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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Social classes > Social mobility
Migration has always been a fundamental human activity, yet little collaboration exists between scientists and social scientists examining how it has shaped past and contemporary societies. This innovative volume brings together sociocultural anthropologists, archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, ethnographers, paleopathologists, and others to develop a unifying theory of migration. The contributors relate past movements, including the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the Islamic conquest of Andalucia, to present-day events, such as those in northern Ethiopia or at the U.S.-Mexico border. They examine the extent to which environmental and social disruptions have been a cause of migration over time and how these migratory flows have in turn led to disruptive consequences for the receiving societies. The observed cycles of social disruption, resettlement, and its consequences offer a new perspective on how human migration has shaped the social, economic, political, and environmental landscapes of societies from prehistory to today.
Rising levels of global inequality and migrant flows are both critical global challenges. Set within the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia, Going Nowhere Fast sets out to answer a question of global importance: how does inequality persist in our increasingly mobile world? Inequality is often referred to as the greatest threat to democracy, society, and economy, and yet opportunity has apparently never been more accessible. Long and short distance transport - from motorbikes to aeroplanes - are available to more people than ever before and telecommunications have transformed our lives, ushering in an era of translocality in which the behaviour of people and communities is influenced from hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. Yet amidst these complex flows of people, ideas, and capital, persistent inequality cuts a jarringly static figure. Going Nowhere Fast brings together a decade of research to examine this uneven development in Cambodia, making a case for inequality as a 'total social fact' rather than an economic phenomenon, in which stories, stigma, obligation and assets combine to lock social structures in place. Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality speaks from an in-depth perspective to an issue of global relevance: how inequality persists in our hypermobile world. Focusing on pressing issues in Cambodia that resonate beyond, it investigates how human movement within and across the nation's borders are intertwined with societal threats and challenges, including of precarious labour and agricultural livelihoods; climate and environmental change; the phenomenon of land grabbing; and the rise of popular nationalism.
India remains a country mired in poverty, with two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people living on little more than a few dollars day. Just as telling, the country's informal working population numbers nearly 500 million, or approximately 80 percent of the entire labor force. Despite these figures and the related structural disadvantages that imperil the lives of so many, the Indian elite hold fast to the idea that the poor need only work harder and show some discipline and they, too, can become rich. The results of this ambitious ten-year ethnography at exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore shatter such self-serving illusions. In Narrow Fairways, Patrick Inglis combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to show how social mobility among the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy upper-caste members at these clubs is ultimately constrained and narrowed. The book highlights how elites secure and extend class and caste privileges, while also delivering a necessary rebuke to India's present development strategy, which pays far too little attention to promoting quality health care, education, and other basic social services that would deliver real opportunities to the poor.
India remains a country mired in poverty, with two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people living on little more than a few dollars day. Just as telling, the country's informal working population numbers nearly 500 million, or approximately 80 percent of the entire labor force. Despite these figures and the related structural disadvantages that imperil the lives of so many, the Indian elite hold fast to the idea that the poor need only work harder and show some discipline and they, too, can become rich. The results of this ambitious ten-year ethnography at exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore shatter such self-serving illusions. In Narrow Fairways, Patrick Inglis combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to show how social mobility among the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy upper-caste members at these clubs is ultimately constrained and narrowed. The book highlights how elites secure and extend class and caste privileges, while also delivering a necessary rebuke to India's present development strategy, which pays far too little attention to promoting quality health care, education, and other basic social services that would deliver real opportunities to the poor.
The Great Migration--the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in the twentieth century--shaped American culture and life in ways still evident today. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere. Black Southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban wards of Houston, Texas, for new opportunities in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They took with them the South's rich tradition of religion, language, music, and art, recreating and preserving their Southern identity in the churches, newspapers, jazz clubs, and neighborhoods of America's largest cities. Rutkoff and Scott's sweeping study explores the development and adaptation of African American culture, from its West African roots to its profound and lasting impact on mainstream America. Broad in scope and original in its interpretation, "Fly Away" illuminates the origins, development, and transformation of national culture during an important chapter in twentieth-century American history.
Although Canada is known internationally as a leader among industrialized countries for inclusive practices towards immigrants and refugees, the twenty-first century has witnessed a rise in the number of refugees and temporary migrant workers who are often denied citizenship and may also experience detention and deportation. Containing Diversity examines to what extent Canada's long-standing support for immigration, multiculturalism, and citizenship has shifted in favour of discourses, policies, and practices that "contain" diversity. This book reflects on how diversity is being "contained" through practices designed to insulate the Canadian settler-colonial state. In assessing the Canadian government's policies towards refugees and asylum seekers, economic migrants, family-class migrants, temporary foreign workers, and multiculturalism, the authors show the various contradictory practices in effect. Containing Diversity reflects on policy changes, analysed alongside the resurgence of right-wing political ideology and the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Containing Diversity highlights the need for a re-imagining of new forms of solidarity that centre migrant and Indigenous justice.
How have immediate school-to-work transitions and early careers changed in different labor market entry regimes since the early 1980s? How do institutional frameworks differ with regard to insecurity perception? This book investigates these topics from a cross-national perspective while focusing on Denmark, the darling of flexicurity literature. The results show that in all the labor market entry regimes, the school-to-work transition has become increasingly difficult, and flexible forms of work are more typical in the first job. Furthermore, the liberal institutional framework of the United States seems to produce a similarly low degree of job-loss worry among young people in their early careers as does the Danish paradigm. Contents include: employment flexibilization and increasing economic insecurity at labor market entry * the role of institutional settings for shaping school-to-work transitions * the Danish flexicurity as a framework for labor market entry processes * insecurity experiences: the development of employment risks at labor market entry since the 1980s * insecurity perception: the translation of unemployment risks into job-loss worry in times of flexible employment.
This book is an ethnography of labor mobility and its challenges to the idea of the nation. Using the example of francophone Canada, it examines how social difference-race, ethnicity, language, gender-has been used to sort out who must (or can) be mobile and who must (or can) remain in place in the organization of global circulation of human and natural resources. It argues that "francophone Canada" can best be understood as an ethnoclass category that has embedded francophones into specific forms of labor mobility since the beginnings of European colonization, even as their social difference has been constructed as national in the interests of gaining political power. The result has been an erasure both of francophone mobilities and of their contribution to the rooted community that lies at the heart of the idea of the nation, and of francophone capacity to resist economic marginalization and exploitation. By following French Canadian workers back and forth between eastern and central Canada and the frontiers of the Canadian northwest, Sustaining the Nation explores how contemporary forms of labor mobility make it increasingly difficult for national structures and discourses to produce the francophone nation. By following the ideological tensions between language as a skill and language as a marker of belonging, the authors present grounded evidence of how the globalized new economy challenges the nation-state, and how mobilities and immobilities are co-constructed.
Literacy education has historically characterized mass media as manipulative towards young people who, as a result, are in need of close-reading "skills." By contrast, Pop Culture and Power treats literacy as a dynamic practice, shaped by its social and cultural context. It develops a framework to analyse power in its various manifestations, arguing that power works through popular culture, not as everyday media. Pop Culture and Power thus explores media engagement as an opportunity to promote social change. Seeing pop culture as a teaching opportunity rather than as a threat, Dawn H. Currie and Deirdre M. Kelly worked with K-12 educators to investigate how pop culture can support teaching for social justice. Currie and Kelly began the research for this project with a teacher education seminar in media analysis where participants designed classroom activities using board games, popular film, music videos, and advertisements. These activities were later piloted in participants' classrooms, enabling the authors to identify and address practical issues encountered by student learners. Case studies describe the design, implementation, and retrospective assessment of activities engaging learners in media analysis and production. Following the case studies, the authors consider how their approach can foster ethical practices when engaging in the digital environment. Pop Culture and Power offers theoretically informed yet practical tools that can help educators prepare youth for engagement in our increasingly complex world of mediated meaning making.
The lives of wealthy people have long held an allure to many, but the lives of wealthy Russians pose a particular fascination. Having achieved their riches over the course of a single generation, the top 0.1 percent of Russian society have become known for ostentatious lifestyles and tastes. Nevertheless, as Elisabeth Schimpfoessl shows in this book, their stories reveal a bourgeois existence that is distinct in its circumstances and self-definition, and far more complex than the caricatures suggest. Rich Russians takes a deep and unprecedented look at this group: their personal stories, trajectories, ideas about life and how they see their role and position both on top of Russian society as well as globally. These people grew up and lived through a historically unique period of economic turmoil and social change following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But when taken in a wider historical context, their lives follow a familiar path, from new money to respectable money; parvenus becoming part of Society. Based on interviews with millionaires, billionaires, their spouses and children, Rich Russians concludes that, as a class, they have acquired all sorts of cultural and social resources which help consolidate their personal power. They have developed distinguished and refined tastes, rediscovered their family history, and begun actively engaging in philanthropy. Most importantly, they have worked out a narrative to justify why they deserve their elitist position in society - because of who they are and their superior qualities - and why they should be treated as equals by the West. This is a group whose social, cultural and political influence is likely to outlast any regime change. As the first book to examine the transformation of Russia's former "robber barons" into a new social class, Rich Russians provides insight into how this nation's newly wealthy tick.
A fresh take on social class from the experts behind the BBC's 'Great British Class Survey'. Why does social class matter more than ever in Britain today? How has the meaning of class changed? What does this mean for social mobility and inequality? In this book Mike Savage and the team of sociologists responsible for the Great British Class Survey look beyond the labels to explore how and why our society is changing and what this means for the people who find themselves in the margins as well as in the centre. Their new conceptualization of class is based on the distribution of three kinds of capital - economic (inequalities in income and wealth), social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive) - and provides incontrovertible evidence that class is as powerful and relevant today as it's ever been.
For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global knowledge wars. Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Global Auction forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. Drawing on cutting-edge research based on a major international study, the authors show that the competition for good, middle-class jobs is now a worldwide competition-an auction for cut-priced brainpower-fueled by an explosion of higher education across the world. They highlight a fundamental power shift in favor of corporate bosses and emerging economies such as China and India, a change that is driving the new global high-skill, low-wage workforce. Fighting for a dwindling supply of good jobs will compel the middle classes to devote more time, money, and effort to set themselves apart in a bare-knuckle competition that will leave many disappointed. The authors urge a new conversation about the kind of society we want to live in and about the kind of global economy that can benefit workers, but without condemning millions in emerging economies to a life of poverty. The Global Auction is a radical rethinking of the ideas that stand at the heart of the American Dream. It offers a timely expose of the realities of the global struggle for middle class jobs, a competition that threatens the livelihoods of millions of American and European workers and their families. "A brilliant new book." - Andrew Reinbach, The Huffington Post "This is a very important book. Their critique of the present state of global capitalism is both timely and convincing." - Roger Brown, Times Higher Education "[A]truly outstanding volume."-Lois Weis, University of Buffalo, British Journal of Sociology of Education. "The Global Auction is a must-read for parents, college students, and policymakers. We press the message to our children: 'Study. Get degrees. Get a good job. And you will live the good life.' But such claims are strikingly at odds with the realities of income stagnation and poor job prospects. The authors explain how this dramatic breakdown between rhetoric and reality happened and how we might reconstruct an alternative future in which education becomes meaningful and fulfilling in its own right." -Henry M. Levin, Columbia University "This is a challenging and very timely book. The gauntlet is thrown down to economists wedded to human capital theory and to sociologists who see education as the great engine of social mobility." -John Goldthorpe, University of Oxford "The Global Auction deals with one of the most pressing issues of our times: how the significant expansion in the labor supply available to multinational corporations is leading to dramatic shifts in the location of employment around the world. It draws on years of in-depth research, offering valuable insights for both academics and business leaders."-David Finegold, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey "Brown, Lauder, and Ashton's book is brilliantly argued and provides a wakeup call to global citizens everywhere. There is no substitute for the regulation of global capitalism in the interests of the many rather than the few, and this book slams the door on the last set of excuses for maintaining the current system-that somehow the educated will escape the race to the bottom."-Kevin Leicht, University of Iowa
In this fascinating and provocative book, David Willetts shows how the baby boomer generation has amassed unprecedented wealth and power at the expense of its children. Today's young people will pay heavier taxes, work longer hours for less money and live in a vastly degraded environment in order to pay for their parents' quality of life. Worried about the world they are passing on to their children, baby boomers are taking note. But are they willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a more equal distribution of wealth and assets? The Pinch is an insightful look at one of the most pressing issues facing Britain today; this fully revised and updated edition is essential reading for parents and policymakers alike.
Weaving Transnational Solidarity from the Catskills to Chiapas and Beyond analyzes the grassroots, economic justice work of three groups-two Mexican organizations, Jolom Mayaetik, Mayan women's weaving cooperative, and K'inal Antzetik, NGO in the highlands of Chiapas, and an informal, international solidarity network. The book provides scholar-activist, ethnographic case study data which contributes to understanding collective organization, and indigenous rights.
Since the nineteenth century, Greek financial and economic crises have been an enduring problem, most recently engulfing the European Union and EU member states. The latest crisis, beginning in 2010, has been - and continues to be - a headline news story across the continent. With a radically different approach and methodology, this anthropological study brings new insights to our understanding of the Greek crises by combining historical material from before and after the nineteenth century War of Independence with extensive longitudinal ethnographic research. The ethnography covers two distinct periods - the 1980s and the current crisis years - and compares Mystras and Kefala, two villages in southern Greece, each of which has responded quite differently to economic circumstances. Analysis of this divergence highlights the book's central point that an ideology of aspiration to work in the public sector, pervasive in Greek society since the nineteenth century, has been a major contributor to Greece's problematic economic development. Shedding new light on previously under-researched anthropological and sociological aspects of the Greek economic crisis, this book will be essential reading for economists, anthropologists and historians.
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality - a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make. As Devin Fergus shows in Land of the Fee, these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers - agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the development within the larger context of escalating income inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm. The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth inequality in America.
The Si, Yo Puedo (SYP) program manual is a step-by-step, culturally specific, 11-week curriculum for Spanish-English graduate level licensed mental health professionals (e.g., clinical social workers, professional counselors, family and marriage therapists, psychologists). Si, Yo Puedo is Yes, I Can in English. The empowerment program the text outlines is designed to provide education, promote self-esteem, prevent domestic violence, and help readers understand healthy relationships within a cultural framework. Participants meet weekly for two hours and examine topics addressing issues related to immigrant Latina women's sense of self, characteristics of healthy relationships and dating, keys to understanding the dynamics of domestic violence, and ways to access resources. The program manual includes structured sessions with goals and objectives, in-class self-reflection drawing and writing exercises, and handouts for the weekly topics. Upon completion of the SYP program, immigrant Latinas and Latinas in general will be empowered to examine current relationships and their self-esteem, and to potentially make changes in their lives.
Social mobility research has held a central place in the sociological analysis of industrialized countries of the west, particularly with regard to the study of stratification systems, their forms, and processes. The research on India has however been mostly scattered. The lack of systematic research in this area implies that we do not have a sense of the precise amount of social mobility in contemporary India, and the changes such mobility has had on social structures over time and across demographics. This book draws on national level datasets and quantitative methods to understand the multiple strands of social mobility or the lack of it, by focusing on the overlapping identities of social class, caste, and gender in both rural and urban context. It investigates the contemporary processes and drivers of mobility, and appraises the role of education in supporting or preventing increased upward social mobility by concentrating on those groups that are disadvantaged from this very opportunity. It also takes into account the impact of liberalization on social mobility and argues that mobility today is differentially patterned on the basis of local and global identities.
A critical examination of the complex system of college pricing-how it works, how it fails, and how fixing it can help both students and universities. How much does it cost to attend college in the United States today? The answer is more complex than many realize. College websites advertise a sticker price, but uncovering the actual price-the one after incorporating financial aid-can be difficult for students and families. This inherent uncertainty leads some students to forgo applying to colleges that would be the best fit for them, or even not attend college at all. The result is that millions of promising young people may lose out on one of society's greatest opportunities for social mobility. Colleges suffer too because losing these prospective students can mean lower enrollment and less socioeconomic diversity. If markets require prices to function well, then the American higher-education system-rife as it is with ambiguity in its pricing-amounts to a market failure. In A Problem of Fit, economist Phillip B. Levine explains why institutions charge the prices they do and discusses the role of financial aid systems in facilitating-and discouraging-access to college. Affordability issues are real, but price transparency is also part of the problem. As Levine makes clear, our conversations around affordability and free tuition miss a larger truth: that the opacity of our current college-financing systems is a primary driver of inequities in education and society. In a clear-eyed assessment of educational access and aid in a post-Covid economy, A Problem of Fit offers a trenchant new argument for educational reforms that are well within reach.
Poverty and Austerity amid Prosperity puts a sharp focus on rising levels of poverty and homelessness in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Highlighting the important differences between these countries, Gregg M. Olsen examines how poverty and homelessness have been conceptualized, defined, measured, and addressed in each country. Olsen critically contrasts the two main theoretical traditions - individual and societal - that have emerged to explain poverty and homelessness. Ultimately, he argues that societal approaches to the study of poverty are better equipped to explain the developments unfolding across these nations and that the eradication of poverty will only happen when the socioeconomic system has been seriously overhauled and founded upon economic democracy.
In Art Work, Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art - as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love, without any concern for its financial aspects - and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour. This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions behind Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.
When Americans conceptualize freedom, they often disproportionately focus on negative freedom, or freedom from government constraint-being told what they cannot say, which religion they cannot practice, where they cannot move, etc. By this measure, Americans are remarkably free. However, such a conceptualization of freedom is incomplete without including notions of positive freedom-possession of agency, to be able to think and act autonomously in pursuit of one's desired life. Positive freedom unlocks agency through more than the absence of something, but the presence of something else-the conditions which enable people's development of their abilities and access to crucial resources and opportunities. If we measure the freedom of Americans by positive freedom measures, we are falling behind our perceived status. In On Inequality and Freedom, a diverse group of authors discuss how a variety of contemporary American inequalities-from racial, economic, and gender, to health, environmental, and political inequalities-actually limit American freedom, regardless of how much negative freedom we possess. This book provides readers with a deeper understanding of what true freedom is and concrete steps toward restoring it.
Making Education Work for the Poor identifies wealth inequality as the gravest threat to the endangered American Dream. Though studies have clearly illustrated that education is the primary path to upward mobility, today, educational outcomes are more directly determined by wealth than innate ability and exerted effort. This accounting directly contradicts Americans' understanding of the promise the American Dream is supposed to offer: a level playing field and a path towards a more profitable future. In this book, the authors share their own stories of their journeys through the unequal U.S. education system. One started from relative privilege and had her way to prosperity paved and her individual efforts augmented by institutional and structural support. The other grew up in poverty and had to fight against currents to complete higher education, only to find his ability to profit from that degree compromised by student debt. To directly counter wealth inequality and make education the 'great equalizer' that Americans believe it to be, this book calls for a revolution in financial aid policy, from debt dependence to asset empowerment. The book examines the evidence base supporting Children's Savings Accounts, including CSAs' demonstrated potential to improve children's outcomes all along the 'opportunity pipeline': early education, school achievement, college access and completion, and post-college financial health. It then outlines a policy that builds on CSAs to incorporate a sizable, progressive wealth transfer. This new policy, Opportunity Investment Accounts, is framed as the cornerstone of the wealth-building agenda the nation needs in order to salvage the American Dream. Written by leading CSA researchers, the book includes overviews of the major children's savings legislation proposed in Congress and the key features of prominent CSA programs in operation around the country today, as well as new qualitative and quantitative CSA research. The book ultimately presents a critical development of the theories that, together, explain how universal, progressive, asset-based education financing could make education work equitably for all American children.
Migration presents a stark policy dilemma. Research repeatedly confirms that migrants, their families back home, and the countries that welcome them experience large economic and social gains. Easing immigration restrictions is one of the most effective tools for ending poverty and sharing prosperity across the globe. Yet, we see widespread opposition in destination countries, where migrants are depicted as the primary cause of many of their economic problems, from high unemployment to declining social services. Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets addresses this dilemma. In addition to providing comprehensive data and empirical analysis of migration patterns and their impact, the report argues for a series of policies that work with, rather than against, labour market forces. Policy makers should aim to ease short-run dislocations and adjustment costs so that the substantial long-term benefits are shared more evenly. Only then can we avoid draconian migration restrictions that will hurt everybody. Moving for Prosperity aims to inform and stimulate policy debate, facilitate further research, and identify prominent knowledge gaps. It demonstrates why existing income gaps, demographic differences, and rapidly declining transportation costs mean that global mobility will continue to be a key feature of our lives for generations to come. Its audience includes anyone interested in one of the most controversial policy debates of our time. |
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