This is the first book devoted exclusively to the study of social stratification from a biosocial perspective. The biosocial perspective explicitly assumes that both biological and social environmental factors are important for explaining behavior, including behavior surrounding the formation of hierarchies and unequal distribution of resources. In a variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the issue of how biological factors may interact with social experiences to affect social stratification.

Chapters 1 and 2 present a detailed review of the issues surrounding how social stratification is defined and subdivided. Chapter 3 takes the reader back to the first six civilizations that evolved on earth and provides a historical picture of social stratification, which served the reproductive interests of a small proportion of males who wielded great political and economic power. In Chapter 4, the nature of social stratification in traditional Arab cultures is explored, and the author hypothesizes why different types of stratification systems may have evolved throughout the world. In Chapter 5, the authors provide evidence that genetics are among the factors that contribute to variations in income and wealth. Chapter 6 provides suggestions about how group differences in social stratification may have evolved. The authors contend that sexual selection may be at the heart of the evolution of social stratification, and present a theory as to how it may have happened. Chapter 7 also focuses upon sex as a central variable in social stratification, specifically, how sex hormones alter brain functioning and how these alterations underlie many of the tendencies that men and women have to gravitate toward different types of occupations. In Chapter 8, a general theory of social stratification is presented. It is offered as a specific alternative to the two strictly environmental theories that dominate: functionalist and conflict theories.

This text reflects the growing diversity of perspectives, methods and insights currently used in social stratification research. Authors discuss the following broad themes from an international perspective: the changing real and symbolic boundaries of social stratification; who benefits from rapidly changing markets; immigration, marginalization and exclusion; and modelling occupational mobility. The contributions demonstrate the changing nature of social stratification systems in today's global and fragmented economy.

Most people think of class as a ranking system-the more you have, the higher your class status. In contrast to this view, in this new study author Gus Bagakis demonstrates that class is a tool that explains how the capitalist system works and why the class struggle is invisible.

Capitalism was and is a developing system in which the working class is turned into a commodity, selling its labor power to the capitalist class that owns the factories, businesses, and corporations. While capitalism claims to promote efficiency, wealth, and freedom, it is also a system where the rich are getting richer, the earth and climate are being destroyed, and the poor get more and more desperate with each passing day.

All of this is happening because we live in a system that stunts personality and corrupts human relations by pitting people against one another for economic gain. Through class analysis, Bagakis explains that we must take off the filters that we've been indoctrinated with, so that we can see how personal, social, and international problems develop. Primary among these false filters is the idea that we are all middle class and so there are no class conflicts in our society.

Seeing through the System seeks to help students, workers, social activists, and those interested in understanding the reasons behind many of the problems in the world today. You can come to understand how our society was put together, how it works, and how it can be transformed.

'Rich girl meets poor boy who liberates her then dies.' Or, 'low-life girl is trashed by lower-life boy.' The contemporary middle-class fictions of poverty that inform films such as "Titanic" and "Kids" are a far cry from the nineteenth-century genres: rags-to-riches stories and seduction tales. Our fictions of class turn the older tales upside down. By the surprising juxtaposition of recent films and the classic writings and unusual lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen Crane, Henry Miller, and Michel Foucault, the book shocks the reader into a reappraisal of these authors' works and lives, our myths about class, and poststructural theory.

The concept of agency has long been drawn upon - overtly or implicitly - in contemporary social theory. However, theory shapes how human agency and its determinants are understood and can be built upon. The last few years have seen growing interest in notions of privilege and affect. How might these newer concepts affect our understanding of agency? Does human agency need to make new modes of sociability possible, and how does privilege constrain or facilitate possibilities for social change? Privilege, Agency and Affect seeks to answer some of these questions, showcasing recent work by UK, North American, Australasian and Scandinavian writers at the cutting edge of sociology, social theory and education. Strongly empirical as well as theoretical in the approach taken, it offers a timely extension of foundations laid in early 21st century social theory and debate.

Have de-industrialization, expanding services and occupational upgrading put an end to class divisions? Drawing on extensive empirical research, this book adds new insights to the debate about the end of class and shows that Western European societies remain decidedly stratified with respect to material advantages and citizenship rights. Well grounded in theory, it offers a highly original account of today's social stratification and presents novel findings about working conditions, political preferences and pension coverage of different classes in contemporary Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland.

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women's studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

Ann Williams' important new book discusses the dynamics of English aristocratic society in a way that has not been explored before. She investigates the rewards and obligations of status including birth, wealth, the importance of public and royal service and the need to participate in local affairs, especially legal and administrative business. This period saw the birth of a 'lesser aristocracy', the ancestors of the English gentry, the power-house of society and politics in the late medieval and early modern periods. Going on to examine the obligations and rewards of lordship and the relations between lords and their men, Williams illustrates how status was displayed and covers the importance of the manorial house, which was at once a home, an estate centre and a symbol of authority and the insignia of rank in weaponry, clothing and personal adornment. The growing gap between the highest rank of society and the lowest, fuelled by underlying economic developments is also covered. In conclusion she considers some of the occupations which symbolized and perpetuated lordly power. Though the upper levels of aristocratic society were swept away by the Norman settlement, the 'lesser aristocracy' had a much higher rate of survival and it was this group who began the manorialization of English society, familiar from the late medieval period.

Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.

Edited by leading British sociologists of stratification, this book advances contemporary debates in class analysis. It draws on current theoretical debates in sociology and considers the implications of the cultural turn for the study of class. It brings together the very latest empirical work on contemporary topics such as culture, identities and lifestyles undertaken by researchers from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. It will be required reading for those committed to pushing the boundaries of class and stratification in new and exciting directions around the world.

After the end of America's longest (20-year) war in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost more than $6 trillion and nearly half a million lives, what does the future hold for America and the American people in the 21st century? In this timely and important book, Berch Berberoglu provides an eye-opening account of the history of the American Empire from its inception to the present, with prospects for its future. Examining the worldwide expansion of the American Empire over the course of its turbulent history in great detail, Berberoglu assesses America's imperial legacy in a sober way, highlighting its failure to come to terms with the enormous cost of this adventure in imperial overreach. But Berberoglu sees light at the end of the long, dark tunnel, when the American people will awaken and lead the way to a new America after empire in the coming decades of the 21st century.

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.

This book is an analysis and exploration of the relationship between peasants and policies within the process of reform in China. After examining the long term rural policies, either before or after the reform, it was found that all these polices have been expected to promote peasants' interests and claimed to take enhancing peasants' happiness as their goal. Nonetheless, the history and current reality of rural development have demonstrated that the same policy starting point had lead to very different policy designs. Even today, quite a few institutional arrangements with good intentions have ended up with opposite results and have even become bad policies that do harm to people. This book argues that the reason for such serious deviation, between political intentions and institutional arrangements, as well as between policy goals and its results is: as a political force, the peasantry itself has not effectively engaged with the political process of the country.

Life in a castle isn't always a fairytale, as the Duchess of Rutland vividly illustrates in her fascinating, revealing and funny autobiography. When Emma Watkins, the pony-mad daughter of a Welsh farmer, imagined her future, she imagined following in her mother's footsteps to marry a farmer of her own. But then she fell in love with David Manners, having no idea that he was heir to one of the most senior hereditary titles in the land. When David succeeded his father, Emma found herself becoming the chatelaine of Belvoir Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Rutland. She had to cope with five boisterous children while faced with a vast estate in desperate need of modernisation and staff who wanted nothing to change - it was a daunting responsibility. Yet with sound advice from the doyenne of duchesses, Duchess 'Debo' of Devonshire, she met each challenge with optimism and gusto, including scaling the castle roof in a storm to unclog a flooding gutter; being caught in her nightdress by mesmerised Texan tourists and disguising herself as a cleaner to watch filming of The Crown. She even took on the castle ghosts . . . At times the problems she faced seemed insoluble yet, with her unstoppable energy and talent for thinking on the hoof, she won through, inspired by the vision and passion of those Rutland duchesses in whose footsteps she trod, and indeed the redoubtable and resourceful women who forged her way, whose homes were not castles but remote farmhouses in the Radnorshire Hills. Vividly written and bursting with insights, The Accidental Duchess will appeal to everyone who has visited a stately home and wondered what it would be like to one day find yourself not only living there, but in charge of its future.

This project provides an in-depth study of the role of worker-activist leaders in industrial strikes in China, a country where labor rights face significant challenges from state and industry suppression and by current lack of formal organization.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy-victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby-Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their "forgotten" neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this "the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America." The Other Side of Prospect is a reportorial tour de force, at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life, told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.

This book analyzes the discourse generated by pundits, politicians, and artists to examine how poverty and the income gap is framed through specific modes of representation. Set against the dichotomy of the structural narrative of poverty and the opportunity narrative, Lemke's modified concept of precarity reveals new insights into the American situation as well as into the textuality of contemporary demands for equity. Her acute study of a vast range of artistic and journalistic texts brings attention to a mode of representation that is itself precarious, both in the modern and etymological sense, denoting both insecurity and entreaty. With the keen eye of a cultural studies scholar her innovative book makes a necessary contribution to academic and popular critiques of the social effects of neoliberal capitalism.

How does culture articulate, frame, organise and produce stories about social class and class difference? What do these stories tell us about contemporary models of success, failure, struggle and aspiration? How have class-based labels been revived or newly-minted to categorise the insiders and outsiders of the new 'age of austerity'? Drawing on examples from the 1980s to the present day this book investigates the changing landscape of class and reveals how it has become populated by a host of classed figures including Essex Man and Essex Girl, the 'squeezed middle', the 'sharp-elbowed middle class', the 'feral underclass', the 'white working class', the 'undeserving poor', 'selfish baby boomers' and others. Overall, the book argues that social class, although complicated and highly contested, remains a valid and fruitful route into understanding how contemporary British culture articulates social distinction and social difference and the significant costs and investments at stake for all involved.

American Skinheads is the first criminological analysis of organized hate crime violence. Mark Hamm presents historical specificity for a modern theory of hate crime, then rigorously tests the theory with interview data derived from skinheads who have committed an array of violent acts against persons because of their race, religion, or sexual preference--people who are members of the classic outgroups of American society. Part One traces the roots of the Skinhead Nation through the Beats, Mods, Hippies, and Punks in London, and then examines the rise of the Neo-Nazi Skinheads in the United States, including a look at Neo-Nazi offshoots (Romantic Violence, The Aryan Youth Movement), recruiters (Tom Metzger), and recruitment tools (W.A.R. Magazine and Hotline, electronic mail, Race and Reason), and appearances on the Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera shows. In Part Two, Hamm discusses the accepted sociological perspectives on terrorist youth subcultures (not gangs), then presents findings of his own study of 36 skinheads, including social and economic characteristics, psychological profiles, the role of skinhead girls, use of drugs and weapons, satanism, and neo-fascism. Part Three assesses the future for American Neo-Nazism and recommends steps for preventing skinhead terrorism.

It wasn't so long ago that the white working class occupied the middle of British and American societies. But today members of the same demographic, feeling silenced and ignored by mainstream parties, have moved to the political margins. In the United States and the United Kingdom, economic disenfranchisement, nativist sentiments and fear of the unknown among this group have even inspired the creation of new right-wing parties and resulted in a remarkable level of support for fringe political candidates, most notably Donald Trump. Answers to the question of how to rebuild centrist coalitions in both the U.S. and U.K. have become increasingly elusive. How did a group of people synonymous with Middle Britain and Middle America drift to the ends of the political spectrum? What drives their emerging radicalism? And what could possibly lead a group with such enduring numerical power to, in many instances, consider themselves a "minority" in the countries they once defined? In The New Minority, Justin Gest speaks to people living in once thriving working class cities-Youngstown, Ohio and Dagenham, England-to arrive at a nuanced understanding of their political attitudes and behaviors. In this daring and compelling book, he makes the case that tension between the vestiges of white working class power and its perceived loss have produced the unique phenomenon of white working class radicalization.