Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. "Barrios to Burbs" offers a new understanding of the Mexican American experience.
Vallejo explores the challenges that accompany rapid social mobility and examines a new indicator of incorporation, a familial obligation to "give back" in social and financial support. She investigates the salience of middle-class Mexican Americans' ethnic identification and details how relationships with poorer coethnics and affluent whites evolve as immigrants and their descendants move into traditionally white middle-class occupations. Disputing the argument that Mexican communities lack high quality resources and social capital that can help Mexican Americans incorporate into the middle class, Vallejo also examines civic participation in ethnic professional associations embedded in ethnic communities.

The city of Liverpool had frequently been prone to industrial unrest for most of its recent history, but it was the dawn of Thatcher and the sanctioning of neoliberal economic strategies which made Liverpool a nucleus of resistance against the encroaching tide of right-wing politics and sweeping de-industrialisation. This critique explores six case studies which will illustrate how elements of a highly politicised local working-class fought against the rapid rise in forced redundancies and industrial closures. Some of their responses included strikes, factory occupations, the organisation and politicisation of the unemployed, consent to radical left-wing municipal politics, as well as tacit endorsement a period of violent civil unrest. This critique concludes that in the range, intensity and use of innovative tactics deployed during these conflicts, Liverpool was distinctive. -- .

Family mobility decisions reveal much about how the public and private realms of social life interact and change. This sociological study explores how contemporary families reconcile individual members' career and education projects within the family unit over time and space, and unpacks the intersubjective constraints on workforce mobility. This Australian mixed methods study sampled Defence Force families and middle class professional families to illustrate how families' educational projects are necessarily and deeply implicated in issues of workforce mobility and immobility, in complex ways. Defence families move frequently, often absorbing the stresses of moving through 'viscous' institutions as private troubles. In contrast, the selective mobility of middle class professional families and their 'no go zones' contribute to the public issue of poorly serviced rural communities. Families with different social, material and vocational resources at their disposal are shown to reflexively weigh the benefits and risks associated with moving differently. The book also explore how priorities shift as children move through educational phases. The families' narratives offer empirical windows on larger social processes, such as the mobility imperative, the gender imbalance in the family's intersubjective bargains, labour market credentialism, the social construction of place, and the family's role in the reproduction of class structure.

Unequal life-chances became a key feature of cross-border migration to, and within, the enlarged Europe. Combining transnational, intersectional and cultural-sociological perspectives, this book develops a conceptual tool to analyse patterns, contexts and mechanisms of these cross-border inequalities. This book synthesizes the theories of social boundaries and of intersectionality, approaching cross-border relations as socially generated and as an inherent element of contemporary social inequalities. It analyses the mechanisms of cross-border inequalities as 'regimes of intersection' relating spatialized cross-border inequalities to other types of unequal social relations (in terms of gender, ethnicity/race, class etc.). The conceptual arguments are supported by empirical research on cross-border migration in Europe: migration of scientists and care workers between Ukraine and Germany. This book integrates the analysis of space - including cross-border categories of global and transnational - into intersectionally-informed studies of social inequalities. Broadly, it will appeal to scholars and students in the areas of sociology, political sciences, social anthropology and social geography. In particular, it will interest researchers concerned with transnational and global social inequalities, the interplay of the categories 'gender', 'ethnicity' and 'class' on the one hand and global and transnational relations on the other, theories of space and society, and migration and mobility in Europe.

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 formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. Taking a large sample of patient records, it pays particular attention to gender, ethnicity and class as categories of analysis, reminding us of the varied journeys of immigrants to the colonies and of how and where they stopped, for different reasons, inside the social institutions of the period. It is about their stories of mobility, how these were told and produced inside institutions for the insane, and how, in the telling, colonial identities were asserted and formed. Having engaged with the structural imperatives of empire and with the varied imperial meanings of gender, sexuality and medicine, historians have considered the movements of travellers, migrants, military bodies and medical personnel, and 'transnational lives'. This book examines an empire-wide discourse of 'madness' as part of this inquiry. -- .

Julien Benda's classic study of the European 1920s resonates today. La trahison des clercs is one of those phrases that bristle with hints and associations without stating anything definite. In his new introduction, Roger Kimball quotes from a contemporary, Alain Finkielkraut, who recalls in haunting words the essence of The Treason of the Intellectuals. "When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning." As Kimball reminds us, in the present age, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys currency. The book itself is well known without being known well. Its release at this time should overcome that neglect.

The "treason" of which Benda writes was the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men, Benda noted, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."

According to Benda, this situation began to change in the early decades of the twentieth century. More and more, intellectuals abandoned their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear indication of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The implications for intellectual life today are transparent, and this long unavailable classic of European thought should interest all those who teach and who preach the human sciences.

This accessible introductory text offers an engaging and thought-provoking discussion of class in relation to several cultural, sociological and political schools of thought and draws upon the works of a broad range of key theorists as well as contemporary thinkers to restate the ongoing importance of class as a sociological concept. Class has long been a key focus of sociological and political studies. This book explores what it might mean today in a 21st century context. Is class really disappearing? Is class morally justifiable? What impact has globalisation and neoliberalism had on the restructuring of class-based social relationships? These questions and others are explored in this short but lively book. Stevenson reviews a number of normative traditions including anarchist, Marxist, social democratic and citizenship-based forms of understanding of class in order to shed light on the themes of class-based experiences, health and inequality, work, class struggle, social movements and the possibility of developing more egalitarian and just societies in the future. This short book will be invaluable to general readers and students in the humanities and social sciences seeking an accessible introduction to the central problems raised by discussions of class in the 21st century.

When King looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People's Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King's political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.

This book represents a truly innovative and empowering approach to social problems. Instead of focusing solely on a seemingly tireless list of major problems, Sara Towe Horsfall considers how select key issues can be solved and pays particular attention to the advocate groups already on the front lines. Horsfall first provides a r

Whilst learning is central to most understandings of what it is to be human, we now live in a knowledge society where being educated defines life chances more than ever before. Learning Beyond the School brings together accounts of learning from around the world in organisations, spaces and places that are schooled, but not school. Exploring examples of learning organisation, pedagogisation, informal learning and social education, the book shows not only how understandings of education are framed in terms of local versions of schooling, but what being educated could and should mean in very different social and political contexts. With contributions from scholars based in Australia, Europe, the USA, Latin America and Asia, the book brings together accounts of learning outside of school. Chapters contain rich and detailed case studies of innovative projects, new kinds of learning institutions, youth, peer-driven and community-based activities and public pedagogies, as well as engaging with the dimensions of an argument about the place and nature of learning outside of the school. It challenges dominant versions of school around the world, whilst also critically discussing the value and place of non-institutionalised learning. Learning Beyond the School should be of interest to academics, researchers, postgraduate scholars engaged in the study of comparative education, youth work, education systems, digital culture, sociology of education and youth development. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers who are interested in youth and education system reform.

Living Off Crime describes highly active property offenders who commit themselves to careers in serious property crimes such as burglary and armed robbery. This book takes the unique approach of situating these criminal careers within the fundamental sociological concepts of social class, criminal subcultures, and consciousness. Tunnell brings class back into the dialogue of property crime among the highly criminally active and economically marginalized, and gives considerable treatment to the subcultural values of this group. Repetitive property offenders also demonstrate a particular consciousness, which is used as an organizing motif throughout the book. Their consciousness indicates little of class commitment or anti-systemic recognition and strategy, but rather is described as street-centered, hedonistic anarchy as indicated by their disparate crimes against lower- and working-class individuals. The book does not ignore the politics of their behaviors; rather it describes their actions as political yet absent politicized class-based consciousness and strategies.

Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. "Barrios to Burbs" offers a new understanding of the Mexican American experience.
Vallejo explores the challenges that accompany rapid social mobility and examines a new indicator of incorporation, a familial obligation to "give back" in social and financial support. She investigates the salience of middle-class Mexican Americans' ethnic identification and details how relationships with poorer coethnics and affluent whites evolve as immigrants and their descendants move into traditionally white middle-class occupations. Disputing the argument that Mexican communities lack high quality resources and social capital that can help Mexican Americans incorporate into the middle class, Vallejo also examines civic participation in ethnic professional associations embedded in ethnic communities.

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and "other" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought, Class Unknown offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.

"Caste", a word normally used in relation to the Indian subcontinent, is rarely associated with Japan in contemporary scholarship. This has not always been the case, and the term was often used among earlier generations of scholars, who introduced the Buraku problem to Western audiences. Amos argues that time for reappraisal is well overdue and that a combination of ideas, beliefs, and practices rooted in Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and military traditions were brought together from the late 16th century in ways that influenced the development of institutions and social structures on the Japanese archipelago. These influences brought the social structures closer in form and substance to certain caste formations found in the Indian subcontinent during the same period. Specifically, Amos analyses the evolution of the so-called Danzaemon outcaste order. This order was a 17th century caste configuration produced as a consequence of early modern Tokugawa rulers' decisions to engage in a state-building project rooted in military logic and built on the back of existing manorial and tribal-class arrangements. He further examines the history behind the primary duties expected of outcastes within the Danzaemon order: notably execution and policing, as well as leather procurement. Reinterpreting Japan as a caste society, this book propels us to engage in fuller comparisons of how outcaste communities' histories and challenges have diverged and converged over time and space, and to consider how better to eradicate discrimination based on caste logic. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Japanese History, Culture and Society.

About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed more and more families into financial collapse--with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. "Broke" explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America.
While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The staples of middle-class life--going to college, buying a house, starting a small business--carry with them more financial risk than ever before, requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success stories that dominate the American economic narrative.
Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, "Broke" presents analyses from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.

This book sets out to redress the balance of history in favor of the peasants. Reminding us that peasants made up the vast majority of the population in medieval Europe, R&oumlsener's research illustrates that their lives were just as complex and interesting as those of the nobility.
R&oumlsener first considers the social, economic and political foundations of peasant life, in particular how occupational and land divisions determined the relative freedom of the rural population. At the height of the Middle Ages, the peasant condition improved as the seigneurial system was gradually replaced by tenant farming and progress in agricultural technology increased productivity. Peasant colonists now left overcrowded villages to farm less fertile or barely populated terrains. Forms of village settlement diversified and relationships among the peasants developed into more complex communal networks. Changes were also apparent in the quality and variety of clothing and the design of farmhouses and farmyards. The author also sheds new light on successful peasants who owned land and began to form "peasant republics" independent of the nobility. As the peasant population swelled, however, economic and ecological concerns became of vital importance to a community which derived its living from the soil.
This book is a lively refutation of those preconceptions which see peasant existence either as a rural idyll or a life of unmitigated oppression and poverty. R&oumlsener's detailed study has unearthed a rich peasant culture which flourished alongside and was frequently in conflict with the medieval nobility.
Peasants in the Middle Ages will be welcomed by historians of medieval Europe and by sociologists and anthropologists interested in the Middle Ages or comparative studies.

This book offers an understanding of the transient migration experience in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of communication and entertainment media. It examines the role played by digital technologies and uncovers how the combined wider field of entertainment media (films, television shows and music) are vital and helpful platforms that positively aid migrants through self and communal empowerment. This book specifically looks at the upwardly mobile middle class transient migrants studying and working in two of the Asia-Pacific's most desirable transient migration destinations - Australia and Singapore - providing a cutting edge study of the identities transient migrants create and maintain while overseas and the strategies they use to cope with life in transience.

This book analyses the making of the Chinese middle class that started in the 1990s using a constructivist approach. With the development of the Chinese economy, a new group of middle wage earners appeared. Chinese social scientists and state institutions promoted the idea that China needs a middle class to achieve modernization. Middle class members are defined-and define themselves-as good consumers, educated people, politically engaged but reasonable citizens. As such, the making of the middle class is the result of three convergent phenomena: an attempt to define the middle class, a process of civilization, and the development of protest movements. The making of the Chinese middle class, Rocca argues, is a way to end the stalemate that modern Chinese society is facing, in particular the necessity to democratize without introducing an election system.

In a front-page review in the Washington Post Book World, John Judis wrote: "Political analysts have been poring over exit polls and precinct-level votes to gauge the meaning of last November's election, but they would probably better employ their time reading the late Christopher Lasch's book." And in the National Review, Robert Bork says The Revolt of the Elites "ranges provocatively [and] insightfully." Controversy has raged around Lasch's targeted attack on the elites, their loss of moral values, and their abandonment of the middle class and poor, for he sets up the media and educational institutions as a large source of the problem. In this spirited work, Lasch calls out for a return to community, schools that teach history not self-esteem, and a return to morality and even the teachings of religion. He does this in a nonpartisan manner, looking to the lessons of American history, and castigating those in power for the ever-widening gap between the economic classes, which has created a crisis in American society. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy is riveting social commentary.

This book provides fresh insights into the study of Chinese elites at the county level and below. By shifting the analytical focus onto the agency of elites at the local level and away from the institutional structures within which they operate, it fills a number of significant gaps in the field. In particular, this book addresses the lacunae through an empirically rich and diverse set of case studies. It proceeds from the premise that the study of local elites can be most fruitful through examining their relations with each other and with the groups that wield power in the community. Particularly pertinent to the analyses are three major relations, namely the relationship between the elites and their environment, between particular types of elites, and between the locality and the upper and lower scales. Ultimately, it concludes that these relations are not only essential to understanding local elites in post-Mao China but also in accounting for socio-political change and in distinguishing China from other types of societies. As a study of local elites in China, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese politics, political sociology and Chinese Studies in general.

Why have statelessness and contemporary enslavement become endemic since the 1990s? What is it about global political economic policies, protracted warfare, and migration rules and patterns that have so systemically increased these extreme forms of vulnerability? Why have intellectual communities largely ignored or fundamentally rejected the concepts of statelessness and contemporary enslavement? This book argues that statelessness and enslavement are not aberrations or radical exceptions. They have been and are endemic to Euromodern state systems. While victims are discrete outcomes of similar processes of the racialized debasement of citizenship, stateless people share the predicament of those most likely to be enslaved and the enslaved, even when formally free, often face situations of statelessness. Gordon identifies forcible inclusion of semi-sovereign nations, extralegal expulsion of people who cannot be repatriated, and the concentrated erosion of the rights of full-fledged citizens as the primary modes through which people experience degrees of statelessness. She argues for the political value of seeing the connections among these discrete forms. With enslavement, she insists that while the centuries-long practice has taken on some new guises necessary to its profitability in the current global economy, what and who it involves have remained remarkably consistent. Rather than focusing on slavery as a radical and exceptional extreme of abuse or coercion, Gordon contends that we can understand contemporary slavery's specificity most usefully through considering its defining dimensions together with those of wage laborers and guest workers. Gordon concludes that appreciation of the situation of the stateless and of the enslaved should fundamentally orient our thinking about viable contemporary conceptions of consent and of the kinds of twenty-first-century political institutions that would make it harder for some to make the vulnerability of others so lucrative.

Hailed as the beneficiary, driving force and result of globalisation, India's middle-class is puzzling in its diversity, as a multitude of traditions, social formations and political constellations manifest contribute to this project. This book looks at Indian middle-class lifestyles through a number of case studies, ranging from a historical account detailing the making of a savvy middle-class consumer in the late colonial period, to saving clubs among women in Delhi's upmarket colonies and the dilemmas of entrepreneurial families in Tamil Nadu's industrial towns. The book pays tribute to the diversity of regional, caste, rural and urban origins that shape middle- class lifestyles in contemporary India and highlights common themes, such as the quest for upward mobility, common consumption practices, the importance of family values, gender relations and educational trajectories. It unpacks the notion that the Indian middle-class can be understood in terms of public performances, surveys and economic markers, and emphasises how the study of middle-class culture needs to be based on detailed studies, as everyday practices and private lives create the distinctive sub-cultures and cultural politics that characterise the Indian middle class today. With its focus on private domains middleclassness appears as a carefully orchestrated and complex way of life and presents a fascinating way to understand South Asian cultures and communities through the prism of social class.

This classic study on the sociology of Japan remains the only in-depth treatment of the Japanese middle class. Now in a 50th-anniversary edition that includes a new introduction by William W. Kelly, this seminal work paints a rich and complex picture of the life of the salary man and his family. In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburb, living among and interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Tracing the rapid postwar economic growth that led to hiring large numbers of workers who were guaranteed life-long employment, the authors show how this phenomenon led to a new social class, the salaried men and their families. It was a well-educated group that prepared their children rigorously for the same successful corporate or government jobs they held. Secure employment and a rising standard of living enabled this new middle class to set the dominant pattern of social life that influenced even those who could not share it, a pattern that remains fundamental to Japanese society today.

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City and this book is about them, the so-called mole people. They live alone and in communities, in subway tunnels and below subway platforms and this fascinating study presents how and why people move underground, who they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the "topside" world they've left behind.