Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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determined by social status. The burgeoning bureaucracy and the service-import business
have required backgrounds in formal education rather than apprenticeship. As
transportation technology rapidly improved, occupational opportunities have become
unbound by geographical locality. The prosperity brought by the discovery of oil enabled
many people the chance to enter the business world. This process is well illustrated in
Gary Samore's words:
The rapid pace of the development in Saudi has given birth to new social
groups- administrators, skilled labor, army officers and professionals- that are
not part of either the religious hierarchy, the ruling family, or the tribal
order...Modernization has lured young bedouins from the desert to the city,
weakening the tribal structure. 61
With the improvements in the economy, the society gradually started to distance itself
from pre-industrial modes. This distancing occurred slowly during the first three decades
of the Kingdom, but rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s. Concomitantly, cleavages of the
essentially mono-class society ensued due to the increasing gap in the distribution of oil
wealth and the specialization of labor. The 1950s witnessed the expansion of the wealthy
echelon comprising royal family members emerging at the top of a majority of the
population essentially mired in pre-industrial poverty. An upper middle class started to
form, encompassing administrators, the King's aides and royal entourage (retinues), and
the merchant class (and shopkeepers) whose members rushed to reap the opportunities of
the rapidly expanding import business. The merchant class expanded, paralleling the
increase in the standard of living.
The new middle class swelled corresponding to the growth of the modern economy.
It encompassed managers, engineers and skilled technicians who grew to hold assets in
towns and cities diversifying the private business with specialized shops, mechanized
garages, transportation operators, chauffeurs and taxi drivers, and the like. In addition to
the merchant class, both a new growing administrative and professional strata began to join
the ranks of the burgeoning middle class. The transition to the industrial modes of
production was characterized by a far flung division of labor and the imposition of a system
of wage-earning working and professional classes. In the span of fifty years, the
traditional, economically impoverished society mutated to an urban, educated class
involved in the modern economy. Between 1965 and 1985, in nominal terms, the middle
class grew from 14,900 to 113,200, while its proportion within the Saudi labor force grew