SExploring social stratification is certainly the core task of sociology. After all, “social status”, defined by occupation and income, is still the key to participating in social life. The catchphrase used to capture the dynamics of social stratification in recent years is “development” or, even more dramatically, “splitting” in society. The top and the bottom are increasingly separating, with an allegedly shrinking middle class in between, desperately trying to hold on to the position that has been firmly established for decades. Andreas Reckwitz set the tone in this debate with his analyzes of a “late modern” society that is increasingly based on knowledge work. Reckwitz’s theory of society has been tested and extensively questioned by Steffen Mau and Uwe Schimank, among others. What has not been taken into account so far was his thesis of a spatially drifting social structure of this late modern society. If you believe Reckwitz, the new academic middle class lives primarily in certain areas of the service metropolises, but not in the countryside. Does country now mean “below” and city “above”?
Dirk Konietzka and Yevgeniy Martynovych have now examined this thesis of a spatial polarization of the new post-industrial class society using data from the microcensus from 1996 to 2018. According to Reckwitz, the old middle class of skilled workers, medium-sized employees and small freelancers is more sedentary and regionally rooted than the “cosmopolitans” of the new middle class. They “concentrated” in small towns and in rural areas, where they experienced social and spatial declassification. According to this, town and country developed in opposite directions, with the urban centers also being characterized by the contrast between the new middle class, which is culturally dominant here, and the precarious class of simple services. The latter is growing in parallel as a “personal service provider” for the new middle class and is strongly influenced by migrants.
The new cosmopolitan middle class is growing everywhere
It’s a catchy image – and yet wrong. Although Konietzka and Martynovych confirm Reckwitz’s thesis of the rise of the new academic middle class, they refute the assertion that this social separation must also be spatially defined. That is not the case, rather these developments in metropolises and small towns were very similar. No systematic differences could be identified between the places of residence with regard to the change in the socio-economic structures of German society. The new cosmopolitan middle class and migrant service providers are growing everywhere, while the other classes are also shrinking everywhere. And the thesis that the migrant population is concentrated in the metropolises is also wrong: the migrants who belonged to the old middle class and the new lower class also lived in town and country. This also means that the migrant population is no less shaped by internal class differences than the non-migrant population. Here, too, there are clear differences between the new and old middle classes.
An essential implication of Reckwitz’ polarization thesis is thus called into question. Namely that the socio-structural “upgrading” of the metropolises is happening at the expense of rural and small-town areas. But the country is not dying. Of course, this does not mean that there are no social differences between town and country. There are definitely more or less good infrastructures, opportunities for realization and life models for the inhabitants of the regions, and these differences are of course “relevant to inequality”. Nevertheless, the spatial manifestations of inequality in German society have not changed significantly over the past twenty years. The country is different from the city, but that was always the case and in this respect von Reckwitz could not be used as evidence for his thesis that in the course of the rise of the new middle class, spatial polarization had become a very specific feature of the social structure of “late modernity”. be.
This is good news for the country. Where rural regions manage to offer members of the new middle class adequate opportunities, there should be no reason for them to prefer the metropolis to the provinces.
