Vertical Mosaic
The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, Porter's most important work, was published in 1965 by University of Toronto Press. It was the study of equality of opportunity and the exercise of power by bureaucratic, economic and political elites in Canada. Porter was concerned with challenging the image that Canada was a classless society with "no barriers to opportunity." Porter concludes The Vertical Mosaic with the following observations:
- Canada is probably not unlike other western industrial nations in relying heavily on its elite groups to make major decisions and to determine the shape and direction of its development. The nineteenth-century notion of a liberal citizen-participating democracy is obviously not a satisfactory model by which to examine the processes of decision-making in either the economic or the political contexts... If power and decision-making must always rest with elite groups, there can at least be open recruitment from all classes into the elite. (p. 558).
Porter argues that Marxist class analysis, based on ownership of the means of production is a "questionable criterion of class in modern industrial society" (p. 25). Porter rejects power as the basis for social class, with the observation that conflict between those with power and the powerless is nonexistent. Porter constructs a new model based on the study of elites.
Elites are those who make decisions in the hierarchical institutional systems of modern society. Porter describes elites in the following way:
- ...individuals or groups at the top of our institutions can be designated as elites. Elites both compete and co-operate with one another: they compete to share in the making of decisions of major importance for the society, and they co-operate because together they keep the society working as a going concern. Elites govern institutions which have, in the complex world, functional tasks... It is elites who have the capacity to introduce change... (p. 27).
Read more about this topic: John Porter (sociologist)
Famous quotes containing the word vertical:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)