Caste is a contested terrain in India s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. Presenting rich empirical findings across north India, it presents an original perspective on the reasons for the persistence of caste in India today. "

Fabos and Isotalo address the issue of forced migration and mobility in the Muslim world. Their work explores the tensions between Muslim religious conceptions of space and place and new policies of 'migration management' and secure borders.

Brothers and sisters remain, for those that have them, an inextricable part of existence. In adult life they may never be in contact but they cannot be formally divorced. Brothers and sisters are frequently life's longest relationship. Yet until recently, historians have scarcely noticed.
Thicker than Water is a pioneering history of sibling relationships in the long nineteenth century, from the last decades of the eighteenth to the first decades of the twentieth. The principal focus is on Britain, the first major capitalist society, and its middle classes, who were at the core of the nascent new order. It was their extensive family networks that provided the capital, personnel, skills, and contacts crucial to the rapidly expanding commercial and professional enterprises of the Victorian era.
Davidoff examines what we know about sibling relationships at this time, before delving deeper, looking at their uses and meaning for British middle class families, how they operated within the economic, social, cultural, and religious constraints of their place and time, and how they changed as families became smaller from the end of the nineteenth century onwards.
The issues raised throughout the book are grounded in an exploration of some specific themes, sibling intimacy and incest, sibling death, as well as in case studies of famous sibling relationships, such as that between William Gladstone and his sisters, and a revealing account of the household relations of perhaps the most influential interpreter of personal and familial life in modern society, Sigmund Freud.

Global forces and accountability once again converge in this volume, illustrating the significant and multifaceted nature of the role of accounting in societies. The accounting discipline in its numbers, its silences, its privileging of select classifications over others, it is continually constructing knowledge, cultivates meaning, and impacts public policy in the intersection of socio-political-economic realms. The research in this volume responds to calls for examining accounting as an interdisciplinary role in neoliberal governance by examining migration, race, gender, class and the creation of the 'other'. Each paper uniquely contributes toward significantly exploring accounting's role in disenfranchising populations while identifying participants actualized and potential role in emancipatory struggles. By recognizing marginalized groups embedded power rather than casting them as victims, the authors reject an inevitability of widening inequalities and forms of violence to world populations. Rather these critical accounting researchers seriously tackle the task of transformation, providing pathways for thinking differently and aspiring for change.

Ross McKibbin investigates the ways in which `class culture' characterized English society and intruded into every aspect of life, during the period from 1918 to the mid-1950s. He shows how this division into separate social classes manifested itself within the mini `cultures' which together help constitute society: families and family life, friends and neighbours, the workplace, schools and colleges, religion, sexuality, sport, music, film, radio, and examines the effects of increasing Americanization. This fascinating and original study is invaluable for an understanding of the fundamental structures and belief systems underpinning English society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Drawing on interviews with nurses, social workers, exotic dancers and hairdressers, this book explores the processes involved in producing and reproducing gendered and classed workers and occupations.

Hong Kong's anti-corruption agency, ICAC, is hailed as among the world's best having almost completely purged systemic corruption within a decade of its inception. This book explains how Hong Kong maintains the myth of a clean city and examines the prevalence of white collar crime in the city's property sector.

Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture is bad for you examines the link between social inequality and who produces, consumes and participates in culture. Exclusion from culture begins at an early age, the authors argue, and despite claims by cultural institutions and businesses to hire talented and hardworking individuals, women, people of colour, and those from working class backgrounds are systematically disbarred. While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of state-society development in the most volatile region of the world. In the Middle East, various anti-systemic movement and radical Islam often clashed and resisted the political, cultural, economic, and military domination of the region by the world's major imperial powers. Emadi investigates state, revolution, and development in the Middle Eastern states of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria in the immediate post-World War II period. Maintaining that the state is an instrument of class domination, exhibiting a certain degree of autonomy in the creation and design of domestic development programs, he details the role of class in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the diverse factors at work. Politics of the Dispossessed provides an alternative analysis of development in regional politics and its context in world politics, aspects that are generally neglected by most mainstream studies. It examines state formation, internal development strategies, and how class conflict and ideology led to class alliance on an international basis, as well as the external interference in the internal affairs of these societies. It also explores the process of political and ethnic integration of the Middle East into the global economic system and the resulting counter-strategies of the nationalist and Islamic resistance to the increasing superpower domination of the international system.

Western society has become increasingly diverse, but stereotypes still persist in the public discourse. This volume explores how people who have a marked status in society - among them Travellers, teenage mothers, homeless people - manage their identity in response to these stereotypes.

Politicians, business leaders and citizens look with hope to the Latin American middle class for political stability and purchasing power, but the economic position of the middle class remains vulnerable. The contributors document the remarkable emergence of this middle group in Latin America, whose measurement turns out not to be an easy task.

Through an analysis of the marriage patterns of thousands of aristocratic women as well as an examination of diaries, letters, and memoirs, this book demonstrates that the sense of rank identity as manifested in these women's marriages remained remarkably stable for centuries, until it was finally shattered by the First World War.

Despite becoming a big issue in public debate, social mobility is one of the most misunderstood processes of our time. In this accessible and engaging text, Geoff Payne, one of Britain's leading mobility analysts, presents up-to-date sociological research evidence to demonstrate how our politicians have not grasped the ways in which mobility works. The new social mobility argues for considering a wider range of dimensions of mobility and life chances, notably the workings of the labour market, to assess more accurately the causes and consequences of mobility as social and political processes. Bringing together a range of literature and research, it covers key themes of mobility analysis, and offers a critical and original approach to social mobility. This important book will challenge the well-established opinions of politicians, pressure groups, the press, academics and the public; it is also sufficiently comprehensive to be suitable for teaching and of interest to a broad academic audience.

In this landmark work, Neil Gilbert addresses the long-standing tensions between capitalism and the progressive spirit. Challenging the contemporary progressive outlook on the failures of capitalism, Capitalism and the Progressive Spirit analyzes the empirical evidence for conventional claims about the real level of poverty, the presumed causes and consequences of inequality, the meaning and underlying dynamics of social mobility, and the necessity for more social welfare spending and universal benefits. A careful reading of the research reveals that these issues are far less serious than contemporary progressive claims would have the public believe. Progressive leaders, however, remain firmly wedded to the established social agenda, which conveys a vision of the good society that disregards the historically unprecedented and wide-spread abundance in the advanced post-industrial countries. Meanwhile, the progressive agenda inadvertently caters to the corrosive effects of insatiable consumption and the commodification of everyday life, from which modern capitalism profits. The analysis suggests that it is time to resist the material definition of progress that stands so high on the current agenda and envision alternative ways for government to advance society.

This volume provides a novel and relational sociological approach to the study of EU civil society. It focuses on the interactions and interrelations between civil society actors and the forms of capital that structure the fields and sub-fields of EU civil society, through new and important empirical studies on organized EU civil society.

This book demonstrates the symbolic centrality of servants in Brazilian intellectual discourse (fiction, memoirs, conduct literature, and journalism) over the course of one century--from the aftermath of the abolition of slavery (1888) to late twentieth-century maids' testimonies. It explores demeaning images of servants to examine the ways intellectuals reconciled the colonial legacy of servitude with Brazil's modernization. While the first chapters examine the discourse of 'the servant problem, ' revealing the elite's power anxieties vis-a-vis post-abolition transformations of domestic social contracts, later chapters explore new nuances of cross-racial conflicts facing contemporary servants' grassroots movements and the increase in female white-collar employment.

How did so many Punjabi immigrants come to find themselves behind the wheels of so many New York City taxi cabs, and what do their stories have to teach us about how immigrants must navigate life in a new society? Diditi Mitra analyzes how race and class influence settlement patterns in the United States, based on her extensive interviews with 59 Punjabi taxi drivers, organizers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, laywers who represent drivers in taxi courts, owners of taxi fleets, and an official of the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission. What emerges is an unprecedented exploration into how society shapes the 'choices' made by immigrants as they adapt to America.

What is the social structure of Chinese society in the 21st century? How should China address the problem of migrant workers? How can China form a modern society? These key sociological issues are some of the topics this book covers. This book is a collection of the research articles and lectures that Dr. Lu Xueyi, the former Head of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has published since the 1980s. The author discusses the social structure, social stratification, social construction and development of contemporary Chinese society. Arguing that the gap between economic and social development has become the major social issue facing modern China, the author advocates paying close attention to the country's social structure and the growth of the middle-class. The book will be of interest for all scholars and students of Sociology and Chinese Studies.

This Festschrift is published in honor of Alex C. Michalos, a great scholar and inspiration to many upcoming and famous academics and practitioners. The Festschrift celebrates his lifelong, outstanding scientific and cultural contribution to Quality of Life Research. It contains contributions written by the most prestigious and renowned scholars in the field of social indicators research and quality of life studies. Taken together, the contributions from scholars around the world reflect Michalos' stance that even though there may be differences in individual scientific positions, the language in the field of quality of life has no limits and boundaries.