One of the most important results of the French Revolution was the destruction of the old feudal order, which for centuries had kept the common people of the countryside subject to the lords. In this book, John Markoff addresses the ways in which insurrectionary peasants and revolutionary legislators joined in bringing "the time of the lords" to an end and how, in that ending, seigneurial rights came to be central to the very sense of the Revolution. He traces the interaction of peasants and legislators, showing how they confronted, challenged, and implicitly negotiated with one another during the course of events.

Contrary to many historians who see the source of revolutionary change in elite culture, Markoff argues that peasant insurrection was a crucial element of the transformation of France. Of particular importance to the study is Markoff's analysis of the unique cahiers de doleances, the lists of grievances drawn up in 1789 by rural communities, urban notables, and nobles alike. These documents are invaluable for understanding the Revolution, but until the pioneering work of Markoff and Gilbert Shapiro, they had not been studied systematically at the national level. In addition to an unprecedented quantitative analysis of the cahiers, Markoff traces the ebb and flow of peasant insurrection across half a decade of revolutionary turbulence. He also offers qualitative analysis through his use of the records of the legislative debates as well as the memoirs and journals of the legislators.

The Abolition of Feudalism breaks new ground in charting patterns of grievance and revolt in one of the most important social and political upheavals in history.

For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against them, many people still believe they can overcome the economic and racial constraints placed upon them at birth. In the first edition, Heather Beth Johnson explored this belief in the American Dream with over 200 in-depth interviews with black and white families, highlighting the ever-increasing racial wealth gap and the actual inequality in opportunities. This second edition has been updated to make it fully relevant to today's reader, with new data and illustrative examples, including twenty new interviews. Johnson asks not just what parents are thinking about inequality and the American Dream, but to what extent children believe in the American Dream and how they explain, justify, and understand the stratification of American society. This book is an ideal addition to courses on race and inequality.

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition's examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today's celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

This study, first published in 1986, provides a systematic account of the processes and structure of class formation in the major advanced capitalist societies. The focus is on the organizational mechanisms of class cohesion and division, theoretically deriving from a neo-Marxian perspective. Chapters consider the organization and structure of the 'corporate ruling class', the middle class and the working class, and are brought together in an overarching analysis of the organization of class in relation to the state and the economy. This title will be of particular interest to students researching the impact of recession on societal structure and the processes of political class struggle, as well as those with a more general interest in the socio-economic theories of Marx, Engels and Weber.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail with an extraordinary account of a woman committing massive welfare fraud. The story caught fire and a devastating symbol of the misuse government programs was born: the Welfare Queen. Overthrowing the Queen examines these legends of fraud and abuse while bringing to light personal stories of hardship and hope told by cashiers, bus drivers, and business owners; politicians and aid providers; and, most important, aid recipients themselves. Together these stories reveal how the seemingly innocent act of storytelling can create not only powerful stereotypes that shape public policy, but also redemptive counter-narratives that offer hope of a more accurate, fair, and empathetic view of poverty in America today. Overthrowing the Queen tackles perceptions of welfare recipients while proposing new approaches to the study of oral narrative that extend far beyond the study of welfare, poverty, and social justice.

The rapid shift of German elite groups' political loyalties away from Nazism and toward support of the fledgling democracy of the Federal Republic, in spite of the continuity of personnel and professional structures, has surprised many scholars of postwar Germany. The key, Hayse argues, lies in the peculiar and paradoxical legacy of these groups' evasive selective memory, by which they cast themselves as victims of the Third Reich rather than its erstwhile supporters. The avoidance of responsibility for the crimes and excesses of the Third Reich created a need to demonstrate democratic behavior in the post-war public sphere. Ultimately, this self-imposed pressure, while based on a falsified, selective group memory of the recent past, was more important in the long term than the Allies' stringent social change policies.

First published in 1979, Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy integrates and interprets the vast corpus of existing research on social class, slums, and crime, and presents its own findings on these matters. It explores two major questions. First, do policies designed to redistribute wealth and power within capitalist societies have effects upon crime? Second, do policies created to overcome the residential segregation of social classes have effects on crime? The book provides a brilliantly comprehensive and systematic review of the empirical evidence to support or refute the classic theories of Engles, Bonger, Merton, Cloward and Ohlin, Cohen, Miller, Shaw and McKay, amongst many others. Braithwaite confronts these theories with evidence of the extent and nature of white collar crime, and a consideration of the way law enhancement and law enforcement might serve class interest.

Much of the literature on globalization has centered on the large, macro-level forces that influence the ways ideas, people, and various forms of capital move around the world. From this vantage point, discussions about the progressive feminization of migration, in particular the feminization of out-migration from rural areas, indicate an intriguing trend. Simultaneously, the local experience of global forces is an important way of exploring how macro-level processes are navigated by social actors on the ground. This provides added texture to our understanding of why and how people make decisions about their lives within an increasingly interconnected social, economic, and political environment. This volume explores whether concurrent patterns in identity development, social relations, and youth behaviors on the micro-level might help explain similarities observable at the macro-level. Through a triangulated approach that balances between statistical backdrops, extant quantitative research, and in-depth qualitative interviews, this book theorizes about shifts in gender normativity, efforts towards social mobility, and the possible effects of an increasingly globalized society. To do this, it examines the decision-making processes employed by high-achieving young women from rural areas in Vermont and Leinster, Ireland as they figured out who they wanted to become as adults and where they wanted to be those people. Remaining mindful of structural constraints and using the lens of the "psychic landscape" (Reay 2005) to view class as a reflexive practice, this book peers into the ways certain types of identity evident among blue-collar students seem to be carving out some potential for social and spatial mobility amidst both global and local trends.

Much has been written about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which brought out deep racial tensions throughout the city, exposed by media images of police brutality. This book sheds light on another facet of the events, the birth of a dynamic grassroots activist and community organizing movement that has been little noticed by academics or even by the press. It also focuses on the theatrical production of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, a performance created by Anna Deavere Smith. Performance and Activism analyzes a rich, eclectic, and ongoing ensemble of local activist struggles in the context of the history and political economy of Los Angeles. Building on the important critical urban studies work of Mike Davis and Edward Soja, it also draws on Dwight Conquergood's writings on performance ethnography to theorize the political work of grassroots formations such as alternative/underground media collectives, gang truce parties/picnics, and women-organized prisoner support and court watch groups, such as Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. The book focuses on these events through the inter-disciplinary approach of performance studies, highlighting "performance-conscious activisms" that help bridge the enormous class, race, and gender divides of our society.

The major themes explored in this book, originally published in 1986, are the political resonances of social stratification and change; the growing distance between the working class and the providers of social services; and the role of locality in social reproduction.

The relationship between society and space is the subject of a major debate in developed countries. The key questions are about just how far spatial patterns and local conditions affect social relations and stratification and how far they shape collective action, electoral responses and class.

The emergence of the African middle class as a driver of Africa s economic growth stands out as an important milestone in Africa s contemporary economic history. This growth, though uneven, is a source of hope for Africa but also a signal to the rest of the world on the prospects for economic recovery and renewal, particularly because it has been steady despite the global downturn."

The Emerging Middle Class in Africa" analyses specific aspects of the lives of the middle class in Africa. It looks at how people become and remain in the middle class through a series of thematic chapters. It examines how behaviour changes in the process, in terms of consumption patterns, and spending on health and education. A further dimension taken up in this analysis is how class impacts gender relations and whether women are equally reaping the benefits of social advancement as men. Africa is a continent of such scale and diversity that experiences across countries vary widely. The book thus captures the common patterns across the continent.

This book is primarily aimed at Africanist researchers, policy makers, students of African studies, political science, political economy, development studies and development economics as well as development practitioners, and bilateral and multilateral institutions."

Focusing on the working-class experience of gentrification, this book re-examines the enduring relationship between class and the urban. Class is so clearly articulated in the urban, from the housing crisis to the London Riots to the evocation of housing estates as the emblem of 'Broken Britain'. Gentrification is often presented to a moral and market antidote to such urban ills: deeply institutionalised as regeneration and targeted at areas which have suffered from disinvestment or are defined by 'lack'. Gentrification is no longer a peripheral neighbourhood process: it is policy; it is widespread; it is everyday. Yet comparative to this depth and breadth, we know little about what it is like to live with gentrification at the everyday level. Sociological studies have focused on lifestyles of the middle classes and the working-class experience is either omitted or they are assumed to be victims. Hitherto, this is all that has been offered. This book engages with these issues and reconnects class and the urban through an ethnographically detailed analysis of a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification which historicises class formation, critiques policy processes and offers a new sociological insight into gentrification from the perspective of working-class residents. This ethnography of everyday working-class neighbourhood life in the UK serves to challenge denigrated depictions which are used to justify the use of gentrification-based restructuring. By exploring the relationship between urban processes and working-class communities via gentrification, it reveals the 'hidden rewards' as well as the 'hidden injuries' of class in post-industrial neighbourhoods. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive 'sociology of gentrification', revealing not only how gentrification leads to the displacement of the working class in physical terms but how it is actively used within urban policy to culturally displace the working-class subject and traditional

As middle classes in developing countries grow in size and political power, do they foster stable democracies and prosperous, innovative economies? Or do they encourage crass materialism, bureaucratic corruption, unrealistic social demands, and ideological polarization? These questions have taken on a new urgency in recent years but they are not new, having first appeared in the mid twentieth century in debates about Latin America. At a moment when exploding middle classes in the global South increasingly capture the world's attention, these Latin American classics are ripe for revisiting. Part One of the book introduces key debates from the 1950s and 1960s, when Cold War era scholars questioned whether or not the middle class would be a force for democracy and development, to safeguard Latin America against the perceived challenge of Revolutionary Cuba. While historian John J. Johnson placed tentative faith in the positive transformative power of the "middle sectors," others were skeptical. The striking disagreements that emerge from these texts lend themselves to discussion about the definition, character, and complexity of the middle classes, and about the assumptions that underpinned twentieth-century modernization theory. Part Two brings together more recent case studies from Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, written by scholars influenced by contemporary trends in social and cultural history. These authors highlight issues of language, identity, gender, and the multiple faces and forms of power. Their studies bring flesh-and-blood Latin Americans to the forefront, reconstructing the daily lives of underpaid office workers, harried housewives and striving professionals, in order to revisit questions that the authors in Part One tended to approach abstractly. They also pay attention to changing cultural understandings and political constructions of who "the middle class" is and what it means to be middle class. Designed with the classroom and non-specialist reader in mind, the book has a comprehensive critical introduction, and each selection is preceded by a short description setting the context and introducing key themes.

Shifts in America's socioeconomic geography have been documented since the 1960s, demonstrating the reversal of white flight and the reshaping of a nation, evidenced by the growing divide between underprivileged citizens and the wealthy. As state and local governments continue to scale back social services that impact health and well-being, how will disenfranchised groups fare in this expanding, market-driven global society? Uprooting Urban America addresses this query by examining the social consequences of policies that change urban landscapes during the process of gentrification. In this book, junior and senior scholars present contemporary research findings and innovative strategies within the fields of education, healthcare, geography, sociology and policy studies. The book is ideal for graduate and advanced graduate level courses in the disciplines of education, sociology, cultural studies, political science, public policy, urban planning, social justice education and health care and human services.

Since the introduction of economic reforms in the mid-1980 which sought to create a socialist-oriented market economy in Vietnam, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life. This book analyzes the ways in which class identities are forged and contested through the practices and discourses of domestic service, which, is central to middle-class domesticity in Vietnam today. 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 more and more 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, and these boundaries are ridden with gender and class anxiety, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the workers. More broadly, Minh T. N.Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with broader political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As an ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

How do the media represent obesity and eating disorders? How are these representations related to one another? And how do the news media select which scientific findings and policy decisions to report? Multi-disciplinary in approach, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media presents critical new perspectives on media representations of obesity and eating disorders, with analyses of print, online, and televisual media framings. Exploring abjection and alarm as the common themes linking media framings of obesity and eating disorders, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media shows how the media similarly position these conditions as dangerous extremes of body size and food practice. The volume then investigates how news media selectively cover and represent science and policy concerning obesity and eating disorders, with close attention to the influence of pre-existing framings alongside institutional and moral agendas. A rich, comprehensive analysis of media framings of obesity and eating disorders - as embodied conditions, complex disorders, public health concerns, and culturally significant phenomena - this volume will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences and all those interested in understanding cultural aspects of obesity and eating disorders.

Shifts in America's socioeconomic geography have been documented since the 1960s, demonstrating the reversal of white flight and the reshaping of a nation, evidenced by the growing divide between underprivileged citizens and the wealthy. As state and local governments continue to scale back social services that impact health and well-being, how will disenfranchised groups fare in this expanding, market-driven global society? Uprooting Urban America addresses this query by examining the social consequences of policies that change urban landscapes during the process of gentrification. In this book, junior and senior scholars present contemporary research findings and innovative strategies within the fields of education, healthcare, geography, sociology and policy studies. The book is ideal for graduate and advanced graduate level courses in the disciplines of education, sociology, cultural studies, political science, public policy, urban planning, social justice education and health care and human services.

First published in 1989, this book focuses on the policing of male violence against women. It is an issue that has been criticised substantially in the past, and the book shows how even police themselves have sometimes admitted that women have received inadequate treatment. The book includes contributions from North America, Australia, and Western Europe and looks at different approaches that have been taken by states in intervening into the violence of men against women. Chapters explore the differences and similarities of policing practices in western societies at the time surrounding the book's original publication.

India's economic growth has brought opportunities for many but to what extent has it benefitted its ethnically-shaped underclass: the Dalits? Have Dalits fared better in a neoliberal India or have structural economic and social changes served to magnify Dalit disadvantage? This volume offers a varied picture of Dalit experience in different states in contemporary India. The essays draw on factual research in rural and urban areas by experts in the field. With case studies ranging from Dalit entrepreneurs in Bhopal to housewives in Tamil Nadu to ex-millworkers in Mumbai, the book contends that radically progressive change and advance is attended by discrimination and exclusion, as well as surprising new areas of stigma. With contributions by political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, the volume will be key reading for scholars and students of Dalit and subaltern studies, sociology, political science, and economics.

Non-manual workers are fast becoming the largest occupational category in Western capitalist countries. This is the first book to present a detailed socialist analysis of this much discussed change in the class structure of contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the class position of managerial and supervisory workers, Robert Carter takes as his starting-point the inadequacy of both orthodox Marxist and Weberian models of class relations. Rather, he concurs with recent structuralist theorists of class who maintain that there exists between capital and labour in the process of producing a new middle class. He parts company from the work of these theorists, however, in his insistence that the organisation and consciousness of the new middle class have also to be examined because of the practical consequences these have on class relations. The book therefore examines the historical rise of the middle class, both in the private and the state sector, together with the tendency of the class to respond to its changing relations with capital and labour by unionising. It is sharply critical of the dominant models of the causes and nature of white-collar unionism - both industrial relations and Weberian ones - and indeed rejects these models in favour of a perspective which views the extent and nature of middle-class unionism within the dynamics of class relations.

This book is abut the place of space in the study of class formation. It consists of a set of papers that fix on different aspects of the human geography of class formation at different points in the history of Britain and the United States over the course of the last 200 years. The book shows that the geography of class formation is a valuable and cross-disciplinary tool in the study of modern societies, integrating the work of human geographers with that of social historians, sociologists, social anthropologists and other social scientists in an enterprise which emphasises the essential unity of social science.

Professor Wesolowski presents a detailed study of Marx's theory of class structure and compares it with non-Marxist theories of social stratification, in particular the functionalist theory of stratification and the theory of power elite. He is also concerned to develop and extend the Marxist approach to the study of class structure and social stratification in a socialist society. The book begins with a thorough and original reconstruction of Marx's theory of class domination in a capitalist society, and goes on to show that contemporary non-Marxist theories of power elites complement rather than contradict Marx's concept of class domination. The author examines in detail the functionalist theory of stratification, but rejects it, preferring the Marxist approach. Finally, though, he demonstrates the complementary nature of the two approaches to the study of class structure by expounding a comprehensive paradigm for empirical research based on Marxist theory but including some elements of contemporary stratification theories as well.

The migration of professionals is widely seen as a paradigmatic representation and a driver of globalization. The global elite of highly qualified migrants-managers and scientists, for example-are partly defined by their lives' mobility. But their everyday lives are based and take place in specific cities. The contributors of this book analyze the relevance of locality for a mobile group and provide a new perspective on migrant professionals by considering the relevance of social identities for local encounters in socially unequal cities. Contributors explore shifting identities, senses of belonging, and spatial and social inequalities and encounters between migrant professionals and 'Others' within the cities. These qualitative studies widen the understanding of the importance of local aspects for the social identities of those who are in many aspects more privileged than others.

An incidental pleasure of watching a film is what it tells us about the society in which it is made. Using a sociological model, The British working class in postwar film looks at how working-class people were portrayed in British feature films in the decade after the Second World War. Though some of the films examined are well known, others have been forgotten and deserve reassessment. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Students of media and cultural studies are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields. This work should appeal to all readers interested in social history and in how cinema and society works. -- .