Labouring to Learn examines academic mobility pathways among ethnic minority Tamil youths in public secondary schools and vocational institutions in Singapore. This book qualitatively examines the interactive effects of race and class on the educational performance of these youths through the lens of social capital. Despite their numerical majoritarian position within the Indian population in Singapore, the foreclosed access for Tamils to diverse class networks within the ethnic community as well as limited inter-ethnic interactions has historically truncated the means to resources and opportunities for social mobility. In schools, the narratives shared by Tamil boys and girls from the lower academic streams and economically disadvantaged backgrounds reveal that they typically experience exclusion on account of racial, economic and academic marginalisation in their everyday lives. Turning to bonding ties among peers and family members provides social support resources that offer some respite from marginalisation. On the flipside, articulations of resistance ensue among Tamil youths that tangibly take time away from learning, and run the danger of strengthening the cultural deficit rhetoric for mainstream society to explain the poor academic performance among ethnic minorities. This account of educational marginalisation amongst Singaporean Tamil youths contributes towards understanding social inequality in a non-liberal multicultural context where marginalisation is differentially experienced across ethnic minority groups and traced to broader socio-historical contexts of migration, assimilation and minority-majority relations. Furthermore, it also articulates the utility of a social capital framework in historically revealing how educational inequality emerged and continues to be sustained in a postcolonial context.

This book offers a historically sweeping yet detailed view of world-systemic migration as a racialized process. Since the early expansion of the world-system, the movement of people has been its central process. Not only have managers of capital moved to direct profitable expansion; they have also forced, cajoled or encouraged workers to move in order to extract, grow, refi ne, manufacture and transport materials and commodities. The book offers historical cases that show that migration introduces and deepens racial dominance in all zones of the world-system. This often forces indigenous and imported slaves or bonded labor to extract, process and move raw materials. Yet it also often creates a contradiction between capital's need to direct labor to where it enables profitability, and the desires of large sections of dominant populations to keep subordinate people of color marginalized and separate. Case studies reveal how core states are concurrently users and blockers of migrant labor. Key examples are Mexican migrants in the United States, both historically and in contemporary society. The United States even promotes of an image of a society that welcomes the immigrant-while policy realities often quite different. Nonetheless, the volume ends with a vision of a future whereby communities from below, both activists and people simply following their communal interests, can come together to create a society that overcomes racism. Its final chapter is a hopeful call by Immanuel Wallerstein for people to make small changes that, together, can bring real about real, revolutionary change.

Based on a critical Marxist ethnography, conducted at a state primary school in a former coalmining community in the north of England, this book provides insight into teachers' perceptions of the effects of deindustrialisation on education for the working class. The book draws on the notion of social haunting to help understand the complex ways in which historical relations and performances, reflective of the community's industrial past, continue to shape experiences and processes of schooling. The arguments presented enable us to engage with the 'goodness' of the past as well as the pain and suffering associated with deindustrialisation. This, it is argued, enables teachers and pupils to engage with rhythms, relations, and performances that recognise the heritage and complexities of working-class culture. Reckoning and harnessing with the fullness of ghosts is essential if schooling is to be refashioned in more encouraging and relational ways, with and for the working class. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in the sociology of education, and social class and education in particular. Those interested in schooling, ethnography, and qualitative social research will also benefit from the book

African American homebuyers continue to pay more for and get less from homeownership. This book explains the motivations for pursuing homeownership amongst working-class African Americans despite the structural conditions that make it less economically and socially rewarding for this group. Fervent adherence to the American Dream ideology amongst working-class African Americans makes them more vulnerable to exploitation in a structurally racist housing market. The book draws on qualitative interviews with sixty-eight African American aspiring homebuyers looking to buy a home in the Chicago metropolitan area to investigate the housing-search process and residential relocation decisions in the context of a racially segregated metropolitan region. Working-class African Americans remained committed to homeownership, in part because of the moral status attached to achieving this goal. For African American homebuyers, success at the American Dream of homeownership is directly related to the long-standing dream of equality. For the aspiring homebuyers in this study, delayed homeownership was a practical problem for the same reasons, but they also experienced this as a personal failing, due to the strong cultural expectation in the United States that homeownership is a milestone that middle-class adults must achieve. Furthermore, despite using perfectly reasonable housing search strategies to locate homes in stable or improving racially integrated neighborhoods, the structure of racial segregation limits their agency in housing choices. Ultimately, policy solutions will need to address structural racism broadly and be attuned to the needs of both homeowners and renters.

Technologies of Refuge and Displacement: Rethinking Digital Divides aims to theoretically and practically understand technology access and use from the perspective of those on the "wrong" side of the digital divide. Specifically, it examines refugees as a group that has received scant attention as technology users, despite their urgent need for technological access to sustain tenuous links to family and loved ones during displacement. It draws from over 100 interviews and surveys with refugees conducted from 2007 to 2011, utilizing this empirical data to interrogate well-known theories about technology and its users. In doing so, it seeks to rethink the popular model of "digital divide" and offer alternative ways of conceptualizing technology literacy and access. It examines how principles from design and IT industries can be applied to contexts with constrained availability, access, and affordability to provide technology services that accommodate users with limited technical and language literacies.

Racial tension in America has become a recurring topic of conversation in politics, the media, and everyday life. There are numerous explanations as to why this has become a predominant subject in today's news and who is to blame. As Americans prepare once again to cast their Presidential ballots, it's more important than ever to have a smart and thoughtful conversation about race. In Getting Smart About Race, expert Margaret Andersen discusses why racial healing should be an integral element of our everyday discussions surrounding race and how to move the conversation in a positive direction. Getting Smart About Race is a clear, accessible introduction to understanding racial inequality and how we can and need to make a difference. The updated paperback edition offers a new prologue by the author that reflect on and synthesizes the cataclysmic events of 2020, and how they have both intensified and transformed the conversation of race in America.

Aneurin Bevan is a revered figure in Welsh and British politics, celebrated for his role as the founder of one of the country's most cherished institutions, the National Health Service. As a result, Bevan is continuously invoked, quoted widely, and is praised for his principles. However, Bevan was not only a significant politician. He was also a prolific writer, contributing extensively to the socialist magazine Tribune from its founding in 1937 until his death in 1960. This is My Truth represents the first edited collection of these writings. Beginning with an introduction that charts Bevan's writing career and emphasises Bevan's legacy, the collection showcases Bevan's analysis of class conflict, capitalism, democracy, the world and democratic socialism. This is My Truth provides readers with the opportunity to read Bevan in his own words and to reflect on a figure who remains a source of inspiration and controversy today.

This powerful book presents a fresh and compelling set of portraits that bring to life the human dimension of the vast and growing social and economic divides in urban China. Leading scholars explore the increasing rigidity of class and social boundaries, focusing on two new "castes" in contemporary China's cities-the immensely wealthy and the abjectly poor. Much has been made of the rise in incomes, the elimination of much rural poverty, and the expansion of an urban middle class over almost forty years of spectacular economic growth. But what often has been overlooked is the polarization, exclusion, and exclusiveness in cities that have accompanied this rise, along with the threat that these trends will extend to future generations. The book considers five cases that emblematize these castes and depict their varying degrees of agency. Highlighting the social groups at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, the contributors illuminate the growing inequality in urban China today.

"Caste", a word normally used in relation to the Indian subcontinent, is rarely associated with Japan in contemporary scholarship. This has not always been the case, and the term was often used among earlier generations of scholars, who introduced the Buraku problem to Western audiences. Amos argues that time for reappraisal is well overdue and that a combination of ideas, beliefs, and practices rooted in Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and military traditions were brought together from the late 16th century in ways that influenced the development of institutions and social structures on the Japanese archipelago. These influences brought the social structures closer in form and substance to certain caste formations found in the Indian subcontinent during the same period. Specifically, Amos analyses the evolution of the so-called Danzaemon outcaste order. This order was a 17th century caste configuration produced as a consequence of early modern Tokugawa rulers' decisions to engage in a state-building project rooted in military logic and built on the back of existing manorial and tribal-class arrangements. He further examines the history behind the primary duties expected of outcastes within the Danzaemon order: notably execution and policing, as well as leather procurement. Reinterpreting Japan as a caste society, this book propels us to engage in fuller comparisons of how outcaste communities' histories and challenges have diverged and converged over time and space, and to consider how better to eradicate discrimination based on caste logic. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Japanese History, Culture and Society.

In this book, the author argues that a new form of capitalism is emerging at the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He asserts that we are in the midst of a transition from democratic capitalism to feudal capitalism and highlights how robotization and innovation is leading to a social crisis for the middle classes as economic inequality is on the rise. Johannessen outlines the three elements - Balkanization, the Great Illusion, and the plutocracy - which are referred to here as feudal structures. He describes, analyzes, and discusses these elements both individually and in interaction with each other, and asks: "What structures and processes are promoting and boosting feudal capitalism?" Additionally, the book serves to generate knowledge about how the middle class will develop in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It shows the various effects of robotization on the middle class, where middle class jobs are transformed, deconstructed, and re-constructed and new part-time jobs are created for the middle class. Given the interest in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the book will appeal to students of economic sociology and political economy as well as those in innovation and knowledge management courses focusing upon the emerging innovation economy. The topic will attract policymakers, and the accessible and engaging tone will also make the book of interest to the general public.

Socialist countries like Yugoslavia garnered legitimacy through appealing to social equality. Yet social stratification was characteristic of Yugoslav society and increased over the course of the state's existence. By the 1980s the country was divided on socio-economic as well as national lines. Through case studies from a range of social millieux, contributors to this volume seek to 'bring class back in' to Yugoslav historiography, exploring how theorisations of social class informed the politics and policies of social mobility and conversely, how societal or grassroots understandings of class have influenced politics and policy. Rather than focusing on regional differentiation between Yugoslav republics and provinces the emphasis is placed on social differentiation and discontent within particular communities. The contributing authors of these historical studies come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, linking scholarship from the socialist era to contemporary research based on accessing newly available primary sources. Voices of a wide spectrum of informants are included in the volume; from factory workers and subsistence farmers to fictional television characters and pop-folk music superstars.

This book provides an ethnographic investigation of the white, upper-middle classes in Britain. It follows the Jack Wills brand to demonstrate how the internal economies of the brand forge a distinctive, elite social network made up of former public-school and Russell Group university students.

This volume addresses the contested relationship between social stratification and social movements in three different ways: First, the authors address the relationship between social stratification and the emergence of protest mobilization. Second, the texts look at social stratification and social positions to explain variations in political orientations, as well as differing aims and interests of protestors. Finally, the volume focuses on the socio-structural composition of protestors. Social Stratification and Social Movements takes up recent attempts to reconnect research on these two fields. Instead of calling for a return of a class perspective or abandoning the classical social movement research agenda, it introduces a multi-dimensional perspective on stratification and social movements and broadens the view by extending the empirical analysis beyond Europe.

This book addresses what is perhaps the most salient issue in American politics today: the decline of the middle class. It is this single issue that drove the outlier presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to national prominence, and undergirded the electoral victory of Donald Trump. While there are other longer studies exploring in detail the structural forces, most prominently the loss of manufacturing in the US, that have caused the contraction of the middle class, none offer in shorter form practical policy solutions directly geared towards practitioners in government and the private sector. This work focuses specifically on combining both an academic analysis of the subject combined with detailed policy recommendations. These recommendations are designed to be implemented; they take into account the latest set of real world political variables such as actual current legislative and institutional agendas currently in play on the federal and local levels.

This monograph examines the ways in which discourses on the public sector were articulated in the print media during the 2011 financial crisis in the Irish, UK and European news media. It finds that coverage of the public sector was ideological, portraying public sector workers as overpaid, inefficient, and sheltered from the worst of the crisis. These explanations perpetuated the view that there was a need for austerity through cutbacks to public services and public sector pay. The central thesis is that these representations must be understood as being part of the complex organisational culture of the newsroom. Additional themes explored in the book include but are not limited to: Media ownership concentration and journalistic self-censorship. The marketisation of news and its impact on journalistic practice. The casualisation of the newsroom. The fourth estate function of the media. The discourse of austerity. Neoliberalism as a dominant ideology. Reflexivity in the newsroom The crisis of credibility in journalism Media portrayals of The "Looney" Left versus the "Reasonable" Right

Originally published in 1973, Semi-Detached London looks at the great suburban expansion of London between the two world wars. The book covers all aspects of urban history, presenting an authoritative and balanced account of the Great Suburban Age, and the final uninhibited forty years before the Green Belt and Development Plan. The roles of the speculative builder, the estate developer and the local authorities receive careful attention and the author's special knowledge of London's transport systems ensures that the leading part they played is fully developed. Students of social, urban and transport history will find this book a valuable source of reference.

Based on qualitative research among industrial workers in a region that has undergone deindustrialisation and transformation to a service-based economy, this book examines the loss of status among former manual labourers. Focus lies on their emotional experiences, nostalgic memories, hauntings from the past and attachments to their former places of work, to transformed neighbourhoods, as well as to public space. Against this background the book explores the continued importance of class as workers attempt to manage the declining recognition of their skills and a loss of power in an "established-outsider figuration". A study of the transformation of everyday life and social positions wrought by changes in the social structure, in urban landscapes and in the "structures of feeling", this examination of the dynamic of social identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and geography with interests in post-industrial societies, social inequality, class and social identity.

This book examines experiences and implications of 'against-the-grain' school choices, where white middle class families choose ordinary and 'low performing' secondary schools for their children. It offers a unique view of identity formation, taking in matters like family history, locality and whiteness.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351017558, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Few institutions in modern society are as significant as universities, yet our historical and sociological understanding of the role of higher education has not been substantially updated for decades. By revisiting the emergence and transformation of higher education since 1800 using a novel processual approach, this book recognizes these developments as having been as central to constituting the modern world as the industrial and democratic revolutions. This new interpretation of the role of universities in contemporary society promises to re-orient our understanding of the importance of higher education in the past and future development of modern societies. It will therefore appeal to scholars of social science and history with interests in social history and social change, education, the professions and inequalities.

This book is a collection of empirical studies on China's middle class from top-ranking Chinese sociologists, discussing this newly identified social stratum with regard to the basic concept and scope of the group, its functions, formation, identity, consumption, behavior patterns and value system. As the first study of its kind, the analysis of most chapters is based on a rich body of empirical data gathered from rigorous large-scale surveys designed specifically for the Chinese middle class across megacities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The book traces the complex and dynamic formation process of China's middle class from different perspectives while dealing with issues of social concern such as "rigid social stratification". The findings shed light on the underlying logic of structural change in Chinese society over several recent decades, with significant policy implications. The book will attract sociologists, students and policymakers interested in social structure, social transformation and middle-income groups in China.

This important book provides the first substantial analysis of white working class perspectives on themes of multiculturalism and change in the UK, creating an opportunity for these 'silent voices' to be heard. Based on over 200 interviews in multiple sites the results are startling - challenging politicians, policy makers and researchers. Improving our understanding of how this group went from 'hero to zero', became framed as racist, resistant to change and disconnected from politics, the book suggests a new and progressive agenda for white working class communities to become a fully inclusive part of a modern and diverse country in the 21st century.

In 21st century Britain the rich are protected while the poor punished. Rich Crime, Poor Crime shows how contemporary British society is founded on a legacy of past plunder and dispossession by elites against the rest. Over centuries, power and property have been consolidated in the hands of a few and coded in legal systems that favoured the rich and created extreme inequality. Colin Webster puts a spotlight on Britain's hereditary and new ruling classes, whose inherited entanglements in land ownership, war and conquest, new world slavery, finance, trade, industry and empire allow them to accumulate and grow capital and wealth at the expense of others. He reveals a system facilitated by political corruption and wealth that accommodates serious wrongdoing - such as corporate, banking and accounting fraud, money laundering and tax evasion - and does substantial harm to fellow Britons. Examining the conditions of extreme inequality that give rise to poor crime and rich crime - and to the social response to both types of crime - we find them to be deeply implicated one with the other. Rich Crime, Poor Crime is vital reading for academics and professionals interested in the fields of history, sociology, criminology, and politics.

Exploring the structural causes and consequences of inequalities based on a person's race, class, and gender, Poverty, Racism and Sexism: The Reality of Oppression in America concentrates on this formidable set of disadvantages, demonstrating how Americans are adversely affected by just one or a combination of three social factors. Grounded in sociological thought, the text highlights unfolding stories about major social inequalities and relentless campaigns for people's rights. Weaving together such concepts as individualism, social reproduction, social class, and intersectionality, the book provides a framework for readers to understand the vast injustices these groups encounter, where and why they originated, and why they continue to endure. Poverty, Racism and Sexism is a compact, versatile volume which will prove an invaluable resource for those studying social inequality, social problems, social stratification, contemporary American society, social change, urban sociology, and poverty and inequality.

Exploring the structural causes and consequences of inequalities based on a person's race, class, and gender, Poverty, Racism and Sexism: The Reality of Oppression in America concentrates on this formidable set of disadvantages, demonstrating how Americans are adversely affected by just one or a combination of three social factors. Grounded in sociological thought, the text highlights unfolding stories about major social inequalities and relentless campaigns for people's rights. Weaving together such concepts as individualism, social reproduction, social class, and intersectionality, the book provides a framework for readers to understand the vast injustices these groups encounter, where and why they originated, and why they continue to endure. Poverty, Racism and Sexism is a compact, versatile volume which will prove an invaluable resource for those studying social inequality, social problems, social stratification, contemporary American society, social change, urban sociology, and poverty and inequality.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.