Equality and Conflict in the Mass Consumption Society. by William A. Westley; Margaret W.WestleyReview by: William H. FormSocial Forces, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Mar., 1972), pp. 408-409Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2577061 .

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408 / SOCIAL FORCES / vol. 50, march 1972

client needs that are within the professional's com- petence and to act on them; and autonomy in applying professional judgment to clients' prob- lems. It is not clear in what sense this scale re- places the ideal-typical method of measuring pro- fessionalism; it would seem, rather, to add another ideal type to those already found in the literature.

The criteria are not used as a scale to compare the professionalism of occupations but chiefly as rubrics under which attributes of professional roles and their incumbents are described. Distinctively professional occupations are presumed to exist on the basis of the first three criteria, and a knowl- edge base is presumed to exist in the stipulations of the last three criteria. But the relations of pro- fessional roles to their parent occupations as com- monly treated in the literature on professionals are not dealt with. The failure to distinguish ex- plicitly between professions and the roles of pro- fessional individuals or to make plain that the scale of professionalism deals chiefly with the latter weakens much of the analysis, especially the parts of Section One that concern the process of institutionalization of professional roles.

The first three attributes are at times viewed as initial stages in the professionalization of occupa- tions and the last three as later stages. The institu- tionalization of professional roles is said to be a sequential acquisition of the professional attributes. But in discussing the institutionalization of roles, Moore and Rosenblum appear to start with the assumption that a full-blown profession, including the role expectations which are to be institutional- ized in the later stages of the process, already exists. At this point in the analysis, the relations among professional attributes and sequential pro- cess stages become difficult to disentangle. The nature of the demand for professional services as described by the authors presupposes that a service orientation has been institutionalized, but the pro- fessional role-including its service orientation-is said to be institutionalized only after the demand for professional services has evidenced stable con- tinuity. The service orientation is defined in terms of the very thing that supposedly fosters its in- stitutionalization: the bringing to bear of profes- sional judgment on clients' problems.

The scale criteria are used to good effect (though as topic headings more than as variables for mea- suring professionalism) in an analysis of role autonomy and constraints on it. Drawing heavily from the work of Freidson, Moore and Rosen- blum show how the characteristics and organiza- tion of clients influence autonomy, promote or dampen service orientations, and affect prestige and other rewards.

The book suggests important questions and pre- sents many illuminating insights. It does not, how- ever, organize them into a coherent line of reason- ing to show systematically the relations of the criteria of professionalism to each other or the processes through which professions and profes- sional roles become institutionalized.

EQUALITY AND CONFLICT IN THE MASS CON-

SUMPTION SOCIETY. By William A. Westley and Margaret W. Westley. Montreal: AMcGill- Queens University Press, 1971. 155 pp. $7.50.

i

Reviewed by WILLIAM H. FORM, Univetsity of Illinois at Urbana

Westley and Westley have scanned the literature on the changing industrial society and have writ- ten an essay on the emerging worker. Their thesis is simple: the semiskilled and clerical employees in automated industries are the emerging workers. They have emerged with the affluent society whose main characteristic is mass consumption.

Unlike the traditional worker, the emergent worker lives in a rapidly changing, technologically oriented society with equalitarian tendencies. A new stratification ball game is already here. The emergent worker is highly educated and highly paid, as is everyone in the New Society a la Peter Drucker and David Riessman. His high level of education, his high level of income, and his style of life (consumption) are indistinguishable from the middle class and particularly the managers of industry. This is as it should be because the emergent worker is working in an automated plant which is cleaner, safer, and pleasanter than the old factory or office. He has more responsibility, prestige, higher wages, and intellectually challeng- ing work-antecedents of an emerging professional career. He lives in a suburb, owns his own house, is family- and child-centered, helps his wife, and is less class conscious-just like his manager. Un- derstandably the emergent worker feels a sense of equality with the old business, labor, and com- munity elites because the old bases of legitimacy are eroded when everyone shares the same educa- tional level, affluence, and style of life. But the managers, union officers, and community leaders do not respect the emergent worker who wants the elites to behave rationally, universalistically, and efficiently. Their failure to do so induces the emerging worker to lose interest in his job, en- gage in wildcat strikes and refrain from com- munity participation. But this situation cannot long endure for the emergent worker is really in- terested in his work and community. He wants a share of power in the union and in the company; he wants to be consulted because "getting more" is not enough. Unless institutions are changed to take advantage of his competence, there can only be more trouble ahead.

The problem with Westley and Westley is that they believe everything they read. Important changes are certainly occurring in the lives of semiskilled workers in factories and offices and these changes demand serious study. Unfortunately Westley and Westley feel that this can be done by observing national trends and applying them un-

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Book Reviews / 409

critically to some occupational groups. But some- times the national trends turn out to be simply myths or uninformed guessing. Thus the alleged appearance of a middle-income society and the redistribution of national income over the years is either an artifact of how middle income is de- fined or the result of ignoring conflicting historical data on income distribution. The emergence of an affluent society with universal high levels of consumption is something that even Galbraith re- grets having said. Pointing to the narrowing levels of educational achievement in the population is not necessarily a sign of increasing equality. Mov- ing to a working-class suburb is not necessarily upward mobility.

What sociology needs is a series of carefully controlled comparative studies of various occupa- tional categories exposed to different types of tech- nological change. And the questions need to be quite specific: What occupations are selected for study? Why? What is the average income of men and women in those occupations? Exactly how much do different occupational groups spend for what? How much time do they spend with their neighbors, kin, or work associates? Who are their neighbors? Do people exposed to different tech- nologies have ideological disagreement? What is their character? Last or first, what is educational, income and consumption equality? Westley and Westley have already answered these questions, but perhaps now is the time to start the research.

BLACK BELONGING: A STUDY OF THE SOCIAL

CORRELATES OF WORK RELATIONS AMONG

NEGROES. By Jack C. Ross and Raymond H. Wheeler. Westport: Greenwood, 1971. 244 pp. $1 1.00.

Reviewed by JAMES M. FENDRICH, Florida State University

When I first picked up this research monograph I thought it might help to answer the question: How can we best predict and understand the par- ticipation in the black protest movement? I have found deviance, great man, social class, and status inconsistency theories either inadequate or insuffi- ciently specific in accounting for the development of manpower in social movements. The dynamics of becoming involved is probably related to par- ticular work or educational experiences under- going structural strains within social classes. This book investigates the influence of work relations on participation in voluntary associations among blacks in Tampa, Florida in 1967. It was not very useful in answering my question but did reveal once again how conservative the black community is in its organizational participation. And it re- vealed the major class divisions within the black

community as determined by occupational status. The major proposition explored was that the

"amount and kind of participation of Negroes in voluntary associations can be predicted from knowledge of their formal and informal social relations at work and from community and per- sonal factors related to them" (p. 36). Three ma- jor hypotheses that were tested were: (1) the greater the coracialism on the job, the greater the total voluntary association membership; (2) the greater the reinforcement (union or civil service support) the more likely the participation in Negro-rights organizations; and (3) collegiality at work strengthens the effect of other variables re- lated to voluntary association membership but is not the sole reason for membership. There are also a number of other conditioning variables such as "phase segregation" and "work imperialism."

The analysis begins with examining the effects of the three major independent variables on total voluntary association membership. Overall, 44 per- cent of the respondents belonged to one or more voluntary associations. Membership was classified into ten types of either expressive or instrumental voluntary associations, excluding churches and unions. The most frequent types of membership were church-related (21 percent), PTA (12 per- cent), Negro-rights (11 percent) and regular (10 percent), and mutual-aid lodges (8 percent). Oc- cupational status is strongly related to membership with 77 percent of white-collar workers compared to 38 percent of "low blue-collar workers" be- longing to at least one voluntary association. The stronger the coracialism (having a Negro super- visor and Negro co-workers) the more likely membership in voluntary associations. Although weakened substantially, the relationship remains when controlling for occupational status. There was no relationship between reinforcement and joining or collegiality and joining. Weak support does exist for the second and third hypothesis al- though again occupational status was a major con- ditioning variable.

For those interested in the intersection of the work and organizational life of the black com- munity the book is worth reading mainly because there is so little available on this problem. Exten- sion of the findings is limited by the relatively small black community in a southern city without a substantial black middle class. There are addi- tional shortcomings. The book lacks a summary of the major findings and little attempt is made to relate the materials to issues and trends in race re- lations. The authors try to relate their results to mass vs. pluralistic society theoretical orientations but it does not come off very well. The theoretical orientations are not initially presented satisfac- torily and only briefly mentioned to support par- ticular findings. The exercise is sterile. Although the authors had a large N (1,086) and a fairly well-designed interview schedule, the data analysis is an elementary presentation of frequencies and percentages.

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