Long Lives Are for the Rich is the title of a silent ominous program that affects the lives of millions of people. In all developed countries disadvantaged and, especially, poor people die much earlier than the most advantaged. During these shorter lives they suffer ten to twenty years longer from disabilities or chronic disease. This does not happen accidentally: health inequalities – including those between healthy and unhealthy life styles – are mainly caused by social inequalities that are reproduced over the life course. This crucial function of the life course has become painfully visible during its neoliberal reorganization since the early 1980s. Studies about aging over the life course, from birth to death, show the inhumane consequences as people get older. In spite of the enormous wealth that has been piled up in the US for a dwindling percentage of the population, there has been growing public indifference about the needs of those in jobs with low pay and high stress, but also about citizens from a broad middle class who can hardly afford high quality education or healthcare. However, this ominous program affects all: recent mortality rates show that all Americans, including the rich, are unhealthier and dying earlier than citizens of other developed countries. Moreover, the underlying social inequalities are tearing the population apart with nasty consequences for all citizens, including the rich. Although the public awareness of the consequences has been growing, neoliberal policies remain tempting for the economic and political elites of the developed world because of the enormous wealth that is flowing to the top. All this poses urgent questions of social justice. Unfortunately, the predominant studies of social justice along the life course help to reproduce these inequalities by neglecting them. This book analyzes the main dynamics of social inequality over the life course and proposes a theory of social justice that sketches a way forward for a country that is willing to invest in its greatest resource: the creative potential of its population.

Much more than a simple compendium on the shape of social differentiation in China today, this ambitious volume takes on the earth-shattering shifts that officially swept away the concept of class (even as class contradictions grow ever sharper) and that replaced that term with 'stratum,' in line with regime 'dreams' of 'harmony.' The authors offer us a kaleidoscope of history, politics, and much else interpreted through the lens of class, providing a sophisticated, elegant set of chapters. The work amounts to a virtual treatise on Chinese society today - most of whose contributions would qualify as high-caliber journal articles. The tome provides a vigorous justification for a resurgence of class analysis.' - Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, US'China has witnessed extraordinary shifts in class structures in recent decades, affecting a fifth of the world's population. The Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China is the most comprehensive book on this vital topic. It brings together the expertise of twenty academic specialists on China, who write with admirable clarity and insight on the various important aspects of China's social hierarchy. This book is a tour de force.' - Jonathan Unger, Australian National University and Editor, The China Journal 'This Handbook is an ideal text for courses on class and stratification in China as well as an excellent introduction for readers interested in knowing more about China. It includes many interesting topics, it is clearly written and highly readable and it addresses the continuity and change of contemporary Chinese society and politics.' - Xiaowei Zang, City University of Hong Kong This comprehensive and interdisciplinary Handbook illustrates the patterns of class transformation in China since 1949, situating them in their historical context. Presenting detailed case studies of social stratification and class formation in a wide range of settings, the expert international contributors provide invaluable insights into multiple aspects of China's economy, polity and society. The Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China explores critical contemporary topics which are rarely put in perspective or schematized, therefore placing it at the forefront of progressive scholarship. These include; - state power as a determinant of life chances - women's social mobility in relation to marriage - the high school entrance exam as a class sorter - class stratification in relation to health - China's rural migrant workers and labour politics. Eminently readable, this systematic exploration of class and stratification will appeal to scholars and researchers with an interest in class formation, status attainment, social inequality, mobility, development, social policy and politics in China and Asia. Contributors: J. Andreas, M. Blecher, J. Chan, M. Chen, L. Chunling, L. Du, M. Gao, B.C. Garcia, D.S.G. Goodman, Y. Guo, R. Hasmath, P. Lu, S. Sargeson, M. Selden, W. Sun, L. Tomba, T.E. Woronov, X. Wu, S. Yu, Z. Zhang

Fewer than 100 people own and control more wealth than 50 per cent of the world's population. The Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich is a landmark multidisciplinary evaluation of both the lives and lifestyles of the super-rich, as well as the processes that underpin super-wealth generation and its unequal distribution. Drawing on international case studies, leading experts from across the social sciences offer 22 accessible and coherently organized chapters, which critically analyse a range of topics including: the legitimacy of extreme wealth from a moral economic perspective biographies of illicit super-wealth London's housing markets how the very wealthy fly the environmental consequences of super-rich lives crafting immigration policies to attract the rich. Students and scholars studying a host of topics such as development studies, economics, geography, history, political science and sociology will find this book eminently engaging. It will also be of great interest to public commentators, charitable organizations and NGOs concerned with wealth and income distributions. Contributors: R. Atkinson, J.V. Beaverstock, L. Budd, R. Burrows, L. Crewe, A. Davison, A.D. Dixon, R. Forrest, D.R. Green, S. Hall, T. Hall, I. Hay, I. Kapoor, S.Y. Koh, G. Mangraviti, A. Martin, I.A. Osuoka, A. Owens, R. Palan, C. Paris, D. Rhodes, A. Sayer, P.G. Schervish, S. Schulz, J.R. Short, E. Spence, A. Watson, B. Wissink, M. Woods, A. Zalik

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy-victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby-Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their "forgotten" neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this "the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America." The Other Side of Prospect is a reportorial tour de force, at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life, told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.

Those who regard him as a "doom and gloom" critic will find an unexpected Chomsky in these pages. Here the world-renowned author speaks for the first time in depth about his career in activism, and his views and tactics. Chomsky offers new and intimate details about his life-long experience as an activist, revealing him as a critic with deep convictions and many surprising insights about movement strategies. The book points to new directions for activists today, including how the crises of the Coronavirus and the economic meltdown are exploding in the critical 2020 US presidential election year. Readers will find hope and new pathways toward a sustainable, democratic world.

American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy. In particular, how we can understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich. To trace the evolution of the American state, the author takes a deep politics approach, shedding light on those political practices that are typically repressed in "mainstream" discourse. In its long history before World War II, the US had a deep political system--a system of governance in which decision-making and enforcement were carried out within--and outside of--public institutions. It was a system that always included some degree of secretive collusion and law-breaking. After World War II, US elites decided to pursue global dominance over the international capitalist system. Setting aside the liberal rhetoric, this project was pursued in a manner that was by and large imperialistic rather than progressive. To administer this covert empire, US elites created a massive national security state characterized by unprecedented levels of secrecy and lawlessness. The "Global Communist Conspiracy" provided a pretext for exceptionism--an endless "exception" to the rule of law. What gradually emerged after World War II was a tripartite state system of governance. The open democratic state and the authoritarian security state were both increasingly dominated by an American deep state. The term deep state was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it herein refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions. Key institutions involve the relationships between the overworld of the corporate rich, the underworld of organized crime, and the national security actors that mediate between them. History-making interventions include the toppling of foreign governments, the launching of aggressive wars, and the political assassinations of the 1960s. The book concludes by assessing the prospects for a revival of US democracy.

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women's studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

After the end of America's longest (20-year) war in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost more than $6 trillion and nearly half a million lives, what does the future hold for America and the American people in the 21st century? In this timely and important book, Berch Berberoglu provides an eye-opening account of the history of the American Empire from its inception to the present, with prospects for its future. Examining the worldwide expansion of the American Empire over the course of its turbulent history in great detail, Berberoglu assesses America's imperial legacy in a sober way, highlighting its failure to come to terms with the enormous cost of this adventure in imperial overreach. But Berberoglu sees light at the end of the long, dark tunnel, when the American people will awaken and lead the way to a new America after empire in the coming decades of the 21st century.

Social Inequality Across the Generations provides an innovative perspective on social stratification studies by advancing the theoretical and empirical case for the influence of resource compensation. It examines whether resource compensation is a successful mechanism for social mobility, contrasting it against competing types of resource accumulation such as multiplication. So, this book is the first to extensively cover the role of compensation in intergenerational attainment - a new and rapidly spreading concept in stratification research. The editors bring together research on different types of resources contributing to social mobility from the nuclear family, extended family and society, including in-depth analysis of the influence of wider family members in three different contexts and specific empirical chapters covering European and US societies. The authors cover a variety of institutional systems that achieve similar results through contrasting methods, and this conceptual framework reveals which policies have the biggest effect on social mobility. The book offers original insight into intergenerational inequality and mobility for researchers and students of social stratification research and social mobility, particularly within sociology, social policy and economics. Contributors include: F. Bernardi, H.-P. Blossfeld, D. Boertien, J. Erola, M. Gratz, J. Helemae, M. Kainu, J. Kallio, O. Kangas, E. Kilpi-Jakonen, H. Lehti, A. Minello, J. Palme, F.T. Pfeffer, I. Prix, H. Poeylioe, E. Saar, O.N. Wiborg

First published in 1982, Professor Bauman's discussion of the mechanism of class formation and institutionalisation of class conflict argues that our understanding of changes in social and political structure has been hindered by the freezing of concepts of class in the ice-age of industrial society. He investigates the impact of historical memory on the early transformation of rank into a class society, and on the current confusion in the analysis of the 'crisis of late-industrial society'. The book traces the formation of a class society back to the patterns of 'surveillance power' and control, and shows how these patterns preceded and made possible the industrial system. Subsequently 'economised' into the industrial system, these same patterns of control have now proved to be inadequate under social conditions brought about by this economisation of the power conflict.

This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction-Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place-to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.

Social Mobility: Chance or Choice?, a sequel to `Born to Fail? Social Mobility, a Working Class View' (October 2017), sets out the current chances and choices available for those considered by the establishment to need social mobility. Revisiting mutuality, Sonia Blandford asks whether we care enough as a society by considering the issues, solutions and impact to the education and social issues that push against the chance or choice of social mobility. Citing the views from interviews with education and business leaders, Social Mobility: Chance or Choice? reflects on the changing skillsets and capacities of workers required by employers, business and industry and the inescapable conclusion that the skillsets and capacities will continue to change in ways that are almost impossible for us to predict. In these contexts, we must question whether the traditional acme and 'recognised journey' of educational achievement - maximising university entrance - is still relevant or useful for working class children and young people and children facing disadvantage. Apprenticeships, at their best, can offer an updated and forward-facing solution to the providing choice for working class and all children and young people. Despite current policy developments to encourage meaningful apprenticeships, apprenticeship programmes are experiencing challenges. Social Mobility: Chance or Choice? argues that applied learning and work-based learning should be more accessible and available to all children and young people. If we are serious about unleashing the talent of all children and young people, regardless of their background, challenges or needs, we must consider new and innovative approaches to post-14 education. If we are to unleash the potential of all children and young people, the role of Further Education needs to be respected and understood. Quality Further Education and training in partnership with business is a credible answer to social mobility. Further Education is an underused but ideally placed sector to develop meaningful change for working-class young people, providing real chances and choices. Beginning with Leaders - professionals, practitioners, parents or carers, and members of society have a shared responsibility to ensure that all children and young people have a right to chance or choice and support these opportunities. Building a society that is truly inclusive.

This is the history of England's turbulent times, told through the stories of the country's nobility. The book begins with the Norman Conquest in 1066 and ends with the union of England and Scotland in 1707. The nobility fought wars against Scotland in the north and against France on the Continent. They conquered Ireland and Wales and then had to deal with the rebellions that followed. This is the story of their abduction plots and assassination attempts and the brutal retribution when the treachery failed. It recalls the barons' rebellions and the peasant uprisings against the king. It also explains the reasons behind the family factions who fought for the crown, the most famous example being the War of the Roses. Also covered are the noble marriages arranged by the king to reward loyalty and maintain the balance of power. It tells of the children betrothed to marry, the failed marriages of convenience and the secret marriages for love. Learn how Henry VIII introduced new problems when he appointed himself head of the Church of England. Successive monarchs switched between the new church and the Catholic Church. Then there was the challenge to Charles I's rule in the Civil Wars.The story ends with the union of England and Scotland and the creation of Great Britain in 1707. It was also the end of the period of treachery and retribution which had plagued the English crown for nearly 650 years.

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.

Good Company: A Tramp Life, is a vivid portrait of a lifestyle long part of America's history, yet rapidly disappearing. The author traveled extensively by freight train to gain rich insights into the elusive world of the tramp.Richly illustrated with 85 photographs by the author, the book presents the homeless man as an individual who "drank, migrated, and worked at day labor" rather than the stereotype of a victim of alcoholism. The tramps with whom Harper shared boxcars and hobo jungles were the labor force that harvested the crops in most of the apple orchards in the Pacific Northwest. They were drawn to the harvest from across the United States and migrated primarily on freight trains, as had hobos in the 1930s. Although not without its problems, the tramp way of life is a fierce and independent culture that has been an integral part of our American identity and an important part of our agricultural economy. Since the first edition of this classic book was published by the University of Chicago Press, the tramp has virtually disappeared from the American social landscape. The agricultural labor force is now made up of Hispanic migrants. This significantly revised and updated edition contrasts this disappearing lifestyle with the homelessness of the modern era, which has been produced by different economic and sociological forces, all of which have worked against the continuation of the tramp as a social species. The new edition richly documents the transition in our society from "tramps" to urban homelessness and the many social, political, and policy changes attendant to this transformation. It also includes an additional thirty-five previously unpublished photographs from theoriginal research.

A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China's troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi's family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated "new woman" exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang's trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China's early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen's rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.

Even as COVID-19 made a seismic impact across the world, the cracks exposed by Brexit, Black Lives Matter and rising levels of race hate crimes revealed bitter divisions in British society. In the aftermath of the pandemic, and with questions over the breakup of the United Kingdom refusing to dissipate, how do people across Britain choose to navigate the tensions in this divided land? With a foreword by Kit de Waal, This Separated Isle explores how concepts of 'Britishness' reveal an inclusive range of opinions and understandings about our national character. Featuring a diverse range of fascinating photographic portraits of people from across the UK and their accompanying narrative stories, this landmark book examines the relationship between identity and nationhood, revealing not only what divides us, but also the ties that bind us together as a nation.

By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China's (CCP's) impact on social change in China between 1978 and 2021. This book explores in depth the CCP's programme of reform and openness that had a dramatic impact on China's socio-economic trajectory following the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It also goes on to chart the acceptance of Market Socialism, highlighting the resulting emergence of a larger middle class, while also appreciating the profound consequences this created for workers and peasants. Additionally, this volume examines the development of the dominant class which remains a defining feature of China's political economy and the Party-state. Providing an in-depth analysis of class as understood by the CCP in conjunction with sociological interpretations of socio-economic and socio-political change, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese History, Asian Politics, and Asian studies.

Drawing on primary qualitative research, this book explores the experiences and identities of a group of British-born women of Bangladeshi background attending university in London through a Bourdieusian theoretical framework. It demonstrates the inequities that these women experience in UK higher education and employment as well as how they challenge them. This book presents stories that illuminate the diversity of views and experiences marked by dynamics of class, race, ethnicity, religion and gender. These stories reveal family projects of social mobility and discourses of aspiration, the multiple resources and constraints that influence decisions, experiences and pathways, and the mutual construction of different dimensions of identification and tensions between them. Through participants' narratives, the book tackles wider questions around fair access to education and employment, social mobility and the (re)production and transformation of social inequities. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Youth, Education, Race/Ethnicity and Migration Sociology, as well as community and education practitioners and anyone with an interest in multi-ethnic societies and young people's histories.

Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

As the world changes, so sexual identities are changing. In a context of globalisation, mass communication and technological advances, individuals find themselves able to make lifestyle choices in new and different ways. In this increasingly confusing world, sociologists have argued that identities are in flux, and that traditional patterns of identity and intimacy are being disrupted and reshaped, with all the implications for sexual identities that this suggests. Changing Gay Male Identities draws on the powerful life stories of twenty-one gay men to explore how individuals construct and maintain their sense of self in contemporary society. The book draws upon theoretical debates on topics such as gender, performance, sex, class, camp, race and ethnicity, to explore four aspects of identity: the role of the body in who we are relationships and communities performing in everyday life reconciling different aspects of our selves (such as religion and sexuality). In Changing Gay Male Identities Andrew Cooper assesses the magnitude of these social and sexual changes. He argues that although there are many opportunities for new forms of identity in a changing world, the possibilities can be significantly constrained, and that this has major implications for the freedoms and choices of individuals in contemporary societies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, sexuality studies, gender studies, and GLBTQ studies.

The site of industrial struggle is shifting. Across the Global South, peasant communities are forced off the land to live and work in harsh and impoverished conditions. Inevitably, new methods of combating the spread of industrial capitalism are evolving in ambitious, militant and creative ways. This is the first book to theorise and examine the present and future shape of global class struggles. Immanuel Ness looks at three key countries: China, India and South Africa. In each case he considers the broader historical forces at play - the effects of imperialism, the decline of the trade union movement, the class struggle and the effects of the growing reserve army of labour. For each case study, he narrows his focus to reveal the specifics of each grassroots insurgency: export promotion and the rise of worker insurgency in China, the new labour organisations in India, and the militancy of the miners in South Africa. This is a study about the nature of the new industrial worker in the Global South; about people living a terrifying, precarious existence - but also one of experimentation, solidarity and struggle.

Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's social space theory, this book provides an unprecedent overview of class relations, covering topics such as class polarisation, cultural reproduction, political orientations, and globalisation. The book applies Bourdieusian social space approach to show how class boundaries have been maintained or transformed in different European countries. Based on quantiative data, it proposes a renewal of the analysis of distances, divides, and relations of domination between social classes, documenting objective and symbolic boundaries that form the basis of individuals' living and working conditions in 11 European countries. Focusing on transformations of wealth inequalities, education strategies, and European labour markets, the book examines the role of cultural, economic and social capital. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, in particular to those studying social and wealth inequalities in a comparative perspective and Master's students in European studies.