1984."Social Bases of Class Consciousness: A Study of Southern Textile Workers with a Comparison by Race." Social Forces63:98-116

This paper is an empirical study of class consciousness among a random sample of textile workers in a small North Carolina city. Following the theoretical—method-ological assumption that one can profitably study working class consciousness during relatively quiescent periods of capitalist development by examining its components, werking class consciousness is operationalized as the ordinal vari-able, "class conflict consciousness. " The social bases of class consciousness are in-vestigated for the sample as a whole and for subsamples divided according to race. Regression analysis identifies personal income, union membership, race, and job dissatisfaction as significant predictors of class conflict consciousness. Compara-tive treatment of whites and blacks reveals important differences, both in their de-gree of class conflict consciousness and their respective predictor variables. While the concept of class consciousness is integral to most theoretical models of stratification and social conflict, it is one of the more controver-sial subjects in sociology. ' Order-pluralist theorists generally consider the concept to be inapplicable to contemporary advanced industrial societies because of the supposed integration of the working class into the domi-nant values and norms of the society. Alternatively, some conflict and Marxian theorists consider the concept to be inappropriate to research at this time. They assume that the contemporary absence of radical working class movements aimed at changing fundamental social relations denote