First published in 1978, this unique work throws much-needed light upon the exact nature of privilege and elite life-styles in the contemporary Soviet Union, under the Communist regime. Dr Matthews' study places these life-styles in a historical perspective, and characterises, in sociological terms, the people who enjoyed them.

This study is based on an extensive programme of personal interviews among emigr? groups and a close analysis of original and little-known legal historical sources. There are special sections on the nature of change in the Soviet elite and on social mobility. This reissue will attract interest amongst students and scholars concerned with the history, politics and sociology of the Soviet Union; it will also be of value to all those concerned with the age-old problem of social equality.

This title was first published in 2002: The trade union movement in twentieth-century Britain has been a cornerstone for society's marginalized members - women, disabled people, lesbians and gay men and people from black and ethnic minority communities. As these groups of workers self-organized to reform their unions, they built a bridge between the old social movement based around class position and labour identity and the new social movements based around civil rights and status stratifications. This book presents a detailed look at self-organization within public sector unions through the emergence of four self-organized groups within NALGO and later, UNISON. Drawing upon unique insider knowledge of the alliances and antipathies between the self-organized groups and the host union, the book also provides fascinating revelations of the tensions between self-organized groups themselves. This study will be essential reading for students of political sociology and industrial relations.

This interdisciplinary study examines painted portraiture as a defining metaphor of elite self-representation in early modern culture. Beginning with Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), the most influential early modern account of the formation of elite identity, the argument traces a path across the ensuing century towards the images of courtiers and nobles by the most persuasive of European portrait painters, Van Dyck, especially those produced in London during the 1630s. It investigates two related kinds of texts: those which, following Castiglione, model the conduct of the ideal courtier or elite social conduct more generally; and those belonging to the established tradition of debates about the condition of nobility -how far it is genetically inherited and how far a function of excelling moral and social behaviour. Van Dyck is seen as contributing to these discussions through the language of pictorial art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, early modern history and Renaissance studies.

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

Bringing together for the first time sexual and industrial labour as the means to understand gender, work and class in modern Japan and Korea, this book shows that a key feature of the industrialisation of these countries was the associated development of a modern sex labour industry. Tying industrial and sexual labour together, the book opens up a range of key questions: In what economy do we place the labour of the former "comfort women"? Why have sex workers not been part of the labour movements of Korea and Japan? Why is it difficult to be "working-class" and "feminine"? What sort of labour hierarchies operate in hostess clubs? How do financial crises translate into gender crises? This book explores how sexuality is inscribed in working-class identities and traces the ways in which sexual and labour relations have shaped the cultures of contemporary Japan and Korea. It addresses important historical episodes such as the Japanese colonial industrialisation of Korea, wartime labour mobilisation, women engaged in forced sex work for the Japanese army throughout the Asian continent, and issues of ethnicity and sex in the contemporary workplace. The case studies provide specific examples of the way gender and work have operated across a variety of contexts, including Korean shipyard unions, Japanese hostess clubs, and the autobiographical literature of Korean factory girls. Overall, this book provides a compelling account of the entanglement of sexual and industrial labour throughout the twentieth century, and shows clearly how ideas about gender have contributed in fundamental ways to conceptions of class and worker identities.

This title was first published in 2001. This detailed study of European trade unions also addresses academic concerns about the continuing relevance of the class concept as an analytical tool. As a social movement, the trade union has always used the class principal to unite and defend workers, and the diverse contributions to this volume enable the more accurate positioning of class discourse within both the debate about trade unions and wider sociological inquiry.

This handbook critically examines the three concepts of exclusion, inequality and stigma and their interrelationship in the Indian context. Divided into five parts, the volume deals with the issues of exclusion, inequality, gender discrimination, health and disability, and assault and violence. It discusses important topical themes such as caste and social exclusion in rural labour markets, impact of poverty and unemployment, discrimination in education and literacy, income inequality and financial inclusion, social security of street vendors, women social entrepreneurs, rural-urban digital divide, workplace inequality, women trafficking, acid attacks, inter-caste marriages, honour killings, health care and sanitation, discrimination faced by those with disabilities, and regional disparities in India. The book traces rising socio-economic inequality and discrimination along with the severe lack of access to resources and opportunities, redressal instruments, legal provisions and implementation challenges, while also looking at deep-rooted causes responsible for their persistence in society. With emphasis on affirmative action, systemic mechanisms, and the role of state and citizens in bridging gaps, the volume presents several policies and strategies for development. It combines wide-ranging empirical case studies backed by relevant theoretical frameworks to map out a new agenda for research on socio-economic inequality in India with important implications for public policy. Comprehensive and first of its kind, this handbook will serve as a key reference to scholars, researchers and teachers of exclusion and discrimination studies, social justice, political economy, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, development studies, education and public administration. It will also be useful to policymakers, bureaucrats, civil society activists, non-governmental organisations and social entrepreneurs in the development sector, in addition to those interested in third world studies, developing economies and the global south.

Post-war Japan was often held up as the model example of the first mature industrial societies outside the Western economy, and the first examples of "middle-mass" society. Today, and since the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990 s, the promises of Japan, Inc., seem far away.

Social Class in Contemporary Japan is the first single volume that traces the dynamics of social structure, institutional socialization and class culture through this turbulent period, all the way into the contemporary neoliberal moment. In an innovative multi-disciplinary approach that include top scholars working on quantitative class structure, policy development, and ethnographic analysis, this volume highlights the centrality of class formation to our understanding of the many levels of Japanese society. The chapters each address a different aspect of class formation and transformation which stand on their own. Taken together, they document the advantages of putting Japan in the broad comparative framework of class analysis and the enduring importance of social class to the analysis of industrial and post-industrial societies.

Written by a team of contributors from Japan, the US and Europe this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese society and culture, as well as those interested in cultural anthropology and social class alike.

Can sport serve as a vehicle for social mobility of disadvantaged social groups? How and to what extent are different forms of social capital created through sport participation? Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries takes up these questions through a critical examination of the ways in which sport facilitates or inhibits upward social mobility. Drawing on four case studies, the book provides a rich sociological analysis of people 's lived experiences of sport in diverse social, cultural and political contexts, ranging from sport-for-development programs in Brazil and the Netherlands to rural communities and the Somali diaspora in Australia. The first international comparison of and critical reflection on the relationship between social mobility and participation in non-professional sport, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in sport 's potential for social inclusion.

This title was first published in 2002: Numerous reports have identified the serious problems of under-representation of, and discrimination against, minority ethnic groups in the British NHS. It is widely argued that this both raises issues of social justice and undermines the quality of service to minority ethnic patients. Nowhere are these problems more acute than among the largest occupational group in the NHS - nurses. This book reports the results of research carried out for the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting to evaluate NHS equal opportunities policy. Drawing on additional original research involving interviews with key policy actors, this fascinating book examines the prospects for a national strategy linking the business and justice cases for the delivery of greater equity in employment and service delivery.

This essay, first published in 1980, analyses the relationship between intellectuals' social locations and their political orientations. Dr. Brym provides a critical discussion of the various sociological views of intellectuals and specifies some of the social conditions which encourage intellectuals to follow various directions on the political compass. He also demonstrates that intellectuals are neither socially rootless nor tied to one particular class or group within society, concluding that it is only by an analysis of intellectuals' mobility patterns that we can hope to arrive at an adequate understanding of their politics. Clearly written, and assuming only a basic grounding in sociological theory, this book will thus be of special interest to students of political sociology, social movements, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of culture and the sociology of intellectuals.

This book is about the causes and consequences of economic inequality in the advanced market economies of today. It is commonplace that in market systems people choose their own individual economic destinies, but of course the choices people make are importantly determined by the alternatives available to them: economic disparity arises mainly from unequal opportunity. Yet this merely begs the question; from whence do the vast existing inequalities of opportunity arise? This book theorizes power and social class as the real crux of economic inequality. Most of mainstream economics studiously eschews questions involving social power, preferring to focus instead on "individual choice subject to constraint" in contexts of "well-functioning markets". Yet both "extra-market" power structures and power structures arising from within the market system itself are unavoidably characteristic of real-world market-based economies. The normal working of labor and financial markets engenders an inherent wealth-favoring bias in the distribution of opportunities for occupational choice. But that bias is greatly compounded by the economic, social, political and cultural power structures that constitute the class system. For those power structures work to distribute economic benefit to class elites, and are in turn undergirded by the disparities of wealth they thus help engender. Inequality and Power offers an economic analysis of the power structures constituting that class system: employers' power over employees; the power of certain businesses over others; professionals' power over their clients and other employees; cultural power in the media and education systems; and political power in "democratic" government. Schutz argues that a "class analysis" of the trend of increasing economic inequality today is superior to the mainstream economic analysis of that trend. After considering what is wrong with power-based inequality in term of criteria of distributive justice and economic functionality, the book concludes with an outline of various possible correctives. This book should be of interest to students and researchers in economics, sociology, political science and philosophy, as well as anyone interested in the theories of social class.

Luck greatly influences a person's quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens social inequality. But societies can change their luck. Too often debates about inequality focus on the accuracy of data or modeling while missing the greater point about ethics and exploitation. In the wake of growing disparity between the 1% and other classes, this book combines philosophical insights with social theory to offer a much-needed political economy of life chances. Timcke advances new thought on the role luck plays in redistributive justice in 21st Century capitalism.

This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years.

New Labour deployed community as a conceptual framework to rearticulate the state / citizen relationship to be enacted at and through new spaces of governance. An important example of this was how successive New Labour governments sought to renovate the social, political and economic cultures of poor neighbourhoods and generate trajectories of strong, empowered and ordered civic space. This was pursued through programmes such as the New Deal for Communities (NDC) that sought to invigorate and embed socially excluded citizens within localised regeneration projects. In attempting to construct community as a space through which personal and spatial renewal could be achieved, New Labour relied on problematic assumptions about the nature, scope and meaning of community and its relationship with individual social agents. Drawing on original research conducted in an NDC neighbourhood, Remaking Community addresses the interlinking uses of community in government rhetoric and practice. It explores why this concept was so central to the New Labour governing project and what it meant for individuals enveloped in the 'regeneration' of their citizenship and locality. It seeks to understand how community is conceptualised, applied, constructed, misunderstood, exploited, experienced, contested, mobilised and activated by both policy actors and neighbourhood residents and situates this discussion within an examination of the political, emotional and cultural impact of the regeneration experience. Offering a timely analysis of New Labour, regeneration and the politics of community, this book makes an original and important contribution to debates around new spaces of governance, citizen participation and the tackling social exclusion in poor neighbourhoods.

Welfare offices usually attract negative descriptions of bureaucracy with their queues, routines, and impersonal nature. Are they anonymous machines or the locus of neutral service relationships? Showing how people experience state public administration, The Bureaucrat and the Poor provides a realistic view of French welfare policies, institutions and reforms and, in doing so, dispels both of these myths. Combining Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy theory with the sociology of Bourdieu and Goffman, this research analyses face-to-face encounters and demonstrates the complex relationship between welfare agents, torn between their institutional role and their personal feelings, and welfare applicants, required to translate their personal experience into bureaucratic categories. Placing these interactions within the broader context of social structures and class, race and gender, the author unveils both the social determinations of these interpersonal relationships and their social functions. Increasing numbers of welfare applicants, coupled with mass unemployment, family transformations and the so-called 'integration problem' of migrants into French society deeply affect these encounters. Staff manage tense situations with no additional resources - some become personally involved, while others stick to their bureaucratic role; most of them alternate between involvement and detachment, assistance and domination. Welfare offices have become a place for 're-socialisation', where people can talk about their personal problems and ask for advice. On the other hand, bureaucratic encounters are increasingly violent, symbolically if not physically. More than ever, they are now a means of regulating the poor.

This book brings together a diverse range of critical interventions in sexuality and gender studies, and seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging. The book is organized around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (Part 1); sexuality and "race" (Part 2); and sexuality and religion (Part 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about "sexual nationalism," or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-a-vis an uncivilized, racialized "Other." The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilized to explore the interplay between sexuality and "race," nation, ethnicity and religious identities. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of "Europe" and of European nation-states.

Rising exclusion rates indicate the continuing marginalisation of many young people in education in the UK. Working-class boys, children living in poverty, and children with additional/special educational needs are among those experiencing a disproportionate rate of exclusion. This book traces the processes of exclusion and alienation from school and relates this to a changing social and economic context. Jean Kane argues that policy on schooling, including curricular reform, needs to be re-connected to the broad political pursuit of social justice, and presents compelling case studies of excluded pupils, showing the multi-faceted identities of pupils, with a particular focus on masculine and feminine identities. This invaluable contribution to the literature offers an alternative analysis where the social identities of pupils are shown to be tied up with their exclusion from school. Themes investigated include: the meanings of school exclusions social class, gender and schooling social identities of excluded pupils negotiating identities in school: moving towards exclusion exclusions and young people's lives improving participation in schooling. Providing fascinating reading for teachers, social workers, researchers and policy-makers this book considers how educational disadvantage might be addressed through recognition of the gender and class identities of pupils.

This essay, first published in 1980, analyses the relationship between intellectuals' social locations and their political orientations. Dr Brym provides a critical discussion of the various sociological views of intellectuals and specifies some of the social conditions which encourage intellectuals to follow various directions on the political compass. He also demonstrates that intellectuals are neither socially rootless nor tied to one particular class or group within society, concluding that it is only by an analysis of intellectuals' mobility patterns that we can hope to arrive at an adequate understanding of their politics. Clearly written, and assuming only a basic grounding in sociological theory, this book will thus be of special interest to students of political sociology, social movements, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of culture and the sociology of intellectuals.

Social class has been at the forefront of sociological theories of crime from their inception. It is explicitly central to some theories such as anomie/strain and conflict, and nips aggressively at the periphery of others such as social control theory. Yet none of these theories engage in a systematic exploration of what social class is, how individuals come to be placed in one rung of the class ladder rather than another, or the precise nature of the class-crime relationship. This book avers that the same factors that help to determine a person's class level also help to determine that person's risk for committing criminal acts. Social class is a modern outcome of primordial status-striving and requires explanation using the modern tools of genetics, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology, and this is what this book does. Many aspects of criminal behavior can be understood by examining the shared factors that lead to the success or failure in the workplace and to pro- or antisocial activities.

A biosocial approach requires reducing sociology's "master variable" to a lower level analysis to examine its constituent parts, which is resisted by many criminologists as highly controversial. However, this book makes plain that the more we know about the nature side of behavior the more important we find the nurture side to be. It makes clear how the class/crime relationship and criminology in general, can benefit from the biosocial perspective; a perspective that many criminological luminaries expect to be the dominant paradigm for the twenty first century.

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans, in highly readable essays, from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: Who is multiracial? How does class influence racial identity? How does social class status vary among multiracial populations? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an "honorary white"? What is the relationship between social class, culture, and race? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds? What are multiracial Americans' explanations for racial inequality in the United States?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of sociology, race and ethnic studies, social stratification, race relations, and cultural studies.

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans, in highly readable essays, from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: Who is multiracial? How does class influence racial identity? How does social class status vary among multiracial populations? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an "honorary white"? What is the relationship between social class, culture, and race? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds? What are multiracial Americans' explanations for racial inequality in the United States?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of sociology, race and ethnic studies, social stratification, race relations, and cultural studies.

Classed Intersections examines the salience, transformation and tension of class analysis at a crucial juncture in its return to and reinvention of sociological agendas. The contributors, including both established and emerging academics, examine class as produced through combined social, cultural and economic practices but are clear not to reify class over and above other paradigms; instead a number of key intersections are fore grounded including gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The collection draws on a variety of methodological positions, including in-depth interviews, ethnographies, and auto-biographical approaches. It scrutinizes classed intersections across a wide range of social spheres and practices, including education, the workplace, everyday life, citizenship struggles, consumption, the family and sexuality. Taken together, this volume will enhance efforts to establish 'new' working class studies both in the UK and around the world.

How should we understand the personal and social impacts of complex mobility systems? Can lifestyles based around intensive travel, transport and tourism be maintained in the 21st century? What possibility post-carbon lifestyles?

In this provocative study of "life on the move," Anthony Elliott and John Urry explore how complex mobility systems are transforming everyday, ordinary lives. The authors develop their arguments through an analysis of various sectors of mobile lives: networks, new digital technologies, consumerism, the lifestyles of ?globals?, and intimate relationships at-a-distance. Elliott and Urry introduce a range of new concepts ? miniaturized mobilities, affect storage, network capital, meetingness, neighbourhood lives, portable personhood, ambient place, globals ? to capture the specific ways in which mobility systems intersect with mobile lives.

This book represents a novel approach in "post-carbon" social theory. It will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate students, postgraduates and teachers in sociology, social theory, politics, geography, international relations, cultural studies, and economics and business studies.