The class paradigm also fails to deal with some important questions. First, the extent of social and cultural diversity within classes is played down, although this class heterogeneity may have decisive implications for the potential for class consciousness, solidarity, and conflict. Second, the persistence of authority relationships and the requirements of hierarchical and disciplined organization of labor under conditions of high technology and industrial production are minimized,if not ignored. If these requirements are not in fact simply an epiphenomenon of capitalism, but are endemic to industrial organization, both the image of the future society and the means to get there would have to change sharply.