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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getulio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city's economy, and consequently its citizen's lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant - of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

This text offers a fresh look at Taiwan's state workers in from the postwar period to the present day and examines the rise and fall of labor insurgency in the past two decades. Challenging the conventional image of docile working class, it unearths a series of workers resistance, hidden and public, in a high authoritarian era.

Originally published between 1959 and 1975 these 4 volumes are by one of the 20th Century's foremost sociologists. The ideas of power, resistance, conflict, historical change, openness, freedom and uncertainty pervade this set and make the works as relevant now as when they were originally published. In addition they: Examine the structures of power in which political process takes place. Offer a critique of historical sociologists whilst discussing the problems of the 20th Century and how to solve them. Provide a cross-over with political and philosophical perspectives as well as sociological ones.

Reframes the story of modern Ethiopia around the contributions of the Oromo people and the culturally fluid union of communities that shaped the nation's politics and society. Although the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, their history has been distorted in order to buttress twentieth-century notions of a homogeneous Ethiopian state. The Other Abyssinians tells the story of the Oromo people's contribution to modern Ethiopia, tracing their experiences from the early nineteenth century onward and detailing the varied interactions of Oromo groups throughout the Ethiopian highlands. Focusing on the historic provinces of Wallo and Shawa, this well-researched work elucidates the importance of these territories in the creation of Ethiopia and the history of the Oromo. It casts the Oromo as Abyssinians and central in all aspects of modernEthiopian life, while making a case for Ethiopia, a nation without a colonial legacy, as an example of indigenous African identity formation that challenges notions of "tribal" or ethnic identities. Author Brian J. Yates details the cultural practices that integrated the populations of the highlands into the Abyssinian group; in addition, he analyzes the political structures that evolved concurrently. The book, notably, utilizes a community-based framework to underscore the fluidity of modern national identity. All in all, the work offers a close study of Ethiopian modernization policies and illuminates how Africans might have crafted their nations without the legaciesof colonialism.

The contributions of this book examine contemporary dynamics of migration and mobility in the context of the general societal transformations that have taken place in Europe over the past few decades. The book will help readers to better understand the manifold ways in which migration trends in the region are linked to changing political-economic constellations, orders of power and inequality, and political discourses. It begins with an introduction to a number of theoretical approaches that address the nexus between migration and general societal shifts, including processes of supranationalisation, EU enlargement, postsocialist transformations and rescaling. It then provides a comprehensive overview of the political regulation of migration through border control and immigration policies. The contributions that follow detail the dynamic changes of individual migration patterns and their implications for the agency of mobile individuals. The final part challenges the reader to consider how policies and practices of migration are linked to symbolic struggles over belonging and rights, describing a wide range of expressions of such conflicts, from cosmopolitanism to racism and xenophobia. This book is aimed at researchers in various fields of the social sciences and can be used as course reading for undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of international migration, transnational and European studies. It will be a beneficial resource for scholars looking for material on the most current conceptual tools for analysis of the nexus of migration and societal transformation in Europe.

2012 Americo Paredes Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries This is Olivia's story. Born in Los Angeles, she is taken to Mexico to live with her extended family until the age of three. Olivia then returns to L.A. to live with her mother, Carmen, the live-in maid to a wealthy family. Mother and daughter sleep in the maid's room, just off the kitchen. Olivia is raised alongside the other children of the family. She goes to school with them, eats meals with them, and is taken shopping for clothes with them. She is like a member of the family. Except she is not. Based on over twenty years of research, noted scholar Mary Romero brings Olivia's remarkable story to life. We watch as she grows up among the children of privilege, struggles through adolescence, declares her independence and eventually goes off to college and becomes a successful professional. Much of this extraordinary story is told in Olivia's voice and we hear of both her triumphs and setbacks. We come to understand the painful realization of wanting to claim a Mexican heritage that is in many ways not her own and of her constant struggle to come to terms with the great contradictions in her life. In The Maid's Daughter, Mary Romero explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating Olivia's challenge to establish her sense of identity, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in her life. Romero points to the hidden costs of paid domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday routines are important in maintaining and assuring that various forms of privilege are passed on from one generation to another. Through Olivia's story, Romero shows how mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor. A happy ending for the maid's daughter: Hector Tobar's profile of Olivia for the LA Times