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Amid renewed debates and theorizing about informality and the role of informal workers in Africa and across the globe, there remains little in the way of class-based understandings of Africa's informal workers and of informal worker politics. Marxists, especially Analytical Marxists, have been slow to study and consider the role and potential role of informal workers in geopolitics and class struggle across the Global South, and Africa, in particular. Drawing on ethnographic field work and interviews conducted in Sierra Leone, and broader informal worker-led struggles and events across Africa and the Global South, this work argues for a renewed understanding of collective action and class formation among informal workers. JEL Classification: J0, J2, J6 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines conflicting conceptualizations of the human subject in political ecology and geography: Foucauldian views of "subject-making" and Gramscian views of "the person". While Foucauldian work holds that the more complete exertion of power, the more coherent subject-making, Gramscian historical–geographical perspectives counter that, the more complete exertion of power, the more in coherent persons and their class-based collectivities. Outlining incongruities between these approaches, I argue that the "dark side" of Gramscian political ecology—with its emphasis on incoherence and fracture–allows geographers new nuance in understanding the human subject, although not without challenges to the actual writing of such scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a case study of algorithmically controlled manual labour in German manufacturing and delivery logistics, this article develops the concept of cybernetic proletarianization. It does so by joining an empirical analysis of labour processes with theoretical class analysis. Thus, it reconstructs Marx's understanding of technical proletarianization as a dialectic between expulsion and reintegration of living labour in production processes. In the cases researched here, a qualitative and quantitative expulsion of living labour could be observed in different forms: First, deskilled flexibilization via digital instructions on working steps; second, a cybernetic mode of work intensification that is based on a permanent digital evaluation of the labour process; third, data-based automation, which builds on the data collected from the labour processes. This expulsion is counterweighted by a process of reintegration of devaluated living labour due to new highly labour-intensive forms of production and distribution, which are enabled by algorithmic work control. However, these processes are highly conflictual, resulting in different 'technopolitics from below', in which workers influence or even disrupt the processes of cybernetic proletarianization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner's two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright's Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik's Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to the Critical Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erik Olin Wright's scholarship is often considered to be formed by two entirely disjoint projects represented by his early work on class analysis and his later writings on "real utopias." This essay uses Michael Burawoy's recent formulation of the "two Marxisms" thesis as a foil to argue for the continuities rather than discontinuities in the body of work produced by Wright. More particularly, the critical spirit of the real utopias project infused Wright's work on class analysis from its inception. It is further argued that the limitations Wright encountered in realizing those critical aims directly seeded the search in his later work for institutional design principles and an explicit articulation of normative values that could undergird alternatives to capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical right voters and parties are often characterized as conservative and traditionalist on issues of gender, sexuality, and morality. Common wisdom is that they reject the progressive sociopolitical shifts that began in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, some radical right parties, such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, maintain moderate positions on morality issues. Are radical right supporters still traditionalist? Latent class analysis applied to European Social Survey data from 10 West European countries reveals that radical right supporters belong to three ideologically distinct classes. The fastest growing group is the sexually-modern nativists, who make up about 45% by 2016. Contrary to extant literature, traditionalism no longer appears to be a major motivation for today's radical right. Instead, immigration and nationalism are now the core common concerns for radical right supporters in Western Europe. This development may be due to the Euro crisis and the migration crisis, which have increased the salience of national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis has re-emerged as a pertinent area of enquiry. This development is linked to a growing body of work dubbed cultural class analysis, that utilises Bourdieu's class scheme to develop rich understandings of how culture and lifestyle interacts with economic and social relations in Britain, generating inequalities and hierarchies. Yet cultural class analyses do not properly account for the way individuals resist their relative class positions, nor the role of unsecured credit in facilitating consumption. This article contributes to this area by examining how unsecured credit and problem debt influences consumption and class position amongst individuals with modest incomes. Drawing on 21 interviews with individuals managing problem debt, this article details how class inequality emerges through affective states that include anxiety and feelings of deficit. It also shows how these experiences motivate participants to rely on unsecured credit to consume cultural goods and engage in activities in a struggle against their class position, with the intention of enhancing how they are perceived and classified by others. The findings indicate that cultural class analyses may have overlooked the symbolic importance of mundane consumption and goods in social differentiation. This article further details how these processes entangle individuals into complex liens of debt – which lead to over-indebtedness, default, dispossession and financial expropriation – illustrating how investigations of credit-debt can better inform understandings of class inequality, exploitation and struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the 'death of class'. The ensuing 'cultural turn' in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between 'old' politics related to economic issues and 'new' politics related to 'post-material values' follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes critically the most recent scientific bibliography on the causes of the growth of mortality and morbidity in the white working class of the United States. The methodology used in these studies, and also the insufficient conceptualization of the variables used (such as social class), limits the understanding of the increment of the "diseases of despair" in that sector of the population. This article emphasizes the need to analyze the evolution of the social classes in the United States, and the political determinants that have changed not only the character and composition of that class, but also the power differentials between this class and other classes in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which Nepali migrants perceive, experience and rework their downward class mobilities within the processes of labour migration to South Korea (hereafter Korea). It focuses on the temporal dimension of the migration process in relation to the Korean labour migration regime in terms of three aspects: the temporariness of sojourn, temporal disjunctures and adaptations in workplaces, and temporal resynchronisation in transnational spaces. First, the article argues that the temporariness of their sojourn under the Employment Permit System (EPS) is perceived by migrants as a 'liminal time' or a 'time-out' from the life course, serving to make the precariousness of life and work bearable. Second, illustrating the subjective experiences of Nepali migrants as underclass workers in unfamiliar workplaces, the article argues that they experience their working-class positions through temporal disjunctures between time in Nepal and Korea, and heteronomous time as discipline under the EPS. Lastly, it is shown that their downward class identities are reworked by dividing working time and social time, with a further temporal resynchronisation between migrants and their homeland. The conceptual and empirical insights offered by this study aim to contribute to the discussions of temporalities of migration and class analysis of people on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Lockwood’s concept of the work situation and its fate within class analysis. For a brief period, this concept served to make the experiences that people have by virtue of their positions in the division of labour a central concern in class analysis. Over time, however, attention to such issues has given way to an increasing interest in workers’ individual characteristics, and the measurement of social mobility according to class schemes. Over recent decades, the wider contexts of ‘class culture’ and ‘social space’ have become common frames of interpretation. While these developments have all broadened understandings of social class, their net effect has been to break up the once close relation between class analysis and the study of work. Key findings from recent labour market research suggest that, in the current context of increasing inequality and precariousness, the contribution of class analysis might be strengthened by a reincorporation of attention to work situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of juvenile probation officers (JPOs) involves a balancing act between “child saving” and community safety activities. In this study, we examine JPOs’ supervision strategies and how these fit within a juvenile justice framework. Using surveys and latent class analysis, we examine the extent to which JPOs engage in a variety of case management and supervision strategies. Findings reveal little evidence supporting a purely law enforcement role and identified a new class of JPOs that does not fit within the traditional role definitions but focuses on a pro forma role that was nonengaged in case management and supervision activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyse class cultures by mapping out differences in ‘original taste’; that is, respondents’ classed preferences for food and drink. By employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we produce a relational model of tastes. Using three indicators of social class – occupational class, income and education – we find clear class divisions. The upper and middle classes exhibit diverse and what are typically regarded as ‘healthy’ tastes; this contrasts with the more restricted and what are typically regarded as ‘less healthy’ tastes found among the working classes. Our findings challenge ongoing debates within cultural stratification research where it has become almost usual to demonstrate that the contemporary upper and middle classes exhibit playful tastes for the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the ‘exotic’. We find that upper- and middle-class households also enjoy very traditional foodstuffs. We argue that this illustrates a need for a relational understanding of taste: even the consumption of the traditional peasant food of pre-capitalist Norway can be refashioned as a badge of distinction in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns of occupational mobility. In line with Max Weber, our research is based on the notion that, if class boundaries do not inhibit social mobility then the class categories are of little value. Thus, unlike dominant, theoretically defined class schemes, this article derives social class categories from observed patterns in a mobility network covering intra-generational mobility. The network is based on a mobility table of 109 occupational categories tied together by 1,590,834 job shifts on the Danish labour market 2001–2007. The number of categories are reduced from 109 to 34 by applying a new clustering algorithm specifically designed for the study of mobility tables (MONECA). These intra-generational social class categories are related to the central discussions of gender, income, education and political action by providing empirical evidence of strong patterns of intra-generational class divisions along these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent approaches to class analysis in advanced capitalism have been largely disconnected from the capitalist labour process. This paper has three basic goals. First, we suggest a composite Marxist model of current class structure grounded in ownership, managerial authority, specialized knowledge and value relations in the capitalist labour process. Secondly, this model is used for an empirical assessment of continuity and change in class structure, based on a series of national surveys in Canada in the period 1982–2010. Thirdly, using the same series of surveys, we use this model of class structure to evaluate the extent to which employment class positions are relevant for understanding shifting expressions of class consciousness. Within the employed labour force in this particular advanced capitalist country, we find a generally declining conventional working class and expanding proportions of managerial and professional employees. Connections between employment class positions and class consciousness can involve complex mediations. Evidence for the persistence of strong hegemonic consciousness among corporate capitalists is provided by an additional unique series of surveys. This persistence contrasts with declining working class identity and increasingly mixed class consciousness among most other employment class positions. However, pro-labour oppositional consciousness is found to dominate among unionized industrial workers and professional employees in the private goods-producing sector, who may be among the most directly exploited workers in value terms in an emergent ‘knowledge economy’. The findings suggest the continuing relevance of pursuing class analyses based on production relations in advanced capitalist economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on post-Keynesian macroeconomics, the French Regulation Theory and a Neo-Gramscian International Political Economy approach to class analysis to propose an International post-Keynesian Political Economy approach that is used to offer an empirical analysis of European growth models and working class restructuring in Europe between 2000 and 2008. We will distinguish between the ‘East’, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ and structure our analysis around industrial upgrading, financialisation and working class coherence. We find an export-driven growth model in the North, which came with wage suppression and outsourcing to the East. In the East, the growth model can be characterised as dependent upgrading, which allowed for high real wage growth despite declining working class coherence. The South experienced a debt-driven growth model with a real estate bubble and high inflation rates resulting in large current account deficits. Our analysis shows that class restructuring forms an integral part in the economic process that resulted in European imbalances and the Euro crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis has never gone out of fashion in Ukraine, but it has been conducted in ways that limit its effectiveness and ability to make sense of the world. It is marked by four aspects inherited from Soviet times: a focus on large-scale surveys offering only surface presentations of findings, a gradational rather than relational orientation to class, unwillingness to engage with subjective experiences of class, and a tendency towards functional legitimation of the existing order. Data showing significant transformation of social structure and high levels of inequality tend to be presented with little consideration of its meaning for people's lives. The absence of serious theoretical reflection, deep ethnographic analysis, or studies of class relations and power constitute significant handicaps for Ukrainian sociology. A recently created group of young sociologists gathered around the journal and website Commons/Spilne has been seeking to overcome these limitations. Embracing "public sociology's" aim of producing reflexive knowledge for academic and non-academic audiences alike, this new milieu, with its creators trained in western universities and engaged with Marxist social science and left-wing politics, has explored topics such as changing relations in work, the informal economy, independent unions, labor mobilization, and ethnographic study of workers' life-worlds. Pressing work still needs to be done on the oligarchical business class, middle-class activists, class politics across regions, and the Maidan events of 2014 and the conflicts and violence that have followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critique of classic applications of class analysis to Polish society. It argues from a Bourdieusian standpoint that class is subordinate to culture in shaping social relations in Poland. More specifically, Poland can be seen as a dual-stratification order, with the economic logic of class clashing continually with the logic of rank, which is defined in terms of cultural capital. These two models of logics appear to be in constant competition, which may also be related to the tension between economic and cultural elites. The latter is most clearly represented by the old intelligentsia, which is the only faction of the elite able to reproduce itself successfully and impose its logic of stratification and ideology on the entire society. The article also argues that class and rank logic can be seen as two dimensions of a social structure that are much more autonomous than in a typical western society. Within these two dimensions, there is a constant competition between different modes of framing and regulating respective hierarchies. In this internal competition of hierarchies, rank and class use each other to reinforce particular arguments. A sound class analysis must recognize these tensions and seek to reconstruct the process of confrontation between particular modes of logic and their internal visions, rather than arbitrarily embracing one form of logic as the privileged one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class became virtually a taboo topic in Poland after the fall of the communist system, and a discourse of "normality" took hold. Social scientists and journalists considered new market institutions natural and inescapable and urged people to adapt. Sociologists were more interested in the identity of the new elites than the social consequences of the new capitalism, and a cult of a not-yet-existing "middle class" quickly grew. Inequality and poverty, previously understood as systemic, were now presented as due to individual pathology. That class talk became so marginalized despite the historical robustness of Polish sociology as a discipline is explained by the dominance of a functionalist stratification paradigm, which kept questions relevant to the new system, about emerging class relations and power, from even being raised. Polish sociology thus appeared stuck in the past and in the future--thinking about stratification without power, and imagining an individualist meritocracy as already in effect--but not ready to ask about the class formation and new economic relations of the present. The paucity of class analysis allowed illiberal populist nationalism to grow, blaming economic problems on internal "anti-Polish" enemies. New kinds of class thinking has revived in the new millennium, promoted by a new generation raised in a capitalist society and trained in western universities, and legitimized in part by class analyses of postcommunism by scholars from abroad. Though hobbled, class analysis is making a modest comeback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the political and academic treatment of the notion of class, in this article I emphasize overlapping continuities and discontinuities from the socialist period. I argue that in Serbia, class preserved its policy relevance at least until the mid-1990s, since there was a peculiar melding of nation and class in public discourse. Key to these developments was the rise of Milošević as a reformed communist already in the late 1980s. Milošević's agenda was heavily reliant on class-based appeals and the mobilization of workers for its legitimacy. Even though formal democratization began in 1990, with an accompanying mobilization of nationalism, the category of workers remained politically relevant, present in the patronizing rhetoric of most political sides. Only after 2000, with renewed democratization and neoliberal reforms, did public discourses begin to downplay class in the conventional sense, while young scholars took up issues of class in new, more critical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the concept of class and class analysis in sociological research in the last few decades in Slovenia. It reveals the specific reasons for the relatively marginal role of this sort of analysis before and especially after 1990. First, it lists a selection of the key class and stratification studies during the communist era. Second, it describes the class and stratification studies that occurred before and around the regime change (1980-1991). Third, it describes a number of stratification research studies after 1991 (to the present), with many international components. The research efforts of a few influential research groups in Slovenia that have engaged in class and stratification studies, following special approaches, are presented and commented on: the Marxist tradition, a Bourdieuian approach focusing on symbolic discourse, and a structurally based labor process approach. In the conclusion, both a substantive and methodological account of relative achievements in the field are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes recent trends in Croatia with regard to class analysis and class discourse. It traces the main currents both in academic debate as well as more broadly in the public sphere. Issues of class were sidelined with the outbreak of war and the rise of nationalism in the 1990s. Later, neoliberalism further weakened class and leftist discourse. Research on class has been sporadic and rare. New developments among a younger generation of leftist activists and scholars have begun to challenge the silence on class, but the main trends have not been reversed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 led to a radical transformation of the social structure and new types of economic inequalities in Slovakia, but the media, academia, and civil society initially rejected any talk of these developments in terms of class, seeing the topic as potentially toxic to democracy. There was a tendency to veer away from the study of new social stratification toward research on postmaterialist topics such as environmental protection, civil rights, and alternative subcultures. Those social scientists who did study the changing social structure mostly analyzed statistical data without linking this to a broader theoretical framework. Social classes came to be discussed in gradational rather than relational terms, without discussion of how one group's new privileges comes at the expense of others. In the early 2000s, radical neoliberal thinking became prominent, leading to the pervasive presentation of the poor and working poor as themselves responsible for their own fate. A backlash against that led to the triumph of the SMER party in 2006, which allowed topics such as poverty and social justice to return to everyday political discourse, and in this sense allowed for the return of class into politics. A younger generation of Slovak social scientists now regularly criticize the cult of the market and argue for an alternative political economy, though ongoing neoliberal hegemony in public discourse continues to make it hard for these new voices to be heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class structure, class inequality, and class analysis are central to understanding contemporary Russian politics and society. And yet Russians themselves--from social scientists, to political leaders, to everyday Russians--have struggled to come to grips with the concept of class, which became a taboo topic following the collapse of communism. In recent years, that has started to change. Russian social scientists have placed great emphasis on defining the Russian "middle class," in a search both for a non-Marxist conception of class and for a social group with the potential to lead Russia toward a more liberal future. Yet the middle class concept remains fuzzy, and the political aspirations for the group have been only partially realized. Meanwhile, much of the rest of Russian society retains a more traditional view of class and class conflict, as reflected in various political struggles and even in popular culture, such as Russian film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the variety of discourses on social inequalities in postcommunist Bulgaria. The focus is on academic discourse, but political and everyday interpretations are presented as well. Politicians generally avoid talking about social differences and prefer instead the dichotomy of "elite" versus "the people," whose interests the politicians vow to protect. In popular consciousness, the main division is between "the rich" (mafia, politicians, ex-nomenklatura) and "the honest poor." In sociology, three main research trajectories have emerged: from class-based to status-based stratification; from one-dimensional to multidimensional stratification; and from a Marxist class model to a social network model. Perhaps the most important characteristic of Bulgarian society is its high level of poverty, according both to income indicators and self-perception. In this context of a pervasive sense of poverty, status differences lose their significance. This in turn prevents the establishment of group or class solidarity, as everyone feels she or he is competing with all others. Starting in 2013, a new trend can be observed: of social protests organized by those who say they feel powerless and manipulated by corrupt elites. As they try to initiate new types of economic negotiations with the government, sociologists have a responsibility both to study this new movement and to push the problems it raises into public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about socio-economic inequalities and class has become increasingly important in mainstream academic and political debates. This article shows that during the late 2000s class analysis was rediscovered in Romania both as an analytical category and as a category of practice. The evidence suggests that this was the result of two converging processes: the deepening crisis of Western capitalism after 2008 and the country's increasingly transnational networks of young scholars, journalists, and civil society actors. Although a steady and focused interest in class analysis is a novelty in Romania's academia, media, and political life and has the potential to change the political conversation in the future, so far the social fields where this analysis is practiced have remained relatively marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociopolitical control (SPC) has been identified as a critical component of empowerment, resilience and civic development among young people. Sociopolitical control has been assessed according to a two dimensional model: (1) leadership competence and (2) policy control. Very little is known, however, about heterogeneity of perceptions of SPC, how this heterogeneity is distributed across subpopulations, and how it may affect relationships between SPC and other variables. This study used a person-centered approach, latent class cluster analysis, to test items on a SPC scale for youth. Participants were high school students (n = 334) in the Northeastern United States. Four distinct groups of participants emerged: those with (1) exceptional SPC, (2) elevated SPC, (3) limited SPC, and (4) diminished policy control. Group differences were observed on a set of relevant variables including perceived school importance, tobacco use, bullying behaviors, and sense of community. Implications are discussed for policy, practice and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a critique of Mike Savage's 'From the "problematic of the proletariat" to a class analysis of the "wealth elites"'. It first rejects the notion of the 'problematic of the proletariat' - the importance of a dividing line between the working and middle class - instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and financialization, alongside a consideration of class globally. It stresses the importance of exploitation for understanding class and inequality, rather than moving to the notion of 'advantage', as proposed by Savage, which expels an understanding of power. While the focus on elites in class analysis is welcomed, it is argued that there is a continuing interdependence between classes and that race and gender must also be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper argues that it is vital to reorient class analysis away from its long term preoccupation with class boundaries in the middle levels of the class structure towards a focus on the class formation at the top. This will permit sociological analysis to engage more effectively with concerns about the '1 percent' and accentuating wealth which are increasingly evident. Accordingly I sketch out the persistence of the 'problematic of the proletariat' in sociological analysis before considering theoretical resources which might permit an engagement with the 'wealth elite'. This paper serves to introduce the other papers of this special issue which use the GBCS to explore different facets of the wealth elite in Britain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of 476 Spanish travelers found mixed interest and use for the many travel-related mobile internet services that are involved in planning and executing a trip. The findings indicate that these Spanish respondents can be classified into four segments based on the timing of using mobile apps for over a dozen activities involved in travel planning and execution: Savvies, Planners, Opportunists, and Low-techs. Each segment exhibits distinct patterns of mobile internet services usage. Savvies tend to be heavy mobile device users both before and during their trip, while Planners make heavy use of mobile devices in advance of but not during their trip. The Opportunists show a pattern opposite the Planners, and fire up their phones and pads when they arrive at a destination. Low-techs generally do not participate in the mobile internet. The respondents generally saw four benefits from mobile device use: ubiquity, immediacy, personalization, and information access, but the four groups ranked those benefits differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how complex combinations of control contribute to class variations in the experience of work through their impacts on relational aspects of workplace dignity. Analysis of content-coded data on 154 work groups suggests that control structures vary by class and have significant implications for levels of abuse and shame, but exert little direct impact on hostility toward management or coworker conflict. Abusive treatment rooted in coercion, however, generates hostility toward management and intensifies feelings of shame associated with coercive control. Contrary to expectations, a pattern of abuse does not tend to generate coworker conflict. Reimmersion in the case studies suggests that when it does, the cause is often favoritism—a correlate of abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even though contemporary discussions of class have moved forward towards recognizing a multidimensional concept of class, empirical analyses tend to focus on cultural practices in a rather narrow sense, that is, as practices of cultural consumption or practices of education. As a result, discussions within political sociology have not yet utilized the merits of a multidimensional conception of class. In light of this, the article suggests a comprehensive Bourdieusian framework for class analysis, integrating culture as both a structural phenomenon co-constitutive of class and as symbolic practice. Further, the article explores this theoretical framework in a multiple correspondence analysis of a Danish survey, demonstrating how class and political practices are indeed homologous. However, the analysis also points at several elements of field autonomy, and the concluding discussion therefore suggests the need for further studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the potential found within two approaches that recognize the complexity of social hierarchy in different ways. First, it looks at the revival of class analysis within culturally inflected approaches to class. These have incorporated a number of societal relations, broadly referred to as the symbolic, the social and the cultural, into the analysis. Second, the article assesses attempts to theorize the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class through the intersectionality framework. It considers the potential for developing more integrated analytical frameworks for understanding social hierarchy through cross-referencing these debates. It proposes an intersectional framing which centres on social location and translocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to identify the internal divisions within the ‘upper class’ of Norway, defined as comprising different types of property owners, top executives and business managers. Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and forms of capital are applied to construct a social space of the Norwegian economic upper class by subjecting 12 indicators of capital to Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Central issues in the sociology of elites and upper classes are addressed, including the role of educational credentials in upper class reproduction, and the salience of divisions by social origin. The article reveals a maintained division between owners and employees (managers, executives, business professionals) in an age of ‘financialisation’. Furthermore, the divisions established are related to the segmentation of the upper class by occupation and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I develop a critique of both standard neoclassical and standard Marxian conceptualizations of human capital that illustrates an important hypothesis of feminist political economy: collective conflicts based on class, gender, and age, as well as other dimensions of collective identity, affect the distribution of the costs of developing human capital.JEL codes: B50; E11; E24 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a new and freely available tool for performing analyses according to the Rasch model (RM) and the latent class analysis (LCA). The software allows for the estimation of the model parameters and offers several measures of model fit. A graphical user interface (GUI) provides access to numerous options regarding data, models, and output. For educational purposes, an optional annotate feature allows to augment the output with brief explanations and citations regarding the procedures. Based on published data, the features of GANZ RASCH are briefly illustrated in two worked examples. The program intends to combine ease of use while allowing for performing a full-fledged analysis, thus targeting a wide range of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crucial difference between Robinson’s view of the world today and mine has to do with what has been happening in the last 30–50 years. Robinson sees ‘globalization’ as a new stage in capitalism, in which financial institutions are the main mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. I see the same period as one in which capitalist structures have moved so far from equilibrium that they cannot survive. The world-system has entered into a structural crisis and a bifurcation that, in the next 20–40 years, will result in a new world-system (or systems), which may be worse than the current system or much better. In analysing my views, he asserts they are state-centric unlike his. This is incredible, given that the very name of the perspective, world-systems analysis, is used because the basic premise is that social reality occurs within a world-system and not within the states. Robinson’s view is based on a misreading of our concepts of core and periphery. They do not refer to states, but to a relation, in which the crucial difference is the degree of monopolization of the productive process. These processes are located in all states. It is true that the concentration of core-like and peripheral processes is different in different states, which results in a different national politics. But this is a political, not an economic, difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research note describes the use of latent class analysis to examine how three dimensions of religiosity-the importance of religion (religious salience), attendance at religious services, and frequency of prayer-cluster together to form unique profiles. Building upon recent research identifying different profiles of religiosity at the level of the individual, we used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to identify dyadic profiles of religious concordance or discordance between 14,202 adolescents and their mothers. We identified five profiles: one concordant (27% of sample), two discordant (25% of sample), and two of mixed concordance/discordance (49%). The profiles distinguish between various levels of adolescent/mother relations, suggesting that they may represent distinct family dynamics. They also distinguish between several variables (race, adolescent age, geographical region) in predictable ways, providing additional demonstration of the categories' meaningfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on topics related to history and planning including attitudes towards menstruation in Elizabethan England, sexual fantasy in modern America, and feminism.

This study investigates target selection scripts of 72 serial sex offenders who have committed a total of 361 sex crimes on stranger victims. Using latent class analysis, three target selection scripts were identified based on the victim's activities prior to the crime, each presenting two different tracks: (1) the Home script, which includes the (a) intrusion track and the (b) invited track, (2) the Outdoor script, which includes the (a) noncoercive track and the (b) coercive track, and (3) the Social script, which includes the (a) onsite track and the (b) off-site track. The scripts identified appeared to be used by both sexual aggressors of children and sexual aggressors of adults. In addition, a high proportion of crime switching was found among the identified scripts, with half of the 72 offenders switching scripts at least once. The theoretical relevance of these target selection scripts and their practical implications for situational crime prevention strategies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Career counselors are challenged to consider the cultural validity of the theories and models that guide their practice. The cultural formulation approach is proposed as an organizing framework for career counselors to consider cultural influences on their clients' career issues, related interventions, and the working alliance. The discussion illustrates the application of cultural formulation for career counseling with international students. A case study details common transition issues faced by international students, while exploring unique aspects of cultural identity. The case study illustrates how the cultural-formulation approach may be strengthened by incorporating a relational theoretical orientation as seen through a feminist lens to examine a client's multiple identities, such as the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A classification scheme for completed suicide is proposed based on the classification of first, second, and third degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of class and the sociology of work have, historically, occupied two sides of the same coin, sharing foundational studies such as the Affluent Worker series and Braverman's vivisection of the labour process. Recently, however, the partnership has been questioned. Though the seeds of the split were sown by Erik Wright and John Goldthorpe, the overdue de-hegemonizing of Marx and Weber in research on class with the growing influence of Pierre Bourdieu and the broader 'cultural turn' in sociology has weakened the bond and forged a new alliance between class and the sociology of culture. This is, by all means, a positive development, but the connection between processes in the sphere of work and class has become less clear. This article therefore seeks to explore the new theoretical nexus between class and work, demonstrating that a Bourdieusian approach fruitfully reverses the connection put in place by Goldthorpe and Wright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latent trajectory analysis is a form of latent class analysis, where the manifest variables are longitudinal measurements of a single outcome. The latent classes may correspond to either constant increasing or decreasing levels of the outcome over time and describe different severity or course of a disease. Extension to multiple outcomes at each time point allows more accurate determination of classes, with classes based on combination of the outcomes, however requiring models which account for both correlation between outcomes and periods. Three models are described for multiple binary outcomes, observed at each time point: a latent class model where all outcomes are considered independent at all time points, a model incorporating random effects for subject only and one incorporating random effects for subject and period. The methods are applied to data on asthma and allergy symptoms in infants, with symptoms recorded at four time points, and it is shown that the incorporation of subject and period heterogeneity results in lower estimates of the number of latent classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financialization is studied here from a microeconomic viewpoint. Following Stockhammer (2004a), the theory of the firm has been amended by introducing agency problems and class analysis between shareholders and managers. Further to that, I propose two alternative configurations for incorporation into the theory: the first views financialization as a constraint for the managerial firm, while the second discusses shareholders' interests and integrates them as an end in itself for the finance-dominated firm. My conclusions focus on finance-oppressed accumulation, financial fragility, and potential macroeconomic instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A renewed class analysis has shown the importance of culture, emotions and identity in conceptualizing and understanding how class is lived. However, proponents of the new sociology of class rarely explore these issues in an occupational setting. This article argues that the insights developed in the new cultural approaches to class can be used fruitfully to analyse contemporary experiences of work. Using a comparative study of women working in working-class and middle- class occupations, the article illustrates the implicit and emotional dimensions of the classed experience of work through a study of the women's aspirations and their class identities. Rather than equating class with economic resources and constraints, the article shows how class 'thinking and feelings' (Reay, 2005) also shape the experiences of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The few studies that have examined associations between measured interests and abilities have suffered from small sample sizes, restricted ranges of ability and background, preconceived groupings of interests, and measures of ability that confound general and specific cognitive abilities. In this study of 425 adults from diverse backgrounds, the authors used latent class analysis, with general intelligence and two dimensions of ability that are uncorrelated with general intelligence as covariates, to articulate eight occupational interests that could be characterized by level and profile of ability. These groups showed substantial mean differences in all covariates, and differences in the covariates had substantial effects on probabilities of interest group classification. Sex differences in ability dimensions did not, however, completely explain the sex differences in most likely interest group classification. Although socialization may explain the greater sex differences in occupational interests than abilities, biological explanations are also possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rates of digital piracy appear to be increasing, suggesting that additional research that uses new approaches is necessary to evaluate the problem. Using data from undergraduate students (n = 353), the present study explores actual digital piracy and the intention to perform piracy using latent class analysis, develops profiles of these individuals, and provides an analysis of the differences between intentions and actual digital piracy for the groups. The results indicate three separate classes for each form of digital piracy and different profiles for each form of piracy. Actual piracy shows more demographic and social learning theory differences among individuals, whereas scenario-based digital piracy shows more self-control and social learning theory differences among individuals. A cross-tab analysis shows that there are differences between individuals who actually perform digital piracy and those who have the intention to pirate. Research and policy implications are discussed from these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]