What is the social structure of Chinese society in the 21st century? How should China address the problem of migrant workers? How can China form a modern society? These key sociological issues are some of the topics this book covers. This book is a collection of the research articles and lectures that Dr. Lu Xueyi, the former Head of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has published since the 1980s. The author discusses the social structure, social stratification, social construction, and development of contemporary Chinese society. Arguing that the gap between economic and social development has become the major social issue facing modern China, the author advocates paying close attention to the country's social structure and the growth of the middle class. The book will be of interest to all scholars and students of Sociology and Chinese Studies.

A radical new interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, The Making of an American Thinking Class envisions the Bay colony as a seventeenth century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological 'cells' and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. From there Staloff offers a broadened conception of the interstices of political, social, and intellectual authority in Puritan Massachusetts and beyond, arguing that ideologies, as well as ideological politics, are produced by self-conscious, and often class-conscious, thinkers.

This title was first published in 2002: Numerous reports have identified the serious problems of under-representation of, and discrimination against, minority ethnic groups in the British NHS. It is widely argued that this both raises issues of social justice and undermines the quality of service to minority ethnic patients. Nowhere are these problems more acute than among the largest occupational group in the NHS - nurses. This book reports the results of research carried out for the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting to evaluate NHS equal opportunities policy. Drawing on additional original research involving interviews with key policy actors, this fascinating book examines the prospects for a national strategy linking the business and justice cases for the delivery of greater equity in employment and service delivery.

This volume addresses the contested relationship between social stratification and social movements in three different ways: First, the authors address the relationship between social stratification and the emergence of protest mobilization. Second, the texts look at social stratification and social positions to explain variations in political orientations, as well as differing aims and interests of protestors. Finally, the volume focuses on the socio-structural composition of protestors. Social Stratification and Social Movements takes up recent attempts to reconnect research on these two fields. Instead of calling for a return of a class perspective or abandoning the classical social movement research agenda, it introduces a multi-dimensional perspective on stratification and social movements and broadens the view by extending the empirical analysis beyond Europe.

This title was first published in 2002: The trade union movement in twentieth-century Britain has been a cornerstone for society's marginalized members - women, disabled people, lesbians and gay men and people from black and ethnic minority communities. As these groups of workers self-organized to reform their unions, they built a bridge between the old social movement based around class position and labour identity and the new social movements based around civil rights and status stratifications. This book presents a detailed look at self-organization within public sector unions through the emergence of four self-organized groups within NALGO and later, UNISON. Drawing upon unique insider knowledge of the alliances and antipathies between the self-organized groups and the host union, the book also provides fascinating revelations of the tensions between self-organized groups themselves. This study will be essential reading for students of political sociology and industrial relations.

This title was first published in 2003. A fascinating insight into the economic, social and political processes that shaped the lives of white workers in Johannesburg between the beginning of deep level mining (c. 1890) and the 1922 Rand Revolt miners' strike. The book examines four related topics: the formation of working class families, working class accommodation, the constitution of social networks in the working class neighbourhoods and the political and ideological aspects of white workers' unemployment. The main argument presented here is that the class experience of white workers in Johannesburg had a very important role in fostering a sense of community between English and Afrikaner workers and their families. It is this sense of community that plays an important part in understanding the solidarity that emerged between English and Afrikaner workers during the 1922 Rand Revolt.

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of Freeway in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of Freeway in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

Dick Houtman argues that neither authoritarianism nor libertarianism can be explained by class or economic background, but rather by position in the cultural domain-- what he calls cultural capital. Although he examines all of the statistics and arguments of the conventional approaches with care and concern, Houtman convincingly demonstrates that the conclusions drawn from earlier studies are untenable at a more general theoretical level. Despite differences among advocates of class explanations, their theories are based on largely identical research findings--in particular a strong negative relationship between education and authoritarianism. Unobstructed by the conclusions these authors felt called upon to draw from the findings themselves, Houtman configures them in a new way. The hypotheses derived from this new theory allow for a systematic, strict, and competitive testing of original theses without ignoring the value of and earlier research. After demonstrating that authoritarianism and libertarianism cannot be explained by class or economic background, Houtman examines the implications of this argument for today's death of class debate in political sociology. He holds it to be unfortunate that the relevance of class to politics is typically addressed by studying the relation between class and voting. This conceals a complex cross-pressure mechanism that causes this relationship to capture the net balance of class voting and its opposite, cultural voting, instead of class voting. He argues that references to a decline in class voting may be basically correct, but dogmatic reliance on the relation between class and voting to prove the point systematically underestimates levels of class voting and produces an exaggerated picture of the decline. "Dick Houtman has an eye for the critical gap in our grand theorizing, and like the classic Dutchman, has filled the gap. This book we must all read to find how better to fill the gaps in our own theorizing about culture, class, and politics."--Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago "Dick Houtman" is professor of sociology at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Addressing the issues of educational equity and social class diversity, Donna Marie San Antonio documents the challenges adolescents face when making the transition from elementary school to middle school. The book explores the values, resources, and ways of interacting that students from diverse economic backgrounds bring from their families and communities, and how they are enabled or discouraged from integrating these assets in their new school environment.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

Globalised Minds, Roots in the City utilises empirical evidence from four European cities to explore the role of urban upper middle classes in the transformations experienced by contemporary European societies. * Presents new empirical evidence collected through an original comparative research about professionals and managers in four European cities in three countries * Features an innovative combination of approaches, methods, and techniques in its analyses of European post-national societies * Reveals how segments of Europe s urban population are adopting exit or partial exit strategies in respect to the nation state * Utilises approaches from classic urban sociology, globalization and mobility studies, and spatial class analysis * Includes in depth interviews, social networking techniques, and classic questions of political representation and values

Contents:
1. Race and Class in Manhattan and Harlem History
2. Locating Class and Race in Anthropology and History
3. Professionals, Entrepreneurs and Artists: Harlem's African American Professional-Managerial Workers
4. Work and its Impact on Income and Housing
5. Lifestyle, Consumption and Ideology
6. Negotiating Socioeconomic Boundaries in Kin Networks
7. Negotiating Socioeconomic Boundaries in Community Life
8. Conclusion: Race, Class, History and Identity

Class, Self, Culture puts class back on the map in a novel way by taking a new look at how class is made and given value through culture. It shows how different classes become attributed with value, enabling culture to be deployed as a resource and as a form of property, which has both use-value to the person and exchange-value in systems of symbolic and economic exchange.

The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through mechanisms of giving value to culture, and how what we come to know and assume to be a 'self' is always a classed formation.

Analysing four processes: of inscription, institutionalisation, perspective-taking and exchange relationships, it challenges recent debates on reflexivity, risk, rational-action theory, individualisation and mobility, by showing how these are all reliant on fixing some people in place so that others can move.

Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables 1. Introduction 2. Bedford in Context 3. Narrative Structures: The Cultural Codes of a Landscape Aesthetic 4. Anxious Pleasures: Place-Based Identity and the Look of the Land 5. Legislating Beauty: The Politics of Exclusion 6. The Taxman Cometh: The Gift of Nature in Suburbia 7. Fabricating History: The Production of Heritage in Bedford Village 8. Another Country: Latino Labor and the Politics of Disappearance 9. Epilogue Bibliography

Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables 1. Introduction 2. Bedford in Context 3. Narrative Structures: The Cultural Codes of a Landscape Aesthetic 4. Anxious Pleasures: Place-Based Identity and the Look of the Land 5. Legislating Beauty: The Politics of Exclusion 6. The Taxman Cometh: The Gift of Nature in Suburbia 7. Fabricating History: The Production of Heritage in Bedford Village 8. Another Country: Latino Labor and the Politics of Disappearance 9. Epilogue Bibliography

This volume develops a historically informed phenomenology of caste and untouchability. It explores the idea of 'Brahmin' and the practice of untouchability by offering a scholarly reading of ancient and medieval texts. By going beyond the notions of purity and pollution, it presents a new framework of understanding relationships between social groups and social categories. An important intervention in the study of caste and untouchability, this book will be an essential read for the scholars and researchers of political studies, political philosophy, cultural studies, Dalit studies, Indology, sociology, social anthropology and Ambedkar studies.

While the clash between what has been called the "modern" and "undeveloped" worlds has led to America's military involvement in the Middle East and other places, few people realize the tension between the modern and the traditional within the United States. Beginning in the 1920's, professional intellectuals and academics began influencing the nation's public policy on matters as diverse as education, economics, and public health. In this thoughtful work, David A. Horowitz analyzes the tension between the so-called "New Class" of knowledge professionals and their critics, who accused them of being out of touch with the common sense of everyday people, strangers to the American Way, even Communists.
"America's Political Class Under Fire" is organized over nine periods of 20th-century history, providing a window into everything from the Scopes evolution trial and McCarthyism to affirmative action and the Clinton health care fiasco. Along the way, the book explores the New Left, populist conservatism, and the mid-90's reaction to political liberalism, which saw Newt Gingrich rise to the top post in the House of Representatives. In telling these stories, Horowitz seeks to encourage a more balanced and fair-minded assessment of the consequences of expertise and applied intellect to democratic existence in the United States.

Education forms a unique dimension of social status, with qualities that make it especially important to health. It influences health in ways that are varied, present at all stages of adult life, cumulative, self-amplifying, and uniformly positive. Educational attainment marks social status at the beginning of adulthood, functioning as the main bridge between the status of one generation and the next, and also as the main avenue of upward mobility. It precedes the other acquired social statuses and substantially influences them, including occupational status, earnings, and personal and household income and wealth. Education creates desirable outcomes because it trains individuals to acquire, evaluate, and use information. It teaches individuals to tap the power of knowledge. Education develops the learned effectiveness that enables self-direction toward any and all values sought, including health. For decades American health sciences has acted as if social status had little bearing on health. The ascendance of clinical medicine within a culture of individualism probably accounts for that omission. But research on chronic diseases over the last half of the twentieth century forced science to think differently about the causes of disease. Despite the institutional and cultural forces focusing medical research on distinctive proximate causes of specific diseases, researchers were forced to look over their shoulders, back toward more distant causes of many diseases. Some fully turned their orientation toward the social status of health, looking for the origins of that cascade of disease and disability flowing daily through clinics. Why is it that people with higher socioeconomic status have better health than lower status individuals? The authors, who are well recognized for their strength in survey research on a broad national scale, draw on findings and ideas from many sciences, including demography, economics, social psychology, and the health sciences. People who are well educated feel in control of their lives, which encourages and enables a healthy lifestyle. In addition, learned effectiveness, a practical end of that education, enables them to find work that is autonomous and creative, thereby promoting good health.

The transformation from Communist rule towards democratic development in Russia cannot be fully understood without taking the elites into full consideration. Elites and Democratic Development in Russia examines how elites support and challenge democracy and why they are crucial to Russian democracy in particular.
In this innovative volume, twelve respected scholars investigate how elites have affected the transition from Communist rule towards democratic development in Russia. They discuss how the elites' degree of integration on national and regional levels may constitute the main condition for the consolidation of the emerging political regime and interpret the complex post-communist elite patterns of behaviour and attitudes into a theoretical framework of elitist democracy.
This book will appeal to those interested in democratization, elites, post-Soviet Russia and post-communist studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203712757

Dividing Classes offers a first-hand ethnographic account to examine the relationship between social class structures and educational success. Instead of studying the historically marginalized lower classes, this book asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values of dominant groups to explain the reproduction of social class. Drawing on interviews with 31 administrators, principals, and teachers and 20 middle class mothers in a small Indian town in which the author lives, Ellen Brantlinger discovers the considerable power the middle class wields in determining school policy and practice to secure educational advantages for their children. With the insight gained from this perspective, the roots of increasingly conservative educational policy and the idea of class as an organising category in education are critically examined.

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader.

The essays in this collection examine agrarian transformation in Latin America and the role in this of peasants, with particular reference to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Central America. Among the issues covered are the impact of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.

Class Strategies and the Education Market examines the ways in which the middle classes maintain and improve their social advantages in and through education.
Drawing on an extensive series of interviews with parents and children, this book identifies key moments of decision making in the construction of the educational trajectories of middle class children. Stephen J. Ball organises his analysis around the key concepts of social closure, social capital, values and principles and risk, while bringing a broad range of up-to-date sociological theory to bear upon his subject. From this thorough analysis, valuable and thought-provoking insights emerge into the assiduous care and considerable effort and expenditure which goes into ensuring the educational success of the middle class child
The middle classes are a sociological enigma, presenting the social researcher with considerable analytic and theoretical difficulties. Class Strategies and the Education Market provides a set of working tools for class analysis and the examination of class practices. Above all, it offers new ways of thinking about class theory and the relationships between classes in late modern society.