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.

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.

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

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and "other" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought, Class Unknown offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.

This pioneering book provides the first systematic historical analysis of occupational and social mobility in England. Using a collection of over 10,000 marriage certificates to examine inter-generational change, and almost 500 autobiographical texts and abstracts to explore the dynamics of career mobility, it shows how the development of the nineteenth-century economy was accompanied by rising rates of mobility, which made English society more 'open' while at the same encouraging a distinct process of working-class formation.

Research into the impact of the First World War on European societies has recently begun on a major scale and Dr Waites has been one of the pioneers in this field in Britain. His book considers the War's effects on such major issues as popular images of class, the distribution of income and wealth in society, social relations within the working class, class consciousness and the educational experiences of children from different backgrounds. This study is noteworthy not only for its wide range of hitherto unpublished sources, but also for its attempt to bring social theory to bear upon the study of class relations in England during the first of this century's total wars.

Social Inequality Across the Generations provides an innovative perspective on social stratification studies by advancing the theoretical and empirical case for the influence of resource compensation. It examines whether resource compensation is a successful mechanism for social mobility, contrasting it against competing types of resource accumulation such as multiplication. So, this book is the first to extensively cover the role of compensation in intergenerational attainment - a new and rapidly spreading concept in stratification research. The editors bring together research on different types of resources contributing to social mobility from the nuclear family, extended family and society, including in-depth analysis of the influence of wider family members in three different contexts and specific empirical chapters covering European and US societies. The authors cover a variety of institutional systems that achieve similar results through contrasting methods, and this conceptual framework reveals which policies have the biggest effect on social mobility. The book offers original insight into intergenerational inequality and mobility for researchers and students of social stratification research and social mobility, particularly within sociology, social policy and economics. Contributors include: F. Bernardi, H.-P. Blossfeld, D. Boertien, J. Erola, M. Gratz, J. Helemae, M. Kainu, J. Kallio, O. Kangas, E. Kilpi-Jakonen, H. Lehti, A. Minello, J. Palme, F.T. Pfeffer, I. Prix, H. Poeylioe, E. Saar, O.N. Wiborg

The provision of care has been widely referred to as facing a 'crisis'. International migrants are increasingly relied upon to provide care - as domestic workers, nannies, care assistants and nurses. This international volume examines the global construction of migrant care labour and how it manifests itself in different contexts.

This book explores mobile representations in government policy, literature, visual arts, music, and research and examines the methodological potential of these representations and the ways in which representations co-produce mobilities.

Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy. In it, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York. He provides a panoramic chronicle of New York City's labor strife, social movements, and political turmoil in the eras of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Twenty years after its initial publication, Wilentz has added a new preface that takes stock of his own thinking, then and now, about New York City and the rise of the American working class.

Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Methodologies of Mobility speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries to the methodological challenges and possibilities of engaging with a world on the move. With scholars continuing to face different forms and scales of mobility, this volume strategically traces innovative ways of designing, applying and reflecting on both established and cutting-edge methodologies of mobility.

Both China and Europe have in recent years witnessed the emergence of new migration dynamics. In China, hundreds of millions of migrant workers help to fuel China's economic growth with their labour whislt Europe has witnessed an increase in various new forms of migration by people from within and without seeking refuge, family-reunion or work.
In all societies significantly affected by migration, governments are rushing to adjust and implement rules and institutions so as to regulate these new forms of migration. This is accompanied by strong public discourse on how to name and characterise the newcomers and how to define who is a wanted migrant and who is unwanted.
This volume systematically explores the role that boundary making plays in creating a societal understanding of current migration dynamics and, by extension, in legitimising migration regimes. By comparing recent developments in Europe and China, it reveals insights on convergent social and political practices of boundary making under divergent conditions.

Looking closely at both the slaves' and masters' worlds in low, middle, and up-country South Carolina, Larry E. Hudson Jr. covers a wide range of economic and social topics related to the opportunities given to slaves to produce and trade their own food and other goods - contingent on first completing the master's assigned work for the day. In particular, Hudson shows how these opportunities were exploited by the slaves to both increase their control over their family life and to gain status among their fellow slaves. Filled with details of slaves' social values, family formation, work patterns, "internal economies", and domestic production, To Have and to Hold is based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, emphasizing wherever possible the recollections of former slaves. Although their private world was never immune to intervention from the white world, Hudson demonstrates a relationship between the agricultural productivity of slaves, in family situations that range from simple to complex formations, and the accumulation of personal property and social status within slave communities. By capitalizing on these opportunities for autonomy, says Hudson, slaves not only tempered some of the daily brutalities of their lives but also prepared themselves for freedom, for it was the family group that most powerfully influenced the personalities of the slaves and it was in the slave quarters that the foundations of an African American culture were established.

Bringing together leading scholars to investigate trends in contemporary social life, this book examines the current patterning of identities based on class and community, gender and generation, race, faith and ethnicity, and derived from popular culture, exploring debates about social change, individualization and the re-making of social class.

Rather than using a ranking system based on occupational prestige to explain social stratification through class, Burrage attempts to show how class formation can be explained through political events and decisions. Using detailed analysis of four countries, the book attempts to answer several 'mysteries' of the English class system: why did an English "intelligentsia "fail to emerge? Why was the working class reluctant to engage in violent class struggle? Why did public ownership increase class consciousness, and why could class sentiment be combined with comparatively high rates of mobility? In this distinctive and important contribution, Burrage identifies the main features of England's emerging 'classless society' - one that is centralized, intensively managed, and no longer resting on internalized social controls.

As an insight into contemporary British society, Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England is a timely ethnographic exploration of the ways in which the 'white', 'English' 'working classes' in a north Manchester neighbourhood expressed feelings of being 'ignored' and 'neglected' by local and national governments. Providing important insights into the implications of policy-making, the book focuses on local idioms and individual articulations of 'fairness', exploring governmental ideologies and policies of 'equality' to question the disparate connotations concerning these topics. Discussing what it means to be both 'fair' and a good English person and what this means for 'belonging' in this part of northern England, it seeks to specify how each narrative of 'belonging' and 'fairness' is marked and changed by the interlocking concerns and effects of geographical origin, familiarity between individuals and groups, political orientations, ethnicities, genders and shared histories of racial and cultural imaginations.

This text reflects the growing diversity of perspectives, methods and insights currently used in social stratification research. Authors discuss the following broad themes from an international perspective: the changing real and symbolic boundaries of social stratification; who benefits from rapidly changing markets; immigration, marginalization and exclusion; and modelling occupational mobility. The contributions demonstrate the changing nature of social stratification systems in today's global and fragmented economy.

This is the first book devoted exclusively to the study of social stratification from a biosocial perspective. The biosocial perspective explicitly assumes that both biological and social environmental factors are important for explaining behavior, including behavior surrounding the formation of hierarchies and unequal distribution of resources. In a variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the issue of how biological factors may interact with social experiences to affect social stratification.

Chapters 1 and 2 present a detailed review of the issues surrounding how social stratification is defined and subdivided. Chapter 3 takes the reader back to the first six civilizations that evolved on earth and provides a historical picture of social stratification, which served the reproductive interests of a small proportion of males who wielded great political and economic power. In Chapter 4, the nature of social stratification in traditional Arab cultures is explored, and the author hypothesizes why different types of stratification systems may have evolved throughout the world. In Chapter 5, the authors provide evidence that genetics are among the factors that contribute to variations in income and wealth. Chapter 6 provides suggestions about how group differences in social stratification may have evolved. The authors contend that sexual selection may be at the heart of the evolution of social stratification, and present a theory as to how it may have happened. Chapter 7 also focuses upon sex as a central variable in social stratification, specifically, how sex hormones alter brain functioning and how these alterations underlie many of the tendencies that men and women have to gravitate toward different types of occupations. In Chapter 8, a general theory of social stratification is presented. It is offered as a specific alternative to the two strictly environmental theories that dominate: functionalist and conflict theories.

This work is the first to study the gentlemen's clubs that were an important feature of the Late Victorian landscape, and the first to discover the secret history of clubmen and their world, placing them at centre stage, detailing how clubland dramatically shaped 19th and early 20th-century ideas about gender, power, class, and the city.

Most people think of class as a ranking system-the more you have, the higher your class status. In contrast to this view, in this new study author Gus Bagakis demonstrates that class is a tool that explains how the capitalist system works and why the class struggle is invisible.

Capitalism was and is a developing system in which the working class is turned into a commodity, selling its labor power to the capitalist class that owns the factories, businesses, and corporations. While capitalism claims to promote efficiency, wealth, and freedom, it is also a system where the rich are getting richer, the earth and climate are being destroyed, and the poor get more and more desperate with each passing day.

All of this is happening because we live in a system that stunts personality and corrupts human relations by pitting people against one another for economic gain. Through class analysis, Bagakis explains that we must take off the filters that we've been indoctrinated with, so that we can see how personal, social, and international problems develop. Primary among these false filters is the idea that we are all middle class and so there are no class conflicts in our society.

Seeing through the System seeks to help students, workers, social activists, and those interested in understanding the reasons behind many of the problems in the world today. You can come to understand how our society was put together, how it works, and how it can be transformed.

'Rich girl meets poor boy who liberates her then dies.' Or, 'low-life girl is trashed by lower-life boy.' The contemporary middle-class fictions of poverty that inform films such as "Titanic" and "Kids" are a far cry from the nineteenth-century genres: rags-to-riches stories and seduction tales. Our fictions of class turn the older tales upside down. By the surprising juxtaposition of recent films and the classic writings and unusual lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen Crane, Henry Miller, and Michel Foucault, the book shocks the reader into a reappraisal of these authors' works and lives, our myths about class, and poststructural theory.

Border Shifts develops a more complex and multifaceted understanding of global borders, analysing internal and external EU borders from the Mediterranean region to the US-Mexico border, and exploring a range of issues including securitization, irregular migration, race, gender and human trafficking.