Constructing Social Class

Observing how communication is used to construct a class system, and how class identification is obtained in a large hierarchical organization.

In my exploration of the class system I focused on ways the employees are divided into class groups. I examined the practice of annual review – a process used by managers to evaluate the employee performance. From a critical perspective, I looked at how the entire process functions as a control mechanism and contributes to class formation.

Looking at an organization which employs well-specialized engineers and a work force consisting of highly-educated personnel. Those who hold a Ph.D. are engaged in the research and development of advanced technology systems. The remaining staff consists of mechanical engineers and technicians who work in manufacturing and production. These are the employees who work offstage and are rarely seen in the area where the offices and conference rooms are. The office space is split into front and back, giving visibility and higher regard to employees who are in forward positions.

Each employee is expected to set yearly objectives and is responsible for achieving and working towards the set goals. Since the annual performance review is vital for professional advancement, employees often depend on their managers for good ratings. Managers who conduct evaluations of employee performance have seniority and hold higher positions within the organization; they are vice presidents, directors, senior managers and supervisors. These distinctions between levels are evidence of power relationships (p. 99).

Classism occurs when some people have power over the others (p. 98). In an organizational setting, power helps high-status managers to administer their subordinates; it gives them control over the workforce. In this setting, class matters because it affects the organizational system. The powerlessness employees experience leads to consent and subordination. As a result, employees are placed in ranks, and managers with higher status are given the ability to control others’ behavior. This legitimizes the system of domination and maintains the class system that seems very hard to change. Class becomes a product of power relations in the system of hierarchical organization. The workplace is a crucial site of class production and reproduction (p. 108).

In a competitive environment, where employees are driven to exceed expectations, success is seen as a result of “superior” individual effort and employee potential (p. 105). Everyone can advance if they work hard (p. 105). In the process of performance evaluation, however, employees are categorized and classified into groups based on cognitive abilities and skill set. No matter how hard employees work, their ranking is determined by their performance relative to others. Not all employees perform on the same level, especially in relation to each other. Those in business development teams who hold Masters or Bachelor’s Degrees have an advantage over manufacturing and assembly line employees, given their communication skills and capacity for achieving higher rankings. The apparent advantages of business administrators over blue-collar employees can be explained by the differences in cognitive and verbal abilities. In effect, use of performance review marginalizes employees, regardless of their performance capability. By holding employees responsible for their accomplishments, the process ignores the fact that “a person’s starting point can affect success” (p. 99).

Success often depends on social standing, which is determined at birth or earned over a lifetime. There is a difference between the ascribed and achieved status – a status acquired based on merit, skills and abilities. Looking at my own example, the difference in my manager’s and my social status is only the tip of the iceberg. The underwater part of the cultural iceberg is his class identification “based on conditions at birth, race, sex and place of birth” (p. 97). My manager is a white male who was born in the United States and was better positioned to attain resources like social skills and education, whereas I immigrated to America without financial assets and had to rely on my knowledge of language and interpreting skills to obtain my class identification.

Economic factors are not the only determinants of class (p. 98). According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, people use capital to achieve social status (p. 98). Bourdieu emphasizes three types of capital: “economic capital, which includes financial assets; cultural capital, which consists of specialized skills, education, experience, and knowledge such as linguistic; and social capital, which is networks of connections” (p. 98). Due to my cultural capital – the experiences I gained while traveling and the cultural competencies passed down through my family – I was able to work my way through the labyrinth of hierarchical organization. Unless we acknowledge that the economic, cultural and social capital can tilt the playing field in favor of those who have wealth, knowledge and connections, the hierarchies will not be flattened.

Through the ongoing practice of employee evaluation the stratification of employees is created and perpetuated. These types of company policies and processes grant control to managers who are subordinating members of their staff by rating employees into categories of high, basic and low contributors. Subordination of employees is a form of power. This process reinforces the class system; it secures status for employees in higher ranks and deprives those in lower ranks of power.

Moreover, classism is continually reproduced by communication practices and daily interactions. Social status is reflected in ways we communicate; it is apparent in employee conduct and determines a set of behaviors and expectations. We perform class through our choices of clothing, speech style, manners and food preference (p. 108). Our appearance signals status in the organization and helps us maintain a certain image (p. 108). Although people rarely admit how great a part of life is dependent on socioeconomic status (SES), which is determined by the combination of income, education and occupation, many of us throughout life and career strive to achieve status and privilege (p.100).

References
Allen, B. J. (2004) Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Tomas & Teresa

See THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING















As Kundera explains in The Art of the Novel, existence means being in the world, and as the world changes, existence – being-in-the-world – changes as well (Kundera 36). To understand the characters we need to understand their world and the public events. The events that occur in Prague merge with the lives of Tomas and Teresa in a way that changes their existence. The world they live in becomes an entrapment for both of them.

Teresa works in a bar where she meets an engineer and decides to make love to him to experience physical love through her body alone, without involving her soul, to confirm what Tomas told her time and again – that love and sexuality had nothing in common. Teresa’s risky sexual affair with the engineer, who may or may not be an agent of the secret police, becomes her trap. Recalling the smallest details, she realizes that it may have been a predesigned scenario – a trap set for purposes of future blackmail by the government (Banerjee 233). That is the trap, real or not, that she imagines for herself as she thinks of the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police (Kundera 24).

Teresa examines the entire event “in search for her offense” (Kundera 108). She remembers the radio series of private talks between the Czech novelist Jan Prochazka and a friend of his. The recorded conversations were produced by the secret police to broadcast the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of Dubcek and slandered his friends. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes about an extreme version of totalitarian society in which the boundary between the public and the private is abolished and the lives of citizens become entirely transparent (Kundera 110). Teresa realizes that she too, just like Procahzka, lives in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist (Kundera 167). She retreats to a village to escape the trap and lives in isolation with Tomas. Here Kundera underlines the impact and significance of political events for individuals who are obliged to live under a Communist regime (Kundera 37).














Meanwhile, the article Tomas wrote on Oedipus in the spring of 1968 comes back to haunt him. Using the example of Oedipus, who enacts self-indictment by which he acknowledges the actions he committed in ignorance, the article attacks political leaders who refuse to admit responsibility for their actions, because they did not know and were not completely aware of the wrongdoings and the consequences (Banerjee 240). In his article, Tomas uses the Oedipus analogy to hold responsible the Communist leaders for the country’s misfortunes and for its loss of independence: “If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!” (Kundera 177). When Tomas is pressured to make public retractions of his past statements, he gives up his job as a surgeon and goes to work in a country clinic.

When he is visited by a man from the Ministry of the Interior, he is trapped into something even worse. As Tomas realizes he is under interrogation, he falsifies his answers and inadvertently informs on someone else, on a different editor. His fear and paranoia that the police would make public a false statement over his signature, lead him to lose his profession – something so much a part of him (Kundera 194). As a result of these events, Tomas abruptly resigns from his medical post. He escapes the trap by descending the ladder and becoming a window washer. “Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be interested in him” (Kundera 192).













As Tomas refuses to compromise and to comply, he makes heavy go light (Kundera 196). He embarks on a grand holiday and returns to his bachelor existence. By refusing to sign a note stating that he has nothing against the regime, Tomas is released from “his weighty duty” (Kundera 196). The key words for Tomas’s existential code are lightness and weight. His existential problem is the lightness of being in a world where there is no eternal return (Kundera 32). He fails to see that what he chooses as an honorable decision for him is the most horrible thing possible for Teresa. Faced with personal fulfillment on one hand, and with historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, he rejects his life’s external and internal imperatives. Kundera studies Tomas’s attitudes in these situations by tying the individual to the historical and political events, and looking at how private life is balanced with the larger terrors of life in a police state. Tomas is constantly going back and forth between lightness and weight. As Kundera explains, “that was the ‘Es muss sein!’ rooted deep inside him” (Kundera 194).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about an investigation of being and existence. It is a political novel, but the description of the politico-historical events or the role of the Communist institutions does not interest Kundera. He places his novel in a world provoked by political events that transform the world, to investigate the human condition and a way of being. He looks at the relationship between the events and real life – the regulation of private situations where the individuals are dominated in totalitarian ways, the resulting depersonalization of the individual, the violation and the lack of certain kinds of freedoms, the danger of losing privacy. According to Kundera, “the novel is an investigation of the essence of human situations” (Kundera 32).