Marxist Legacyin American SociologyJeff Manza and Michael A. McCarthyDepartment of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY 10012;email: [email protected], [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2011. 37:155–83

First published online as a Review in Advance onMay 6, 2011

The Annual Review of Sociology is online atsoc.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-081309-150145

Copyright c© 2011 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0360-0572/11/0811-0155$20.00

Keywords

capitalism, class, political economy, state, work

Abstract

A significant group of sociologists entering graduate school in the late1960s and 1970s embraced Marxism as the foundation for a criticalchallenge to reigning orthodoxies in the discipline. In this review, weask what impact this cohort of scholars and their students had on themainstream of American sociology. More generally, how and in whatways did the resurgence of neo-Marxist thought within the disciplinelead to new theoretical and empirical research and findings? Using twomodels of Marxism as science as our guide, we examine the impactof sociological Marxism on research on the state, inequality, the laborprocess, and global political economy. We conclude with some thoughtsabout the future of sociological Marxism.

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INTRODUCTION

A significant slice of the “disobedient gener-ation” (Sica & Turner 2006) of sociologistsentering graduate school in the late 1960s and1970s embraced Marxism as the foundationfor a critical challenge to reigning orthodoxiesin the discipline. In the early to mid-1970s,Marxist journals, conferences, and a plethora ofstudy groups sprang up in and around graduatesociology programs across the country. A co-hort of talented Marxist sociologists completedambitious dissertations and took academicappointments in increasing numbers across thecountry from the early 1970s onward, and pro-ceeded to develop and apply Marxist theoriesand concepts in a large number of subfields (forearly surveys of this work, see Burawoy 1982,Flacks 1982). In some ways, the impact of thisintellectual movement within the discipline wasimmediately apparent. Almost overnight, KarlMarx became one of the founding fathers ofthe discipline, in both introductory textbooks(Hamilton 2003) and undergraduate and grad-uate social theory courses. Marxist-orientedresearch began regularly appearing in top jour-nals in the field; the American Journal of Sociologyeven devoted an entire special issue to “MarxistInquiries” in 1982 (Burawoy & Skocpol 1982a).

What impact did this cohort of scholars—and their students—have on the mainstream ofAmerican sociology? More generally, how andin what ways did the resurgence of neo-Marxist1

thought within the discipline lead to new the-oretical and empirical research and findings? IfMarxism commands a significantly smaller alle-giance of sociologists than in the early 1980s, asany systematic reckoning would conclude, whyis that so?

In this review, we explore answers to thesequestions. Our focus is on sociological Marxism

1We use the phrase neo-Marxism to refer to Marxist scholar-ship from the 1970s onward, reserving “Marxist” or “classicalMarxism” for earlier work in the Marxist tradition, from thatof Marx and Engels through World War II. We also usethe phrase “sociological Marxism” to distinguish our spe-cific target—neo-Marxist sociology—from other disciplinesas well as the broader literatures and movements associatedwith Marxism.

(Burawoy & Wright 2002), not Marxist theoryor politics outside the academy. By sociologi-cal Marxism, we refer to sociological work thattests, applies, or seeks to develop the core in-sights of Marxist theory. Our interests subsumequestions about the sociology of knowledge, therecent history of the discipline, and the sub-stantive contributions of Marxists to several keysubfields in sociology, although we devote thebulk of our effort here to the latter.

We should be clear at the outset about theparameters (and limits) of our discussion. Therange of any exploration of the relationship be-tween Marxism and sociology is potentially vast(cf. Bottomore 1984). To focus our discussion,we center it specifically on American sociology,although we consider work by non-Americanauthors that have been integral to debates inthe United States. We also restrict our surveyto empirical sociology rather than social theory(while recognizing that in many cases the di-viding line is unclear). It is worth noting, how-ever, that many key figures in the neo-Marxistmovement in American sociology explicitlyembraced the task of offering an empirical chal-lenge to non-Marxist sociology as the appropri-ate test of Marxist theory (e.g., Burawoy 1982,Wright 1985). The proof of the pudding, asMarx famously said, is in the eating.

Assessing the legacies of an intellectualmovement as diverse as Marxism is a dauntingtask. Even defining what counts as Marxist soci-ology (or who is a Marxist) is far from straight-forward.2 And just as there is no one trueMarxism, so too is there no one standard forassessing sociological Marxism. However, twoconceptions of Marxism as a social sciencehave been advanced by influential sociologicalMarxists that, we believe, taken togetherprovide a useful starting point. Wright (1989a)

2A good example of these complexities can be seen in thework of Pierre Bourdieu. Although Bourdieu had an earlyengagement with Marxism, and class reproduction was oneof the abiding themes of his work, we make the somewhatarbitrary decision not to include him (or his American fol-lowers) as Marxists, however much his work has contributedto the understanding of class and class dynamics that lie atthe heart of sociological Marxism.

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suggests what he calls a realist model of knowl-edge in which Marxist theories can and shouldbe adjudicated with non-Marxist theories toassess which provides a sounder basis for theexplanation of key social phenomena. Burawoy(1990) suggests, by contrast, a post-Kuhnianmodel of Marxism as social science, buildingprincipally on the writings of Lakatos (1978).Here, Marxism’s status as a scientific body ofthought depends on whether it can effectivelyrespond to the challenges, or puzzles, thrownup by history or theoretical competitors. Takentogether, we believe that these two contrastingmodels provide a fair standpoint for assessingneo-Marxism’s legacy.

Our discussion is organized as follows. InPart One, we present a brief overview of thehistorical context and development of Marx-ist sociology in the United States, situating theresurgence of interest in Marxism within thediscipline in the broader turmoil of the 1960sand 1970s. Part Two provides a detailed analysisof the impact of Marxist scholarship in four keysubfields in the discipline [following Burawoy’s(1982) original specification in the early 1980s]:the political sociology of the state, inequalityand class analysis, work and the labor process,and global political economy. In Part Three, weturn to a consideration of some reasons why so-ciological Marxism declined significantly in the1990s. Here, we explicitly consider the largerpolitical environment and the analytical short-comings of neo-Marxist models. Part Four of-fers some brief speculations about the possi-ble futures of sociological Marxism, consideringsome of the pathways that leading Marxists ofthe 1970s generation have charted, and whereand in what ways younger Marxists seem poisedto continue to make robust contributions.

I: RESURGENT SOCIOLOGICALMARXISM: A HISTORICALOVERVIEW

The historical relationship between Marxismand sociology is complex. It is plausible to as-sert that the rise of sociology in Europe isinconceivable without a sustained dialogue in

opposition to Marxism (e.g., Bottomore 1984).But the origins of the discipline in the UnitedStates, by contrast, are largely found elsewhere,in the worlds of theology and the progressivereform impulse in the aftermath of the socialDarwinism of Spencer and his followers (cf.Calhoun 2007b, Breslau 2007).

In some respects, it is hard to imagine aplace less likely to have experienced a majorMarxist revival than the United States. At nopoint prior to the 1960s was there a significantMarxist presence in American sociology ormajor engagement (even if critical) with Marx-ist ideas. The combination of the Cold War, anearly complete lack of a socialist tradition, androbust non-Marxist radical currents (in soci-ology, for example, in the work of social criticssuch as C. Wright Mills and his followers) madeit unlikely that a significant group of Americansociologists would turn toward Marxism as asource of radical renewal. Yet large numbersof the 1960s generation of social scientists didembrace Marxism, at least for a time, and madeserious commitments to developing its insights.Sociology was but one of many academic dis-ciplines challenged by this neo-Marxist revival(on the spread of Marxism in the Americanacademy, see Ollman & Vernoff 1982).

The surge of interest in Marxism in Amer-ican sociology beginning in the late 1960sis less surprising in retrospect than it wouldappear. Disciplinary fragmentation—long thebane of conservative critics of sociology (e.g.,Horowitz 1993)—made infiltration of alterna-tive paradigms possible. Further, the size of theAmerican higher education sector is unique on aglobal scale, and careers can thus draw on alter-native theoretical movements and intellectualcurrents. The New Left, strengthened immea-surably in the United States by opposition to theVietnam War, helped spawn a new critical in-telligentsia that entered the academy and foundopportunities to extend their commitments tosocial justice into professional careers. Sociol-ogy proved an especially receptive disciplinaryenvironment for the exploration of radicalthought and the development of researchprograms pushing the boundaries [see the

www.annualreviews.org • Neo-Marxist Legacy in American Sociology 157

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biographical essays in Sica & Turner (2006) forexamples].

Evidence of the growing interest in Marxismin the 1970s abounds. The journals spawnedby Marxist-inspired scholarship provide oneangle to consider its impact. While MonthlyReview and Science and Society were the onlyactive Marxist social science journals of any sig-nificance publishing in the United States before1968, between 1968 and 1980 the following so-ciological or social science journals with explic-itly Marxist agendas began publishing: Politicsand Society, Kapitalstate, Telos, Socialist Revolu-tion (later Socialist Review), Critical Sociology, andPolitical Power and Social Theory. Another sign ofthe growing interest in Marxism was the rapidtranslation of European (non-Soviet) Marxistworks into English. The classics of WesternMarxism were published in an astonishinglyshort period, enabling American social scien-tists to begin to absorb the full range of criticalMarxist thought (Long 1980).3 But the publica-tion of Marxist scholarship was hardly limitedto specialized journals or presses. In 1982, aspecial issue of the flagship American Journal ofSociology, edited by Michael Burawoy andTheda Skocpol, was devoted to “MarxistInquiries.” The 10 papers it published featuredempirical research applying or developingMarxist concepts to topics as varied as artisanlabor, the patterning of military expenditures,proletarianization of the American classstructure, the political economy of food, andintellectuals in state socialist societies. Theeditors reported receiving more than 150submissions for the special issue (Burawoy &Skocpol 1982b). Landmark scholarship thatexplicitly or implicitly had a Marxist pedigreeabounded throughout the 1970s, and leadinguniversity and commercial presses regularlypublished many of these studies. Three ofthe five annual book awards given by the

3The role of the journal Telos, founded by sociologist PaulPiccone in 1968, deserves special note in this regard. In itscramped pages appeared numerous translations of classicaland previously unavailable works of the Western Marxistcanon.

American Sociological Association (ASA) be-tween 1975 and 1980 were given to works thatwere explicitly or essentially of neo-Marxistorigin: Wallerstein’s (1974) The Modern WorldSystem, Paige’s (1975) Agrarian Revolution, andSkocpol’s (1979) States and Social Revolutions.

Significant milestones and markers of pro-fessional influence of sociological Marxism canbe identified throughout the 1980s. However,by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, interest inMarxism within the discipline clearly and un-ambiguously declined. McAdam (2007) notesthat Marxism had already begun losing groundamong younger scholars and graduate studentsin favor of other inequality schools by the mid-1980s. Major Marxist studies would continue tobe recognized in the ASA’s annual book com-petition [e.g., Wright 1997, Lachmann 2000;Chibber 2004 received honorable mention asthe runner-up]. But even a cursory review ofleading American sociological journals in re-cent years reveals a paucity of Marxist-inspiredscholarship in the 1990s and 2000s comparedwith the 1970s and 1980s.

II: THE CONTRIBUTIONSOF NEO-MARXISTSOCIOLOGY

Although no major subfield in American sociol-ogy was untouched by neo-Marxist ideas duringthis heyday, several key subfields commandedthe bulk of Marxist research. In his 1982 in-troduction to the special issue of the AmericanJournal of Sociology devoted to Marxism,Burawoy identified four such subfields as keyareas of the neo-Marxist resurgence: (a) the cap-italist state, (b) class structure and class analysis,(c) work and the labor process, and (d ) inter-national political economy and global develop-ment. We review each in the next sections ofthe article.

The Capitalist State

Perhaps the most widely debated conceptassociated with the resurgence of Marxismfrom the late 1970s onward was the state, or


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more particularly the capitalist state (for re-views, see Carnoy 1984, van den Berg 1988,Barrow 1993). Classical Marxism viewed statesas important arenas of dominant class rule, andin the case of the capitalist state an institu-tional ensemble dedicated to preserving cap-italism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx &Engels famously described the state as “a com-mittee for managing the common affairs ofthe whole bourgeoisie” (Marx & Engels 1978[1848], p. 475). This model contains both sub-tlety and ambiguity: If it is to represent the cap-italist class as a whole, the state has to remain atleast partially autonomous from the narrow in-terests of particular segments of the bourgeoisieand defend the system as a whole, without spec-ifying how. Other formulations provided sim-ilar kinds of accounts. In Marx’s (1978 [1859])famous summary of the logic of historical ma-terialism in his preface to A Contribution to theCritique of Political Economy, he emphasizes thatpolitical institutions are “conditioned” by thedominant economic system and “correspond”to it, without asserting that they mechanicallyrepresent particular capitalist interests.

The subtlety of Marx & Engel’s origi-nal treatment of the state would, however,largely be lost to second and third InternationalMarxists, who routinely reduced the capitaliststate to a tool of the dominant class and deridedthe development of democratic political institu-tions as what Lenin described as a mere “shell”designed to protect capitalism by giving work-ers the illusion of equal political rights (Lenin1975 [1918]). Lenin was reflecting on the pecu-liar conditions of Russia, but his writings on thestate were soon canonized to apply everywhere.American Marxist Paul Sweezy, for example,claimed in 1942 that the state is “an instrumentin the hands of the ruling class for enforcingand guaranteeing the stability of the class struc-ture itself” (Sweezy 1968 [1942], p. 243). Dis-senting voices, such as that of Gramsci (1971[1929–1935]), postulated a vision of the stateas contributing to the hegemony of capitalistinterests in part by making meaningful conces-sions of one kind or another. This implied aradical departure from instrumentalist views of

classical Marxism, but one that would remainlargely forgotten until the massive internationalrediscovery of Gramsci in the 1970s (see espe-cially Poulantzas 1973, 1978).

The rediscovery of the state by neo-Marxists in the 1970s was part of a much largermovement in the social sciences in which theforgotten state suddenly became the focus ofconsiderable theoretical and analytical work(see Alford & Friedland 1985, Almond 1988;for an overview of how the state disappeared inthe first place, see Ciepley 2000). For a time inthe 1970s and 1980s, vigorous debates across arange of issues concerning the state were rou-tinely found in leading social science journals.

The contribution of neo-Marxism toreigniting the state debate was considerable. Todo so, neo-Marxist political sociologists had tobreak out of the straightjackets of the classicalinstrumentalist view of the state that was thehallmark of twentieth-century Marxist thought.The vehicles for this analytical move werewidely read commentaries on radical theoriesof the state in the early 1970s that emphasizedthe upper-class backgrounds of key person-nel at the top of contemporary capitalist states(Poulantzas 1969; Gold et al. 1975a,b). Thetargets of their attack—principally Domhoff(1967) and Miliband (1969)—were said, ratherunfairly in retrospect, to offer an instrumen-talist model of the state because they focusedattention on the social origins of the personnelstaffing key positions within the state appara-tus. The critics postulated a structuralist alter-native in which, rather than the actors and statemanagers playing key roles, a capitalist state iscompelled to protect the long-run interests ofcapitalism given the centrality of the economicsystem in the social order irrespective of who isin charge (see, e.g., Poulantzas 1973, Therborn1978).

The critical idea from the structuralistneo-Marxist theory of the state was the notionthat the capitalist state had to have relativeautonomy from the dominant classes if it wasto protect capitalism as an economic system.This autonomy could only be relative in thatthe capitalist state is always constrained to


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adopt policies that are supportive of the needsof capital accumulation. In other words, thestate is autonomous from individual capitalistsbut not from capitalism as a system.

The structuralist Marxist accounts of theearly to mid-1970s received a great deal ofacclaim, and work in political sociology onthe state and related topics almost univer-sally contained ritual citations to Poulantzas(1969, 1973, 1975, 1978), O’Connor (1973),Wright (1978), Therborn (1978), and others.Ultimately, however, interest in the structural-ist account waned. Among its shortcomings wasthe lack of clear mechanisms to account for howrelative autonomy could occur over and over. Inother words, why would the capitalist state al-ways end up reproducing capitalism? This workcame to be seen as both functionalist and ul-timately empirically empty [see van den Berg(1988) for a hostile but serious critique].

The most innovative neo-Marxist attemptto suggest mechanisms that account for stateautonomy is the work of Block (1987). In aseries of essays published in the 1970s, Blockargued that the state’s tendency to act in em-ployers’ interests is an outcome of the strugglebetween three actors: capitalists, workers, andstate managers. State managers tend to act inthe interests of capitalists because their positiondepends on the maintenance of high levels ofeconomic investment and output, both to insureadequate tax revenues and to maintain publicsupport for the government’s ability to managethe economy. This manifests in an abiding con-cern for business confidence on the part of statemanagers, independent of anything else. How-ever, Block also asserted that antibusiness re-forms can occur in moments of economic crisis,war, or working-class mobilization from below.Under any of these conditions, business confi-dence is said to become less salient and the classbias of the state is reduced.

Block’s thesis about state managers as ac-tors presaged the even sharper pathway out ofMarxism for Skocpol (1979, 1980, 1992).Although overtly critical of Marxism in herfamous prolegomenon to her 1979 classicStates and Social Revolutions, her account of the

relationship between states and dominantclasses in that book can certainly be read asa Marxist account [as Wright (2006, p. 334)has recently noted]. But as she moved towardstudies of the American New Deal and the his-tory of American social policy (Skocpol 1980,1992), Skocpol pushed much further in em-phasizing the idea that independent state man-agers and other polity insiders played decisiveroles in achieving reforms that were frequentlyopposed by both capitalists and working-classorganizations.

The most wide-ranging debates about thestate from the mid-1980s onward, and thecontext in which the neo-Marxist theory ofthe state ultimately lost ground, was the evo-lution of theoretical and empirical work on thewelfare state. Political context here is especiallyimportant. With the rise of Reagan/Thatcher inthe Anglo-American world and the increasingstruggles of social democratic parties in Europe,welfare state retrenchment was suddenly on theagenda. Even if these threats would prove farless serious than they appeared at the time, therewas clear evidence that the golden age of wel-fare capitalism was ending (Esping-Andersen2001). This generated a newfound apprecia-tion among many Marxists and non-Marxistradicals alike of the potential for welfare statesto permanently transform capitalist economies.

This represented a fundamental, if oftenunremarked, shift. Early neo-Marxist welfarestate theories offered a logic strikingly similar tothat of the then dominant “logic of industrial-ism” model from the modernization paradigm(e.g., Cutright 1965, Wilensky 1975). As Myles(1984, p. 93) put it, radical theorists sometimesadopted a “logic of capitalism” model thatlargely substitutes capitalism for industrializa-tion. Where the “logic of industrialism” thesisposited that industrialization generates socialproblems necessitating welfare state institu-tions, the “logic of capitalism” position is thatmarket capitalism generates crisis tendenciesand surplus workers that welfare states are re-quired to ameliorate and placate, respectively.For example, in O’Connor’s (1973) famousformulation of the fiscal crisis of the state, the


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welfare state arises because of the need for thecapitalist state to manage the contradictionsbetween accumulation and legitimation (withsocial provision facilitating legitimation).

From this early Marxist foundation, anincreasingly mainstream “power resources”model of the welfare state eventually becameone of the dominant models of social provi-sion. The incorporation of class political fac-tors in the making of welfare states provided akey point of departure for “power resources”scholarship (see Korpi 1983, 1989; Esping-Andersen 1990). The “power resources” modelthus started from a set of Marxist assumptions:Unequal class relationships facilitate the forma-tion of social groups with distinct and compet-ing interests, and the resulting political inequal-ities shaped the formation of state interests(for early examples, see Stephens 1979, Esping-Andersen 1985, Pontusson 1992). Because elec-tions and unions provide the numerically largerworking class with some degree of politicalpower, workers and their middle-class allieswere ultimately able to exert significant pol-icy influence. Class conflict—the democraticclass struggle in Korpi’s (1983) influential earlyformulation—is thus a central mechanism inthe development of welfare states. Because thecapacities of core classes such as industrial own-ers, farmers, and manual workers vary overtime and across national context, the subse-quent development of welfare states reflects theinstitutionalization of different patterns of classalliance. At one level, the “power resources”model is deeply indebted to Marxism. But overtime, scholars within the power resources tra-dition have paid increasing attention to the roleof nonclass forces, such as political institutions,gender relations, and the strategic dilemmas ofsocial democratic parties, that go far beyondanything in classical Marxism (for a recent sum-mary, see Brooks & Manza 2007, ch. 1).

The most lasting legacy of the “power re-sources” model is the development of an eleganttypology of welfare state regimes, first advancedby Esping-Andersen (1990). The common ver-sion of this typology postulates three distincttypes of welfare state regimes: those repre-

sented by the social democracies of Scandinavia,the Christian democracies of mainland Europe,and the liberal democracies of the Anglo-American world (Esping-Andersen 1990,Korpi & Palme 1998). The classification ofwelfare states into regime types has been widelyinfluential, and for good reason: It has provideda parsimonious means of capturing features ofwelfare state variation that have proven robustin subsequent scholarship. Yet paradoxically,this model almost neatly reverses the classicalMarxist model of causation. Once established,welfare state regime types create their ownform of path dependency in which causalityflows from the political to the economic.

Class Analysis and Inequality

Like several other key concepts in the Marxisttradition, class was regularly invoked but neverrigorously defined by Marx. The section onclass in Volume 3 of Capital famously breaksoff after a few very general introductory para-graphs, and in various other places Marx (1978[1894]) discusses class without fully defining itor consistently using it throughout his work.Nevertheless, concepts such as class structure,class struggle, and class consciousness werekey analytical concepts that lay at the heart ofclassical Marxist theory. Class has been invokedto account for the patterns and possibilities ofsocial change at the macro level, as well as indi-vidual behaviors and attitudes at the micro level.

In the early 1970s, neo-Marxist sociologistsentered the field of stratification research tochallenge the individualistic assumptions of thesubfield. The widely influential model of statusattainment, made famous by Blau & Duncan(1967) in The American Occupational Structure,offered a clear mainstream target. Blau & Dun-can sought to explain who gets what by lookingat attributes of individuals, such as their parents’education, individuals’ own schooling, and theirfirst job. For neo-Marxist class analysts, thestatus attainment tradition was fundamentallyasking the wrong question in two senses: (a) Itfocused on individual outcomes, rather thanaggregate class structures, and (b) it was,


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as Wright (1979, ch. 1) famously put it, agradational account based on individualcriteria, when a relational analysis based onrigorously defined class categories wouldprovide more analytical leverage. The task of aneo-Marxist class analysis would be to theorizethe structure of positions within contemporarycapitalist societies, rather than the individualswho occupied those places.

However, the central problem of neo-Marxist class theory so defined soon emerged:the need to theorize to the enormous changesin class structure that had occurred in capital-ist democracies since Marx’s death. Marx &Engels’s (1978 [1848]) model of classes incapitalist societies postulated a core divisionbetween owners of the means of production(the bourgeoisie) and those who sell their la-bor power (the proletariat). Although acknowl-edging the existence of intermediate strata(principally the self-employed, or petty bour-geoisie, and farmers), they saw these interme-diate classes as slowly disappearing with theadvance of industrial capitalism.

The dramatic growth of the middle class inthe twentieth century thus represented some-thing of an embarrassment for neo-Marxism (asWright 1985 noted). The boundary problem—that is, how to conceptualize these middle-classstrata while remaining within a Marxistframework—would occupy a generation ofscholarship but prove intractably difficultto solve within a Marxist framework. Thesimplest solution was to assert that white-collarprofessionals and managers were part of theworking class (thus making the working classclose to 90% of the population in many richcapitalist democracies). But this hardly seemedplausible to anyone given the huge differencesin work situations and life chances among suchan enlarged working class. Another solutionin the 1970s was to emphasize the inherentambiguity of middle-class positions in thesocial structure. For example, Poulantzas(1975) and Szymanski (1984) suggested thatwhite-collar workers were a new petty bour-geoisie, in contrast to the old petty bourgeoisieconsisting of small employers. Wright (1978)

advanced a compromise view, asserting thatsalaried white-collar workers, as well asblue-collar foremen and supervisors, stood incontradictory class locations (albeit with thecontradiction referring as much to Marxistclass theory as to the actual class structures).

These early neo-Marxist attempts at solvingthe boundary problem primarily served todisplace rather than solve it, as they generallyfailed to specify clear and theoretically derivedmechanisms that would place incumbents intoappropriate class locations. This was the subjectof a serious effort by Wright in the mid-1980s(Wright 1985, 1989b). Wright identifiedthree unevenly distributed assets—property,organizational power, and credentials—thatpotentially provide the basis for exploitation.But to solve the conceptual problem of the mid-dle class, Wright embedded within his modelvarious elements (organizational and credentialassets) that had no clear status within the Marx-ist tradition. The result was a class map thatbore considerable similarity to competing neo-Weberian schemes such as those of Erikson& Goldthorpe (1992) and Heath et al. (1985).Neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian schemeswere based on workplace criteria involvingsupervisorial powers and some combination ofeducational or professional credentials, withthe latter using a coding of occupational titles,whereas Wright’s map was derived from indi-vidual survey responses. As Goldthorpe (2008)has recently noted, the differences betweenthe schemes are far smaller than textbookcomparisons suggest; they share far more thanthey fundamentally disagree on. Sophisticatedcontemporary work on inequality readilyincorporates insights of both models to under-stand both class exploitation and group-basedclosure processes (cf. Tilly 1998, Massey 2007).

As we noted above, trends in income andwealth inequality since the 1970s have shownunambiguous and, in the case of the UnitedStates in particular, large increases. If thepurpose of class analysis is to provide somepurchase on the patterning of inequality, it mustprovide some analytical leverage to account forthose trends. One critical challenge of rising


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inequality for a Marxist class analysis is todemonstrate that inequality has grown betweenclasses, or that a class-based explanation ofunderlying social and political trends providesthe best explanation. To put it another way,the challenge is to show that the patterning ofexploitation and domination accounts for whyworkers are receiving a declining share of theeconomic pie.

Marxist class analysis—along with manynon-Marxist accounts—has struggled to pro-vide a viable answer. There is little evidencethat increasing categorical inequalities (such asclass) can provide the needed leverage for asystematic understanding of rising inequality(Morris & Western 1999, Leicht 2008). Whydo otherwise elegant neo-Marxist class schemesfail to pick up rising income inequality? Datalimitations provide one answer, but operationalchoices suggest others. Wright (1985), for ex-ample, operationalizes his bourgeoisie categoryas business owners with ten or more employees,and in a small survey this will inevitably lumptogether such disparate bourgeoisie as thosewho own gas stations with those who own hedgefunds or very large companies (cf. Marshall et al.1988). But that is not the end of the problem.Evidence about rising income and wealth in-equality has simply not shown that ownershipassets (in the classical Marxian sense) are the keyfactor. Piketty & Saez (2010) show that the top1% of households increased their share of totalincome from under 10% in the early 1970s to23.5% in 2007 (with the vast bulk of that in-crease going to the top half of the top 1%). Canthis top group be meaningfully characterized inclass terms? Is this a case of a big bourgeoisiepulling away from everyone else? Such a claimis inevitably flawed, as only a modest proportionof the group are property owners in the classicalsense (cf. Bakija et al. 2010). Further, there is noclear pattern in terms of industry or sector. Thelargest group (approximately 40% of the top0.1%) are high-earning CEOs (who exploit or-ganizational assets to claim enormous incomes),followed by financial and hedge fund managersand employees (most of whom are highly com-pensated employees of investment banks and

use knowledge assets to secure high incomes),some high-earning professionals (same as pre-vious), and a scattering of other breakthroughentrepreneurs (many of whom exploit mar-ket niches with expert knowledge) and winner-take-all performers in various fields (includingsports and entertainment). There is, in short,no clear and coherent class logic to identify thisunique but critical group.

Further, nonclass considerations play an in-creasingly critical role in understanding risinginequality at the household level (McCall &Percheski 2010). For example, at the householdlevel marriage patterns are increasingly impor-tant. In a significant analysis, Schwartz (2010)recently showed that approximately 40% of theincrease in inequality at the top of the distribu-tion of household income is due to high earnersmarrying other high earners. Piketty & Saez(2010) report that in 2008, $368,000 was re-quired to be considered part of the top 1% ofyearly wage earners at the household level; thegender revolution allowed some women accessto high-paid employment opportunities, which,combined with rising marital homogamy, cre-ated an entirely new group of high-earninghouseholds at the top of the distribution (seealso Conley 2009 for further discussion).

If the key to understanding rising inequalitylies in examining the remarkable increases atthe very top, however, then the role of classanalysis may nonetheless provide other sortsof critical insight. At the heart of these shiftsin the United States are political and policyshifts that distinguish the United States fromother rich democracies (e.g., Hacker & Pierson2010a, Manza 2011). For example, in theUnited States, public policy has reduced taxburdens on high earners, allowed private sectorunions to decline to near irrelevance, permittedcorporations to compensate CEOs lavishly,promoted deregulation, and unleashed thefinancial sector. It is almost impossible to ac-count for these changes without paying carefulattention to macro class factors, both in thepolitical mobilization at the top and weaknessof countervailing forces from below. A massivecorporate mobilization led by peak business


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associations beginning in the late 1970spowerfully challenged the New Deal legacy(e.g., Akard 2001, Krugman 2007, Hacker &Pierson 2010a). Financial policy organizations,powerful lobbying operations, dramaticallyincreasing political donations by corporationsand wealthy individuals, and strengtheningties of these groups to Republican and Demo-cratic party leaders all contributed to a policyenvironment that fostered rapid growth ofinequality (Rich 2004, Kuttner 2007, Pierson& Skocpol 2007). Of particular note is theremarkable and powerful political mobilizationof finance capital, whose repeated large andsmall victories changed the nature of financeand allowed for rapid if ultimately unstablegrowth ( Johnson & Kwak 2010, Stiglitz 2010,Krippner 2011). The flip side of upper-classmobilization was the decline of organized la-bor. Workers had declining capacity to demanda greater share of profits, and the politicaland legal underpinnings of union organizationhave played a critical role in its steady decline(Fantasia 1988; Freeman 2007, ch. 5).

None of these points would be surprising topolitical sociologists who have long advocateda class-centered understanding of Americanpolitics (e.g., Piven & Cloward 1997, Domhoff2010), but what is striking is that a very similarkind of analysis is now being adopted by manynon-Marxist analysts (e.g., Graetz & Shapiro2005, Skocpol & Jacobs 2005, Hacker &Pierson 2010a, Jacobs & Soss 2010). This leadsto some surprising bedfellows and a confusedintellectual history. For example, in theirimportant recent work on the politics of risinginequality, Hacker & Pierson (2010b) criticizetheir fellow political scientists for neglectingthe role of business interests; this prompteda sharp retort from Block & Piven (2010,pp. 205–6), who suggest that “this is hardly thefirst time that political scientists have recog-nized the centrality of business power to Amer-ican politics . . . . Nevertheless, Hacker & Pier-son are certainly correct that their recent redis-covery is urgent, important, and a needed cor-rective to mainstream work in political science.”This surprising convergence underscores that a

Marxist analysis of the politics of inequality—ifnot necessarily all political conflicts—remainshighly relevant to understanding key featuresof the regime of rising inequality.

Work and the Labor Process

Marx wrote widely on the nature of work, bothin his early philosophical writings on alienationand human labor and in his mature work onthe accumulation process and the extractionof surplus value at the point of production.Prior to the neo-Marxist resurgence, however,relatively few Marxists had taken up thesethemes. The predominant drift in postwarindustrial sociology was toward a much morepositive (albeit not uncritical) view of work andthe labor process under capitalism than that ofMarx. The classics of industrial sociology tookon the economistic assumptions about humanbehavior in Taylorism by arguing that workerswere not primarily motivated by economicself-interests. In The Social Problems of IndustrialCivilization, Mayo (2007 [1945]) argued thatwork could be shaped to satisfy workers’emotional needs. Mayo presented the factoryas a social system where technical and humanorganization affects the social conditions ofthe workers and, in turn, their output. Mayowas writing at the high tide of America’spostwar global dominance, in an era of risingproductivity and wages and declining incomeinequality, and optimism about the future ofconflict-free workplaces abounded. For exam-ple, the influential work of Kerr & Dunlop(1960) argued that new technologies requiringever higher levels of skill and responsibilitywould provide opportunities for individualsatisfaction and advancement for workers.

The widespread optimism about shop floorsatisfaction and class compromise found inmuch postwar industrial sociology, however,hardly captured the underlying dynamics ofpersistent workplace conflict. Even the seem-ingly placid 1950s were a hot decade of laborconflict, with 5.3% of the entire labor forcein 1955 on strike at some point during theyear, and as late as 1970 fully 4.7% of the U.S.


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workforce went on strike at some point (andmany more on unrecorded wildcat strikes)(Moody 2007, p. 99). International labor un-rest in the late 1960s in places such as France,Italy, and Britain further signaled that indus-trial sociology was missing an important aspectof the nature of work and labor conflict.

In this context, the appearance of neo-Marxist scholarship on the labor process in the1970s and 1980s found an important opening.The most widely read contribution was a bookauthored by Harry Braverman (1974), a formersteelworker, editor, and longtime socialist ac-tivist. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, Bravermanargued that capitalism incrementally reduces aworker’s control over the work process by deep-ening the division of labor and separating theconception of work tasks from their execution.This process of deskilling, as Braverman de-scribed it, is rooted in the steady application ofever more precise ways of monitoring and con-trolling the work of subordinates. Bravermanargued that the issue of shop floor control is lit-erally inseparable from the imperatives of tech-nology and managerial control. Braverman’sargument—and its wide resonance with a newgeneration of radical sociologists—reenergizedthe study of the workplace and shifted it infundamentally new and critical directions. Oneimportant source of tension in Braverman’saccount, however, was its derivation of theobjective components of the labor processfrom managerial ambitions to control workers,rather than from the perspective of work-ers themselves. Many of the leading laborhistorians of the same era, notably Gutman(1977), Montgomery (1979), and Brody (1980),examined changes in the labor process fromthe vantage point of the lived experiences ofworkers and working-class communities toprovide a quite different account riddled withtensions and conflict. Braverman’s historicalaccount of managerial power was also chal-lenged in the writings of heterodox radicaleconomists Edwards (1979) and Gordon et al.(1982), who developed an influential historicalaccounts of the complex and shifting strategiesof control at work.

It was the work of sociologist MichaelBurawoy (1979, 1985) that fully reengaged thefield of industrial sociology, reinvigorating itwith a Gramscian account that used ethnogra-phies of the shop floor to explore how workers’consciousness is shaped at work. Burawoy’spuzzle was a deceptively simple one: Whydo workers work as hard as they do, or moregenerally, under what types of labor systems isworker consent most, or least, readily achieved?In the south Chicago factory he studied whilein graduate school, he reported a collectivestriving among workers to achieve levels ofproduction above 100% in a piece-rate systemas the basis for status hierarchies in the shop.The games workers played to come in above100%, but not so far above as to be a ratebuster, increased antagonisms between workerswhile decreasing conflict with management.Burawoy’s later writings, building on his ethno-graphic research in places such as Zambia,Hungary, and Russia, distinguished differenttypes of factory regimes that result from themix of actual labor processes and the largerpolitical environment (including union power,labor law, and macroeconomic conditions)regulating class struggle (Burawoy 1985, 2009).

The influence of Burawoy’s work on a gen-eration of scholarship on the labor process, andindeed in regenerating interest in Marx’s classi-cal puzzles about the labor process, was consid-erable (see, for example, the review symposiumin Contemporary Sociology 2001). Yet over time,even those who welcomed Burawoy’s distinc-tions and ethnographic methods found it neces-sary to stretch the distinctions to fit the realitiesof the global workplaces they investigated.Some suggest that Burawoy’s assumptions leadhim to miss the critical role of gender, race, ornationality (Salzinger 2001). Others, however,sought to elaborate his framework to incorpo-rate nonclass factors. Lee (1998) demonstrateshow labor markets interact with gender to cre-ate a distinct set of labor process outcomes intwo manufacturing firms in China. She arguesthat the organization of local labor markets pro-duces different conditions of workers’ depen-dence on employers. Similarly, McKay (2006)


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uses Burawoy’s framework to identify distincttypes of work regimes in high-tech factories inthe Philippines, but suggests critical variationin the logics of control depending on the natureof the product that the firm manufactures (i.e.,capital-intensive or labor-intensive), the natureof production (i.e., complex or deskilled), andthe gendered dimensions of the labor pool thatthe factory draws on. Munoz (2008) examinesthe role of citizenship and race in workplaceorganization in Mexico and U.S. factories.

It would be impossible to conclude thatthe literature on work and the labor processin American sociology has not been heavilystamped with a strong neo-Marxist influence.In particular, its focus on questions of work-place conflict and in problematizing how em-ployers secure workers’ consent remains vitalto the field. In particular, as despotic laborpractices around the world persist, neo-Marxistmodels of work will have a continuing vital-ity. However, historical and theoretical devel-opments have arisen that may not be well-suitedto neo-Marxist models. For example, in the richdemocracies—where a rapidly growing shareof employment is in professional and manage-rial occupations, as well as in other types ofwhite-collar work where employers’ control isfar weaker—neo-Marxist theories of the laborprocess may have significantly less relevance.Further, theoretical work on markets and or-ganizations over the past 40 years raises seri-ous questions about whether shop floor studiesthat have been the hallmark of the neo-Marxistrevival (with their characteristic focus on pro-duction) capture the full range of dynamics atplay. We take up these issues in the concludingsection of the review.

Global Political Economy,Development, and Capitalism

Karl Marx, like Adam Smith before him,anticipated that capitalism would develop ona global scale. In the Communist Manifesto,for example, Marx & Engels (1978 [1848],p. 212) famously wrote that “[t]he need for aconstantly expanding market for its products

chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surfaceof the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settleeverywhere, establish connections every-where.” Early Marxists explicitly theorizedprocesses of economic and political globaliza-tion, paying particular attention to the roleof imperialism in shaping capitalist regimes.Lenin (1975 [1917]) wrote an influential essayon imperialism, viewing it as “the last stage ofcapitalism” as capitalists scrambled for places tomaintain profitability because of “falling ratesof profit” in domestic economies. Luxemburg(2003 [1913]) argued that global expansion wasfar from new, instead positing that from itsinception, capitalism thrived by expanding intononcapitalist regions. Hilferding (2006 [1910])provided an early and insightful analysis intothe role of international finance in capitalistdevelopment. For the early Bolsheviks, theprospect of a revolutionary seizure of powervirtually required a global revolution, a notionmost clearly articulated in Trotsky’s (2007[1929]) theory of permanent revolution. Theseearly ideas about the global dimension ofcapitalism, developed at a time when interna-tional trade and the spread of foreign empireswere peaking, began to recede as processesof globalization faded sharply after the 1920s.Stalin’s edict that “socialism in one country”was possible did not end the internationalismof the Communist movement, but under Stal-inism, it would be increasingly oriented aroundprotecting the interests of the Soviet Union.

In postwar American sociology, questionsof the international character of capitalismand the role of imperialism had no place inthe dominant modernization paradigm (e.g.,Parsons 1960, Rostow 1960). The modelasserted that individual nation-states were allon the same continuum toward modernization,with more backward places failing to developthe kinds of institutions—among them freemarkets, a quality system of education for allcitizens, a legal system able to enforce contractsand protect private property, and competentand corruption-free governments—necessaryto become a prosperous democratic nation (seeAlmond & Coleman 1960, Hoselitz 1960).


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The explosion of anticolonial struggles inAfrica, Asia, and Latin America in the 1960swould undergird a Third World Marxism, mostwell known from the writings of Mao, FranzFanon, Che Guevara, and Regis Debray. ThirdWorld Marxism held considerable appeal forMarxist political activists and for a time in theearly 1970s for the emerging generation ofMarxist social scientists as well (cf. Burawoy2006). Marxists sought to draw lessons and the-orize from these struggles. The primary chal-lenge to modernization theory would indeedcome from scholars influenced by their inves-tigation of developments in Africa, especiallyin the widely debated world-systems theory(WST) of Immanuel Wallerstein first launchedin the early 1970s (see Wallerstein 1974, 1979).

WST has provided a critical standpoint indebates about globalization within and aroundsociological Marxism since its introduction inthe early 1970s, and it has continued to main-tain an institutional presence in the larger dis-cipline (with journals and research institutesaround the country). When Wallerstein sys-tematized WST, the core linking mechanismwithin the modern world economy was saidto be a transnational division of labor, withsome countries systematically privileged at thecore, extracting resources from a dependentperiphery (Wallerstein 1979, p. 5). In turn,WST argues that it is impossible to look atnational societies as isolated and independent.Rather, the unit of analysis is the world system,which consists of a network of exchange tiesthat give the system certain causal properties(Wallerstein 1979, pp. 14–15). The system isdynamic; upward as well as downward mobil-ity is possible for individual societies (althoughrelatively rare). Those societies in intermediatepositions in the world system were labeled asthe semiperiphery, providing the key locationfor core investments when wages rise too highin older industrial centers (e.g., Ragin & Chirot1984).

A major proposition of WST is thatthese three zones—core, periphery, andsemiperiphery—are differentially rewarded onthe world market. This conclusion is derived

from a theory of unequal exchange (Emmanuel1972) in which core societies reproduce theirsuperior status through the exploitation ofperipheral societies via market exchange. Thesuppression of wages in peripheral societiesallows for significant disparities in global pricesand, in turn, reproduces core/periphery dis-tinctions. On balance, then, global trade is saidto result in the net transfer of value from theperiphery to the core (Chase-Dunn & Grimes1995, p. 396). Foreign direct investment wasviewed as particularly harmful to developingeconomies, at least in sociological dependencymodels (Boswell & Dixon 1990).

The WST analysis of the modern (capi-talist) world economy draws explicit links toMarxian theory and provides an essentiallyeconomistic view of global social and politicaldynamics. However, by the late 1970s, Marxistcritics had mounted powerful challenges toWST for its focus on markets rather than pro-duction (see, for example, Brenner 1977). Thedistance between WST and classical Marxismis by now well established [Wallerstein hasfrequently suggested that WST should beviewed as a critique of orthodox Marxism (see,e.g., Wallerstein 2004, p. 21)]. Yet there hasbeen much dialogue about global economicdevelopment and class conflict that continuesto maintain a close connection between thetwo. For instance, Silver (2003) demonstratesa long-term global pattern in which, as pro-duction expands, workers’ power expands andlabor unions eventually begin to develop andchallenge for a greater share of profits. Arrighi’s(1994) monumental study of global capitalismargues that recurring configurations of businessand state organizations lead to systemic cyclesof accumulation. According to Arrighi, thesecycles take the form of large-scale expansionsof capitalism into new areas of the globe,capital reaching the limit of this approach, andthe subsequent transfer of capital into high fi-nance. Parallel to this process, Arrighi & Silver(1999) argue that financial expansions lead toa decline in strength of the world’s hegemonicpowers, resulting in global chaos, followed by atransformation in the national bloc of business


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and state organizations that will emerge asthe new hegemonic powers. In his last workbefore his death, Arrighi (2007) postulates thata transition is under way in which China willsoon emerge as the next dominant core power.

What all neo-Marxist accounts of globalcapitalism—in WST or others such as Brenner(2006)—include is the continual focus on theinherent instabilities and crisis tendencies ofthe capitalist system [for example, compareWallerstein (2005) and his critic Brenner (2002,2006)]. Crisis has virtually been a leitmotif ofboth classical Marxism and the neo-Marxistrevival in any serious discussion of the globaleconomy. Every downturn has generatedits own literary cycle of doom and gloom.Crisis theory is a recognizable subfield withinMarxism, with competing analytical traditionsand sources of evidence (e.g., Wright 1978,ch. 3; O’Connor 1984; Davis 1986; Harvey2010). The focus on crisis tendencies withinglobal capitalism has produced a distinctivekind of understanding and emphasis that markssociological Marxism’s approach to globalpolitical economy as inherently distinct fromnon-Marxist competitors.

III: ASSESSING THELEGACY OF NEO-MARXISTSOCIOLOGY

In this section, we turn to an assessment of neo-Marxism in American sociology. We begin witha brief discussion of the declining interest in so-ciological Marxism since the late 1980s and thenturn to an analysis of the state of neo-Marxismin the critical fields we have reviewed in thisarticle.

What Happened to Marxist Sociologyin the United States?

If interest in neo-Marxism within Americansociology peaked between the mid-1970s andthe early 1980s, the heyday was a short one.A decade later, research explicitly employing aneo-Marxist framework or testing Marxist ideas

had declined significantly. Membership in theMarxist section of the ASA peaked in 1979 atjust under 600 members, declined for a timeto under 300 in the early 2000s, and has sta-bilized in recent years at around 400 mem-bers, at a time when other sections with in-equality themes have seen their membershipnumbers soar (McAdam 2007). For example,although in the late 1970s the Marxist sectionwas larger than the Sex and Gender section, to-day the latter has three times as many members;other inequality sections such as Race, Class andGender, and Racial and Ethnic Minorities werealso at least twice as large or more).

What happened? Although a complete an-swer goes beyond the parameters of this review,we suggest four critical points: (a) the declineof left politics and movements, (b) challenges ofneoliberalism and the reframing of social andpolitical debate after 1980, (c) the theoreticalpower of the critique of the primacy of classthesis from feminist and critical race theorists,and (d ) growing recognition of the egalitar-ian possibilities within market economies andthe nearly universal loss of confidence in cen-tral planning as a key organizing principle ofsocialism.

The failure to recruit a second generation ofsociological Marxists has to be placed, first andforemost, in the broader context of the changedpolitical circumstances since the 1970s. Themass movements on campuses against theVietnam War, and more broadly for racialjustice, gender equality, and other issues,provided one set of lived experiences for youngintellectuals. In addition to New Left activism,there was also plenty of rank-and-file unionactivism that provided hope for the possibilitiesof a broader working-class mobilization. Andthroughout the 1970s, a number of socialist or-ganizations sought to build ties to radical laborcurrents, and they provided radical intellectualsinside the University a context for thinkingabout the possibilities of a working-class mobi-lization with radical potential (Elbaum 2002).If that combination served to strengthen Marx-ism in the academy in the 1970s, by contrast,


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the drastic weakening of left forces after the late1970s provided no encouragement for youngerintellectuals to pursue Marxism (Petras 1990,Chibber 2006). A second critical context forthe decline of Marxism was the changingpolitical environment in the age of neoliber-alism. Radical scholars link their work in somefashion to the broader project of creating moreegalitarian societies. Since 1980, defending thewelfare state (even the very modest Americanversion) has been a constant challenge. Fromcriticizing welfare capitalism for its role inpropping up capitalism and/or its redistribu-tive shortcomings in the early 1970s, manyneo-Marxists (or former neo-Marxists) hadrediscovered its virtues (or at least prioritizedits continuing existence) (see Brooks & Manza2007, ch. 1 for examples).

The collapse of those forms of socialismthat had existed in Eastern Europe and theSoviet Union prior to 1989, as well as China’sdrift toward free market capitalism, also helpedundermine a source of real-world interest in thesocialist alternative. Few sociological Marxistsembraced Soviet-style socialism in any mean-ingful way. Nevertheless, periodic challengesto Communist rule—in Hungary in 1956,the Dubcek reform era in Czechoslovakia in1967–1968, the Solidarity movement in Polandin 1980–1981, the democratic movement inChina in 1989, and the attempted reforms inthe Gorbachev era in the Soviet Union—wereall dramatic moments that appeared to offerat least the hope of reforming actually existingsocialism from within. Each generated newinterest in the possibilities of socialist renewalfrom within state socialism. And there werealways dissident voices within Soviet-type soci-eties who found hope in the reform of socialismas the pathway toward a better world, and manyof these voices came from sociologists and the-orists who were read in the West (e.g., Bahro1978, Konrad & Szelenyi 1979, Kagarlitsky1990). But the continual crushing of reformistimpulses, and then the stunningly rapid collapseof socialist governments in Eastern Europe in1989, took away one critical foundation within

which Marxism had relevance—albeit an un-easy one—in the academy. Among sociologicalMarxists today, an unwillingness to seriously in-vestigate these societies, warts and all, has nowbeen viewed as a serious shortcoming for thelarger neo-Marxist project (Burawoy & Wright2002).

A third factor arises from the puzzle of thosescholars who confidently embraced Marxism asthe foundation for their analytical work earlyin their careers but chose not to sustain thatcommitment over time. Although there werea variety of pathways out of Marxism, thesedid not—unlike previous generations ofex-Marxists—typically entail abandoning acommitment to egalitarian politics altogether(relatively few of the 1960s/1970s generationof sociological Marxists became outrightneoconservatives). But the very openness ofthe New Left generation to other radicalcurrents made sociological Marxism vulner-able. In particular, the rise of new types ofcontentious politics around issues of gender,race, and sexuality fundamentally challengedMarxism’s critical primacy of class thesis. Forexample, Stacey & Thorne’s (1985) feministsociological manifesto in the mid-1980s tookspecial aim at Marxism’s ghettoization of the“Woman Question,” suggesting that “Marxistsociology has been even less affected byfeminist thought than have more mainstreambodies of sociology theory . . . . Analysis ofsex and gender is not easily absorbed withina Marxist conceptual framework” (p. 308).This issue was a deeply vexing one for Marxistscholars. Few sociological Marxists wouldcontinue to defend the primacy thesis in theface of feminist and critical race theory chal-lenges. As Fred Block (1987, p. 34) elegantlyput it:

Our collective project was to see if a coherenttheoretical framework could be shaped out ofthe “unknown dimension”—the more or lessunderground tradition of critical Marxism.But the task of producing coherence provedmore intractable than we had expected. We


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found that many of the key concepts thatpromised to provide coherence to a Marxistanalysis did so at the cost of an unjustifiablenarrowing of the array of causal factors.The Marxist concept of class, for example,tends to exclude the possibility that nonclasssocial actors could play a significant role indetermining historical outcomes. However,attempts to incorporate these nonclass socialactors into the theoretical framework resultin reduced coherence and a position that isno longer recognizably Marxist.

There were certainly serious attempts to de-velop Marxist analyses that could incorporategender or race, most notably in the classicalsocialist-feminist literature of the 1970s (see es-pecially the classical essays collected in Hansen& Philipson 1990); we noted also the case ofcreative work on the labor process that em-ployed some analytical tools of Marxism whileanalyzing female-dominated workplaces (Lee1998, Salzinger 2001). But in a fairly short pe-riod of time, the marriage of Marxism and fem-inism became an increasingly unhappy one, asHartmann (1981) once put it. A similar storycould be told about Marxist accounts of racialformation (see, for example, Omi & Winant1994).

Finally, a critical challenge to Marxism arosefrom a broader reassessment of the virtues ofmarkets, and the possibilities of achieving egal-itarian outcomes within the context of marketeconomies. Growing evidence of the inherentvarieties of capitalism would displace theclassical Marxist view of capitalism as a singlesocial system. Classical Marxism fundamentallyrejected the possibility that markets could bemeaningfully reshaped and restrained by a cap-italist state, which had the long-run interestsof capitalists (and capitalism) at the center ofits raison d’etre. Yet over time, unmistakableevidence emerged that diverse pathways werepossible for capitalist economies. The differ-ences between the social market economiesof western and northern Europe versus theliberal market economy in the United Statesare vast indeed (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1990,

Pontusson 2005). The notion that sustain-able forms of capitalism could be stronglyredistributive had to be acknowledged.4

Analytical Legacies

Turning now to the critical question of the an-alytical legacies of the neo-Marxist generation,we suggested in the introduction two modelsfor evaluating neo-Marxist social science fromwithin neo-Marxism: those of Burawoy (1990)and of Wright (1989a). The Burawoy modelemphasizes Marxism’s ability to continue togenerate interesting puzzles and to evolve inresponse to the challenges it faces from the-ory and history if it is to continue to be a pro-gressive scientific tradition. Wright, by con-trast, proposes a model of adjudication betweenMarxist and non-Marxist approaches, withMarxist sociology continually having to proveitself in relation to its competitors [we shouldnote that Wright has largely abandoned this re-alist position in his more recent writings (seee.g. Wright 2009)].

By these two standards, the legacies of theneo-Marxist movement in American sociologyare, at best, mixed. It is important at the outsetto note one undeniable accomplishment: bring-ing Marxist ideas into the sociological main-stream. Few serious American sociologists to-day can afford to be ignorant of some of thebasic insights of the Marxist tradition. Giventhe general expansion and fragmentation of thediscipline since the 1960s, this accomplishmenthas to be set alongside the growing numbersof theoretical schools and ideas that contempo-rary sociologists have to know a little somethingabout (see, e.g., Joas & Knobl 2009 [2004]); asMartin (2004) cleverly put it, theoretical plural-ism has led to an “I’m okay, you’re okay” sen-sibility in the discipline today. In other words,to the extent that the Marxist tradition has now

4Changing views about the market and growing acknowl-edgement of the weaknesses of centrally planned economiesled to a brief flurry of interest in market socialism in the 1980sand 1990s, before it too would largely disappear from the dis-cussion (e.g. Miller 1991, Roemer 1996, Ollman 1997).


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become simply one of many potential sourcesof inspiration, it loses its capacity to providean orienting worldview. Marxism becomes theMarxist tradition, one among many (Wright2009).

Beyond making Marxism relevant again,what are the substantive accomplishments ofsociological Marxism, in terms of the two mod-els of science? We can explore this questionsomewhat systematically by returning, briefly,to the four subfields we have investigated insome detail earlier in the review.

Political sociology of the state. SociologicalMarxism played an important role in stimulat-ing renewed interest in the state. But some fourdecades later, Marxist models of the state aretroubled, either in comparison with their capac-ity to protect the classical core or in competitionwith non-Marxist competitors. Marx was onlythe first—and certainly not the last—Marxistpolitical analyst to underestimate the capacityof the capitalist state to forge compromise be-tween classes. The rise of the welfare state, andthe kinds of equality it has produced in places ofits greatest success, has for 100 years frustratedMarxist and neo-Marxist efforts to theorize thecapitalist state. The Gramscian/Poulantzas ef-fort did not go nearly far enough. Poulantzas(1973, 1978) is no longer required reading forthe political sociologist, not just because hisopaque formulations prove nearly impossible tooperationalize and test against alternative mod-els, but also because the relative autonomy ofthe state has proven, on closer inspection, to bea rather empty formulation that cannot inspiresystematic research or generate new insights.Interestingly, the dismissal of plain Marxist orinstrumentalist theories of the state in the 1970sby structuralist Marxists such as Poulantzasnow appears remarkably facile. Critical theo-ries of power and political institutions todayare reexamining the core insights of the powerelite tradition begun by Mills (1956) and rep-resented today by Domhoff (2010), where in-tersecting networks of political, corporate, me-dia, and ideational interests are most central (cf.Chibber 2004 from a neo-Marxist perspective).

Our discussion of the case of the politics ofinequality above is a case in point.

To be sure, Marxism is not alone in wield-ing a model of the state that, by the late 1980s,proved increasingly less useful (cf. Almond1988). The state of the art has moved beyondall approaches—including neo-Marxism—thattreat states as unitary actors with coherent in-terests and fails to provide theoretical frame-works for incorporating policy networks (orfields), which inevitably include a diverse ar-ray of relevant actors and publics (Mitchell1991, Heinz et al. 1993, Bourdieu 2005,Pierson & Skocpol 2007). Dominant classes (orclass fractions) may exert outsized influence insome contexts, and those are important to studyand understand. But this claim hardly exhauststhe possibilities of policymaking once scholarsturn to examining more detailed mechanismsand processes of political change.

The best work of recent years inspiredby Marxist frameworks has succeeded, in ourview, in part because they go beyond theparameters of a Marxist class model of politicsto incorporate a broader range of institutionaland political dynamics while resituating themwithin an overall Marxist framework. Forexample, Chibber’s (2004) work succeeds byshowing, on the one hand, that state interven-tion can prove a decisive positive force in anation’s economic development, whereas onthe other hand, that state capacity depends onthe orientation of capitalists. For such argu-ments to work, and convince a broader array ofpolitical sociologists, Chibber had to provide arich empirical analysis of bureaucratic capacityacross multiple policy fields. Similarly, Hung’s(2008) recent contribution to the transition tocapitalism debate combines previous Marxistand non-Marxist historical institutionalistaccounts to provide a new synthesis. Com-paring Qing China with eighteenth-centuryEngland and nineteenth-century Japan, heshows that China’s nontransition to capitalism,despite its agrarian wealth, lies in the absenceof an entrepreneurial urban elite capable ofshifting agrarian surpluses into industrial andinstitutional innovations.


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Work and the labor process. The sociologyof the workplace, especially in manufacturing,remains heavily indebted to neo-Marxist viewsof control and consent. But history has thrownup two critical puzzles that threaten the pro-gressive character of the neo-Marxist approachto the labor process: growing workforce diver-sity through immigration and social change,and the rising share of employment in less hi-erarchical forms that are not easily examinedwithin a traditional Marxist framework.

The second issue—the changing characterof workplaces in contemporary capitalism, withthe decline of manufacturing and the risingproportion of white-collar jobs that are sub-ject to very different and much looser formsof control—is less easily incorporated into aMarxist framework, built as it was on a factory-based model. The predominantly service-sectorand white-collar workforces in the rich demo-cratic countries (and increasingly elsewhere aswell) have been examined by some Marxistscholarship (e.g., Sherman 2007, MacDonald &Korczynski 2008). But when it comes to white-collar work, especially as one moves closerto sites in the division of labor where levelsof trust and autonomy rise, problems abound.Braverman’s (1974) early assertion that white-collar work was being routinized and deskilledin the same manner as manufacturing jobssurely captured some dynamics. But the steadyexpansion of high-skill, high-trust work defieseasy translation into the neo-Marxist traditionof labor process studies.

If sociological Marxism faces limits in rela-tion to the challenges of history, how robustis its ability to compete with non-Marxist re-search traditions that bear on the organizationof work? Although much of the scholarshipcentered on the shop floor remains embeddedwithin a neo-Marxist framework, work orga-nizations are not defined solely at the point ofproduction. And in the broader context of orga-nizational studies, neo-Marxism has remainedlargely invisible. The growing research liter-atures on management, organizational fields,intra-organizational dynamics, and the study ofthe social construction of labor markets are at

the heart of the sociology of work today. Thenew generation of economic sociology finds fewpoints of contact with sociological Marxism (cf.Dobbin 2004, Granovetter & Swedberg 2011).As rich and thick as the neo-Marxist literatureson the shop floor have been, the theoretical andempirical puzzles about the broader organiza-tion of work beyond the point of productionhave been largely ignored. In this sense, theneo-Marxist legacy has been self-limiting in theface of the challenge of non-Marxist economicsociology.

Inequality and class analysis. Two key his-torical and theoretical puzzles have defined thecontours within which neo-Marxist class anal-ysis has unfolded over the past four decades:the continuing embarrassment of the middleclasses and rising inequality (at least withinthe Anglo-American countries). But the biggerchallenge has been to demonstrate that classanalysis, however formulated, provides suffi-cient analytical leverage to justify its continuedrelevance. To put the point another way, theseemingly endless boundary debate that arisesfrom the changes in class structure of thepast 100 years represents a critical challengefor sociological Marxism, but its resolutionmatters only to the extent that the resultingmap of the class structure provides stronganalytical leverage in accounting for outcomesof contemporary significance. How well hasMarxism responded to these challenges?

In his magisterial work Class Counts, Wright(1997) examines such topics as income in-equality, gender equality, policy and workplaceattitudes, and friendship patterns to show thathis class map does indeed help to explain otherkinds of important inequality outcomes in across-sectional context. Other analysts haveused related class schemes to examine atti-tudes (Vannemann & Canon 1987, Svallfors2006), voting behavior (Hout et al. 1995),income (Hout et al. 1993), subjective classconsciousness (Hout 2008), and social mobility(Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992, Breen 2005).Most of these latter studies situate themselvesin a neo-Weberian tradition, but all owe an


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intellectual debt to Marxist models as well. It isdifficult to characterize them in a neat package,but two broad conclusions appear to be inorder: (a) Carefully measured, class impactshave not declined as much as some death ofclass theories have asserted (Clark & Lipset1991, Waters & Pakulski 1996; for criticalassessment of these arguments, see Goldthorpe& Marshall 1992), but (b) class impacts areoften modest, sometimes far outweighed byother inequality measures found in grada-tional/individualist accounts (e.g., Halaby &Weakliem 1993, Kingston 2000; but cf. Chan& Goldthorpe 2007) or nonclass factors suchas race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and others.

At the center of the conflicts over class anal-ysis is that American sociology’s disciplinarybias insists that identifying class structures inthe absence of demonstrating their empiricalconsequence becomes an empty exercise, butMarxist class analysis has neither proved theanalytical superiority of Marxist conceptionsof class nor demonstrated that class models(however conceived) should have analyticalprimacy over other types of inequality. Thisconclusion leads toward a startling conundrumfor sociological Marxism. If the idea that classstructure should inform individual-level be-havior is abandoned, then the purpose of classanalysis moves solely to a form of macro anal-ysis that largely abandons the empirical field ofinequality studies to non-Marxist approaches.Reframing class analysis as a macro concept inthe movement of history is to cede much of thefield of contemporary inequality studies.

Yet even when it comes to the politicalsources of inequality, there are limits as to howmuch of the critical details Marxist approachescan supply that other theories cannot. The po-litical mobilization of business and upper-classinterests in favor of tax cutting, deregulation,and policy drift, combined with the weaknessof countervailing forces such as unions, hasa now widely acknowledged analytical force,and neo-Marxism has provided a valuable andlong-standing (if sometimes unacknowledged)standpoint for this understanding. But the storycannot stop there. Neo-Marxist efforts to show

the patterning of class mobilization by industryor sector finds weak and contradictory impactsand has not proved a viable contender in theliterature on political money (for the best ofthese studies, see Burris 1987, 2001; Clawson& Neustadtl 1989; Mizruchi 1989, 1990; seeSmith 1995 for a review of these models).Further, Marxism has no plausible theory ofpublic opinion that accounts for the politicaltriumph of neoliberalism among importantsectors of the working class in the past 30 years.The right has largely won the ideologicalframe game, at least in the United States andto a lesser extent in the other Anglo-Americandemocracies. It successfully mobilized publicopinion in support of marketization andan antigovernment agenda (cf. Smith 2007,Bartels 2008, Manza et al. 2012). Marxist andother radical approaches insisting on the powerof simple political manipulation by corporateelites (e.g., Ginzberg 1986, Domhoff 2010) lacka fine-grained understanding of the dynamicsof public opinion and contemporary politicalcontests and, in particular, the complexities ofopinion change. A more sophisticated under-standing of the political triumph of the newinequality requires supplementing a Marxistaccount with a broader analysis of how and whyconservative ideology found and maintainedtraction (see Brooks & Manza 2007 for oneattempt to understand these multiple andlinked dynamics in a comparative perspective).

Globalization, development, and politi-cal economy. As with rising inequality, thereemergence of an increasingly globalized cap-italism and economic turbulence has put somewind behind the sails of a neo-Marxist polit-ical economy. Important questions of our erahave included those on which neo-Marxist ana-lysts have largely focused: the instability of cap-italism, the implications of neoliberalism andglobal economic competition for the well-beingof the world’s poor, and modern imperialismand geopolitical conflict.

In the competition with the modernizationparadigm, or alternatives such as the worldsociety model of Meyer and his students (e.g.,


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Meyer et al. 1997), WST and other sociologicalMarxist accounts have the obvious strengthof calling attention to crisis tendencies withinglobal capitalism and to the hierarchical order-ing of states and the inequalities it generatesbetween countries. The longer-range perspec-tive on capitalism provides a distinctly differentway of thinking about trajectories and of raisingcritical questions for policy and political pro-cesses. Korzeniewicz & Moran’s (2009) intrigu-ing recent work combining a WST model withan account of the diverse institutional pathwaysof countries in a low-inequality equilibriumversus those in a high-income equilibriumsuggests one exciting possible direction.

But at the same time, the political economyframeworks put forth by sociological Marxistshave tended to overstate crisis tendencies. Asmammoth countries like China and India growrapidly, the possibilities of declining inequalitywithin the global system appear at least pos-sible (Firebaugh 2003; but cf. Milanovic 2011).That question remains open, but evidence fromwell-measured outcomes such as life expectancyand infant mortality may provide a firmer viewof these processes and their interaction withdependency dynamics (see, for example, Bradyet al. 2007).

Even more problematic is the failure to pro-vide equal attention to the institutional meansfor economic stabilization within contempo-rary global capitalism. In a remarkable parallelto the shortcomings in the analysis of welfarestates, neo-Marxist analysts of the global po-litical economy have tended to underestimatethe robustness of the capacity of capitalism torespond to crisis. As Mann (2010, p. 181) hasrecently asked, in commenting on Wallerstein,“when the ‘true crisis of the system,’ the ‘so-cial chaos’ . . . will arrive, as Wallerstein has pre-dicted for over thirty years . . . capitalism anddemocracy seem today largely unchallenged.And why cannot capitalism keep expanding byfinding new ‘needs’ to commodify?” The jury isstill out, but as the lack of any significant polit-ical response to recent financial and economiccrises suggests, it is likely to remain out for along time to come.

IV: SOCIOLOGICAL MARXISM’SFUTURES?

It is currently unclear whether, as Therborn(2008) has recently asked, Karl Marx will beone of those handful of thinkers still readhundreds of years after his death (as are Plato,Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, etc.). In itsfirst 150 years, Marxism has shown a consid-erable capacity to regenerate itself and findnew relevance, even in the face of historicaland political challenges. Further, within Amer-ican sociology, the Marx-Weber-Durkheimtriumvirate remains firmly entrenched as thetheoretical anchor of the discipline. Thisparticular grouping works, in part, becauseWeber and Durkheim positioned their work, atleast in part, in opposition to Marx (Bottomore1984). But this is unlikely to hold forever.For example, the rise of analytical sociology(Hedstrom & Bearman 2009) promises a set oftheoretical and empirical starting points thatlargely break with the traditional appeal to theclassics of the discipline.

What about other possible futures for so-ciological Marxism? Several possibilities haveemerged since the 1980s, and we discuss thembriefly in closing.

Analytical Marxism

The so-called analytical Marxist group, ofwhom Erik Olin Wright was the most promi-nent American sociologist member, promisedone way of reviving Marxism by systematicallyidentifying the microfoundations of Marxisttradition (Roemer 1986, van Parijs 1993,Mayer 1994). The core premises of the analyt-ical Marxists were that the themes of classicalMarxism failed to satisfactorily specify the con-ditions of social action under which capitalismreproduces itself, or which individuals livingwithin capitalist society engage in social actionas predicted by Marxist theory. The resultingturn to rational choice models and method-ological individualism was a deep challenge tothe functionalist premises of Marxist theory.Within these broad parameters, members ofthe group made some important and widely


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read contributions to Marxist social sciencein the 1980s (Roemer 1982, Elster 1985,Przeworski 1985, Wright 1985, Carling 1991).But by the 1990s, most had ceased workingwithin the Marxist tradition. Przeworski (2007)summarized the shift among the bulk of thegroup in the following terms: “We ultimatelyfound that not much of Marxism is left and therewasn’t really much more to learn.” Critics fromwithin Marxism raised doubts about whetherit could be meaningfully recast along rationalchoice lines, suggesting that the demise of theanalytical Marxist project was not universallylamented (see, e.g., Burawoy 1986, 1990).

One potentially critical kernel growing outof the analytical Marxist project, however,can be found in the very intriguing work ofSamuel Bowles and his colleagues at the SantaFe Institute (e.g., Bowles 2003, Gintis et al.2006). In formal dialogue with traditionalmicroeconomic theory and its rational choicefoundations, but also engaging questions withdeep sociological relevance, Bowles and hiscolleagues have sought nothing else than toshow that altruistic sentiments provide a morerobust foundation for understanding individualbehavior than standard rational choice assump-tions about the centrality of material interests.Bowles’s laboratory experiments suggest thebeginnings of a rapprochement betweenmicroeconomics and sociology, as well as a newand more plausible kind of microfoundationfor neo-Marxist social science. As work stillin progress, we await further developmentsand efforts to integrate them into sociology(for one such early effort, see Baldassarri &Grossman 2010).

Post-Marxism

For some Marxists, the pathway toward newdirections grew out of the larger postmod-ernist and cultural turn that gathered steamin history and the social sciences in the late1980s and 1990s (Bonnell & Hunt 1999,Steinmetz 1999). An important part of thelarger current was a group of scholars com-ing out of the Marxist tradition who came to

describe themselves as post-Marxists. Amongthe most prominent were those identified withthe Gramscian/Althusserian/Poulantzian tradi-tion. In particular, Laclau & Mouffe’s (1985)highly influential work was at the forefront of abroader post-Marxist wave that insisted on theabandonment of concrete material interests andclass as a structuring force in favor of an anal-ysis of discursive ideas about class and materialinterests. Post-Marxists prided themselves ona rejection of Marxist reductionism and grandtheory, although they were often perfectly ca-pable of generating their own opaque grandtheory of discursive realities to replace it (e.g.,Laclau 1990, Butler et al. 2000).

The most sociologically influential variantsof post-Marxism were those that asserted oneor both of two positions: (a) that the privilegingof class must give way to a multitude of inequal-ities, each with their own logic that is simply notreducible to class structure or class determina-tion; or (b) that the intersection of overlappinginequalities produces a complex patterning ofinequality (Collins 2000, McCall 2005). To besure, one does not have to take a post-Marxistdetour to arrive at the position in which classis not everything; for those who started from aMarxist position, post-Marxism provided a co-herent vehicle. But it would prove of limitedutility beyond its role in providing a move awayfrom the Marxist core, and has little resonancein sociology today.

Utopian Radical Sociology?

In their survey of sociological Marxism,Burawoy & Wright (2002) urge both the-oretical and empirical investigations of realutopias, as Wright (2010) has called them. Asparadoxical as it may seem, at the very momentwhen the prospects for a revival of radicalpolitics appear especially bleak, a remarkablenumber of Marxist sociologists and socialscientists have produced new work on utopianpossibilities. Developing blueprints for newkinds of utopian ideas for socialist transitionhas been a remarkably brisk undertaking inrecent years, strangely enough often emanating


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in North America where real socialism (orsocial democracy) is furthest from the politicalagenda. Wright’s real utopia series (e.g., Cohen& Rogers 1995, Roemer 1996, Fong & Wright2003, Ackerman et al. 2006) is one home forthis surprising enterprise. Claus Offe (Offe& Heinze 1992) has explored labor exchangenetworks as an alternative to conventionallabor markets. Wallerstein (1998), Harvey(2000), and Rogers (2009) offer speculative andutopian ideas about postcapitalist futures. AsTherborn (2008, p. 135) has noted, “despite itsimpressive scale, and defiant stand against theheadwind of the times . . . [the new utopianism]may look somewhat odd, particularly to north-western Europeans,” all the more so given theheavy involvement of American authors.

One particularly interesting example ofrecent utopian thinking can be seen in theattraction of some sociological Marxists andother radical social scientists to ideas aboutbasic income (i.e., government-provideduniversal income grants to all citizens) as avehicle for moving toward egalitarian struc-tural reform (van Parijs 1992, Block & Manza1997, Ackerman et al. 2006). This is a strikingdevelopment. Proposals for a universal incomegrant to all citizens have long held appealto a broad, albeit generally tiny, coalition ofintellectuals and quirky political actors, rangingfrom libertarians such as Milton Friedman andCharles Murray to liberal economists such asJames Tobin and visionaries of various kinds.For most Marxists, however, basic income heldlittle appeal until fairly recently. In fact, in thelate 1960s and early 1970s, American radicalsstrongly opposed proposals for universalincome grants through a negative income tax,viewing it as a poor substitute for real structuralreform (for this history, see Steensland 2007).

Continuing Relevance ofSociological Marxism

Finally, we conclude on a somewhat morepositive note by suggesting that there remainareas of scholarship where the possibility ofcontinuing innovation and development by so-

ciological Marxists appear especially likely. Onesuch area is in comparative-historical work, es-pecially in relation to large-scale social change.Here, American sociology provides space forexplananda that are sufficiently general andbroad for sociological Marxism to be rele-vant. Several recent examples highlight thesepossibilities. Stepan-Norris & Zeitlin’s (2003)impressive Left Out demonstrates, through ahistorical comparison of Congress of IndustrialOrganizations (CIO) unions, that “intraclassstruggle within the class struggle” has a majorbearing on outcomes in American unionorganizing. Similarly, Haydu’s (2008) recentwork grapples with the divergent processes ofcapitalist class formation in the late nineteenthcentury. Seidman’s (1994) focused comparisonof South African and Brazilian workers askshow two countries that were so different couldproduce two labor movements committedto the broader working class, as opposed tosectoral interests, continuing the long-standinginterest among sociological Marxists in theconditions and circumstances of labor militanceor quiescence. The classic work of Marxist la-bor history by Kimmeldorf (1988), comparinglongshoremen unions on the East and WestCoasts to explore why radicalism is fostered insome places but not others, turns Sombart’sfamous challenge on its head to ask “Whywas there any socialism in the United States?”Lachmann’s (2000) award-winning workon state formation in early modern Europeexamines variation in the patterning of elitealignments to explain widely varying outcomes.

Not surprisingly, criticisms of comparative-historical Marxist scholarship abound. Adamset al. (2005) argue that while Marxism wascentral to the reemergence of historical soci-ology (part of the larger movement within thediscipline that was critical of the ahistoricaland atheoretical aspects of the disciplinarymainstream circa 1970), it served more asa standpoint to be built on but ultimatelyrejected for its determinism. Later gener-ations of comparative-historical research,they suggest, inevitably move away from thegrand theoretical narratives to more nuanced


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positions. Hamilton (1996) raises a sharplycritical question of whether large-scalecomparative-historical scholarship can survivein the discipline at all, given the tendencyin such work to pose questions at a levelof abstraction that make them difficult tosystematically test. Nevertheless, preciselybecause (or as long as) the American sociologytent continues to be broad enough to houselarge-scale comparative-historical scholarship,we are confident in seeing this as a place forMarxism to productively pose big questions.

CONCLUSION

The resurgence of sociological Marxism in the1970s and 1980s affected American sociology ina variety of ways, in some subfields more thanothers. As an intellectual movement withina disciplinary context, neo-Marxism affectedsociology but was ultimately constrained andmarginalized within it. Our account has consid-ered two standpoints to assess neo-Marxism’s

impact: whether it was able to continue posingexciting questions and offer plausible responsesto the challenges from history and theory thatit faced; and how well it competed with non-Marxist alternatives. In answer to the first ques-tion, we find evidence that in its key subfieldsMarxism remains a vibrant standpoint, but itcomes up short in terms of generating plausiblemechanisms and detailed analytics to addressthe theoretical and historical puzzles that havearisen. In the confrontation between socio-logical Marxism and the empirical mainstreamin American sociology, sociological Marxism’sinitial insights in the 1970s have pushed the fieldin a novel direction, but nowhere has Marxismconsistently maintained an adjudicatory advan-tage. Our most optimistic conclusions aboutsociological Marxism’s future pertain to thoseareas of the discipline that have the greatestscope for large-scale comparisons across timeand space. In spite of these doubts, we suspectthat as in the past sociological Marxism will findnew sources of intellectual energy and persist.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings thatmight be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although they have not read or commented on this paper in advance, and likely will find much todisagree with, we acknowledge a deep and long-standing debt of gratitude to Erik Olin Wright,Michael Burawoy, and Fred Block, who have done so much to inspire later generations of socio-logical Marxists in America and are themselves models of truly dedicated teachers and mentors inevery respect. We have benefited from discussions with and feedback on various issues addressed inthis paper from Michael Hout, David Brady, Rachel Sherman, Leslie McCall, and Vivek Chibber.None, of course, have any responsibility for the conclusions reached in the article.

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SO37-Frontmatter ARI 11 June 2011 11:38

Annual Reviewof Sociology

Volume 37, 2011

Contents

Prefatory Chapters

Reflections on a Sociological Career that Integrates Social Sciencewith Social PolicyWilliam Julius Wilson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Emotional Life on the Market FrontierArlie Hochschild � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �21

Theory and Methods

Foucault and SociologyMichael Power � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �35

How to Conduct a Mixed Methods Study: Recent Trends in a RapidlyGrowing LiteratureMario Luis Small � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �57

Social Theory and Public OpinionAndrew J. Perrin and Katherine McFarland � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

The Sociology of StorytellingFrancesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner,

and Alice Motes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 109

Statistical Models for Social NetworksTom A.B. Snijders � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 131

The Neo-Marxist Legacy in American SociologyJeff Manza and Michael A. McCarthy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 155

Social Processes

Societal Reactions to DevianceRyken Grattet � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 185

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Formal Organizations

U.S. Health-Care Organizations: Complexity, Turbulence,and Multilevel ChangeMary L. Fennell and Crystal M. Adams � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 205

Political and Economic Sociology

Political Economy of the EnvironmentThomas K. Rudel, J. Timmons Roberts, and JoAnn Carmin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221

The Sociology of FinanceBruce G. Carruthers and Jeong-Chul Kim � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 239

Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse ControlJennifer Earl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261

Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theoryand ResearchJames M. Jasper � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 285

Employment Stability in the U.S. Labor Market:Rhetoric versus RealityMatissa Hollister � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 305

The Contemporary American Conservative MovementNeil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 325

Differentiation and Stratification

A World of Difference: International Trends in Women’sEconomic StatusMaria Charles � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 355

The Evolution of the New Black Middle ClassBart Landry and Kris Marsh � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 373

The Integration Imperative: The Children of Low-Status Immigrantsin the Schools of Wealthy SocietiesRichard Alba, Jennifer Sloan, and Jessica Sperling � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 395

Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, AgencyMounira M. Charrad � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 417

Individual and Society

Research on Adolescence in the Twenty-First CenturyRobert Crosnoe and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 439

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Diversity, Social Capital, and CohesionAlejandro Portes and Erik Vickstrom � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 461

Transition to Adulthood in EuropeMarlis C. Buchmann and Irene Kriesi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 481

The Sociology of SuicideMatt Wray, Cynthia Colen, and Bernice Pescosolido � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 505

Demography

What We Know About Unauthorized MigrationKatharine M. Donato and Amada Armenta � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 529

Relations Between the Generations in Immigrant FamiliesNancy Foner and Joanna Dreby � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 545

Urban and Rural Community Sociology

Rural America in an Urban Society: Changing Spatialand Social BoundariesDaniel T. Lichter and David L. Brown � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 565

Policy

Family Changes and Public Policies in Latin America [Translation]Brıgida Garcıa and Orlandina de Oliveira � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 593

Cambios Familiares y Polıticas Publicas en America Latina [Original,available online at http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-033111-130034]Brıgida Garcıa and Orlandina de Oliveira � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 613

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 28–37 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 635

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 28–37 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 639

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology articles may be found athttp://soc.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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the neo-marxist legacy in american...

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