First published in 2006. This book contributes towards a more just appreciation of the relative importance of the different major social groups in the life of the country. It deals in the main with the economic history of the landed interest, and with its role as a social group and includes much agrarian and some industrial history as seen from the landowners' point of view. The first seven chapters of the book aim to present an analysis and description of the main elements in the institutions and way of life of the landed classes, suggesting their significance for society at large, and emphasizing the forces of change which were at work within an order which in many ways presented a remarkably stable appearance to the outside world. The last five chapters take up the theme of change and examine the dynamic elements in the economic social and political life of the group, in a sequence of chronological subdivisions of the century and a half with which this book is concerned.

The concept of everyday struggles can enliven our understanding of the lives of young people and how social class is made and remade. This book invokes a Bourdieusian spirit to think about the ways young people are pushed and pulled by the normative demands directed at them from an early age, whilst they reflexively understand that allegedly available incentives for making the 'right' choices and working hard - financial and familial security, social status and job satisfaction - are a declining prospect. In Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles, the figures of those classed as 'hipsters' and 'bogans' are used to analyse how representation works to form a symbolic and moral economy that produces and polices fuzzy class boundaries. Further to this, the practices of young people around DIY cultures are analysed to illustrate struggles to create a satisfying and meaningful existence while negotiating between study, work and creative passions. By thinking through different modalities of struggles, which revolve around meaning making and identity, creativity and authenticity, Threadgold brings Bourdieu's sociological practice together with theories of affect, emotion, morals and values to broaden our understanding of how young people make choices, adapt, strategise, succeed, fail and make do. Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, of fields including: Youth Studies, Class and Inequality, Work and Careers, Subcultures, Media and Creative Industries, Social Theory and Bourdieusian Theory.

This book portrays the middle class in contemporary China with plain language and precise professional knowledge in an all-round, broad and responsible way from the perspectives of income, property, profession, education, consumption, investment, physiological and behavioral characteristics, history and development. It gives, in a logical order, the reasons for stimulating the rise of the middle class in contemporary China. It emphatically describes what the middle class is and what the middle class in contemporary China looks like. It also analyzes whether the middle class can rise in China and sheds light on the basic thinking, medium and long-term goals, main measures and current work priorities for achieving full rise of the middle class in contemporary China. As China becomes the world's largest economy, the new middle class will be the Chinese people facing the world; as such, this book will be of interest to sociologists, sinologists, political scientists, and economists.

Musical Gentrification is an exploration of the role of popular music in processes of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion in a variety of contexts. Twelve chapters by international scholars reveal how cultural objects of relatively lower status, in this case popular musics, are made objects of acquisition by subjects or institutions of higher social status, thereby playing an important role in social elevation, mobility and distinction. The phenomenon of musical gentrification is approached from a variety of angles: theoretically, methodologically and with reference to a number of key issues in popular music, from class, gender and ethnicity to cultural consumption, activism, hegemony and musical agency. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, empirical examples and ethnographic data, this is a valuable study for scholars and researchers of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology.

Class Structure and Economic Growth was first published in 1971.

This book examines how middle class women in India engage with divergent cultural discourses of respectability and individualism to make sense of their work and family lives. Based on in-depth interviews amongst women employed in the Indian IT industry, it argues that women attempt to conform to the individualist values of reflexive modernity by drawing on collective bonds within their families. It contends that the expansion of personal and professional choices does not always result in greater individualization but increases women's sense of responsibility for the consequences of their choices. As a result women's narratives of self are collective rather than individual projects, which are created in relationship with others. In this manner the book highlights the gender specific and culturally specific consequences of reflexive modernity in neo-liberal India.

'Women so empowered are dangerous' Written with a 'black woman's anger' and the precision of a poet, these searing pieces by the groundbreaking writer Audre Lorde are a celebration of female strength and solidarity, and a cry to speak out against those who seek to silence anyone they see as 'other'. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

This book explores the forms of credit which have historically been associated with the British working class. Taylor seeks to assess the effect of credit on working class communities, and relates this to the debate about community. This work is the first comprehensive examination of the history of these forms of credit to make comparisons between the periods before and after 1945. Based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, this book combines lively individual accounts with theoretical arguments.

COVID-19: Social Inequalities and Human Possibilities examines the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals, communities, and countries, a fact seldom acknowledged and often suppressed or invisible. Taking a global approach, this book demonstrates how the impact of the pandemic has differed as a result of social inequalities, such as economic development, social class, race and ethnicity, sex and gener, age, and access to health care and education. Economic inequality between and within nations has significantly contributed to the chances of individuals contracting and dying from the virus. Developing nations with weak health care systems, workers whose jobs cannot be performed remotely, the differences between those with and without access to soap and water to wash their hands, or the ability to practice physical distancing also account for the unequal impact of the virus. Racial and ethnic minorities experience higher death rates from the virus, which has also unequally affected indigenous peoples and urban and foreign migrants around the world. Inequality is also embedded in national and international responses to the pandemic, as giving and receiving aid is often impacted by inequalities of demographic and national power and influence, resulting in national and global competition rather than the collaboration needed to end the pandemic. Along with the other titles in Routledge's COVID-19 Pandemic series, this book represents a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to what many believe to be the greatest threat to global ways of being in more than a century. COVID-19: Social Inequalities and Human Possibilities is therefore indispensable for academics, researchers, and students as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and eradicating the inequalities it has exacerbated.

Mediated Images of the South: The Portrayal of Dixie in Popular Culture, edited by Alison F. Slade, Dedria Givens-Carroll and Amber J. Narro, is an anthology that explores the impact of the image of the Southerner within mass communication and popular culture. The contributors offer a contemporary analysis of the Southerner in the media. In most cases, previous literature situates these media images in the past, most notably through historic analyses of the Southerner during the Civil Rights movement. Mediated Images of the South breaks out of the box of the 1960s and 1970s by including the most recent and contemporary cultural examples of the Southerner. This book represents a long overdue analysis of those images, from both the past and the present. In addition, the discussions are not limited to one genre of media, but provide the reader with an opportunity to see how far-reaching the myth of the Southerner and the Southern image is in American society. While there is a long list of successful southern politicians, historical figures, businessmen and women, actors and actresses, sports figures and other national and world leaders, Slade, Givens-Carroll, and Narro find that there is still work to be done to present southerners as capable and educated.

Authored by a stellar line-up of top China scholars from the US, Europe, Australia and China. Interdisciplinary in approach, so will appeal to courses on Chinese society, politics and history. Writing style is excellent and the chapters are truly connected due to the bok being co-authored.

This book focuses on analyzing the inter-relationship between Chinese peasants and the reform and it tries to understand the conditions of peasants during the course of the Chinese social transition. This book argues that Chinese peasants are the most important force that keeps the reform going. More importantly, this book argues that this force comes from the peasants' pursuit of their own social, political and economic interest, not some spontaneous demand for "reform" itself. This inherent relationship between the peasants and the reform is summarized into five major relationships: the inter-relationship between peasants and the central government; between peasants and local government; between peasants and rural democratization; between peasants and social constructions; and between peasants and local officials. These five inter-relationships are the prime mechanism for the interaction between Chinese peasants and the reform, and these forms the basis for understanding and analyzing the inter-relationship between the state and peasants.

This study is a major addition to understanding the problems of social inequality and the nature of caste and kinship. A full account is given of the social structure of the region, emphasizing the continuity of principles, which govern relations between castes and relationships within castes. The ethnographic data bear in particular on: the nature of untouchability; models of caste ranking; the way in which 'traditional' family structures adapt to a diversification of the economy and the debate about the 'instability' of regimes of generalized exchange. Originally published in 1979.

This first volume of The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies offers a bold and wide-ranging assessment of the shape and effects of class systems across a diverse range of capitalist nations. Plumbing a trove of data and deploying cutting-edge techniques, it carefully maps the distribution of the key sources of power and documents the major convergences and divergences between market societies old and new. Establishing that the multidimensional vision of class proposed decades ago by Pierre Bourdieu appears to hold good throughout Europe, parts of the wider Western world and Eastern Asia, the book goes on to examine a number of significant themes: the relationship between class and occupation; the intersection of class with gender, religion, geography and age; the correspondences between social position and political attitudes; self-positioning in the class structure; and the extent of belief in meritocracy. For all the striking cross-national commonalities, however, the book unearths consistent variations seemingly linked to distinct politico-economic regimes. This title will appeal to scholars and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in sociology, politics and demography, and is essential reading for all those interested in social class across the globe. Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

In striving to become cosmopolitan, global cities aim to attract highly-skilled workers while relying on a vast underbelly of low-waged, low status migrants. This book tells the story of one such city, revealing how national development produces both aspirations to be cosmopolitan and to improve one's class standing, along with limitations in achieving such aims. Through the analysis of three different groups of workers in Singapore, Ye shows that cosmopolitanism is an exclusive and aspirational construct created through global and national development strategies, transnational migration and individual senses of identity. This dialectic relationship between class and cosmopolitanism is never free from power and is constituted through material and symbolic conditions, struggles and violence. Class is also constituted through 'the self' and lies at the very heart of different constructions of personhood as they intersect with gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality.

Sonia Blandford, CEO of award-winning charity Achievement for All, writes brilliantly and honestly about the facing up to the realities of the white working class and how to address social mobility from the inside. No-one in the UK is better placed than Sonia to write about the struggles of white working class pupils in our schools. She grew up on the Allied Estate in Hounslow and was the first member of her family to pursue education beyond the age of 14 and was also the first to attend university. Sonia lost her mother when she took an accidental overdose, when she couldn't read the doctor's prescription. This tragic failing served as one of the inspirations for her to set up the award-winning Achievement for All organisation, who work with thousands of schools to help close the attainment gap. Born to Fail? tackles head-on issues such as why education often doesn't matter to the working class; how education has failed to deliver for them; the importance of self-belief, action and confidence; and how the Early Years is the crucial time to build success from the start.

At this crucial moment in American history, when voting rights could be expanded to include all citizens, or legislatively limited, this significantly updated edition of Who Rules America? shows precisely how the top 1% of the population, who own 43% of all financial wealth, and receive 20% of the nation's yearly income, dominate governmental decision-making. They have created a corporate community and a policy-planning network, made up of foundations think-tanks, and policy-discussion groups, to develop the policies that become law. Through a leadership group called the power elite, the corporate rich provide campaign donations and other gifts and favors to elected officials, serve on federal advisory committees, and receive appointments to key positions in government, all of which make it possible for the corporate rich and the power elite to rule the country, despite constant challenges from the inclusionary alliance and from the Democratic Party. The book explains the role of both benign and dark attempts to influence public opinion, the machinations of the climate-denial network, and how the Supreme Court came to have an ultraconservative majority, who serve as a backstop for the corporate community as well as a legitimator of restrictions on voting rights, union rights, and abortion rights, by ruling that individual states have the power to set such limits. Despite all this highly concentrated power, it will be the other 99.5%, not the top 0.5%, who will decide the fate of the United States in the 2020s on all the important issues.

This book explores the gender issues associated with international migration in dual career households. Adopting a feminist approach, the author links research in economics, sociology, management and business and human geography to explore post-industrial managerial and professional careers. Particular emphasis is placed on the way in which social mobility and spatial mobility are entwined.
The author explores the location and mobility decisions of dual career households, examining their personal and household biographies as well as published statistics.
The chapters examine the following aspects of the subject:
Of essential interest to scholars of human geography, sociology and gender studies, this book will also interest those working in organizational, migration and urban studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203470753

In recent years China has experienced intense economic development. Previously a rapidly urbanising industrial economy, the country has become a post-industrial economy with a service sector that accounts for almost half the nation's GDP. This transformation has created many socio-political changes, but key among them is social mobilisation. This book provides a full and systematic analysis of social mobilisation in China, and how its use as part of state capacity has evolved. The first book on the topic written in English in recent decades, Social Mobilisation in Post-Industrial China provides readers with a thorough analysis covering all vertical administrative levels, as well as considering new participants. Bringing together interdisciplinary analyses of the current uses of social mobilisation in China, this book draws on empirically rich original research. It presents a clear picture of how boyi ('strategic game-playing') is acted out at different levels of society and within different sectors, and the social dynamics at work. This book is a unique resource, and will be invaluable for researchers and students of Asian and Chinese studies, Political Science, Public Policy and Management studies. Policy analysts, activists, strategists and educators will also find this book a useful tool for learning more about how social mobilisation mechanisms are utilised in China today.

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born. 'The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied' The New York Times

This book updates our understanding of working-class fiction by focusing on its continued relevance to the social and intellectual contexts of the age of Trump and Brexit. The volume draws together new and established scholars in the field, whose intersectional analyses use postcolonial and feminist ideas, amongst others, to explore key theoretical approaches to working-class writing and discuss works by a range of authors, including Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Jack Hilton, Mulk Raj Anand, Simon Blumenfeld, Pat Barker, Gordon Burn, and Zadie Smith. A key informing argument is not only that working-class writing shows 'working class' to be a diverse and dynamic rather than monolithic category, but also that a greater critical attention to class, and the working class in particular, extends both the methods and objects of literary studies. This collection will appeal to students, scholars and academics interested in working-class writing and the need to diversify the curriculum.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1974 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

This important collection of writings is about, and by, women connected with social and political movements between 1799-1870. It also records the attitudes of the great radical reformers to the role of women in society and documents the vast cultural changes brought about by industrialisation.
The collection draws together the following key material:
Volume I contains an extensive collection of writings from 19th century periodicals, reflecting the high point of working class women's involvement in radical movements.
Volume II focuses on the writings of Frances Wright, an important figure in radical circles in both Britain and the US.
Volume III illustrates the debates of the period surrounding marriage, sexuality and family. Included are writings by Frances Morrison, Robert Dale Owen, William Cobbett and William Lovett.
Volume IV reprints J. D. Milne's 'Industrial Employment of Women'. This important but neglected text argues for the direct engagement of women in all areas of industrial life.
This collection will appeal to anyone with an interest in women's history and Victorian studies.