Arranged around the themes of theorizing and policy-making, race, ethnicity and religion, gender, and class, inequality and welfare, this book addresses the question of whether the European Union tends towards diversification or standardization. It engages with issues of identity, citizenship and social justice, changes throughout the life course, social movements, the reconciliation of work and life, the increasing diversity of cultural values, and integration and immigration, whilst also examining questions of social inclusion and exclusion. Presenting a general theoretical framework for the simultaneous analysis of standardization and diversification processes, alongside detailed case studies at EU and national levels, Diversity, Standardization and Social Transformation explores the interactions between national, European and regional regulatory spaces.

Presenting recent studies of non-profit organizations involved in poverty relief services in New York City in comparison with programmes in existence across the US, Street Practice provides a front-line, ground-level perspective on innovative research practices designed to solve community problems. It explores the manner in which organizations bridge the gap between research and policy advocacy, with an account of the ways in which research contributes to alleviating or solving a community problem, as well as details on successes and failures of advocacy work, problems and limitations of their research, funding constraints and political resistance. As such, this book not only offers compelling examples of social change in action, but also serves to introduce models for research and policy advocacy that can be applied similarly in other urban areas. Adopting a case-based learning approach that enables readers to better understand the dynamic process of research and policy advocacy, this innovative book will appeal to those with interests in poverty, homelessness, policy advocacy, social work and social change.

Debates over who belongs in Europe and who doesn't increasingly speak the language of mixing, but how are the figures commonly described as 'mixed' actually embodied? The Biopolitics of Mixing invites us to reckon with the spectres of pathologization past and present, placing the celebration of mixing beside moral panics over terrorism and trafficking and a post-race multiculturalism that elevates some as privileged members of the neoliberal community, whilst ghosting others from it. Drawing on a broad archive including rich qualitative interviews conducted in Britain and Germany, media and policy debates, popular culture, race-based research and queer-of-colour theories, this book imagines into being communities in which people and places normally kept separate can coexist in the same reality. As such, it will appeal to scholars across a range of sociological and cultural studies, including critical race, ethnic and migration studies, transnational gender and queer studies, German and European studies, Thai and Southeast Asian studies, and studies of affect, performativity, biopolitics and necropolitics. It should be read by all those interested in thinking critically on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability.

The social scientific study of social movements remains largely shaped by categories, concepts and debates that emerged in North Atlantic societies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely resource mobilization, framing, collective identity, and new social movements. It is now, however, increasingly clear that we are experiencing a profound period of social transformation associated with online interactivity, informationalization and globalization. Written by leading experts from around the world, the chapters in this book explore emerging forms of movement and action not only in terms of the industrialized countries of the North Atlantic, but recognizes the importance of globalizing forms of action and culture emerging from other continents and societies. This is the first book to bring together key authors exploring this transformation in terms of action, culture and movements. It not only engages with critical transformations in the nature of collective action, but also makes a significant contribution to the globalizing of sociology.

Drawing on several years of research with grief support organizations and the families and friends of murdered children, this book examines the emotional experience of families in the aftermath of a homicide. It examines the politics of sorrow, offering a comparative analysis of White and African-American families as they navigate the experience of homicide, shedding light on the ways in which the class location or ethnicity of mourners affects their experience. Analyzing the manner in which police and other authorities differentially extend emotional support to bereaved families, notify them of a homicide, or assign blame, The Politics of Sorrow reveals how 'disenfranchised grief' comes to be an institutionalized outcome of their practice. The book further examines the effects of 'announcement shock' and the importance to the family of the moral career of the deceased, as they seek to manage his or her identity, often dealing with their grief through an active pursuit of justice in court, or through political involvement with a grief support organization, which mobilizes families in pursuit of its political ends. A rigorous study of stigma, identity, and stratified experiences of grief, The Politics of Sorrow will appeal to sociologists interested in interactionist methods, race, class, and emotion.

Recent efforts emphasize the roles that privilege and elite education play in shaping affluent youths' identities. Despite various backgrounds, the common qualities shared among the eight adolescents showcased in this book lead them to form particular understandings of self, others, and the world around them that serve as means for them to negotiate their privilege. These self-understandings are crucial for them to feel more at ease with being privileged, foster a positive sense of self, and reduce the negative feelings associated with their advantages - thus managing expectations for future success. Offering an intimate and comprehensive view of affluent adolescents' inner lives and understandings, Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts explores these qualities and provides an important alternative perspective on privilege and how privilege works. The case studies in this volume explore different settings and lived experiences of eight privileged adolescents who, influenced by various sources, actively construct and cultivate their own privilege. Their stories address a wide range of issues relevant to the study of adolescence and the various social class factors that mediate adolescents' educational experiences and identities.

Going beyond the assumption that East Central European cities are still 'in transition' this book draws on the postsocialism paradigm to ask new questions about the impact of demographic change on residential developments in this region. Focussing on four second-order cities in this region, it examines Gdansk and LA(3)dz in Poland and Brno and Ostrava in the Czech Republic as examples and deals with the nexus between urban development and demographic change for the context of East Central European cities. It provides a framework for linking urban and demographic research. It discusses how residential areas and urban developments cope with changes in population development, household types and different forms of in- and out-migration and goes on to explore parallels and differences in comparison with broader European patterns. This book will be useful to academics of urban planning and development especially in transition areas, Central and Eastern European studies, demographics and population studies, and sociology/social exclusion.

Drawing upon quantitative data gathered from the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Education, as well as interviews with students from a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality examines the question of who really benefits from public higher education. It engages with questions of social capital, opportunity, funding and access to education, presenting a rich discussion of social mobility, the value of college education and the impact of education upon the redistribution of income. A thorough exploration of the real impact of college on American society, this volume will appeal to social scientists with interests in education, social capital, social stratification, class and social mobility.

Despite an extensive literature on homelessness there is surprisingly little work that investigates the roots of homelessness by tracking homeless people over time. In this fascinating and much-needed ethnographic study, Megan Ravenhill presents the results of ten years' research on the streets and in the hostels and day-centres of the UK, incorporating intensive interviews with 150 homeless and formerly homeless people as well as policy makers and professionals working with homeless people. Ravenhill discusses the biographical, structural and behavioural factors that lead to homelessness. Amongst the important and unique features of the study are: the use of life-route maps showing the circumstances and decisions that lead to homelessness, a systematic study of the timescales involved, and a survey of people's exit routes from homelessness. Ravenhill also identifies factors that predict those most vulnerable to homelessness and factors that prevent or considerably delay the onset of homelessness.

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

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.

While in recent years the burgeoning Higher Education (HE) sector has been set an agenda of widening participation, few HE institutions have strategies in place for reaching the full range of potential students most likely to benefit from (and successfully complete) their current subject and course offerings. Universities and colleges are often unsystematic in the ways in which they identify schools and colleges for outreach and widening participation initiatives, and sometimes uncoordinated in how they present the full institutional profile of subjects of study in these activities. Using innovative methodology, this book sets out some relevant aspects of the changing HE policy-setting arena and presents a systematic framework for broadening participation and extending access in an era of variable fees. In particular, the book illustrates how HE data and publicly available sources might enable institutions to move from piecemeal analysis of their intake to institution-wide strategic and geographical market area analysis for existing and potential subject and course offerings.

Sarah Swann provides a fresh approach to examining the long-standing debates over disaffection, and in particular social class differences in educational achievement, through a mixed methods methodology and the showcasing of new research. By observing pupils as they engage with peers and teachers in school, Swann allows disaffection to be seen and heard in 'real' events which constructs disaffection differently from objective statistical evidence on school exclusions. Rather than a homogenous identity, this book illustrates disaffection as layered and resting on a series of issues located on the crossroads between the cultural context of the neighbourhood and the public sphere of the school. It plots in a detailed way how these structures interact and mesh to create disaffected identities. Disaffection does not emerge in a vacuum, or without a cause. Pupils arrive at school with a wide variety of experiences and it is from these that they interpret, understand and act out their identities. Whilst the study in part seeks to describe and understand the social world of the school in terms of the pupils' interpretations of the situation, it analytically frames the perceptions of pupils within a wider social context. In particular it focuses on the relationships between schooling and the wider macro structures and social relations that underpin disaffection. This approach makes the research both critical and interpretative and also able to shed new light on educational policy across England based on an understanding of the role of disaffection.

Social movements have shaped and are shaping modern societies around the globe; this is evident when we look at examples such as the Arab Spring, Spain's Indignados and the wider Occupy movement. In this volume, experts analyse the 'classic' and new social movements from a uniquely global perspective and offer insights in current theoretical discussions on social mobilisation. Chapters are devoted both to the study of continental developments of social movements going back to the nineteenth century and ranging to the present day, and to an emphasis on the transnational dimension of these movements. Interdisciplinary and truly international, this book is an essential text on social movements for historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and social scientists.

Unequal life-chances became a key feature of cross-border migration to, and within, the enlarged Europe. Combining transnational, intersectional and cultural-sociological perspectives, this book develops a conceptual tool to analyse patterns, contexts and mechanisms of these cross-border inequalities. This book synthesizes the theories of social boundaries and of intersectionality, approaching cross-border relations as socially generated and as an inherent element of contemporary social inequalities. It analyses the mechanisms of cross-border inequalities as 'regimes of intersection' relating spatialized cross-border inequalities to other types of unequal social relations (in terms of gender, ethnicity/race, class etc.). The conceptual arguments are supported by empirical research on cross-border migration in Europe: migration of scientists and care workers between Ukraine and Germany. This book integrates the analysis of space - including cross-border categories of global and transnational - into intersectionally-informed studies of social inequalities. Broadly, it will appeal to scholars and students in the areas of sociology, political sciences, social anthropology and social geography. In particular, it will interest researchers concerned with transnational and global social inequalities, the interplay of the categories 'gender', 'ethnicity' and 'class' on the one hand and global and transnational relations on the other, theories of space and society, and migration and mobility in Europe.

Issues of poverty and social exclusion are high on the European policy agenda. The Dynamics of Social Exclusion in Europe reports findings from a study funded by the European Commission, using data from the European Community Household Panel, with a multi-dimensional approach to international comparisons of poverty and social exclusion. The research, building upon that of the preceding book - Poverty and Social Exclusion in Europe - compares four groups who are anticipated to be at particular risk of poverty and social exclusion; young adults, lone parents, the sick or disabled, and those retired from employment. Following individuals over a twelve month period, the analysis explores a wide range of indicators of poverty and social exclusion. These include low incomes, lack of household amenities, personal necessities and consumer durables, and the extent of social contact with friends, neighbours and membership of clubs or organisations. The contributors not only provide country-based data, locating empirical findings in the context of national policy, but also cross-national data, with implications for supranational policy. Promoting a thorough understanding of policy trends and issues, this book will be invaluable to policy makers within individual countries and at EU level, as well as academics, students and researchers specialising in social exclusion.

In many European countries, processes of individualisation have contributed to transforming the middle class into a multitude of people, a sort of 'middle mass' with an unstable social identity and radical activism. The different 'worlds' of European welfare states seem progressively less able to manage this new kind of middle-class activism. This book is an essential contribution to ongoing public and academic debates on the unpredictability of middle-class attitudes and on their changing relations with the welfare state. Identifying key trends in the literature, it considers the impact of recent welfare reforms on the needs and preferences of the middle class.

This book presents a class-based analysis of poststructuralism and race. The author positions this fundamental question at the heart of his project: why does race still work if it is commonly misunderstood to be a social construct? The answer is that race works because it operates like a commodity, and like any commodity, as long as it generates value (understood in the widest possible sense: economic, political, and cultural-ideological value), it will remain in circulation. This study should contribute to our understanding of race by linking questions of use value to exchange value.

This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siecle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Perez Galdos and Emilia Pardo Bazan, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuna and Belen Sarraga. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.

In the years 1849 and 1850, Henry Mayhew was the metropolitan correspondent of the Morning Chronicle in its national survey of labour and the poor. Only about a third of his Morning Chronicle material was included in his later and better known, publication, London Labour and the London Poor. First published in 1981, this series of six volumes constitutes Henry Mayhew's complete Morning Chronicle survey, in the sequence in which it was originally written in 1849 and 1850. It addresses a wealth of topics from cholera in the Jacob's Island area and to the food markets of London. The publication of this complete survey represented the first time in which the whole was Mayhew's pioneering work was available in one place. The set is introduced by Dr Peter Razzell, who was co-editor of the national Morning Chronicle survey. This first volume contains letters from October to November 1849. This series will be of interest to those studying the history of social welfare, poverty and urbanisation.

Fifty years ago, familiar images of the lottery would have been strange, as no state lottery existed then. Few researchers have uncovered the obscure role lotteries play in the changing composition of American taxation. Even less is known about what role race plays in this process. More than simply taxing those on the social margins, the emergence of state lotteries in contemporary American history represents something much more fundamental about state fiscal policy. This book not only uncovers the underlying racial factors that contextualize lottery proliferation in the U.S., but also reveals the racial consequences that lotteries have in terms of redistributing tax liability.

This book challenges sociologists and sociology students to think beyond the construction of social problems to tackle a central question: What do sociologists do with the analytic tools and academic skills afforded by their discipline to respond to social problems? Service Sociology posits that a central role of sociology is not simply to analyse and interpret social problems, but to act in the world in an informed manner to ameliorate suffering and address the structural causes of these problems. This volume provides a unique contribution to this approach to sociology, exploring the intersection between its role as an academic discipline and its practice in the service of communities and people. With both contemporary and historical analyses, the book traces the legacy, characteristics, contours, and goals of the sociology of service, shedding light on its roots in early American sociology and its deep connections to activism, before examining the social context that underlies the call for volunteerism, community involvement and non-profit organisations, as well as the strategies that have promise in remedying contemporary social problems. Presenting examples of concrete social problems from around the world, including issues of democratic participation, poverty and unemployment, student involvement in microlending, disaster miitigation, the organization and leadership of social movements, homelessness, activism around HIV/AIDS and service spring breaks, Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems explores the utility of public teaching, participatory action research, and service learning in the classroom as a contribution to the community.

In When Did We All Become Middle Class?, Martin Nunlee discusses how a lack of class identity gives people a false sense of their relationship to power, which has made the US population accept the myth that they live in a meritocracy. This book examines social class within the framework of psychological tendencies, everyday interactions, institutions and pervasive cultural ideas to show how Americans have shifted from general concerns of social and economic equality to fragmented interests groups. Written in a conversational style, this book is a useful tool for undergraduate courses covering social class, such as inequality, stratification, poverty, and social problems.

The Rise of Professional Society lays out a stimulating and controversial framework for the study of British society, challenging accepted paradigms based on class analysis. Perkins argues that the non-capitalist "professional class" represents a new principle of social organization based on trained expertise and meritocracy, a "forgotten middle class" conveniently overlooked by classical social theorists.

It's no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There's Society, and then there's Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latter. Real Society is not about the money-or rather, it's not only about the money-it is about history, breeding, tradition, and most of all, the name. The Right People is an engrossing and illuminating journey through the customs and habits of the phenomenally wealthy, from the San Francisco elite to the upper crust of New York's Westchester County. It is a marvelously anecdotal, intimately detailed overview of the lives of the American aristocracy: where they gather and dine; their games and sports, clubs and parties, friendships and feuds; their mating, marriage, and divorce rituals-a potpourri of priceless true stories featuring the Astors, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Dukes, Biddles, and other lofty names from the pages of the Social Register.