Search

Two years after Erik Olin Wright’s death, this article rereads one of his most famous works, Class Counts. This book, published in 1997, can be considered at the same time a contemporary classic of scientific Marxism and the manifest of neo-Marxist class analysis. The objectives of the article are manifold. Firstly, it contextualizes the author’s theoretical contribution in his biography, emphasizing his complicated relationship with sociology as a Marxist. Then, it focuses on the book’s specific contribution in terms of conceptual work, also looking at the theoretical implications of the empirical results. Finally, it reflects on the resilience of the heuristic capacity of Wright’s categories to understand social inequalities in contemporary society.

Two years after Erik Olin Wright's death, this article rereads one of his most famous works, Class Counts. This book, published in 1997, can be considered at the same time a contemporary classic of scientific Marxism and the manifest of neo-Marxist class analysis. The objectives of the article are manifold. Firstly, it contextualizes the author's theoretical contribution in his biography, emphasizing his complicated relationship with sociology as a Marxist. Then, it focuses on the book's specific contribution in terms of conceptual work, also looking at the theoretical implications of the empirical results. Finally, it reflects on the resilience of the heuristic capacity of Wright's categories to understand social inequalities in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu's recasting of the question of class exemplifies the major features of his sociology and the way he extends, melds and mends classical views into a distinctive framework. Bourdieu's approach is relational, agonistic, and synthetic; it spotlights the symbolic dimension of group formation as practical achievement while fusing theory and research; and it introduces multiple correspondance analysis as a statistical technique suited to grasping constellations of multiple capitals. Bourdieu reformulates the problem of domination by questioning the ontological status of collectives and by forging tools for elucidating the politics of group-making: the sociosymbolic alchemy where- by a mental construct is turned into a historical reality through the inculcation of schemata of perception and their deployment to draw, enforce, or contest social boundaries. The article traces the impetus behind the key conceptual shifts Bourdieu effects, from class structure to social space, from class consciousness to habitus, from ideology to symbolic violence, and from ruling class to field of power. It also points to recent studies that have tried, tested, and refined the core tenets of his model as well as offers a bibliography of Bourdieu's publications on class documenting a twofold empirical and analytic shift towards a sociology of the realization of categories that spotlights the constitutive power of symbolic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces this issue's special section on Pierre Bourdieu's contribution to class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In current theoretical and policy debate concerning urban regeneration in Europe, the neighbourhood has re-emerged as an important setting. This paper addresses the theme of urban regeneration drawing on a research study about a specific «area and people-based» program, realized in two neighbourhoods in Turin. In these selected areas some estates, originally built to host athletes and journalists during the Olympic Winter Games (2006), were converted into social housing units meant to promote social mix among less and more well off inhabitants of the area. The aim of the study is to gain a better insight into the development and the outcome of the program. Evidence is offered from a survey on orientations and behaviours concerning social relationships in one of the two neighbourhoods, after two years from the intervention. The core question of the paper is whether the effect of cohesion and cooperation among people living in the same area, but belonging to different social classes, has taken place as expected. The paper explores factors and mechanisms explaining the partial failure of this social and urban experiment, focusing on the experience of daily inclusion/exclusion from a specific shared place. Concepts from institutional economy are introduced to enlighten the complexity of this experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a research conducted on different classes of people responsible for social and political problems of Italy and discusses measures to be taken to address the issue. For the research, a questionnaire was prepared in which people were asked to indicate, within a list of 11 categories, the grade of responsibility of each with respect to the problems in the country. A medium point structure was given to businessmen while the journalists and trade unionists were given a modest responsibility.