Series Information:
Nissan Institute/RoutledgeCurzon Japanese Studies

This text focuses on the theory of class as it relates to women. It debates questions such as: how do women define themselves in terms of social class and why?; is definition important or not?; what part does education play in our understanding of class?; and how does class affect relationships?

This text focuses on the theory of class as it relates to women. It debates questions such as: how do women define themselves in terms of social class and why?; is definition important or not?; what part does education play in our understanding of class?; and how does class affect relationships?

Based on in-depth analysis, extensive interviews, and a journalist's keen insight, An Empire of Schools provides a new framework to explore the misunderstandings that have arisen between Japan and the United States. The vital determining issue that complicates U.S.-Sino communications, Cutts says, is not the cultural incompatibilities of the people or economies but the fact that all Japanese leaders emerge from the same educational treadmill or "cartels of the mind". This revered system, crowned by five national and private universities, and from which almost all Japanese leaders emerge, teaches its students that they are inherently incapable of sharing their values, civic or personal, with those of any other civilization. Describing an educational system that has been left fundamentally unchanged since the Meiji Empire, Cutts depicts the elites who graduate from the system, describes what ethical philosophy is imparted to those graduates, and warns of the dangers of nationalist elitism that arise from the system. Filled with personal anecdotes as well as critical interviews, An Empire of Schools traces the potential consequences to Japan and the Pacific Rim of an educational system that begins imparting an elitist doctrine in kindergarten that extends to the highest levels of Japanese government.

First published in 1975, this volume aims to direct attention at a number of aspects of the lives and occupations of village labourers in the nineteenth-century that have been little examined by historians outside of agriculture. Some of the factors examined include the labourer's gender, whether they lived in 'closed' or 'open' villages and what they worked at during the different seasons of the year. The author examines a range of occupations that have previously been ignored as too local to show up in national statistics or too short-lived to rank as occupations at all as well as sources of 'secondary' income. The analysis of all of these factors in related to the seasonal cycle of field labour and harvests. The central focus is on the cottage economy and the manifold contrivances by which labouring families attempted to keep themselves afloat.

First published in 1972, this book rejects as inadequate the 'trait' and 'functionalist' theories of the professions and instead presents an alternative framework to analyse the contemporaneous occupational change in industrial societies. The author describes how occupational specialisation creates varying degrees of social distance between producers and consumers of goods or services, thus several institutions of control social have developed - collegiate, corporate or oligarchic patronage, mediative. The author looks at the social conditions necessary for the development of these methods of control and the apparent decline of professionalism in both developed and undeveloped societies.

Poor or marginal whites occupy an uncharted space in recent identity studies, particularly because they do not easily fit the model of whiteness-as-power proposed by many multiculturalist or minority discourses. Associated in mainstream culture with "trashy" kitsch or dangerous pathologies rather than with the material realities of economic life, poor whites are treated as degraded caricatures rather than as real people living in conditions of poverty and disempowerment. White Trash situates the study of poor whites within the context of several academic disciplines, public-policy analysis, and popular or mass-media representations. Arguing that white racism is directed not only against people of color but also against certain groups of whites, the contributors to this volume explore the ways in which race and class in America are often talked about and represented in hidden, coded, or half-realized ways. In so doing, they demonstrate why the term white trash itself embodies yet another way in which some whites generate a debased "other" through pejorative naming practices.

This collection is devoted to exploring stereotypes about the social conditions of poor whites in the United States and comparing these stereotypes with the social reality, unmasking the racial and class assumptions behind the term 'white trash'.

The various contributions in this book, originally published in 1971, discuss many aspects of the complex subject of history and class consciousness, and the themes that are dealt with are all inter-related. The papers range from history and sociology, through political theory and philosophy, to art criticism and literary criticism. Georg Lukacs' classic work History and Class Consciousness, is discussed in several of the essays, and the volume is prefaced by a letter from Georg Lukacs to Istvan Meszaros.

Chris Given-Wilson provides an authoritative and vivid reconstruction of the true nature of political society in late medieval England. He looks at the social structure of the time, discussing what contemporaries meant when they talked of the nobility, always emphasizing the close relationship between social status and political influence. He describes the noble household and council, and examines the territorial and familial policies of local and national affairs.

Much of the existing research on parental involvement and higher education choice examines the difference between the working class and the middle class, but little literature looks at different factions within the social classes. This book discusses higher education choice in China, particularly through the examination of social issues such as social stratification, parental involvement, and gender and educational inequality. Drawing from an empirical study based on Bourdieu's theory, the book explores both inter-class and intra-class differences in China, providing an insight into how social class differences influence a number of issues, including: educational equality the role parents, especially mothers, play in higher education decision-making the relationship between traditional cultural norms gendered relationships within Chinese families. The sociology of higher education choices are derived through feedback from various sources, including both parents and students themselves. The book will be key reading for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of sociology, sociology of education, Chinese studies and Asian studies.

Many studies of the Chinese middle class focus on defining it and viewing its significance for economic development and its potential for sociopolitical modernisation. This book goes beyond such objective approaches and considers middle class people's subjective understanding and diverse experiences of class. Based on extensive original research including social surveys and detailed interviews, the book explores who the middle class think they are, what they think about a wide range of socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues, and why they think as they do. It examines attitudes towards the welfare state, social inequality, nationalism, relations with foreign countries and opinions on many social controversies, thereby portraying middle class people as more than simply luxury consumers and potential agents of democracy. The book concludes that a clear class identity and political consciousness have yet to emerge, but that middle class attitudes are best characterised as searching for a balance between old and new, the traditional and the foreign, the principled and the pragmatic.

Based on numerous qualitative interviews, this cutting edge book investigates how Hong Kong's economic structure and neoliberal policies have contributed to class inequality in China's global city. Inspired by Bourdieu's approach to class, the author examines class stratification in education, works, and political attitudes and argues that the lack of explicit class identifications among the people does not imply irrelevance of class. Relying upon empirical field data to question the applicability of the reflexive modernization theory, the text debates whether individualization makes class a redundant concept in advanced capitalist societies.

First published in 1975. How do men come to perceive and evaluate a world in which marked inequalities of class and status exist? This book considers the nature of class images and their underlying work and community structures. Beginning with the argument that the perception of society varies according to type of work and community milieux, it first considers the social imagery of working-class professions and their sources of variation, and then examines some of the methodological problems of the study of class imagery. The nature of proletarian traditionalism and radicalism in then contemporary Britain is discussed in conclusion. This title will be of interest to students of sociology.

Focusing on the working-class experience of gentrification, this book re-examines the enduring relationship between class and the urban. Class is so clearly articulated in the urban, from the housing crisis to the London Riots to the evocation of housing estates as the emblem of 'Broken Britain'. Gentrification is often presented to a moral and market antidote to such urban ills: deeply institutionalised as regeneration and targeted at areas which have suffered from disinvestment or are defined by 'lack'. Gentrification is no longer a peripheral neighbourhood process: it is policy; it is widespread; it is everyday. Yet comparative to this depth and breadth, we know little about what it is like to live with gentrification at the everyday level. Sociological studies have focused on lifestyles of the middle classes and the working-class experience is either omitted or they are assumed to be victims. Hitherto, this is all that has been offered. This book engages with these issues and reconnects class and the urban through an ethnographically detailed analysis of a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification which historicises class formation, critiques policy processes and offers a new sociological insight into gentrification from the perspective of working-class residents. This ethnography of everyday working-class neighbourhood life in the UK serves to challenge denigrated depictions which are used to justify the use of gentrification-based restructuring. By exploring the relationship between urban processes and working-class communities via gentrification, it reveals the 'hidden rewards' as well as the 'hidden injuries' of class in post-industrial neighbourhoods. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive 'sociology of gentrification', revealing not only how gentrification leads to the displacement of the working class in physical terms but how it is actively used within urban policy to culturally displace the working-class subject and traditional

In recent years dramatic changes in Asia's social and economic systems have seen the burgeoning of a substantial middle-class. This has captured the imagination of the West, in large part because the new middle-class represents massive new markets for Western style products. But what are the implications of the emergence of Asia's 'new rich'? Will they bring with them the institutions of liberalism, democracy, rule of law and new institutional freedoms? Or is Asia's 'new rich' quite different?
The New Rich in Asia: Mobile phones, McDonald's and Middle-class Revolution introduces a new series examining the social, political and economic construction of the new rich in East and South East Asia. It raises central issues about the nature of the 'new rich', including their social, economic and political impact on the region.
The contributors are acknowledged experts on the social and political systems they dissect. Each study, based on detailed research, combines theoretical and empirical material. This volume provides a valuable insight into the composition and global economic impact of these newly emerging classes and highlights a common inheritance of rapid economic growth.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415113350

The sociopolitical, and cultural, implications of the provision and consumption of elite education are dizzyingly complex and controversial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, one of the most publicized and contested areas of research focuses on the education of elites, and the institutional and power structures which such groups reinforce and reproduce. Now, answering the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this disputatious body of thought, Routledge announces a new title Elites in Education which brings together in one easy-to-use 'mini library' foundational major works and the very best cutting-edge contributions.

This work describes the emergence of the professions in late tsarist Russia and their struggle for autonomy from the aristocratic state. It also examines the ways in which the Russian professions both resembled and differed from their Western counterparts.

This work describes the emergence of the professions in late tsarist Russia and their struggle for autonomy from the aristocratic state. It also examines the ways in which the Russian professions both resembled and differed from their Western counterparts.

The study of education and social mobility has been a key area of sociological research since the 1950s. The importance of this research derives from the systematic analysis of functionalist theories of industrialism. Functionalist theories assume that the complementary demands of efficiency and justice result in more 'meritocratic' societies, characterized by high rates of social mobility. Much of the sociological evidence has cast doubt on this optimistic, if not utopian, claim that reform of the education system could eliminate the influence of class, gender and ethnicity on academic performance and occupational destinations. This book brings together sixteen cutting-edge articles on education and social mobility. It also includes an introductory essay offering a guide to the main issues and controversies addressed by authors from several countries. This comprehensive volume makes an important contribution to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the changing relationship between origins, education and destinations. This timely collection is also relevant to policy-makers as education and social mobility are firmly back on both national and global political agendas, viewed as key to creating fairer societies and more competitive economies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion offers a critical reflection on the establishment of neoliberalism as the new global orthodoxy in the field of education, and considers what this means for social justice and inclusion. It brings together writers from a number of countries, who explore notions of inclusion and social justice in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. Contributors examine policy, practice, and pedagogical considerations covering different dimensions of (in)equality, including disability, race, gender, and class. They raise questions about what social justice and inclusion mean in educational systems that are dominated by competition, benchmarking, and target-driven accountability, and about the new forms of imperialism and colonisation that both drive, and are a product of, market-driven reforms. While exposing the entrenchment, under current neoliberal systems of educational provision, of longstanding patterns of (racialised, classed, and gendered) privilege and disadvantage, the contributions presented in this book also consider the possibilities for hope and resistance, drawing attention to established and successful attempts at democratic education or community organisation across a number of countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

This book is drawn from diverse studies that grapple with Black Middle Class experiences in contemporary and historical South Africa. The chapters present research from diverse disciplines, and tackle issues related to being black and middle class, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Like many other social phenomena, the black middle class concept is seen as complex and not easy to pin down. As a result, conceptualizations from these chapters are dynamic and relevant for understanding the position of the black middle class in contemporary South African society. An interesting dynamic explored by contributors is the critical engagement with the usually reductionist notions of black middle class experiences as ahistorical, homogenous experiences of a group of conspicuous consumers. These limiting notions are unpacked and repositioned in how the book is structured. This book was published as a special issue of Development Southern Africa.

For minorities in today's society, there may be a greater complexity and risk to moving about in the retail, restaurant, and other consumer marketplaces than some might expect. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with people from various backgrounds across the country, the purposes of this book is threefold. Firstly, to bring greater awareness to minority marketplace experiences both for consumers and marketplaces by offering a tapestry of what shopping and otherwise moving about and engaging in the consumer marketplaces may look like for minorities, even today. Secondly, to increase sensitivity to this issue for all involved. And third, to provide some of the steps and resources that others have taken in an attempt to interrupt, disrupt, or ameliorate the inappropriate handling of minority consumers. To an extent, this book is about not only shopping, but also humane living in America, surviving and making sense of experiences, what to do about it, and the larger issues and contexts that surround the marketplace for minorities.

Terrorism and neoliberalism are connected in multiple, complex, and often camouflaged ways. This book offers a critical exploration of some of the intersections between the two, drawing on a wide range of case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, and the European Union. Contributors to the book investigate the impact of neoliberal technologies and intellectual paradigms upon contemporary counterterrorism - where the neoliberal era frames counter-terrorism within an endless war against political uncertainty. Others resist the notion that a separation ever existed between neoliberalism and counter-terrorism. These contributions explore how counterterrorism is already itself an exercise of neoliberalism which practices a form of 'Class War on Terror'. Finally, other contributors investigate the representation of terrorism within contemporary cultural products such as video games, in order to explore the perpetuation of neoliberal and statist agendas. In doing all of this, the book situates post-9/11 counter-terrorism discourse and practice within much-needed historical contexts, including the evolution of capitalism and the state. Neoliberalism and Terror will be of great interest to readers within the fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.