A radical new interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, The Making of an American Thinking Class envisions the Bay colony as a seventeenth century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological 'cells' and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. From there Staloff offers a broadened conception of the interstices of political, social, and intellectual authority in Puritan Massachusetts and beyond, arguing that ideologies, as well as ideological politics, are produced by self-conscious, and often class-conscious, thinkers.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

This book offers a comprehensive look into issues and trends driving international student mobility as the phenomenon becomes increasingly prevalent worldwide. Chapters first present an expanded definition of student mobility in the context of internationalization and go on to discuss the underlying motivations, issues, and challenges students face in attaining successful outcomes. The authors employ marketing concepts to illustrate ideas and recommendations for better attracting and integrating international students into academic institutions abroad with the goal of greater satisfaction for students and improved profitability for the universities they attend.

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of Freeway in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of Freeway in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

Spanning the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers' politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on childcare, work and gender. The book illustrates how maternal workers continue to organize against low pay, exploitative working conditions and state retrenchment and provides a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities. Bringing together social reproduction with maternal studies, this is a resonating call to build a cross-sectoral, intersectional movement around childcare. Maud Perrier shows why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.

"A herd of independent minds," Harold Roseberg once labelled his fellow intellectuals. They were, and are, as this book shows, a special and fascinating group, including literary critics like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Rahv, and William Phillips; social scientists like Nathan Glazer; art critics and historians Clement Greenberg, Harold Rrosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro; novelist Saul Bellow; and political journalists Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Their story winds through nearly all of the crucial intellectual and political events of the last decades, as well as through the major academic institutions of the nation and the editorial boards of such important journals as Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, The Public Interest, and The New York Review of Books.
So deeply entrenched in our intellectual establishment are these people that it's easy to forget that most grew up onthe edge of American society--poor, Jewish, the children of immigrants. Prodigal Sons retraces their common past, from their New York City ghetto upbringing and education at Columbia and City College through their radicalization in the '30s to their preeminence in the postwar literary and academic world. The book examines their youthful efforts to ignore their Jewish heritage and their later rediscovery of this heritage in the wake of the Holocaust. It shows how they moved toward the liberal center during the Cold War and how the group fragmented in the 1960s, when some turned toward the right, becoming key figures in the Neo-Conservative movement of the 1970s and '80s.
As Bloom points out, there is no single typical New York intellectual; nor did they share all their ideas. This book is concerned with how the community came to be formed, and what it thought important, how and why it moved and changed, and why it ultimately came undone. We learn some of the ways in which intellectuals function and justify their own places and a great deal about the political and cultural landscape over which New York intellectuals passed.
A fascinating portrait of New York intellectual life over the past half-century

.Based on interviews with many of the leading figures and 10 years of extensive research

.Takes us behind the scenes at Commentary, Partisan Review, The Public Interest and other influential publications"

Dick Houtman argues that neither authoritarianism nor libertarianism can be explained by class or economic background, but rather by position in the cultural domain-- what he calls cultural capital. Although he examines all of the statistics and arguments of the conventional approaches with care and concern, Houtman convincingly demonstrates that the conclusions drawn from earlier studies are untenable at a more general theoretical level. Despite differences among advocates of class explanations, their theories are based on largely identical research findings--in particular a strong negative relationship between education and authoritarianism. Unobstructed by the conclusions these authors felt called upon to draw from the findings themselves, Houtman configures them in a new way. The hypotheses derived from this new theory allow for a systematic, strict, and competitive testing of original theses without ignoring the value of and earlier research. After demonstrating that authoritarianism and libertarianism cannot be explained by class or economic background, Houtman examines the implications of this argument for today's death of class debate in political sociology. He holds it to be unfortunate that the relevance of class to politics is typically addressed by studying the relation between class and voting. This conceals a complex cross-pressure mechanism that causes this relationship to capture the net balance of class voting and its opposite, cultural voting, instead of class voting. He argues that references to a decline in class voting may be basically correct, but dogmatic reliance on the relation between class and voting to prove the point systematically underestimates levels of class voting and produces an exaggerated picture of the decline. "Dick Houtman has an eye for the critical gap in our grand theorizing, and like the classic Dutchman, has filled the gap. This book we must all read to find how better to fill the gaps in our own theorizing about culture, class, and politics."--Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago "Dick Houtman" is professor of sociology at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Globalised Minds, Roots in the City utilises empirical evidence from four European cities to explore the role of urban upper middle classes in the transformations experienced by contemporary European societies. * Presents new empirical evidence collected through an original comparative research about professionals and managers in four European cities in three countries * Features an innovative combination of approaches, methods, and techniques in its analyses of European post-national societies * Reveals how segments of Europe s urban population are adopting exit or partial exit strategies in respect to the nation state * Utilises approaches from classic urban sociology, globalization and mobility studies, and spatial class analysis * Includes in depth interviews, social networking techniques, and classic questions of political representation and values

This volume develops a historically informed phenomenology of caste and untouchability. It explores the idea of 'Brahmin' and the practice of untouchability by offering a scholarly reading of ancient and medieval texts. By going beyond the notions of purity and pollution, it presents a new framework of understanding relationships between social groups and social categories. An important intervention in the study of caste and untouchability, this book will be an essential read for the scholars and researchers of political studies, political philosophy, cultural studies, Dalit studies, Indology, sociology, social anthropology and Ambedkar studies.

Contemporary democracies vary greatly in how much income inequality they tolerate. Some, like the United States and the United Kingdom, have seen high and rising levels for decades, while others, such as the Nordic countries, are much more equal. This comprehensive text draws on a wealth of cutting-edge theories and empirical data to examine the political and economic causes and consequences of income inequality around the globe. It is organized around a set of key questions, including: - Is there something morally wrong with inequality? - Is inequality good or bad for economic growth? - How does inequality affect political participation and engagement? - Who decides in the politics of inequality? Systematic and accessible, this is the perfect book for students with an interest in the connections between politics and inequality.

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader.

First published in 1999, this much-needed volume powerfully re-evaluates attitudes to the 'deserving and 'undeserving' poor and aims to investigate social workers' attitudes and actions towards poverty issues, social service users who have needed financial help and to question whether learning about poverty is an integrated part of social work students' training and social workers' in-service training. Monica Dowling has experience of being a social work student and social worker, as well as a social work teacher and researcher. In an age when increasing numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students are unemployed and living on benefits, Dowling reveals the true picture of the people who end up on the poverty line, reconnecting social work theory and practice.

First published in 1998, this volume asks: are new social classes in the making in eastern Europe? Are class issues withering away? How do different classes organize their lives, what kind of strategies do they adopt in East and West. Markku Kivinen brings Eastern Europe into the class debate. Recent sociological discussions have touched upon questions of class in Eastern Europe only very provisionally. On the other hand, old analyses of social stratification under conditions of 'actually existed socialism' are no longer relevant in the current situation. This book analyses processes of class relations in Eastern Europe from new theoretical vantage-points, using up-to-date empirical data. Under socialism, power was said to be vested in the working class. However, there was a constant tension between the 'holy proletariat' and the real life of the working class. Today, all political forces in Eastern Europe; leftist and liberal alike, are hankering for the middle class. This book explores the real processes in both East and West. This leads to more concrete political and even moral issues. The new 'sacred middle class' is challenged. The contributors adopt several conceptual approaches and perspectives which enter into a fruitful exchange in this book.

First published in 1997, this study of 9,000 people born in the same week in 1970, who have been followed up since birth, has produced a unique picture of life for those in their mid 20s - a year before the new Labour Government took office. The new survey shows a fractured society with clear evidence of an increasing gulf between those 'getting on' with their careers and blooming and those who are being left behind. The polarisation between those 'getting on' and those 'getting nowhere' was primarily about financial and career achievement but was also reflected in almost every other area of their lives. A theme running throughout the book is what characterises successful integration into adult life, as opposed to marginalisation and social exclusion which is encountered by increasing numbers of young people.

First published in 1999, this volume examines the 'meanings' specific child protection cases involving the familial sexual abuse of adolescent girls hold for social workers. This is achieved through a qualitative analysis of a series of interviews with social workers regarding current or recent cases. The analysis reveals various influences on social workers' practice: the organisation and administrative structure of child protection, governmental requirements to interagency coordination, the abused girl, her family, and the skills and limitations of the social worker. The findings point to a series of tensions between social workers' perceptions of appropriate intervention practice on the one hand and organisational needs, the demands of the criminal justice system and client choice on the other. This leads to recommendations for improved in-service training, including joint training for social workers and police officers, and a review of the transitional procedures between child protection and adult services.

First published in 1998, this volume contains an edited selection of papers presented at the Fifth International Research Seminar on 'Issues in Social Security', held on 14-17 June 1997 in Sweden by the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS) in memory of Brian Abel-Smith. The chapters cover a wide range of subjects related to old age pension reform, family policy, employment, privatization of social security and health care. The authors form a body of well-established researchers and scholars of world-wide reputation as well as younger scientists, stemming from various continents, and representing a range of relevant disciplines. This volume is the fourth in a series on international studies of issues in social security. The series is initiated by the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS). One of its aims is to confront different academic approaches with each other, and with public policy perspectives. Another is to give analytic reports of cross-nationally different approaches to the design and reform of welfare state programs.

Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables 1. Introduction 2. Bedford in Context 3. Narrative Structures: The Cultural Codes of a Landscape Aesthetic 4. Anxious Pleasures: Place-Based Identity and the Look of the Land 5. Legislating Beauty: The Politics of Exclusion 6. The Taxman Cometh: The Gift of Nature in Suburbia 7. Fabricating History: The Production of Heritage in Bedford Village 8. Another Country: Latino Labor and the Politics of Disappearance 9. Epilogue Bibliography

Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables 1. Introduction 2. Bedford in Context 3. Narrative Structures: The Cultural Codes of a Landscape Aesthetic 4. Anxious Pleasures: Place-Based Identity and the Look of the Land 5. Legislating Beauty: The Politics of Exclusion 6. The Taxman Cometh: The Gift of Nature in Suburbia 7. Fabricating History: The Production of Heritage in Bedford Village 8. Another Country: Latino Labor and the Politics of Disappearance 9. Epilogue Bibliography

In this comprehensive volume, authors from across the social sciences explore how housing wealth transfers have impacted the integration of families, society and the economy, with a focus on the (re)negotiation of the 'generational contract'. While housing has always been central to the realization and reproduction of families, more recently, the mutual embedding of home and family has become more obvious as realignments in housing markets, employment and welfare states have worked together to undermine housing access for new households, enhancing intergenerational interdependencies. More families have thus become involved in smoothening the routes of younger adult members into and up the 'housing ladder'. While intergenerational support appears to have become much more widespread, it remains highly differentiated across countries, cities and regions, as well as uneven between social and income classes. This book addresses the increasing role that family support, and intergenerational transfers in particular, are playing in sustaining the formation of new households and the transition of young adults towards social and economic autonomy. The authors draw on diverse international cases and a variety of methodologies in order to advance our understanding of housing as a key driver of contemporary social relations and inequalities. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367262822_oachapter1.pdf Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367262822_oachapter6.pdf Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367262822_oachapter9.pdf Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367262822_oachapter8.pdf

Contents:
1. Race and Class in Manhattan and Harlem History
2. Locating Class and Race in Anthropology and History
3. Professionals, Entrepreneurs and Artists: Harlem's African American Professional-Managerial Workers
4. Work and its Impact on Income and Housing
5. Lifestyle, Consumption and Ideology
6. Negotiating Socioeconomic Boundaries in Kin Networks
7. Negotiating Socioeconomic Boundaries in Community Life
8. Conclusion: Race, Class, History and Identity

After Pinochet's dictatorship ended in Chile in 1990, the country experienced a rapid decline in poverty along with a quickly growing economy. As a result, Chile's middle class expanded dramatically, echoing trends seen across the Global South as neoliberalism took firm hold in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Identity Investments examines the politics and consumption practices of this vast and varied fraction of the Chilean population, seeking to better understand their value systems and the histories that informed them. Using participant observation, interviews, and photographs, Joel Stillerman develops a unique typology of the middle class, made up of activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters. This typology allows him to unearth the cultural, political, and religious roots of middle-class market practices in contrast with other studies focused on social mobility and exclusionary practices. The resultant contrast in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of these four groups animates this book and extends an emerging body of scholarship focused on the connections between middle-class market choices and politics in the Global South, with important implications for Chile's recent explosive political changes.

Class, Self, Culture puts class back on the map in a novel way by taking a new look at how class is made and given value through culture. It shows how different classes become attributed with value, enabling culture to be deployed as a resource and as a form of property, which has both use-value to the person and exchange-value in systems of symbolic and economic exchange.

The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through mechanisms of giving value to culture, and how what we come to know and assume to be a 'self' is always a classed formation.

Analysing four processes: of inscription, institutionalisation, perspective-taking and exchange relationships, it challenges recent debates on reflexivity, risk, rational-action theory, individualisation and mobility, by showing how these are all reliant on fixing some people in place so that others can move.

While the clash between what has been called the "modern" and "undeveloped" worlds has led to America's military involvement in the Middle East and other places, few people realize the tension between the modern and the traditional within the United States. Beginning in the 1920's, professional intellectuals and academics began influencing the nation's public policy on matters as diverse as education, economics, and public health. In this thoughtful work, David A. Horowitz analyzes the tension between the so-called "New Class" of knowledge professionals and their critics, who accused them of being out of touch with the common sense of everyday people, strangers to the American Way, even Communists.
"America's Political Class Under Fire" is organized over nine periods of 20th-century history, providing a window into everything from the Scopes evolution trial and McCarthyism to affirmative action and the Clinton health care fiasco. Along the way, the book explores the New Left, populist conservatism, and the mid-90's reaction to political liberalism, which saw Newt Gingrich rise to the top post in the House of Representatives. In telling these stories, Horowitz seeks to encourage a more balanced and fair-minded assessment of the consequences of expertise and applied intellect to democratic existence in the United States.

Education forms a unique dimension of social status, with qualities that make it especially important to health. It influences health in ways that are varied, present at all stages of adult life, cumulative, self-amplifying, and uniformly positive. Educational attainment marks social status at the beginning of adulthood, functioning as the main bridge between the status of one generation and the next, and also as the main avenue of upward mobility. It precedes the other acquired social statuses and substantially influences them, including occupational status, earnings, and personal and household income and wealth. Education creates desirable outcomes because it trains individuals to acquire, evaluate, and use information. It teaches individuals to tap the power of knowledge. Education develops the learned effectiveness that enables self-direction toward any and all values sought, including health. For decades American health sciences has acted as if social status had little bearing on health. The ascendance of clinical medicine within a culture of individualism probably accounts for that omission. But research on chronic diseases over the last half of the twentieth century forced science to think differently about the causes of disease. Despite the institutional and cultural forces focusing medical research on distinctive proximate causes of specific diseases, researchers were forced to look over their shoulders, back toward more distant causes of many diseases. Some fully turned their orientation toward the social status of health, looking for the origins of that cascade of disease and disability flowing daily through clinics. Why is it that people with higher socioeconomic status have better health than lower status individuals? The authors, who are well recognized for their strength in survey research on a broad national scale, draw on findings and ideas from many sciences, including demography, economics, social psychology, and the health sciences. People who are well educated feel in control of their lives, which encourages and enables a healthy lifestyle. In addition, learned effectiveness, a practical end of that education, enables them to find work that is autonomous and creative, thereby promoting good health.