Relations of Ruling: Class and Gender in Postindustrial Societies

Franзois Boudreau is a sociology professor at Laurentian University in
Sudbury.

Relations of Ruling is part of an original five-country project aimed at
updating our understanding of class and gender relations in
postindustrial societies. It is well written and well documented, with
many subtle observations. The methodology is strong and coherent. But
the book is artificially divided into two parts: the analysis of class
relations is followed by the analysis of gender relations.

The strength of the book resides in the presentation of comparative
data between Canada, the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Finland—
an approach that provides an understanding of different models of
capitalist development in the Western world. The numerous informative
tables provide data on many aspects of work and gender as well as on the
transformation of work-gender relations in the 20th century.

On the less positive side, this book is remarkably empirical. The
authors refuse to go beyond the evidence shown by the tables to explore
analytically their theoretical paradigm. They explicitly say they want
to move beyond the affirmation that Canada is “less than Europe and
more than the U.S.,” but consistently reaffirm this “truth”:
“Canadian women, while more progressive than U.S. women, are not as
progressive as Nordic women.” Adhering to a materialist theory
(“Modernity [is] to be understood in terms of the revolution in the
forces of production”) and disregarding the “spiritual” and
“ontological” development of modernity, they end up with a
one-legged dialectic in which they are insufficiently critical of their
own categories. Their vision of patriarchy suggests that it is
problematic only for women, and is still rooted in a 1970s conception
that the domestic sphere is the source of oppression. And, they fail to
integrate the materialist and the feminist perspectives in a unified
understanding of the new relations of ruling that are emerging.

Although the book is a notch behind present-day theory, it is a
suitable source for providing empirical comparative data.