Browsing by Subject "Class"

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    'Just Deserts': Race, Class and Distributive Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa
    (Taylor & Francis, 2008) Seekings, Jeremy
    This article examines how racial differences affect perceptions of distributive justice in postapartheid South Africa. In 'divided' societies, citizens might be expected to discriminate on the basis of race or culture in assessing the justice of other citizens' claims. South Africa is a prime example of a 'divided' society in which, in the past, legislation and racial elite culture combined in pervasive discrimination. Given the continued importance of race in daily life in South Africa, we might expect that attitudes about distributive justice would continue to be racialised, with people considering members of the same 'racial group' as themselves as being more deserving than members of other groups. But evidence from both national datasets and a new data-set for Cape Town in particular suggests that race has complex and often counter-intuitive effects on perceptions of distributive justice. By some criteria, and some analytic techniques, people do not discriminate on the basis of race when assessing 'just deserts'; by other criteria, and other analytic techniques, 'just deserts' appear still to be somewhat 'coloured' in post-apartheid South Africa. Overall, however, the evidence suggests that the effects of race are either weak or work in counter-intuitive directions. Rich and white Capetonians are certainly more generous in their views on redistribution than is generally assumed.
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    Perceptions of class and income in post-apartheid Cape Town
    (2007) Seekings, Jeremy
    The renaissance of studies of class in post-apartheid South Africa has not produced any certainty as to the optimal delineation of classes in empirical analysis. This paper uses data from a 2005 survey in Cape Town to examine the relationships between occupational (or objective) class, self-reported (or subjective) class, race, neighbourhood income and household income. Cape Town is not an industrial city, and thus has small working classes, but (like all South African cities) it does have high unemployment. There are clear relationships between race, education and occupational class (unsurprisingly, given the history of apartheid). The relationships between occupational class, incomes and self-reported class are less clear. The paper concludes with a preliminary analysis of some of the possible consequences of class, in terms of perceptions of the social structure and of government policy, and of racial identities and attitudes.
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    The Rise and Fall of the Weberian Analysis of Class in South Africa between 1949 and the early 1970s
    (Taylor & Francis, 2008) Seekings, Jeremy
    The hegemony of Marxist approaches to the study of stratification in South Africa has obscured the prominence of Weberian contributions between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Some of these Weberian studies focused on the nascent black middle class, paying particular attention to the importance of status. Others, influenced by the literature on the American South, used the concept of caste as an extreme form of status in analysing the relationship between race and class in South Africa. Whilst flawed, these studies did directly address aspects of South Africans' everyday lives – and especially interactions – that the subsequent structural Marxists side-stepped and with which neo-Marxist social historians struggled.