Hans Bayer on Ludwig Neundörfer’s Die Angestellten (1963)

Hans Bayer’s journal book review assesses Ludwig Neundörfer’s Die Angestellten. Neuer Versuch einer Standortbestimmung, published in 1961, as a fundamental contribution to understanding salaried employees. Its central concern is the relationship between a legal employment category and a sociologically coherent group. Bayer endorses Neundörfer’s refusal to assume that people classified as Angestellte share a uniform social position. The review moves from the book’s historical and conceptual framework to its investigation of workplace functions, then considers the limits of occupational advancement.

Bayer first emphasizes that Neundörfer does more than report the results of a specialized empirical inquiry. The book’s first part addresses the history of the problem and of the doctrines used to interpret it. It examines observers of the employee phenomenon, the persistence and effectiveness of legal norms, and attempts to establish the numerical size of the employee group. This preparatory work matters because the category under investigation already carries historical and legal assumptions: defining its boundaries is itself part of the sociological problem.

The decisive disagreement concerns F. Croner’s proposal that sociology should positively ask what salaried employees are and analyze the Angestellenschaft as a fact in its own right. As Bayer presents it, Neundörfer challenges the potentially misleading substantialization of that collective category. Shared employment and social-law provisions do not establish that the people governed by them form a socially homogeneous body:

Angestellenschaft würde bedeuten, daß es sich um eine in ihrem gesamten sozialen Habitus geschlossene und einheitliche Gruppe handelt und nicht um Angestellte, denen zwar bestimmte arbeits- und sozialrechtliche Regeln gemeinsam sind, die aber in vielen anderen Bezügen weit auseinanderfallen können.

English translation: A body of salaried employees would mean a group that is cohesive and uniform in its entire social habitus, rather than salaried employees who share certain rules of employment and social law but may differ widely in many other respects.

The objection is not that subgroups exist; their existence is uncontested. The issue is whether essential social characteristics remain common across those subgroups. Bayer identifies Neundörfer’s alternative as a working hypothesis subsequently supported by the specialized investigation:

Die Gruppe der als „Angestellte“ Tätigen ist mehrschichtig; es gehen, von den aus der Arbeitsfunktion resultierenden Daseinsformen aus gesehen, wesentliche Trennlinien durch die Gruppe.

English translation: The group of those working as “salaried employees” is multilayered; viewed in terms of the forms of existence resulting from work functions, significant dividing lines run through the group.

The conceptual shift is from nominal membership to differentiation through work. The empirical inquiry asks which activities legally classified salaried employees perform within enterprises, how widespread or rare those activities are, and how important they are to enterprise operations. It also compares them with the activities of legally classified workers in the same enterprise. Legal status thus supplies a starting classification, while actual functions provide a means of testing its sociological significance. Bayer’s account presents this comparison as the practical counterpart of Neundörfer’s criticism of an assumed unified employee body.

Occupational advancement supplies the review’s clearest substantive example. Neundörfer investigates women and men separately, although Bayer reports specific findings only for men. Even their opportunities, he argues, are less favorable than some authors suggest:

Für die Masse der männlichen Angestellten führt allerdings der berufliche Aufstieg über diese Positionen, die etwa im Buchhalter, Sachbearbeiter und in der Spitze im Leiter einer Unterabteilung oder Leiter einer kleinen Abteilung typische Tätigkeitsbezeichnungen aufweisen, nicht hinaus.

English translation: For the mass of male salaried employees, however, occupational advancement does not extend beyond these positions, whose typical job titles include bookkeeper, administrative officer, and, at the upper end, head of a subsection or head of a small department.

The point is a ceiling on advancement, not its complete absence. Bayer also reports that among men over fifty-five in the enterprises studied, more remained in broad-base positions than rose beyond the middle functional levels: 31 percent compared with 21 percent. Neundörfer’s military analogy distinguishes the relatively attainable lieutenant’s commission from the rarely available marshal’s baton.

Bayer closes by noting substantial agreement with findings presented at the Sozialakademie Dortmund’s 1958 international conference on employees’ position in modern economic policy, drawing on reports from European and non-European countries. His favorable assessment rests on the connection between conceptual criticism and empirical differentiation: salaried employment must be understood through internal divisions, workplace functions, and actual mobility opportunities, rather than through legal designation alone.