Reply to Ken Smith’s reply

Jane Elliott and Shirley Dex

In response to Ken Smith’s reply to our earlier comments on his article (Smith2009), we would like to take this opportunity to reiterate three of the mainpoints we sought to communicate when we decided to make a written responseto his original paper. In doing this we will make a few further responses to KenSmith’s reply to us. Smith makes some new points in his reply which we will notaddress here since they do not alter our basic view that the original paper andthe ideas for empirical analysis that it contained were at best misleading toanyone who might spend time trying to follow them up.

1) We think that Smith’s suggestions for operationalizing a new approach toclass analysis are unworkable from the point of view of carrying out anempirical analysis.

Ken Smith used ‘operationalizing’ in the title of his BJS paper (Smith2007) and gave detailed empirical examples of his suggested approach. Weanticipated from the title, therefore, that this was the main focus of his paper.This is why in our response we concentrated on the operationalizing issue,rather than on any other, including theoretical, issues. Smith is correct,therefore, that our response was a-theoretical.There seems little point, to us,in entering into a debate over what Weber might have meant. We certainlythink it is open to different interpretations but ultimately, the matter isunresolvable in the twenty-first century. Smith implies that his inclusion of adiscussion and interpretation of Weber’s words makes his paper‘theoretical’. But even this is debatable. However, by the end of this reply hedoes seem to share our view that there is no way of knowing what Weberthought. However, Smith appears to yearn to know what Weber meant‘What I want to know is what then does Weber mean by this?’ (Smith: 183).For our part, we are content to accept this is unresolved. In principle, Smith’sideas could have been useful, (or not useful) irrespective of what Webermeant. In our view they were clearly not useful, hence our reply.

Elliott and Dex (Center for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education) (Corresponding author email: j.elliott@ioe.ac.uk)© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.01225.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2009 Volume 60 Issue 1

2) It is our view that the most serious way in which Smith’s suggestions areunworkable is that people who have the same occupation and materialcircumstances can end up being in different social class groupings.This arisesbecause Smith advocates incorporating people from an adjacent class into aclass group where there are insufficient members because of too few (percent) failing to remain in the group over time. We tried to illustrate howarbitrary and unappealing this would be through an example of two adjacentoccupation groups, ‘large business owners’ and professionals. However,Smith, in his reply failed to comment on this problem, i.e. that his process offorming classes would leave similar people or occupations in differentclasses (and different people/occupations in the same class). Instead hemerely noted the similarity between a title Weber suggested for a class, ‘theclass privileged through property and education’, with one we used, ‘a classmade up of large business owners and a few professionals’, to illustrate howunsatisfactory this procedure would be. By using ‘a few’ in the label for theclass we were trying to draw attention to the fact that not all professionalswere going to be in the same class. However, this is only one possibleexample. The main problem with Smith’s proposal is not the issue of decid-ing which percentage to use to trigger the need to shift some people fromone group to another. It is the fact that the process advocated by Smithwould lead to many occupation groups being split up and put into differentsocial classes. We feel this is an unsatisfactory feature of Smith’s classschema. The shifting of people around would also have to be done on anarbitrary basis since there is no clear rationale for selecting somepeople in a single occupation, to be moved to join another occupationgroup.

3) In our earlier approach to constructing a response, we wished to cautionagainst using concepts from the natural sciences as justification for devel-opments in social science. We are not against this in principle, but, pastexamples show that it is all too easy to get hold of the wrong end of the stickwhen you do not have the background in a discipline. It was our judgmentthat Smith’s approach was yet another example of applying concepts fromnatural sciences that would not translate simply, or even at all, into socialscience. His latest reply seems to want to applaud a cavalier approach toapplying concepts across disciplines where others fear to tread. It is as if theonly issue for Smith is having sufficient daring or boldness. The fact thatother sociologists (including BJS editors) offered him ‘warnings’ seems onlyto have strengthened his resolve to pursue his approach.

In the original paper (Smith 2007), Smith also showed a lack of understandingof simple statistical concepts such as significance levels. His reply to our article,confirms this lack of understanding. If he cannot get even this right, what hopefor far more advanced concepts.

186 Jane Elliott and Shirley Dex

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(1)

Smith offers a further metaphor in his reply to illustrate the nature of hisown contribution. His aim is to show how enlightened his approach is espe-cially when set against what he clearly sees as the dismal state of social science.He poses the question ‘Is it genes or environment?’ as one that natural scien-tists are able to see is a false dichotomy. He implies that social scientists,presumably excepting himself, are unable to see that both elements are impor-tant because they are wedded to thinking in dichotomies. But this is a mis-useof the metaphor. What Smith’s original paper was doing, in terms of thismetaphor, was asking: What is a gene? What is the environment? Smith’scontribution is akin to offering new definitions of a gene or the environment,but ones which, on examination, fail to identify and clearly demarcate anythingthat is specifically or uniformly ‘a gene’ or ‘an environment’. Any furtherattempts to address questions about how genes or environments relate toother outcome measures founder therefore by having no clearly defined oridentifiable concepts with which to work, just in the same way as social classanalysis will founder, in our view, if it cannot identify what a social class is.Rather than help in this aim, Smith’s suggested approach moves us furtheraway from the task.

(Date accepted: October 2008)

Bibliography

Smith, K. 2007 ‘Operationalizing MaxWeber’s Probability Concept of Class Situa-tion: The Concept of Social Class’, TheBritish Journal of Sociology 58(1): 87–104.

Smith, K. 2009 ‘Thinking Outside the Box:AReply to Elliott and Dex’, British Journal ofSociology 60(1): 179–187.

Reply to Ken Smith’s reply 187

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009British Journal of Sociology 60(1)