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.

This qualitative study explores the meaning of working-class origin in the life and career of university graduates. Social transition from a working-class background to a middle-class milieu results in loyalty conflicts and communication barriers. The lack of social and cultural capital and the absent sense of an assertive self-presentation are pivotal barriers to gaining management functions. Positions in certain key sectors are not necessarily allocated according to professional capacity, but to obscure social connections, regulated by cultural codes and tests. Matthys approaches social mobility as a trajectory of identity construction in which different classes are integrated, and uses the notion of identity capital to interpret and discuss the meaning of the individual drive in social mobility.

Social conflicts and voting patterns in Western nations indicate a gradual erosion of working-class support for the left, a process that class theory itself cannot adequately explain. "Farewell to the Leftist Working Class" aims to fill this gap by developing, testing, and confirming an alternative explanation of rightist tendencies among the underprivileged. The authors argue that cultural issues revolving around individual liberty and maintenance of social order have become much more significant since World War II. The obligation to work and strict notions of deservingness have become central to the debate about the welfare state. Indeed, although economic egalitarianism is more typically found among the working class, it is only firmly connected to a universalistic and inclusionary progressive political ideology among the middle class.

"Farewell to the Leftist Working Class" reports cutting-edge research into the withering away of working-class support for the left and the welfare state, drawing mostly on survey data collected in Western Europe, the United States, and other Western countries.

The essays and letters of Ervin Szabo (1877-1918) present proof of his critical insight into Marxist theory and of his perceptive analysis of socialism around the turn of the century. His ideals of an engaged social science and an enlightened socialism, his preoccupation with the socialist future, are still relevant today. The writings selected in this work, first published in 1982, are primarily those which address themselves to general issues of the European working-class movement and socialist theory, but there are also a few pieces that characterize the intellectual and political climate of early twentieth-century Budapest. Szabo was one of the theoretical leaders of a whole generation of progressive thinkers from Oscar Jaszi through Karl and Michael Polanyi to Georg Lukacs and many others. The almost insurmountable conflict between theory and practice that characterized Ervin Szabo's life remains a problem that has to be solved by engaged intellectuals whatever the time and place. Background notes and an introduction by the editors help to place the writings in their historical and political context.

The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classed people into hierarchically ranked status groups (mibun). The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, adapting and clarifying existing customary divisions between warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Subsequently, during the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, status laws backed by coercive force worked to limit social mobility between groups and regulate relations between people of different status. This book begins by examining the origins and evolution of the outcaste groups within the Tokugawa status order. It then looks into the complex processes leading up to the abolition of outcaste status and the institution of legal equality in 1871 under the Meiji regime, and analyzes subsequent practices and theories of social discrimination against firstly 'former outcastes' and 'New Commoners' and then 'Burakumin'. Finally, it analyses the tactics and strategies of liberation adopted at local and national levels by anti-discrimination movements in Meiji Japan. Detailing the history of early-modern Japanese outcastes into the post-abolition era, Japan's Outcaste Abolition explores the dynamics of national inclusion, social exclusion, and the making of disciplined modern subjects. It will therefore be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese history, culture and society, social history and Asian studies.

This book explores resilience, social capital and relationships of power in an examination of the manner in which capital can be converted from one form to another. Through a study of the survival of the Polish gentry, in spite of the communist regime's attempts to disempower and discredit them through land reform and high-profile trials, Patrons of History shows how the gentry managed not only to survive as a class, but also to remain influential. By revitalising older forms of cultural capital invested with education and transnational networks, the gentry were able to transform wealth, land, patronage, lifestyle and the ability to define patriotism and authorise a version of history, so as to ensure that noble heritage remained an advantageous resource in the face of communist opposition. Drawing on rich interview material spanning fifteen years, Patrons of History sheds light not only on communism as it existed and the stratification that persisted under such regimes, but also on the functioning of relationships of power and the ways in which privilege can be studied in the contemporary world. As such, this book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers and historians interested in cultural and social capital, inequality and resistance.

We know very little about variations in urban class and ethnic segregation among nations and even less about differences among cities in different regions of the world. Spatial organization (places and neighbourhoods) matters significantly in some cities in reproducing class relations and ethno-racial hierarchies, but may be much less important in others. The degree and the impact of segregation depend upon contextual diversity. By emphasizing the importance of contextual diversity in the study of urban residential segregation, the book questions currently popular urban theories such as global city, neoliberal urbanism, and gentrification. These theories tend to dissociate cities from their national and regional context and thus ignore their history, culture, politics and institutions. The aim of this book is to introduce the significantly different urban experiences in social and spatial segregation patterns and rationales which exist among the world's regions and to demonstrate that urban theory needs to draw systematically upon this wide range of experiences. The cities selected (Athens, Beijing, Budapest, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Madrid, Paris, SAGBPo Paulo, Taipei, and Tokyo) were chosen in order to achieve geographical spread, to maximise the diversity of types of socioeconomic regulation.This volume is thus able to avoid the interpretative limitations and misconstructions resulting from universalizing the Anglo-American experience.

This book is about the causes and consequences of economic inequality in the advanced market economies of today. It is commonplace that in market systems people choose their own individual economic destinies, but of course the choices people make are importantly determined by the alternatives available to them: economic disparity arises mainly from unequal opportunity. Yet this merely begs the question; from whence do the vast existing inequalities of opportunity arise? This book theorizes power and social class as the real crux of economic inequality. Most of mainstream economics studiously eschews questions involving social power, preferring to focus instead on "individual choice subject to constraint" in contexts of "well-functioning markets". Yet both "extra-market" power structures and power structures arising from within the market system itself are unavoidably characteristic of real-world market-based economies. The normal working of labor and financial markets engenders an inherent wealth-favoring bias in the distribution of opportunities for occupational choice. But that bias is greatly compounded by the economic, social, political and cultural power structures that constitute the class system. For those power structures work to distribute economic benefit to class elites, and are in turn undergirded by the disparities of wealth they thus help engender. Inequality and Power offers an economic analysis of the power structures constituting that class system: employers' power over employees; the power of certain businesses over others; professionals' power over their clients and other employees; cultural power in the media and education systems; and political power in "democratic" government. Schutz argues that a "class analysis" of the trend of increasing economic inequality today is superior to the mainstream economic analysis of that trend. After considering what is wrong with power-based inequality in term of criteria of distributive justice and economic functionality, the book concludes with an outline of various possible correctives. This book should be of interest to students and researchers in economics, sociology, political science and philosophy, as well as anyone interested in the theories of social class.

Social differentiation, poverty and the emergence of the newly rich occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union have seldom been analysed from a class perspective. Rethinking Class in Russia addresses this absence by exploring the manner in which class positions are constructed and negotiated in the new Russia. Bringing an ethnographic and cultural studies approach to the topic, this book demonstrates that class is a central axis along which power and inequality are organized in Russia, revealing how symbolic, cultural and emotional dimensions are deeply intertwined with economic and material inequalities. Thematically arranged and presenting the latest empirical research, this interdisciplinary volume brings together work from both Western and Russian scholars on a range of spheres and practices, including popular culture, politics, social policy, consumption, education, work, family and everyday life. By engaging with discussions in new class analysis and by highlighting how the logic of global neoliberal capitalism is appropriated and negotiated vis-A -vis the Soviet hierarchies of value and worth, this book offers a multifaceted and carefully contextualized picture of class relations and identities in contemporary Russia and makes a contribution to the theorisation of class and inequality in a post-Cold War era. As such it will appeal to those with interests in sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, gender studies, Russian and Eastern European studies, and media and cultural studies.

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa's current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or 'capitals' - including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of 'gains' and 'losses'.

Research into social stratification and social divisions has always been a central component of sociological study. This volume brings together a range of thematically organised case-studies comprising empirical and methodological analyses addressing the challenges of studying trends and processes in social stratification. This collection has four themes. The first concerns the measurement of social stratification, since the problem of relating concepts, measurements and operationalizations continues to cause difficulties for sociological analysis. This book clarifies the appropriate deployment of existing measurement options, and presents new empirical strategies of measurement and interpretation. The conception of the life course and individual social biography is very popular in modern sociology. The second theme of this volume exploits the contemporary expansion of micro-level longitudinal data and the analytical approaches available to researchers to exploit such records. It comprises chapters which exemplify innovative empirical analysis of life-course processes in a longitudinal context, thus offering an advance on previous sociological accounts concerned with longitudinal trends and processes. The third theme of the book concerns the interrelationship between contemporary demographic, institutional and socioeconomic transformations and structures of social inequality. Although the role of wider social changes is rarely neglected in sociological reviews, such changes continue to raise analytical challenges for any assessment of empirical differences and trends. The fourth theme of the book discusses selected features of policy and political responses to social stratification. This volume will be of interest to students, academics and policy experts working in the field of social stratification.

This volume addresses different aspects and areas of inequality in Israel, a country characterized by high levels of economic inequality, poverty, and social diversity. The book expands on the mechanisms that produce and maintain inequality, and the role of state policies in influencing those mechanisms.

Despite the growing significance of social movements worldwide, scholarship on the subject remains largely Western in nature, with studies written primarily by Western scholars and based on the experiences of Western cultures and societies. This book makes an important contribution to the study of social movements in non-Western societies by examining their development in Iran. With a particular focus on the recent environmental movement, the author sheds new light on the implications and significance of these movements. Drawing on in-depth original research, the case study of the environmental movement is integrated into a historical and comparative analysis. Implementing the new social movement theory of Touraine and Melucci in the Iranian context, the author shows that although the reform movement of Iran is unique, in some aspects it is a continuation of the past social movements. She places emphasis on the role of women in recent Iranian social movements, exploring the significance of social movements in civil society and in instigating social change. Using the case of Iran to offer a critical framework for studying social change and transformation of non-European countries, this book fills an important gap in the existing literature on the topic. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars and students of sociology, political science and Middle Eastern studies.

Social Class and Education: Global Perspectives is the first empirically grounded volume to explore the intersections of class, social structure, opportunity, and education on a truly global scale. Fifteen essays from contributors representing the US, Europe, China, Latin America and other regions offer an unparralleled examination of how social class differences are made and experienced through schooling. By underscoring the consequences of our new global reality, this volume takes seriously the transnational migration of commerce, capital and peoples and the ramifications of such for education and social structure. Moving beyond national confines, internationally recognized scholars, Lois Weis and Nadine Dolby, offer a set of emblematic essays that break new theoretical and empirical ground on the ways class is produced and maintained through education around the world.

Fitting into Place adopts a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary approach to explore shifting geographies and temporalities that re-constitute 'city publics' - and the place of the 'public sociologist'. Class, race and gender (dis)advantages are situated in relation to urban-rural contrasts, where 'future selves' are reconfigured in and through 'local' and 'global' sites: people inhabit shifting times and places, from industrial landscapes of the 'past', to a current present and (imagined) 'cosmopolitan' 'regenerated' future. The rhetorics and vocabularies of place, as affective and material, suggest a more complex 'fit' than the language of masculine 'crisis' for past-times, or 'feminised' fit into new-futures, suggests. Across the generations, women's labour is still effaced as maps of loyalty hold up families as reference points of belonging and 'fitting in'; such architecture of place complicates reified 'geographies of choice' which centre a middle-class mobile subject. Based upon funded empirical research, this book will be of interest to sociologists and geographers.

Globalization and Technocapitalism considers the global reach of a new capitalist era, exploring the nature of 'technocapitalism' as grounded in new forms of accumulation, commodification, and corporate organization. As technological creativity, corporate research, and talent flows become more important than ever, this book explores the manner in which globalization acquires new contextual features that will become central to the macro-social dynamics of the twenty-first century. It thus sheds light on the resultant growth in global inequalities and more intrusive forms of global domination that are grounded in emerging sectors, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and its diverse fields, such as genomics, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics and biopharmacology, and related advances in computing and telecommunications. A rigorous examination of developments in contemporary capitalism as driven by the forces of globalization, Globalization and Technocapitalism will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of social and political theory, international political economy, political philosophy, science and technology studies and globalization.

This book examines the rise of welfare markets in Western societies and explores their functioning, regulation and embeddedness by addressing the particular field of old age provision, including both retirement provision and elderly care. It goes beyond a mere social policy analysis by investigating major cultural underpinnings of the new (quasi-)markets, with these underpinnings embracing collective normative representations of how societies (should) institutionally handle old age. The book looks at whether pension and care systems are converging under the influence of globalization - with marketization being a key phenomenon - and to what extent this is creating a transnational culture of welfare markets. This book, the first book to systematically describe and analyse the phenomenon of welfare markets, elucidates the complex cultural underpinnings of care and pensions systems in an era of marketization, arguing that we are facing a cultural struggle over the way late modern societies conceptualize institutional old-age provision.

Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? investigates the definition, role, and decline of public intellectuals in American society. Drawing from a wide range of commentaries and studies, this edited volume demonstrates the unique importance of public intellectuals and probes the timely question of how their voices can continue to be effective in our ever-changing social, academic and political climates. At a time when many argue that public intellectuals are dying out, the book addresses questions such as who qualifies as a public intellectual? Have their ranks thinned out and their qualities diminished? What is that special service that public intellectuals are supposed to render for the body politic? And, above all, is society being shortchanged?

Since 2003, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of large-scale protests which have constituted the core of a reinvigorated pro-democracy movement. What drove tens of thousands of citizens to the street on a yearly basis to protest? What were the social and organizational bases of the protest movement? How did media and public discourses affect the protests formation and mobilization? How did the protesters understand their own actions and the political environment? This book tackles such questions by using a wide range of methods, including population and protest onsite surveys, media content analysis, and in-depth interviews with activists, politicians, and protest participants. It provides an account of the "self-mobilization processes" behind the historic July 1, 2003 protest, and how the protest kick-started new political dynamics and discursive contestations in the public arena which not only turned a single protest into a series of collective actions constituting a movement, but also continually shaped the movement 's characteristics and influence. The book is highly pertinent to readers interested in political development in Hong Kong, and as a case study on "the power of critical events," the book also has broad implications on the study of both media politics and social movements in general.

Bringing together the leading authors currently working at the intersection of social science and transport science, this volume provides a companion to the well-established and extensive international Transport and Society series. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, offers closer and richer consideration of the issues, practices and structures of multiple mobilities which shape the current world but which have typically been overlooked or minimised. What this approach seeks to do is not only draw attention to many new areas of research and investigation relating to mobile lives, but also to point to new theories and methods by which such lives have to be researched and examined. Such new theories and methods are relevant both to rethinking 'transport' studies as such but are also recasting 'societal' studies as 'transport' so that it comes out of the ghetto and enters mainstream social science.

Stepping Stones is a joint memoir by two longtime participants in movements for social change in the United States. Staughton and Alice Lynd have worked for racial equality, against war, with workers and prisoners, and against the death penalty. Coming from similar ethical backgrounds but with very different personalities, the Lynds spent three years in an intentional community in Northeast Georgia during the 1950s. There they experienced a way of living that they later sought to carry into the larger society. Both were educated to be teachers-Staughton as a professor of history and Alice as a teacher of preschool children. But both sought to address the social problems of their times through more than their professions. After being involved in the Southern civil rights movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s, both Staughton and Alice became lawyers. In the Youngstown, Ohio, area they helped workers to create a variety of rank-and-file organizations. After retirement, they became advocates for prisoners who were sentenced to death or confined under supermaximum security conditions. Through trips to Central America in the 1980s, Staughton and Alice became familiar with the concept of "accompaniment." To them, accompaniment means placing themselves at the side of the poor and oppressed, not as dispensers of charity or as guilty fugitives from the middle class, but as equals in a joint process to which each person brings an essential kind of expertise. Throughout, the Lynds, who became Quakers in the early 1960s, have been committed to nonviolence. Their story will encourage young people seeking lives of public service in the cause of creating a better world.

Domestic and care work in private households is now the largest employment sector for migrant women. This book sheds light on these households through its focus on the interpersonal relationships between Latin American "undocumented migrant" domestic workers and employers in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK. The personal experiences of these women form the basis for Gutierrez-Rodriguez's decolonial analysis of the feminization of labor in private households and cultural analysis of domestic work as affective labor. This book will be a necessary voice in the debates on citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and migrant workers' rights.

En face bilingual edition of only extant Latin American slave narrative written during slavery era. Original Spanish punctuation, spelling, and syntax corrected and modernized by Schulman; translation is of this new version of text. Introduction, notes, chronology give extensive background. Excellent for undergraduate classroom use. Scholars may prefer original text"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Can grassroots social movements impact the financial system? Technological advancements are poised to completely transform the financial system, and soon it will be unrecognizable. Banks are increasingly using financial technologies ("fintech") to deliver products and services and maximize their profits. Technology enthusiasts and consumer advocates laude the field for its potential to expand access to banking and finance. However, if history is any indication, fintech stands to reinforce digital forms of redlining and enable banks' continued racialized exploitation of Black and Brown communities. Banking on a Revolution takes the perspective that the financial system needs a revolution-not the impending revolution driven by technology. Studying the various ways the financial system bolsters whites by exploiting and marginalizing Black and Brown communities, Terri Friedline challenges the optimistic belief that fintech can expand access to banking and finance. Friedline applies the lens of financialized racial neoliberal capitalism to demonstrate the financial system's inherent racism, and explores examples from student loan debt, corporate landlords, community benefits agreements, and banking and payday lending. Banking on a Revolution is deeply rooted in theory and research, and it presents new interpretations of the climate crisis, student loan debt, and community benefits agreements and their relationships to the financial system. The book makes a compelling case for a revolutionized financial system that centers the needs, experiences, and perspectives of those it has historically excluded, marginalized, and exploited.

Agrarian transformations, market integration and globalization processes are impacting upon rural Southeast Asia with increasingly complex and diverse consequences. In response, local inhabitants are devising a broad range of resistance measures that they feel will best protect or improve their livelihoods, ensure greater social justice and equity, or allow them to just be left alone. This book develops a multi-scalar approach to examine such resistance occurring in relation to agrarian transformations in the Southeast Asian region.

The contributors take a fresh look at the diversity of sites of struggle and the combinations of resistance measures being utilized in contemporary Southeast Asia. They reveal that open public conflicts and debates are taking place between dominators and the oppressed, at the same time as covert critiques of power and everyday forms of resistance. The book shows how resistance measures are context contingent, shaped by different world views, and shift according to local circumstances, the opening and closing of political opportunity structures, and the historical peculiarities of resistance dynamics.

By providing new conceptual approaches and illustrative case studies that cut across scales and forms, this book will be of interest to academics and students in comparative politics, sociology, human geography, environmental studies, cultural anthropology and Southeast Asian studies. It will also help to further debate and action among academics, activists and policymakers.