This book explores the relation between democracy and industrialization in United States history. Over the course of the 1930s, the political center almost disappeared as the Democratic New Deal became the litmus test of class, with blue collar workers providing its bedrock of support while white collar workers and those in the upper-income levels opposed it. By 1948 the class cleavage in American politics was as pronounced as in many of the Western European countries-such as France, Italy, Germany, or Britain-with which we usually associate class politics. Working people created a new America in the 1930s and 1940s which was a fundamental departure from the feudalistic and hierarchical America that existed before. They won the political rights of American citizenship which had been previously denied them. They democratized labor-capital relations and gained more economic security than they had ever known. They obtained more economic opportunity for them and their children than they had ever known and they created a respect for ethnic workers, which had not previously existed. In the process, class politics re-defined the political agenda of America as-for the first time in American history-the political universe polarized along class lines. Eric Leif Davin explores the meaning of the New Deal political mobilization by ordinary people by examining the changes it brought to the local, county, and state levels in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania as a whole.

First published in 1969, this book presents a one-volume anthology of Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, the classic early study of the poor in the urban environment. The original text consists of a vast compendium of descriptions of families, homes, streets, conditions of work, cultural and religious practices, much of it illustrated with charts, maps and statistics - giving the public an idea of the dimensions and meaning of poverty. The editors have selected the extracts in this book for their vividness, readability and intrinsic interest, and their introduction conveys the context of 1880s London - relating Booth's investigations to contemporary concerns.

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.

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.

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.

Thirty-five years after its initial publication, Harold Cruse's "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," remains a foundational work in Afro-American Studies and American Cultural Studies. Published during a highly contentious moment in Afro-American political life, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" was one of the very few texts that treated Afro-American intellectuals as intellectually significant. The essays contained in Harold Cruse's "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered" are collectively a testimony to the continuing significance of this polemical call to arms for black intellectuals. Each scholar featured in this book has chosen to discuss specific arguments made by Cruse. While some have utilized Cruse's arguments to launch broader discussions of various issues pertaining to Afro-American intellectuals, and others have contributed discussions on intellectual issues completely ignored by Cruse, all hope to pay homage to a thinker worthy of continual reconsideration.

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.

Like any book, this one is part of a dialogue. Over the years, I have asked thousands of questions, of myself and others, and tried to answer some. Out of all this discussion, a written pattern has grown. It is certainly not a definitive pattern. Among those whose words have been woven into it, there are many who might have fashioned it better. There are some who would have selected different colors and textures, or who might have preferred a totally different pattern. I am conscious of their voices and wish that I could adequately present them all. First and foremost are the voices of farmers and other villagers, whose experiences I have tried to understand and represent. A few of them will read this book and decide whether I learned anything from all their patient answers. If they were so inclined, they could tell more about the subject than I ever can.

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 cross-disciplinary book, situated on the periphery of culture, employs humour to better comprehend the arts, the outsider and exclusion, illuminating the ever-changing social landscape, the vagaries of taste and limits of political correctness. Each chapter deals with specific themes and approaches - from the construct of outsider and complexity of humour, to Outsider Art and spaces - using various theoretical and analytical methods. Paul Clements draws on humour, especially from visual arts and culture (and to a lesser extent literature, film, music and performance), as a tool of ridicule, amongst other discourses, employed by the powerful but also as a weapon to satirize them. These ambiguous representations vary depending on context, often assimilated then reinterpreted in a game of authenticity that is poignant in a world of facsimile and 'fake news'. The humour styles of a range of artists are highlighted to reveal the fluidity and diversity of meaning which challenges expectations and at its best offers resistance and, crucially, a voice for the marginal. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, fine art, humour studies and visual culture.

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.

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 study is a major addition to understanding the problems of social inequality and the nature of caste and kinship. A full account is given of the social structure of the region, emphasizing the continuity of principles, which govern relations between castes and relationships within castes. The ethnographic data bear in particular on: the nature of untouchability; models of caste ranking; the way in which 'traditional' family structures adapt to a diversification of the economy and the debate about the 'instability' of regimes of generalized exchange. Originally published in 1979.

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.

First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies. The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies. Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association.

"Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience" is a fascinating collection of readings that explores how people negotiate identity in the United States today. While individuals stitch together complex identities based on everything from the hobbies they enjoy to the neighborhoods in which they live, these identities rarely conform to the quick and routine identification of people by race, gender, and age. By exploring this tension between identity and identification, one can begin to understand how people creatively confront the perks and perils of identity in the United States.

"Life in America "offers a look at a wide range of subjects including: violence and video games, queer pilgrimages to San Francisco, Filipina critiques of "sleeping around," and the significance of "lowriders" in Hispano/Chicano culture. Framed by a lively introduction, this book provides readers with a thoroughly engaging and fascinating look at central issues of identity and what it means to be American.

Sweeping across African American history and culture in the shadow of slavery and ongoing racism, The Souls of Black Folk laid bare challenging issues sadly still relevant more than 100 years after its first publication. This collection of 14 essays is a cornerstone work of African-American literature. The author examines history and the social conditions of his era, balancing his observations with philosophical asides and autobiographical insights. He describes the central issue of the 20th century as "the problem of the color line" --a divide both visible and invisible, a veil between blacks and the white world that needs to be broken through before those on either side of it can truly know one another. He describes the tension arising from being both black and American as a dual consciousness, a unique identity which had long been a disadvantage but could conceivably become a source of strength. First published in 1903, this profoundly influential text is an acclamation of human rights, a condemnation of the systems that infringe upon them, and one of the most significant books to contribute to the cause of racial equality in US history. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Souls of Black Folk is both modern and readable.

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.

The ideologies of equal opportunity and individual responsibility that dominate American culture tend to obscure the casual connections between poverty and wealth. Uncovering these connections is one of the purposes of this book. Wealth and Poverty in America is an accessible collection of over 20 important essays on the complex relationship between the rich and poor in the United States. It first presents classic and contemporary selections that form theories of where wealth comes from and why wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of the few. This set of readings deals with wealth at a more systematic, rather than individual, level. Next, the book deals with the question of why certain individuals ndash; based on position in the economy, or accident of birth ndash; can expect to have greater or lesser chances of being rich (or poor), and how inequality gets reproduced. It goes on to offer a series of the most important classic and contemporary readings that focus on the life of the upper class and the daily experience of being poor in America. The final section opens up the question of what is possible in terms of the distribution of material rewards in America. An editorial introduction and suggestions for further reading make this a valuable source of information and analysis on the realities of wealth and poverty in America.

For nearly a century families have been out-migrating to suburbs and peri-urban areas. In this book, Johanna Lilius conceptualizes the relatively recent phenomenon of families choosing to live in the inner city. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, the book offers a holistic approach to simultaneously understanding changes within parenting practices and changes connected to city development. The book explains not only why families choose to stay in the inner city and how they use the city in their everyday lives, but also how families change the landscape of contemporary cities, and how the family is, and has been, perceived in urban planning and policy-making. The Nordic perspective provided by Lilius makes this book an important contribution in helping understand inner city change outside the Anglo-American context, and will appeal to an international audience.

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.

The Routledge International Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender chronicles the development, growth, history, impact, and future direction of race, gender, and class studies from a multidisciplinary perspective. The research in this subfield has been wide-ranging, including works in sociology, gender studies, anthropology, political science, social policy, history, and public health. As a result, the interdisciplinary nature of race, gender, and class and its ability to reach a large audience has been part of its appeal. The Handbook provides clear and informative essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, addressing the diverse and broad-based impact of race, gender, and class studies. The Handbook is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who are looking for a basic history, overview of key themes, and future directions for the study of the intersection of race, class, and gender. Scholars new to the area will also find the Handbook's approach useful. The areas covered and the accompanying references will provide readers with extensive opportunities to engage in future research in the area.

This book updates our understanding of working-class fiction by focusing on its continued relevance to the social and intellectual contexts of the age of Trump and Brexit. The volume draws together new and established scholars in the field, whose intersectional analyses use postcolonial and feminist ideas, amongst others, to explore key theoretical approaches to working-class writing and discuss works by a range of authors, including Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Jack Hilton, Mulk Raj Anand, Simon Blumenfeld, Pat Barker, Gordon Burn, and Zadie Smith. A key informing argument is not only that working-class writing shows 'working class' to be a diverse and dynamic rather than monolithic category, but also that a greater critical attention to class, and the working class in particular, extends both the methods and objects of literary studies. This collection will appeal to students, scholars and academics interested in working-class writing and the need to diversify the curriculum.

Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad. Angie Ngoc Tran concentrates on ethnicity, class, and gender to examine how migrant workers belonging to the Kinh, Hoa, Hre, Khmer, and Cham ethnic groups challenge a transnational process that coerces and exploits them. Focusing on migrant laborers working in Malaysia, Tran looks at how they carve out a third space that allows them a socially accepted means of resistance to survive and even thrive at times. She also shows how the Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, especially from ethnic minorities; how it manipulates its rural poor into accepting work in Malaysia; and the ways in which both countries benefit from the arrangement. A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether.