A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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 This study is noteworthy not only for its wide range of hitherto unpublished sources, but also for its attempt to bring social theory to bear upon the study of class relations in England during the first of this century's total wars.

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.

Why were the European middle classes ready to acquiesce in neo-liberalism? This book argues that upward mobility, the growth of individual and family assets, the growing significance of private provision, and processes of individualization contributed to a major transformation of the middle classes, making them more prone to embrace inequality and market principles. It shows how the self-interest of large sections of the middle classes undermined social democracy and paved the way for neo-liberal reforms, making their socio-economic positioning ever more precarious and reducing their political power. Central to the debate is the question of how the middle classes can rebalance the relationship between the Market and state intervention, so as to establish a new social equilibrium.

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.

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.

Critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers' and scholar-activists' ability to open novel research frontiers. This forward-thinking Research Handbook demonstrates how to pursue fluid and innovative research approaches, identify differences from traditional methodologies, and overcome the common challenges faced when carrying out intersectional research. A transdisciplinary group of contributors offer their experience and expertise to provide an overview of key research topics, qualitative and quantitative approaches, and empirical examples of integrating intersectionality research with other critical practices. Examining the foundational texts that explain historical developments in systems of oppression and interdisciplinary research on marginalized communities, state-of the-art chapters explore the intersections emerging in studies of gender and sexuality, capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, climate emergencies, imperial decline, and public health. Reconsidering the ways in which scholar-activists carry out research, the Research Handbook demonstrates how an intersectional gaze and a continued commitment to social justice moves us closer to producing valuable research and, ultimately, transforming knowledge. Advancing innovative and multidisciplinary approaches, this incisive Research Handbook will be an invaluable tool for scholars and researchers hoping to undertake meaningful intersectional research. Its empirical findings will further benefit practitioners tasked with designing intersectional policy.

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.

Although President Obama's election in 2008 accelerated the debate over whether American society is post-racial, in reality, the idea of a non-racial America has several manifestations, and post-racialism is a variable. Vickerman argues that whilst some manifestations are ideologically-driven, others also coincide with ideas that postulate the non-importance of race in America. Moreover, the ascent of a black president, against the backdrop of a traumatic racial history, has highlighted the black middle class's pivotal role as a symbol of racial progress. But are they post-racial?The Problem of Post-Racialism tackles questions such as these through a combination of theory and empirical analysis.

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.

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.

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 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.

What does it mean to be middle class in contemporary global cities? What do the middle classes do to these cities and what do these cities do to the middle classes? Do the middle classes engage in social mix or are they focused on 'people like us'? Based on comparative study this book explores middle-class identities across Paris and London.

How do teachers "read" children's body language, and what are the consequences of these (mis)interpretations? Using Pierre Bourdieu's work in the construction of social class, together with Annette Lareau's work on how social class influences the child-rearing practices of parents, Henry argues that children raised in working-class homes come to elementary school with different, largely underappreciated, corporeal capacities. The middle-class corporeal practices of elementary school (hands to yourself, raise your hand to speak, stay in straight lines) require working-class children to adopt middle-class corporeal performances in order to demonstrate that they have achieved self-control, a significant mechanism by which some bodies are validated in society and vilified in others. Henry argues that curricula aimed at helping teachers teach poor children predisposes them to see poor children's corporeal performance from deeply classed positions that maintain cycles of social reproduction in schools rather than interrupting them.

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.

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.

..".a fresh and an important contribution ...this book presents an ethnographically rich and conceptually strong account of recent transformations in the educational field and their implications for class relations in Turkey." . Middle East Journal

Middle classes are by definition ambiguous, raising all sorts of paradoxical questions, perceived and real, about their power and place relative to those above and below them in a class-structured society. Focusing on families of the new middle class in Istanbul, the authors of this study address questions about the social construction of middle-class reality in the context of the rapid changes that have come about through recent economic growth in global markets and the global diffusion of information technology. After 1980, Turkey saw a structural transformation from state-owned and managed industry, banking, and media and communications to privatization and open markets. The idea of being middle class and the reality of middle-class practices became open for negotiation and interpretation. This study therefore offers a particularly interesting case study of an emergent global phenomenon known as the transnational middle class, characterized by their location of work in globalizing cities, development of transnational social networks, sumptuary consumption habits, and residences in gated communities. As the authors show, this new middle class associates quality education, followed by property and lifestyle issues, with the concept of a comfortable life.

Broken Promises of Globalization: The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry analyzes the consequences of the latest wave of globalization within the context of the Bangladesh garment industry's integration into world markets and production chains. Shahidur Rahman has found that although globalization has created opportunities, the process of globalization has also triggered a deformed development leaving Bangladesh increasingly vulnerable to shifts and tensions within the world trading regime. Bangladesh s vulnerability, experienced as a constraining framework by all the major actors in dependent industrialization, is of particular importance to the progress both of workers and of Bangladesh s industrializing modernizers in the garment industry. This book intends to respond to three questions. First, has the garment industry been able to counteract the vulnerability that women garment workers had experienced in their villages? Second, is the formation of a welfare committee a substitute model for unions when it comes to protecting women s rights? Finally, how is a Least Developing Country dealing with both domestic and external pressures in its response to globalization? Rahman argues that in spite of the opportunities created by the growth of the garment industry, the key actors such as workers, entrepreneurs, unions, and even the government have become vulnerable in the process of the global integration of this industry. This is an ethnographic study that tells the story of the rise, growth, and demise of a Bangladeshi garment company. From a broader approach, an internal force such as the government of Bangladesh is not alone in being responsible for pushing the workers into a vulnerable position; external pressure on the state is also responsible for intensifying the vulnerability of Bangladeshi institutions and actors. Broken Promises of Globalization exposes the crisis Bangladeshi garment companies face as a result of the momentous pressures emanating from the regime of neo-liberal globalization. This ethnographic study, exploring a wide range of contemporary and recent development issues, holds particular relevance for students and scholars of sociology, political science, political economics, labor, and development studies.

The concept of agency has long been drawn upon - overtly or implicitly - in contemporary social theory. However, theory shapes how human agency and its determinants are understood and can be built upon. The last few years have seen growing interest in notions of privilege and affect. How might these newer concepts affect our understanding of agency? Does human agency need to make new modes of sociability possible, and how does privilege constrain or facilitate possibilities for social change? Privilege, Agency and Affect seeks to answer some of these questions, showcasing recent work by UK, North American, Australasian and Scandinavian writers at the cutting edge of sociology, social theory and education. Strongly empirical as well as theoretical in the approach taken, it offers a timely extension of foundations laid in early 21st century social theory and debate.

Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.

Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time.
The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies.
Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations.

Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn't fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.