Abstract
A comment on Jan Pakulski & Malcolm Waters's "The Reshaping and Dissolution of Social Class in Advanced Societies" (see abstract). Like many other theorists, Pakulski & Waters fail to appreciate a fundamental force for class destruction: the massive entry of women into the labor force. To answer the question that Pakulski & Waters left unasked -- whether the entry of women into the labor force renders models of class less tenable -- three different models of class that have tried to account for the role of women in postindustrial societies are compared: conventional, dominance, & joint classification. The joint-classification model provides the most insight, if only because it begins to recast the traditional debate over class in the language of contextual effects. 2 Figures. M. Maguire