One drawback of the existing discussions is that they have formulated a uniform image of the “middle class,” on the basis of a static data set, observed at a particular point in time, about wide wealth gaps between Bangkok and the rural areas. To be sure, in a comparative sense the Thai middle classes are much smaller in size than those of other East Asian countries (see the paper by Hattori and Funatsu in this spe- cial issue). Nonetheless, however, the number of the middle-class job holders within Thailand has increased steeply over several decades, so much so that the “middle class” is rapidly losing its character as a simple monolithic class. For example, be- tween 1960 and 1995, when industrialization got under way, the number of people holding new middle class jobs (i.e., professional and technical, administrative and managerial, and nonroutine clerical jobs) increased from 2.6 per cent of the civilian labor force to 12.1 per cent; and in metropolitan Bangkok alone, the number of such people increased by a factor of 12.2.7 But existing studies have failed to answer the basic question of from what social strata and through what channels of occupational mobility the growing middle strata were recruited.
Another drawback is that although existing studies seem to imply that the struc- tural gap between the capital and the rural areas manifests itself directly as an ac- tual inter-class political conflict, it is in fact questionable whether this assertion faithfully reflects the actual social consciousness of the various classes. In particular, the political discourse that assigns to the “middle class” the role of a subject, or a re- former, who should solve problems caused by national development policy, is but a pseudo analysis dictated by normative views about what roles the “middle class” ought to perform. The discourse, moreover, overlooks the fact that the “middle