An insidious snobbery has taken root in parts of progressive Britain. Working-class voters have flexed their political muscles and helped to change the direction of the country, but in doing so they have been met with disdain and even abuse from elites in politics, culture and business. They have been derided as uneducated, bigoted turkeys voting for Christmas, as Empire apologists patriotic to the point of delusion. At election time, we hear a lot about 'levelling up the Red Wall'. But when the votes have been counted, what can actually be done to meet the very real concerns of the 'left behind' in the UK's post-industrial towns? In these once vibrant hubs of progress, working-class voters now face the prospect of being minimised or ridiculed in cultural life, economically marginalised and abandoned educationally. In this rousing polemic, David Skelton explores the roots and reality of this new snobbery, calling for an end to the divisive culture war and the creation of a new politics of the common good, empowering workers, remaking the economy and placing communities centre stage. Above all, he argues that we now have a once-in-a-century opportunity to bring about permanent change.

This book explores the formation of working-class identities in the period 1880-1930, as reflected in changes in work and industrial relations, family life, patterns of saving, and changing political allegiances. Trevor Griffiths challenges the notion that the period witnessed the emergence of a more united sense of class among British workers. Instead, the picture emerges of a working class for whom the ties of work and neighbourhood counted for less than those of religion and nationality.

The great issues and conflicts of the early seventeenth century were played out not only on the stages of the Court and Parliament, and, latterly, on the battlefield, but within the confines of the family. Originally published in 1984, in this pioneering study of the Verney family, based on more than 10,000 family letters and papers, Professor Miriam Slater shows how a family of country gentry lived and behaved in a time of political and social crisis. Most of their energies were directed within the family, their concerns with marriage and children, with relationships between members of the Verney clan, with managing their estates and property. They emerge as real people with passions and hatreds, made to live their lives by correspondence when the head of the family was forced to live abroad as an exile and casualty of the political tumults. But their misfortunes have created a unique archive which allows the author to delve deep into the very heart of their personal lives, and to create an extraordinary collective portrait of a family in times of troubles. Professor Slater describes and analyses the way in which Verney family members actually treated each other, and gives an account of their ideas - on marriage, from both the male and female points of view; on the roles of children and parents; on the relationships among adult siblings; on the place of servants within the family. She offers a detailed and systematic examination of family psychological dynamics, and the values, attitudes and goals which affected individual behaviour. She also moves beyond individual idiosyncrasies by linking the nature of personal interaction within the family to the wider social structures of the society, including laws of inheritance, patriarchal control, the different treatment of men and women, and financial arrangements and family strategies.

Originally published in 1974, the conclusions of the book are based on intensive field-work during 1963-66 in a village in south-east Rajasthan, India. Although the marriages of 158 boys and 163 girls were studied, the relevance of the conclusions drawn extends far beyond the village and its region since it reveals the changing themes and values in Indian society at the time. The perceptive analysis of rites and ceremonies of marriage further illuminates the central problem of the book - how the themes of the Dharmasastras are interpreted and acted upon in village life and what kinds of reinforcements and incentives to change they provide to the various units of social structure. The author contends that the series of marriage rites manifest the continuity of tradition, a ritual epitomisation of caste interdependence and means of systematic social advancement. At the time ritual idioms and patterns of social exchange were beginning to change, more often in observance than in content. Traditional sources of status aggrandisement continued to provide new pathways to the forces of modernisation and unveil several clues to the innovative strategies of change. This scholarly study filled the need for a realistic appraisal of the relationship between marriage practices, religious values and the changing social structure.

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers' everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the 'other life' in today's Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of 'habitability', commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

The land reform in Mexico that followed the Revolution of 1910-17 helped to reconstitute peasant communities in the lowland areas of Oaxaca, one of the poorest of the states, as a complement to the peasantries which had persisted from early colonial times at the higher altitudes. This book examines the history, production systems, and life styles of these communities, focusing in particular on their structure, ethnic movements, and political participation.

Making a Life in Yorkville, based on the verbatim, unedited life-course narrative of an urban, working-class, middle-aged man, expands our understanding of the human life course beyond the currently dominant approaches. It presents a comprehensive and rounded life-course narrative of an ordinary man through a systematic analysis. By utilizing some established concepts and by formulating some new concepts, particularly relating childhood to adulthood and concepts related to how time is interpreted, Handel offers an advance both in methodology and in the theoretical approach to the study of the life course. Theoretically, the work falls broadly within the symbolic interactionist framework of sociological and social psychological thought. Methodologically, it argues for the careful study of the lives of ordinary people, people who are not celebrities or exotics, thus people who have no claim on public attention. This important new work will be a welcome addition to the literature on life course studies. The first part of the book explores the idea of the life course in its various contexts: the community, the historical, the narrative, and the theoretical. The second part introduces and reproduces verbatim the life history of Tony Santangelo, an ordinary, working-class man. The third part discusses and analyzes the life history presented. Because most life histories are edited, this book, unique in its exact reproduction of the subject's narrative, makes it possible for the reader to use the information in the life history in ways different from Handel's use.

Across Africa the narrative of "Africa rising" has taken root in a burgeoning middle class. Ambitious and increasingly affluent, this group symbolizes the values and hopes of the new Africa, and they are regarded as important agents of both economic development and democratic change. This narrative, however, obscures the complex and often ambiguous role that this group actually plays in African societies.

The Rise Of Africa's Middle Class brings together a diverse range of economists, political scientists, and development experts to provide a much needed corrective, overturning the received wisdom within development circles and providing a fresh new perspective on social transformations in contemporary Africa. Featuring a wide array of case studies from across sub-Saharan Africa and covering highly topical issues, including black middle-class support for the ANC in South Africa and anti-government activism in Nigeria, this collection of essays is a timely, on-the-ground look at the realities behind the idea of Africa rising.

Ross McKibbin investigates the ways in which 'class culture' characterized English society and intruded into every aspect of life during the period from 1918 to the mid-1950s. He demonstrates the influence of social class within the mini cultures which together constitute society: families and family life, friends and neighbours, the workplace, schools and colleges, religion, sexuality, sport, music, film, radio; and examines how increasing Americanization affected these cultures.

The relationship between the Conservative Party and the organised working class is fundamental to the making of modern British politics. Industrialisation and urbanisation saw the emergence of democracy and class politics, symbolised, by the development of trade unions, which assumed growing political significance. The organised working class, though always a minority, was perceived by Conservatives as a challenge; condemned as threatening property, and as harbingers of socialism. Many trade union members dismissed the Conservatives as the bosses' party, ever-ready to restrict the unions' freedom in the interests of profit. However, at the book's core is a puzzle: why, throughout its history, was the Conservative Party seemingly accommodating towards the organised working class that it ideology, social composition, and the preferences of most Conservatives would seem to permit? And why, in the space of a relatively few years in the 1970s and 1980s, did it abandon this heritage? Taylor argues that throughout its history, the Conservative Party has faced a broad strategic choice with respect to the organised working class: either inclusion or exclusion. The portrayal of the character on the front cover encapsulates the concept of the 'bloody-minded' British worker - an attitude that encapsulates a determinedly 'conservative' attitude to defending rights and influence gained during the twentieth century and which led to the reaction against 'union power' in the 1960s and 70s. -- .

This book provides an inclusive and incisive analysis of the experiences of working-class young people in education. While there is an established literature on education and the working class stretching back decades, comparatively there has been something of a neglect of class-based inequality - with questions of gender, 'race' and other forms of identity attracting significant attention. However, events including Britain's 2016 decision to leave the European Union, have thrown social class into sharp focus, both in the UK and elsewhere. Featuring leading thinkers in the sociology of education, this book examines the different ways in which young people relate to various parts of the education system, including different forms of schooling, post-compulsory and university education. They maintain that the issue of social class goes beyond the walls of specific institutions to affect young people in a variety of ways: not only in the UK, but across the globe. This book will be of great value and interest to students and scholars of the sociology of education, working-class youth, and equality of opportunity.

Superintendents play a large role in the formation of relationships and networks within their neighborhood; and yet, no study in social science has focused on them. Williams closes this knowledge gap through ethnographic fieldwork, providing an in-depth analysis of the daily life of superintendents in the lower Harlem area in New York City.

First Published in 1967. In The Landed Interest and the Supply of Food James Caird reconsidered the position ofBritish agriculture a generation after theappearance of his High Farming pamphlet andhis English Agriculture in 1850 and 1851. Much of this text was devoted to a reconsideration of the structure of landownership and farming, and the relations between landlord and tenant. This is the fifth edition.

Each the work of a specialist on the antebellum South, these essays address broad issues such as the slavery system, the growth of the cotton industry, and the growing sectional self-consciousness of the South. The authors' local, microcosmic approaches permit examination of subjects such as local justice, economic failure, slave marriages, and slave insurrection with an in-depth attention rarely possible in general works.

Originally published in 1971, Homes in High Flats was written at a time when multi-storey flats were a popular solution to the world-wide need for mass housing because they could be produced with speed. However, the social implications of domestic housing in high flats were causing local authorities in Western Europe to reconsider their efficiency. Original research into this question forms the basis of this book which concentrates on Glasgow but gives attention to other examples both in Britain and abroad. The text attempts to encompass all the social and practical aspects of life in high flats by studying tenants’ views on the physical character of the flats and estates, and by examining the success of tenants’ associations and extra-mural classes designed to develop community life. Practical problems are dealt with in chapters on facilities and services, families, children, the elderly and the case for investment in staff. The authors also compare multi-storey flats with other types of household and discuss the reasons for tenants’ movement out of the estate. Perhaps the most eloquent social comment on the shortcomings of high flat life is expressed in the lyrics of the Jeely Piece Song which is included in the Appendix.

India remains a country mired in poverty, with two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people living on little more than a few dollars day. Just as telling, the country's informal working population numbers nearly 500 million, or approximately 80 percent of the entire labor force. Despite these figures and the related structural disadvantages that imperil the lives of so many, the Indian elite hold fast to the idea that the poor need only work harder and show some discipline and they, too, can become rich. The results of this ambitious ten-year ethnography at exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore shatter such self-serving illusions. In Narrow Fairways, Patrick Inglis combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to show how social mobility among the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy upper-caste members at these clubs is ultimately constrained and narrowed. The book highlights how elites secure and extend class and caste privileges, while also delivering a necessary rebuke to India's present development strategy, which pays far too little attention to promoting quality health care, education, and other basic social services that would deliver real opportunities to the poor.

While the 1% rule, poor neighbourhoods have become the subject of public concern and media scorn, blamed for society's ills. This unique book redresses the balance. Lisa Mckenzie lived on the St Ann's estate in Nottingham for more than 20 years. Her 'insider' status enables us to hear the stories of its residents, often wary of outsiders. St Ann's has been stigmatised as a place where gangs, guns, drugs, single mothers and those unwilling or unable to make something of their lives reside. Yet in this same community we find strong, resourceful, ambitious people who are 'getting by', often with humour and despite facing brutal austerity.

Between 1760 and 1860, the English countryside was subject to constant attempts at agricultural improvement. Most often these meant depriving cottagers and rural workers of access to land they could cultivate, despite evidence that they were the most productive farmers in a country constantly short of food. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary sources, Apostles of Inequality argues that such attempts, driven by a flawed faith in the wonders of capital, did little to increase agricultural productivity and instead led to a century of increasing impoverishment in rural England. Jim Handy rejects the assertions about the benefits that accompanied the transition to "improved" agriculture and details the abundant evidence for the efficiency of smallholder, peasant agriculture. He traces the development of both economic theory and government policy through the work of agricultural improver Arthur Young (1741-1820), government advisor Nassau William Senior (1790-1864), and the editors and writers of the Economist, as well as Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus. Apostles of Inequality demonstrates how a fascination with capital - promoted by political economy and farmers' desires to have a labour force completely dependent on wage labour - fostered widespread destitution in rural England for over a century.

In a provocative new approach toward understanding transnational literary cultures, this study examines the specter of the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas. For Elizabeth Russ, the plantation is not merely a literal location, but also a vexing rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told. Through a series of precise, in-depth readings, Russ analyzes the discourse of the plantation through a number of suggestive pairings: male and female perspectives; U.S. and Spanish American traditions; and continental alongside island societies.
To chart comparative elements in the development of the postslavery imagination in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Russ distinguishes between a modern and a postmodern imaginary. The former privileges a familiar plot of modernity: the traumatic transition from a local, largely agrarian order to an increasingly anonymous industrialized society. The latter, abandoning nostalgia toward the past, suggests a new history using the strategies of performance, such as witnessing, reticency, and traversal. Authors examined include The Twelve Southerners, Fernando Ortiz, Teresa de la Parra, Eudora Welty, Antonio Benitez Rojo, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Mayra Santos-Febres, among others.
Applying sharp analyses across a broad range of texts, Russ reveals how the language used to imagine communities influenced by the plantation has been gendered, racialized, and eroticized in ways that oppose the domination of an ever-shifting "North" while often reproducing the fundamental power divide. Her work moves beyond the North-South dichotomy that has often stymied scholarly work in Latin American studies and, importantly, provides a model for future hemispheric approaches."

Marriages that involve the migration of at least one of the spouses challenge two intersecting facets of the politics of belonging: the making of the 'good and legitimate citizens' and the 'acceptable family'. In Europe, cross-border marriages have been the target of increasing state controls, an issue of public concern and the object of scholarly research. The study of cross-border marriages and the ways these marriages are framed is inevitably affected by states' concerns and priorities. There is a need for a reflexive assessment of how the categories employed by state institutions and agents have impacted the study of cross-border marriages. This collection of essays analyses what is at stake in the regulation of cross-border marriages and how European states use particular categories (e.g., 'sham', 'forced' and 'mixed' marriages) to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable marriages. When researchers use these categories unreflexively, they risk reproducing nation-centred epistemologies and reinforcing state-informed hierarchies and forms of exclusion. The chapters in this book offer new insights into a timely topic and suggest ways to avoid these pitfalls: differentiating between categories of analysis and categories of practice, adopting methodologies that do not mirror nation-states' logic and engaging with general social theory outside migration studies. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics of Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Geography, Social Work, and Public Policy. Barring one, all the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

As our society confronts climate change, authoritarianism, and epidemics, what can examples from the past tell us about our present and future? How Worlds Collapse offers case studies of societies that either collapsed or overcame cataclysmic adversity. The authors of this volume find commonalities between past civilizations and our current society, tracing patterns, strategies, and early warning signs that can inform decision making today. While today's complex world presents unique challenges, many mechanisms, dynamics, and fundamental challenges to the foundations of civilization have been seen throughout history - highlighting essential lessons for the future.

This book explores higher education, social class and social mobility from the point of view of those most intimately involved: the undergraduate students. It is based on a project which followed a cohort of young undergraduate students at Bristol's two universities in the UK through from their first year of study for the following three years, when most of them were about to enter the labour market or further study. The students were paired by university, by subject of study and by class background, so that the fortunes of middle-class and working-class students could be compared. Narrative data gathered over three years are located in the context of a hierarchical and stratified higher education system, in order to consider the potential of higher education as a vehicle of social mobility.

This book examines the highly ambivalent implications and effects of anti-elitism. It draws on this theme as a cross cutting entry point to provide transdisciplinary analysis of current conjunctures and their contradictions, drawing on examples from popular culture and media, politics, fashion, labour, and spatial arrangements. Using the toolboxes of media and discourse analysis, hegemony theory, ethnography, critical social psychology and cultural studies more broadly, the book surveys and theorizes the forms, the implications and the ambiguities and limits of anti-elitist formations in different parts of the world. Anti-elitist sentiments colour the contemporary political conjuncture as much as they shape pop cultural and media trends. Populists, right-wing authoritarian ones and others, direct their anger at cultural, political and, sometimes, economic elites while supporting other elites and creating new ones. At the same time, "elitist" knowledge and expertise, decision-making power and taste regimes are being questioned in societal transformations that are discussed much more positively under headlines such as participation or democratization. Focusing on themes such as labour struggles and anti-oligarchy rhetoric in Russia, tax-avoiding elites and fiscal imaginaries, working class agency, nationalist political discourse in India, Austria, the UK, and Hungary, Melania Trump as a celebrity narrative in Slovenia, aesthetic codes of the alt-right, football hooliganism in Germany, "hipster hate" in German political discourse or the politics of expertise and anti-elite iconography in high fashion internationally. The book brings together a group of international, interdisciplinary case studies in order to better understand the ways in which the battle cry "against the elites" shapes current conjunctures and possible future politics. It is intended for undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral research.

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicised ways.

This edited collection is built around the experiences of Yeoville Studio, a research initiative based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Through themed, illustrated stories of the people and places of Yeoville, the book presents a nuanced portrait of the vibrance and complexity of a post-apartheid, peri-central neighbourhood that has often been characterised as a ‘slum’ in Johannesburg. These narratives are interwoven with theoretical chapters by scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting on the empirical experiences of the Studio and examining academic research processes.

These chapters unpack the engagement of the Studio in Yeoville, including issues of trust, the need to align policy with lived realities and social needs, the political dimensions of the knowledge produced and the ways in which this knowledge was, and could be used.