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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Social classes > General
This is a gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers. - Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices - from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion - as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.
Since the 1980s, the relationship between social class and education has been overshadowed by scholarship more generally targeting issues of race, gender, and representation. Today, with the global economy deeply immersed in social inequalities, there is pressing need for serious class-based analyses of schooling, family life and social structure. The Way Class Works is a collection of twenty-four groundbreaking essays on the material conditions of social class and the ways in which class is produced on the ground in educational institutions and families. Written by the most visible and important scholars in education and the social sciences, these timely essays explore the production of class in and through the economy, family, and school, while simultaneously interrogating and challenging our understandings of social class as linked to race, gender, and nation. With essays by distinguished scholars and questions for further reflection and discussion, The Way Class Works will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars in education, sociology, and beyond.
Originally published in 1976, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England examines working-class radicalism in the mid-Victorian period and suggests that after the fading of Chartist militancy the radical tradition was preserved in a working-class subculture that enabled working men to resist the full consolidation of middle-class hegemony. The book traces the growth of working-class radicalism as it developed dialectically in confrontation with middle-class liberal ideology in the generation after Waterloo. Intellectual forces were of central importance in shaping the character of the working-class Left and the Enlightenment, in particular, as the chief source of ideological weapons that were turned against the established order. The Enlightenment also provided the intellectual foundations of the middle-class ideology that was directed against the incipient threat of popular radicalism. The book notes that the same intellectual forces that entered into the first half of the nineteenth century also shaped the value system that provided the foundations of mid-Victorian urban culture. These forces also contributed to the rapprochement between working-class liberalism, bringing latent affinities to the surface. It is also emphasised, however, that inherited ideas and traditions exercised their influence in interaction with the structure of power and status.
This book examines the rise of welfare markets in Western societies and explores their functioning, regulation and embeddedness by addressing the particular field of old age provision, including both retirement provision and elderly care. It goes beyond a mere social policy analysis by investigating major cultural underpinnings of the new (quasi-)markets, with these underpinnings embracing collective normative representations of how societies (should) institutionally handle old age. The book looks at whether pension and care systems are converging under the influence of globalization - with marketization being a key phenomenon - and to what extent this is creating a transnational culture of welfare markets. This book, the first book to systematically describe and analyse the phenomenon of welfare markets, elucidates the complex cultural underpinnings of care and pensions systems in an era of marketization, arguing that we are facing a cultural struggle over the way late modern societies conceptualize institutional old-age provision.
How can teachers bridge the gap between their commitments to social justice and their day to day practice? This is the question author Adam Howard asked as he began teaching at an elite private school and the question that led him to conduct a six-year study on affluent schooling. Unfamiliar with the educational landscape of privilege and abundance, he began exploring the burning questions he had as a teacher on the lessons affluent students are taught in schooling about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are. Grounded in an extensive ethnographic account, Learning Privilege examines the concept of privilege itself and the cultural and social processes in schooling that reinforce and regenerate privilege. Howard explores what educators, students and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book illustrates the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege, not, fundamentally, as what they have, but, rather, as who they are.
This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes. The book also maps the relationship between two trends: the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies (in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership); and a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors. The book mimics this point of convergence by pairing three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). Ying considers the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. Then mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley are re-read from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points.
This edited collection explains the importance of community empowerment in advancing public policy, and gives examples of how professionals have successfully mobilized the public in the past. Written primarily for students, academics, and lawyers, this book also attempts to bridge the widely publicized gap between professional advocates and grassroots organizations. The authors hope to demonstrate two basic principles: that the democratization of research and specialized practice enables the production of new insights; and that professionals' participation in the process of empowerment of low-income communities is transformative in ways that are enriching both professionally and personally.
This edited collection explains the importance of community empowerment in advancing public policy, and gives examples of how professionals have successfully mobilized the public in the past. Written primarily for students, academics, and lawyers, this book also attempts to bridge the widely publicized gap between professional advocates and grassroots organizations. The authors hope to demonstrate two basic principles: that the democratization of research and specialized practice enables the production of new insights; and that professionals' participation in the process of empowerment of low-income communities is transformative in ways that are enriching both professionally and personally.
"A gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers." -Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices-from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion-as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.
Class Construction explores class, racial, and gender identity construction among white, working-class students. Delving into River City High School, Freie asks what happens to the adolescent children of working-class families when economic changes such as globalization and technological advancements have altered the face of working-class jobs. Mass consumerism, greater availability of college level education, lack of a cohesive class identity, and racial and religious politics all combine to create a new working-class identity for today's youth. Featuring interviews with the River City High School students, Class Construction aims to understand how class is conceptualized among American, working-class youths. Class Construction is ideal for courses on sociology, education, gender studies, and American studies, as well as high school educators and administrators.
First published in 1999, this much-needed volume powerfully re-evaluates attitudes to the 'deserving and 'undeserving' poor and aims to investigate social workers' attitudes and actions towards poverty issues, social service users who have needed financial help and to question whether learning about poverty is an integrated part of social work students' training and social workers' in-service training. Monica Dowling has experience of being a social work student and social worker, as well as a social work teacher and researcher. In an age when increasing numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students are unemployed and living on benefits, Dowling reveals the true picture of the people who end up on the poverty line, reconnecting social work theory and practice.
In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time. Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.
Moral reform movements targeting racial minorities have long been central in negotiating the relationship between race and class in the United States, particularly in periods of large scale social change. Over a century ago, when the abolition of racial slavery, Southern Reconstruction, industrialization, and urban migration presented challenges to both race and class hierarchies in the South, postbellum missionary reform organizations like the American Missionary Association crusaded to establish schools, colleges, and churches for Blacks in Southern cities like Atlanta that would aggressively erode cultural differences among former slaves and assimilate them into a civic order defined by Anglo-Protestant culture. While the AMA's missionary institutions in Atlanta sought to shift racial dynamics between Blacks and Whites, they also fueled struggles over the social and cultural boundaries of middle class belonging in a region beset by social change. Drawing upon late nineteenth century accounts of AMA missionary activity in Atlanta, Black attempts to define and maintain a middle class identity, and Atlanta Whites' concerns about Black attempts at upward mobility, the author argue that the rhetoric about the implications of increased minority access to middle class resources like education and cultural knowledge speaks to links between anxieties about class position and racial status in societies stratified by both class and race.
This book presents an analysis of representations of white, heterosexual, working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989 to trace the development of the sociocultural and material conditions that shaped the masculinities which are helping to shape contemporary culture. This book seeks to fan the 'spark of hope' in the past that informs our present. The period which saw the establishment of the welfare state and the construction and breakdown of the post-war consensus in British politics was of great significance in the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities and their correspondent representations. The author engages with a variety of cultural texts across various modes and media including films (Alfie), plays (Don't Look Back in Anger), television (Boys from the Blackstuff), and music (The Beatles), and employs the analysis of the representation of working-class masculinities as a lens through which to examine a range of historical and cultural moments. This book reinstates class as a central precept in the study of British cultural representations and offers a timely intervention in ongoing debates around class and gender identities in Britain. The book will be key reading for students and researchers with interests in twentieth-century social and cultural British history, masculinities and gender studies, twentieth-century British literature, British television, and cultural studies more broadly.
Moral reform movements targeting racial minorities have long been central in negotiating the relationship between race and class in the United States, particularly in periods of large scale social change. Over a century ago, when the abolition of racial slavery, Southern Reconstruction, industrialization, and urban migration presented challenges to both race and class hierarchies in the South, postbellum missionary reform organizations like the American Missionary Association crusaded to establish schools, colleges, and churches for Blacks in Southern cities like Atlanta that would aggressively erode cultural differences among former slaves and assimilate them into a civic order defined by Anglo-Protestant culture. While the AMA's missionary institutions in Atlanta sought to shift racial dynamics between Blacks and Whites, they also fueled struggles over the social and cultural boundaries of middle class belonging in a region beset by social change. Drawing upon late nineteenth century accounts of AMA missionary activity in Atlanta, Black attempts to define and maintain a middle class identity, and Atlanta Whites' concerns about Black attempts at upward mobility, the author argue that the rhetoric about the implications of increased minority access to middle class resources like education and cultural knowledge speaks to links between anxieties about class position and racial status in societies stratified by both class and race.
Class counts. Class differences and class warfare have existed since the beginning of western civilization, but the gap in income and wealth between the rich (top 10 percent) and the rest has increased steadily in the last twenty-five years. The U.S. is heading for a financial oligarchy much worse than the aristocratic old world that our Founding Fathers feared and tried to avoid. The middle class is struggling and shrinking, the Medicare and Social Security trusts are drying up, and education is no longer the great equalizer. A moral society, one that is fair and just, sets limits on the accumulation of wealth and inherited privilege and also guarantees a safety net for the less fortunate. This book describes the need for a redistribution of wealth in order to make U.S. society more democratic, fair and just, and outlines the ways in which we can begin to make these very necessary changes. This is a timely and powerful book, one that should be read by anyone interested in preserving the social fabric of American life.
Class counts. Class differences and class warfare have existed since the beginning of western civilization, but the gap in income and wealth between the rich (top 10 percent) and the rest has increased steadily in the last twenty-five years. The U.S. is heading for a financial oligarchy much worse than the aristocratic old world that our Founding Fathers feared and tried to avoid. The middle class is struggling and shrinking, the Medicare and Social Security trusts are drying up, and education is no longer the great equalizer. A moral society, one that is fair and just, sets limits on the accumulation of wealth and inherited privilege and also guarantees a safety net for the less fortunate. This book describes the need for a redistribution of wealth in order to make U.S. society more democratic, fair and just, and outlines the ways in which we can begin to make these very necessary changes. This is a timely and powerful book, one that should be read by anyone interested in preserving the social fabric of American life.
Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are-contrary to state policy and media portrayals-diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China's urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that-more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform-class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.
Good Company: A Tramp Life, is a vivid portrait of a lifestyle long part of America's history, yet rapidly disappearing. The author traveled extensively by freight train to gain rich insights into the elusive world of the tramp.Richly illustrated with 85 photographs by the author, the book presents the homeless man as an individual who "drank, migrated, and worked at day labor" rather than the stereotype of a victim of alcoholism. The tramps with whom Harper shared boxcars and hobo jungles were the labor force that harvested the crops in most of the apple orchards in the Pacific Northwest. They were drawn to the harvest from across the United States and migrated primarily on freight trains, as had hobos in the 1930s. Although not without its problems, the tramp way of life is a fierce and independent culture that has been an integral part of our American identity and an important part of our agricultural economy. Since the first edition of this classic book was published by the University of Chicago Press, the tramp has virtually disappeared from the American social landscape. The agricultural labor force is now made up of Hispanic migrants. This significantly revised and updated edition contrasts this disappearing lifestyle with the homelessness of the modern era, which has been produced by different economic and sociological forces, all of which have worked against the continuation of the tramp as a social species. The new edition richly documents the transition in our society from "tramps" to urban homelessness and the many social, political, and policy changes attendant to this transformation. It also includes an additional thirty-five previously unpublished photographs from theoriginal research.
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.
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 for all scholars and students of Sociology and Chinese Studies.
This book brings together authors working on some of the most significant poverty and welfare research projects on the European stage. The contributions focus broadly on the experience of being poor in England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany between 1800 and the 1940s, a theme that has received inadequate attention in the European historiography thus far. The chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first deals with the experience of being poor: networks, migration and survival strategies; the second with confinement, discipline, surveillance and classification: paths to the welfare state; and the third with the symbolism of poverty.
You Call This a Democracy? is a penetrating and troubling look at how the U.S. ruling class and the power elite dominate wealth, power and decision-making in all aspects of our lives and institutions. Arguing that the United States has always had a ruling class, this book does not focus on the current administration or rogue corporations, but presents a deeper, longer-term analysis of how the ruling class has created and uses the Constitution, corporations and the courts, as well as a host of other mechanisms such as tax laws, wars, buffer zones, and distractions, to dominate our society and accumulate wealth. The book is carefully researched and referenced, and filled with numerous examples and illustrations. It is an indispensable resource for every person concerned about the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in our society. This revised second printing adds a new workshop and classroom friendly study guide which makes this an easy to use book for activists and educators focused on issues of poverty, inequality, multiculturalism, diversity, politics, and economic, racial, and gender justice. The new Afterword includes practical suggestions for incorporating democratic practice in our everyday family, classroom and workplace processes. You Call This a Democracy? is being used in high school and college classes, in study groups, in religious based social justice projects, and by activists throughout the country because it provides a framework and common vocabulary to talk about issues of economic justice and to help guide people's everyday decisions and political involvement.
There are almost as many works about intellectuals as there are
intellectuals. Perhaps this is because intellectuals are masters of
the word and their mastery is often used to write about themselves.
Indeed, with the possible exceptions of sports figures and film
actors, intellectuals may be the most overpublicized people in
America. In this classic study, originally published in 1974,
Charles Kadushin examines the attitudes of that class of people
known as the American intellectual elite.
"Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic "World reconsiders the
typology and history of intellectuals in the Arabic world from the
late 19th century to present day. |
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