Erik Olin Wright

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Erik Olin Wright (b. 1947, Berkeley, California), is an American sociologist. His work is concerned mainly with the study of social classes, and in particular with the task of providing an update to the Marxist concept of class. Wright has stressed the importance of the control of the means of production in defining 'class', while at the same trying to account for the situation of skilled employees, taking inspiration from Weberian accounts of authority. According to Wright, employees with sought-after skills are in a 'contradictory class location' because, while they are not capitalists, they are more precious to the owner of the means of production than less skilled workers: the owner of the means of production therefore tries to 'buy' their loyalty by giving them stakes in his enterprises and endowing them with authority over their fellow workers. Thus skilled workers tend to be closer to the interests of the 'bosses' than other workers.

Erik Olin Wright's main theoretical and empirical work is Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997), which uses data collected in various industrialized countries, including the United States of America. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.