David Downes' early work on delinquency in East London made an original contribution to the comparative study of anomie and subcultural theory, and social policy on education and employment. His research and writing went on to include the study of gambling, drugs policy and the state of criminological theory. His later work broke new ground in detailed, cross-national, comparative analysis of criminal justice and penal policy, in particular in relation to England and the Netherlands. A related endeavour was to contribute (with Rod Morgan) to the burgeoning study of the politics of crime control. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conference in 1968 and of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the LSE in 1989. He edited the British Journal of Criminology from 1985 until 1990. His most recent work (with Tim Newburn and Paul Rock) has been on the official history of criminal justice policy in England and Wales 1960-1997.

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.

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States--a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight success of a "new entrepreneurial" class, negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security.

"The Burdens of Aspiration" explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working and middle class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students--low-income, "at-risk" Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an "under-performing" public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a "high-performing" public school with informal connections to the tech elite--Elsa Davidson offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.

..".a fresh and an important contribution ...this book presents an ethnographically rich and conceptually strong account of recent transformations in the educational field and their implications for class relations in Turkey." . Middle East Journal

..".the book critically draws attention to a number of key issues that are often taken for granted in the literature on neoliberalism...Co-written by an economist and an anthropologist, Reproducing Classis a refreshing attempt to integrate the analytical perspectives of macroeconomics with the ethnographic traditions of anthropology." . JRAI

Middle classes are by definition ambiguous, raising all sorts of paradoxical questions, perceived and real, about their power and place relative to those above and below them in a class-structured society. Focusing on families of the new middle class in Istanbul, the authors of this study address questions about the social construction of middle-class reality in the context of the rapid changes that have come about through recent economic growth in global markets and the global diffusion of information technology. After 1980, Turkey saw a structural transformation from state-owned and managed industry, banking, and media and communications to privatization and open markets. The idea of being middle class and the reality of middle-class practices became open for negotiation and interpretation. This study therefore offers a particularly interesting case study of an emergent global phenomenon known as the transnational middle class, characterized by their location of work in globalizing cities, development of transnational social networks, sumptuary consumption habits, and residences in gated communities. As the authors show, this new middle class associates quality education, followed by property and lifestyle issues, with the concept of a comfortable life."

Based on the approaches of questionnaire and interview, this book studies the urban subalterns formed with a considerable scale in China since the 1990s. By investigating their living status in detail, it depicts the mental conditions, class consciousness, migration, living difficulties and dilemmas of the subaltern class. It's worth noting that in addition to the group at the bottom of the economic pyramid, this book expands the definition of subaltern by including the deviant underclass. Then it examines the factors causing the living dilemmas and provides suggestions aiming to mitigate them from the perspective of social succor. In the last chapter, this book focuses on the theoretical discussions on subaltern studies. New concepts such as the deviant subaltern group and social vigilance are created, and new theories such as production and transmission mechanism of the subaltern group are put forward.

This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siecle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Perez Galdos and Emilia Pardo Bazan, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuna and Belen Sarraga. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.

While the United States is the world's richest nation, the distribution of private property and wealth among Americans is often comprised of alarmingly disparate portions. With a rapidly aging and increasingly diverse population, the interdependence between generations, institutions, and social spheres has become essential to social stratification processes in contemporary American society.. In this authoritative work, Yuval Elmelech investigates the role that family transactions of material resources play in the stratification system. Drawing on empirical evidence from a broad array of sources, Transmitting Inequality provides an interdisciplinary framework for examining the social, demographic and institutional structures that shape the distribution of property and wealth in the United States.

In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers. Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute - and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger, richer people don't ever have to think about, from being mauled by cats to their house getting stepped on. There are no cars or phones built small enough for them, or schools or hospitals, for that matter - there's no point, when no one that little has any purchasing power, and when salaried doctors and teachers would never fit in buildings so small. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Brilliant, warm and funny, this is a social novel for our times in the tradition of 1984 or the work of Douglas Adams.

The problem of citizenship has long affected Latin America, simultaneously producing inclusion and exclusion, division and unity. Its narrative and practice both reflect and contribute to the region's profound inequalities. However, citizenship is usually studied on the margins of society. Despite substantial public interest in recent mass mobilizations, the middle and upper classes are rarely approached as political agents or citizens. As the region's middle classes continue to grow and new elites develop, their importance can only increase. This interdisciplinary volume addresses this gap, showcasing recent ethnographic research on middle- and upper-class citizenship in contemporary Latin America. It explores how the region's middle and upper classes constitute themselves as citizens through politics and culture, and questions how these processes interact with the construction of difference and commonality, division and unity. Subsequently, this collection highlights how elite citizenships are constructed in dialogue with other identities, how these co-constructions reproduce or challenge inequality, and whether they have the potential to bring about change. Citizenship in the Latin American Upper and Middle Classes will appeal to scholars, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Latin American Studies, Citizenship Studies, Political Science and Cultural Studies; and to a general readership interested in Latin American politics and society.

Not all council estates are the same. A detailed historical account of the birth and social evolution of the Whitley council estate in Reading, Working-Class Suburb challenges many of the more depressing images and cultural stereotypes about council housing in twentieth and twenty-first century England. Key areas covered by the study are housing and politics; community campaigns; women and the corporate life of council estates; the uses of leisure; the relationships between tenants, residents and the local authority, and continuities in working-class life despite economic, demographic and political change. The book will be of interest to anyone studying urban history and social history, to professionals working in the fields of housing policy and housing studies, and to the growing number of academics interested in suburban studies. -- .

East London has undergone dramatic changes over the last 30 years, primarily as a result of London's large scale de-industrialisation and the rise in its financial sector. Large parts of inner East London remain deprived, but a once overwhelmingly white working class area is now home to a more complex and mobile class and ethnic mix. This topical book focuses on the aspirations of these different groups and the strategies they have pursued about where to live, driven in part by a concern to ensure a good education for their children. The book will be essential reading for students and academics in sociology, urban studies, geography and multicultural studies.

Previously published as a special issue of British Journal of Middle East Studies, this volume focuses on leading figures within Iran between 1997-2007 and their visions and works that are related to Iranian society.

A cross section of opinion is investigated, including the clerical ( Ali Khameneh i, Muhammad Khatami and Mohsen Kadivar), the dissident (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), and the poetic (Qaysar Aminpour) and cinematic. The past decade has been a traumatic one in Iran, and the essays in this volume testify to the vibrancy of the responses from Iranian thinkers. It may be a surprise to some observers that in some senses, Ali Khameneh i may be considered a liberal whereas Muhammad Khatami s own credentials as an advocate of rapprochement with the West needs to be qualified. Responses to Western culture continue to remain centre-stage, and this is also nowhere more apparent than in the complex relationship between the directors of Iranian films (perhaps Iran s most celebrated export these days) and their audiences, both Iranian and Western. Despite some viewing Iran as a pariah state, it remains firmly connected to the West and to modern technology, typified in the practice of blogging that is enjoyed by so many Iranians, which has provided a new space for expression and thinking."

First published in 1997. Considerable research has been done to identify neighbourhood influences on children's affective states, motivation, and behaviour. This population, along with the elderly, are the nation's largest dependent groups. In contrast, little research has been done to determine what impact living among poor neighbours has upon older Americans, specifically upon their psychological well-being and neighbourhood satisfaction. In this study the author has sought out to explore this deficit, using a sociological standpoint to examine quality-of-life issues relevant to elderly inner-city residents. This title will be of interest to students of sociology and urban studies.

This book, first published in 1996, examines an important developmental transition: the formation of identity, as well as the influence that having a well-developed identity may have, on a sample of adolescents living in urban Chicago. This study proposes that identity commitment, exploration, and continuity will be associated with positive psychological and behavioural outcomes for adolescents. This title will be of interest to students of sociology, psychology and urban studies.

This book argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. It does so via a transdisciplinary approach that draws on case studies from Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors illustrate and explain the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity as part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. By illuminating the diversity of social formations, this book illustrates the depth and complexity present in Marx's method. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This powerful book presents a fresh and compelling set of portraits that bring to life the human dimension of the vast and growing social and economic divides in urban China. Leading scholars explore the increasing rigidity of class and social boundaries, focusing on two new "castes" in contemporary China's cities-the immensely wealthy and the abjectly poor. Much has been made of the rise in incomes, the elimination of much rural poverty, and the expansion of an urban middle class over almost forty years of spectacular economic growth. But what often has been overlooked is the polarization, exclusion, and exclusiveness in cities that have accompanied this rise, along with the threat that these trends will extend to future generations. The book considers five cases that emblematize these castes and depict their varying degrees of agency. Highlighting the social groups at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, the contributors illuminate the growing inequality in urban China today.

This book examines the question of class formation and social inequality within tribal groups in North-East India. Focussing on the Nagas, it analyses and challenges common perceptions about them as a class-less society with a uniform culture. It looks at the previously neglected themes of class formation and structure, division of work, emerging social milieus and cultural differentiation among the Naga youth - and presents fresh arguments about notions of modernity. Providing a theoretical understanding of inequality, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of North-East India, tribal studies, exclusion studies, sociology, social anthropology, political studies, development studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.

Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime - for example by squatting - they enact what can be called 'contested property claims'. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.

Home ownership plays a significant role in locating the middle class in most western societies, associated with market, consumerism, democracy and "people like us", the significant features of the middle class for any society. In China, private home ownership was not the norm from 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power, until the 1990s. In the past three decades, however, there has been a fast growing housing consumption and private homeowners have become the most significantly changing aspect of Chinese urban life. In particular, the rise of gated communities has become a predominant feature of the urban landscape. Similar to their western counterparts, the gated communities in China exemplify "high status" symbols with enclosed and restricted residential areas, exclusive community parks and recreational facilities, and professional management and security services. But different from western societies where gated communities usually represent luxurious lifestyles only limited to a small group of people, in urban China gated communities have become one major form of supply in the housing market and one of the most popular and desirable choices for homebuyers. Private home ownership and residency in gated communities, altogether characterize the most significant aspect of comfort living and distinct lifestyles of China's new middle classes who have successfully got ahead in the socialist market economy. This book examines the formation of "China's housing middle class". It develops a theoretical argument about, and provides empirical evidence of the heterogeneity of China's new middle class, which underlines the relations between the state, market and life chances under a socialist market economy. As such it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese society, sociology and politics.

This book outlines the history of squatting in Sweden and analyzes the conditions under which squatting has intensified and declined in the country between 1968 and 2017. With close attention to the relationship between civil society and the state in the Swedish context, and the manner in which this relationship, together with attendant political, media and movement-based discourses, shapes the possibilities that exist for collective action, the author draws on two key concepts - those of the narrative of consensus and discourse - to present an analysis of squatting as a form of contentious politics and the "successful" story of civil society development as decisive for its emergence and development in the country. A study of the way in which confrontational actors question both the property relations inherent in capitalism and the authority of the welfare state and its institutions, Contentious Politics and the Welfare State will appeal to social scientists with interests in urban studies, political sociology, squatting, social movements and the relationship between the welfare state and contentious social actors.

On December 5th, 1920, in Patna, the Dasnami sannyasi Sahajanand Saraswati encountered Mahatma Gandhi for the first time. Sahajanand was already known in social-reform circles in Bihar as an energetic activist and educator working to promote Bhumihar Brahman identity. Inspired by the Mahatma's radical reformulation of Indian nationalism, 'the Swami' (as Sahajanand would soon come to be known) threw himself into nationalist politics and the Indian National Congress. Within a decade, moved by the plight of tenant-farmers struggling against excessive rent demands and abusive landlord 'exactions', the Swami had spearheaded the formation of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha. This organization quickly became the largest organization of its kind in India, catapulting the Swami onto the national stage. By the early mid-1930s the Swami had publicly broken with both the Mahatma and the 'Gandhians' and had made common cause with the left wing of the Congress. Later, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered on the horizon, he joined forces with the Forward Bloc and the Communist Party of India. By the time of his death in 1950, the Swami, disillusioned with politics, had dissociated himself from all parties. This pioneering 1961 study by Walter Hauser, tracks the history of the Bihar peasant movement as it both influenced and was buffeted by national and international politics. Hauser offers here a penetrating analysis of the character of the movement and the mind of its leader as he grappled with and gravitated toward Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s and 1940s. Initially written as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, Hauser's path-breaking Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929-1942 is now being published in its entirety for the first time. The volume includes a 'Foreword' by one of Hauser's many students, William R. Pinch. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

First published in 1975, Robber Noblemen represents a break with traditional anthropological studies within the Indian subcontinent in the breadth of its coverage. A whole state, the Punjab, is discussed, with special reference to the social and political organization of its landowning Sikhs: the Jats. Joyce Pettigrew demonstrates that although the Punjab is included within the formal political framework of the Indian Union, it is nevertheless more closely allied to countries on its western border, by virtual of its social structure and value system. The caste system does not exist among the Sikhs. Values sustaining patterns of social and political action are not those pertaining to ritual purity and pollution but are those concerned with the extended family unit: honour, reputation, insult. The author shows how long-standing collaborative relationships between families compete with other similarly formed alliances or 'factions' for power and influence. This book will be of interest to students of anthropology, history, political science and South Asian studies.

First published in 1976. This book covers working-class history from the decline of Chartism to the formation of the Labour Party and its early development to 1914. It gives a historical perspective to the essentially defensive, materialist orientation of twentieth century working-class politics. David Kynaston has sought to synthesise the wealth of recent detailed research to produce a coherent overall view of the particular dynamic of these formative years. He sees the course of working-class history in the second half of the nineteenth century as a necessary tragedy and suggests that a major reason for this was the inability of William Morris as a revolutionary socialist to influence organised labour. The treatment is thematic as much as chronological and special attention is given not only to the parliamentary rise of Labour, but also to deeper-lying intellectual, occupational, residential, religious, and cultural influences. The text itself includes a substantial amount of contemporary material in order to reflect the distinctive 'feel' of the period. The book is particularly designed for students studying the political, social and economic background to modern Britain as well as those specialising in nineteenth-century English history.

Nobody is a powerful and eye-opening examination of the deeper meaning behind the string of deaths of unarmed citizens like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray. Unarmed citizens shot by police. Drinking water turned to poison. Mass incarcerations. We've heard the stories. Now public intellectual and acclaimed journalist Marc Lamont Hill offers a powerful, paradigm-shifting analysis of race and class in America, and what it means to be "Nobody." Through on-the-ground reporting and careful research, Hill shows how some American citizens are made vulnerable, exploitable, and disposable through the machinery of unregulated capitalism, public policy, and social practice. This Nobody class, Hill argues, has emerged over time, and forces in America have worked to preserve and exploit it in ways that are both humiliating and harmful. He carefully reconsiders the details of tragic events like the deaths of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and Freddie Gray, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and delves deeply into a host of alarming trends including mass incarceration, overly aggressive policing, broken court systems, shrinking job markets, and the privatization of public resources, showing time and again the ways the current system is designed to worsen the plight of the vulnerable.