Sociology Program and Dean of the College Present

Class as Power Relations: Understanding Changes in the American Class Structure from the 2000s to the 2020s

As a key concept of social inequality, class is often defined by income, education, or occupational prestige. However, an important but frequently overlooked dimension of class is workplace power relations. Viewing class as power relations can help explain how inequality is generated and experienced by workers, and how factors such as new technologies and politics reshape power dynamics at work. This study introduces a innovative framework for examining class as power relations using novel text data and computational methods powered by Large Language Models. I map the American class structure from 2002 to 2020 and find a significant expansion of “contradictory class locations” (including managers, professionals, and supervisors) alongside a simultaneous contraction of the working class. Surprisingly, more than half of this change results from the addition of supervisory tasks to traditionally working- class jobs, without a corresponding increase in workers’ income. The study reveals previously unrecognized shifts in supervisory work in American workplaces and raises critical questions about how the content and social meaning of supervisory work may have changed from real empowerment to an added burden.

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Di Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at New York University. Her research develops computational methods to study class and inequality, technological change, culture and ideology, and the applications of Generative AI (GenAI) for social research. Her work focuses on both the United States and China. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Science, and Scientific Reports, and is the winner of the Erik Olin Wright Prize.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.

Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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