Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

J. MARSHALL
Life mode 1.
Life modes 2 & 3: Wage-workers
The self-employed, farmers,
fishermen, handicraft
workers.
2. Unskilled or semiskilled
waged workers
3. Salaried career
professionals
Figure 3.
The first is that of the self-employed, where the person is involved in what he
terms ‘simple commodity production’. This includes farmers, fishermen,
‘liberal trades’, handicrafts, and partnership companies (Højrup 1983: 20).
The second and third form part of what he terms the ‘wage-workers’ life
modes. Life mode two has to do with wage-earning workers in the capitalist
mode of production. These people possess neither the means of production as
property, nor the qualifications to begin and control the production process.
Included in this category are unskilled and semi-skilled workers, who work
only in order to obtain the means with which to live a meaningful life during
their free time. The third type includes qualified, educated and responsible
people, those who monitor and control the production process, and who attend
to organisation, management and marketing. These people are not paid hourly,
but usually receive a salary for their abilities. In this career- or successoriented
life mode there is less sense of solidarity with colleagues than is
found with the wage earner of life mode two (I return to this notion below).
The Milroys refer to Højrup’s notion of life modes as a theory
which can explicitly link a network analysis of subgroups within society to an
analysis of social structure at the political, institutional, and economic levels (p. 19).
Højrup’s life modes theory sees subgroups as the effect of ‘fundamental
societal structures which split the population into fundamentally different life
modes’ (Højrup 1983: 47). The Milroys suggest that the different types of
network structure seem to arise from the differences in life mode of
individuals. Højrup’s concept of life mode, like that of network, is a structural
one, and the characteristics of one life mode are determined by its contrast to
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