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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 resulted in one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since World War II. A significant number of Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children, have sought asylum in Germany, where they have been granted temporary protection status. These refugees found themselves in a state of protracted displacement, with uncertain futures. This article examines how middle-class Ukrainian women, with children, envision their futures and how this shapes their present. Engaging with the literature on protracted displacement and the concept of 'agency-in-waiting', we examine how this relatively privileged group variously respond to living in transit. To enable closer analysis of these variations, we extend examinations of protracted displacement with Grzymala-Kazlowska's idea of anchors. This allows us to consider how previous social-class positioning, and also other external and internal structures in places migrated to, intersect to reveal the anchors facilitating or constraining 'agency-in-waiting'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents a cultural script of 'non-materialistic parental investment' in a private kindergarten in Israel, and the paradoxes that accompany it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis reveals an inherent tension between an anti-materialistic ideology and the immersion of the kindergarten in a hyper-consumerist culture. While the explicit discourse emphasizes simplicity and unmediated emotional nurturing, the kindergarten in effect comprises an arena of intense elite consumerism of upper-middle-class parents who wish to give their children high-quality, expensive education. As a prestigious private business, it, therefore, plays a direct role in class differentiation processes, although 'social-class' is not part of the conscious pedagogical agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle-class contexts foster solipsism, a social cognitive tendency that focuses on one's internal states, goals and motivations and favours dispositional attribution. By contrast, working-class contexts foster contextualism, a social cognitive tendency that focuses on uncontrollable situational forces and favours situational attribution. The current research investigates social class differences in attribution of stability and purchase intention following a product-harm crisis. Consistent with previous research on social class differences in social cognitive tendency, four studies (N = 680) demonstrate that middle- (vs. working-) class individuals perceive themselves as having a higher social status in society (Studies 1A and 3), which leads to a stronger tendency to attribute stability to a product-harm crisis (Studies 1A, 1B, 2 and 3), believing to a greater extent that the problem is typical of the brand's products and the brand will likely run into similar problems in the future. Moreover, this stability attribution has downstream consequences for purchase intention — middle- (vs. working-) class individuals are less likely to purchase products from the same brand following a product-harm crisis (Study 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have documented the challenges of combining wage work and care responsibilities in various societal contexts. National variations reveal that public policy and care infrastructure have major effects in shaping gendered patterns, class inequalities, as well as overall wellbeing of parents. Childcare centers and schools can enable people with children to pursue jobs and careers. Yet, as I show in this article, education systems' demands can become a major component of parental care labor. Drawing on interviews with 92 parents in Singapore, I illustrate the ways in which education care labor impedes work-life reconciliation as well as deepens the significance of gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, there has been a revival of social protest and labor union activity in Chile. In this article, we examine the effects of this phenomenon to analyze its influence on working-class identity. Using International Social Survey Programme surveys from 2009 and 2019, we investigate whether class location and union membership affect people's subjective identification with the working class and how that effect may have changed over the decade. Our findings suggest that subjects who are situated in a 'subordinated' class position (unskilled workers or informal self-employed workers) are more likely to identify with the working class compared to subjects located in a privileged class position (employers, experts, or managers). However, surprisingly, our analysis does not indicate that working-class identity is reinforced by union membership. In addition, our results do not demonstrate that the effect of class or union membership has strengthened over the past decade. At the end of this article, we offer some possible explanations for these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global trend towards both middle- and working-class families raising their children intensively increases, social class differences in parenting beliefs and choices for their children have become more subtle. In light of the proliferation of intensive parenting norms, however, few studies have explored particular mechanisms underlying the subtle class differences linked to parental values. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 51 Hong Kong Chinese parents, this study investigated how parents contended with competing values in socialization, which in turn shaped their parenting choices. Three common values emerged from the interviews – academic excellence, hard work and happiness – showing that the middle and working classes managed their values for children in two different ways, termed here as 'values coupling' and 'values juggling', respectively. Middle-class parents were able to make their value choices cohesive through a 'twist' to reconcile between competing values. However, working-class parents were inclined to 'drift' their value choices in the face of unreconciled value tensions as well as structural constraints. Subtle differences in parental values were found to be tied to class position, and contributed to maintaining class inequality and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social psychological study of social class and socioeconomic status (SES) has burgeoned in the last 15 years and much progress has been made. Yet, researchers rarely explain their theoretical standpoint, clearly define social class and/or SES or justify their choice of how to measure it. This, we argue, is holding back progress. We suggest that social class should be considered a social category into which we are socialized that affords differing amounts of economic, social and cultural resources, while SES only captures one's current access to various forms of capital. We briefly review literature that suggests that the meanings, understandings and thus operationalizations of social class and SES vary across groups and contexts. We then give an overview of the special issue, which documents the advances that can be gained from taking a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach to studying social class and SES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socioeconomic status and social class are measured with a wide and complex range of indicators with little attention paid to the impact these choices may have on empirical findings. This research tests whether different socioeconomic indicators consistently predict motivational differences in the same sample. Two studies were conducted in the United Kingdom. The first study (N = 430) examined the relationship between income, employment, education and personal values. The study found inconsistent relationships between different socioeconomic indicators and value preferences. A similar pattern of inconsistent relationships between socioeconomic status indicators and measures of self-mastery, and personal values, was found in the second study (N = 959). The only universal finding across all socioeconomic indicators in both studies was the null relationship with self-transcendence value preferences. These results indicate that we need to be more cautious in framing socioeconomic status as a construct and more rigorous in assessing differences observed across social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research investigated to what extent two Western cultures, France and the United States, differed in making status-related judgements based on a person's familial class background. Consistent with the eco-historical origins of French and American status beliefs, Study 1 (N = 77) showed that French more than American participants perceived an unknown community member with higher (compared to lower) familial class background to have greater status-related characteristics. Study 2 (N = 213) showed that French more than American participants also expected a job candidate with higher (compared to lower) familial class background to attain higher status in the workplace. Study 3 (N = 231) experimentally manipulated upward mobility beliefs in a monocultural sample of American participants. Results showed that when participants were made to believe that upward mobility in society was low (but not when high), information about a person's familial class background was the basis of status-related judgements. Our findings speak to the importance that sociocultural contexts play for the understanding of different aspects of social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses what is still an under-examined issue in social mobility literature: the role played by women in the transmission of social advantages and life chances. We include models that incorporate both progenitors for those who were born in Spain between 1926 and 1976. We selected this country due to the far-reaching transformations experienced there for the female population in recent decades in terms of fertility rates, labor market, and educational mobility. Our results show that joint models that consider the influence of both the mother's and father's social class more accurately predict children's social mobility than models that only considers the father's social class. Contrary to previous studies, we do not find a clear movement toward a more open society, but rather a gendered fluctuation. While the social fluidity of sons has remained constant over time, daughters have experienced an intense process of social fluidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research used longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,091) to examine the link between social class and prosocial behaviour from third grade to sixth grade. Latent growth modelling found that adolescents from families with increased income-to-needs ratio tended to experience an increase in prosocial behaviour from third grade to sixth grade; adolescents from families with high income-to-needs ratio in third grade were more likely to be identified as the class of high initial with decrease; adolescents in the profile of high initial with decrease tended to be more prosocial in each grade and came from families with higher levels of income-to-needs ratio, higher parental education and higher parental occupation. Implications and future directions were presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to understand the way in which people self-identify in society and as a contribution to debates about class identity in Latin America, in this article the authors assess how individuals categorize themselves and others socially, and discuss whether a significant portion of the population classifies itself as middle class. They address the question of whether or not individuals' representation of their social position is linked to social class, examining whether that position incorporates a socio-economic dimension, a hierarchical dimension, or even an element of moral value. The authors focus on how individuals name their own social position by means of a vignette-based survey applied in 2016 to a randomized sample of 2000 people in Chile. The results show that the theoretical notion of class is still of relevance to subjective positioning criteria, and that such criteria are specific to individuals who self-identify with lower or higher social positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines processes of class construction within a transnational community of professionals and managers who are emigrants, returnees, and non-migrants. Building on Bourdieu's class analysis and literature on transnational migration, the article examines how class statuses are supported by moral claims based on varying transnational mobility strategies. The authors draw their results from qualitative interviews with 45 Hong Kong respondents in Hong Kong and Canada. They find that despite Hong Kong emigrants' loss of economic capital due to de-professionalization, their cultural and symbolic claims frame an alternative set of norms about their life successes. Returnees claim to have the best of both worlds having amassed economic capital, while making social distinctions from stayers in terms of their globalized cosmopolitan imaginaries. Stayers appear envious of emigrants' and returnees' flexibility and seek to accumulate economic capital for future retirement migration or to send their children abroad. Respondents' moralizing discourses reveal a social field defining within-class distinctions apart from hyper-concerns of upward mobility through material gains. Nuanced class distinctions articulate values around freedom of space, time, and expression not readily accessible to residents remaining in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to a recent call to problematise the theoretical underpinnings of lifestyle migration and in particular, to critically examine the construction of lifestyle migrants as an ideal-type of individualised subject, freed from the constraints of normative social structures. Recent research has begun to do so, by demonstrating how class, race and gender can intersect to delimit the post-migratory experiences of lifestyle migrants, as they negotiate multiple social hierarchies. This article adds a new dimension to these studies by showing how class, gender and sexuality interconnect through the prism of 'cosmopolitanism' to structure the lives of British women in the affluent Catalan town of Sitges. Although British lesbians have more social autonomy than other British female lifestyle migrants in the town, they are simultaneously rendered subordinate in relation to Sitges' cosmopolitan discourse, which privileges a stereotypical male homosexuality instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correct spelling is associated with social prestige. However, the research carried out in the Spanish-speaking world, from preschool to university, shows little impact of social class on spelling competence. In this study, we use lexical availability materials to investigate the influence of sociolinguistic factors — gender, type of school, area and sociocultural level — on pre-university students' misspellings. The factorial correspondence analysis showed that the variables studied are directly related to the type of error recorded. Sociocultural level may be especially significant: the lower the level, the greater and more stigmatized the reported errors. These results encourage us to reflect on the levelling power that school should have in the twenty-first century when preparing students to face life in society with the strongest guarantees of success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging a biased view towards self-employed returnees as neoliberal selves, as the normalized approach of the migration–development nexus tends to depict them, this article builds an alternative conceptual framework to unpack the variegated experiences of migrant returnees' self-employment trajectories in post-socialist Romania. The authors argue that the overemphasis on the benefits of return migration for origin countries through the skewed focus on the migrants' accrual of human and financial capital and their ostensible entrepreneurial orientation has resulted in disregarding more influential biographical and cultural aspects. Life story interviews with middle-aged participants reveal the complex subjectivities that are co-produced by the habitus formed during communism – as children born and raised within working-class families – neoliberalism's rise during the post-socialist transition, and migration, which altered the pursuit of their life goals. The article documents three distinct self-employment pathways among the interviewed return migrants, suggesting that the subjectivities of the self-employed are not uniformly confined to neoliberal self-understandings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological study of class, whether Marxist, Weberian or Bourdieusian, has discussed class systems and individuals' location in these systems within the framework of the nation-state and has largely ignored the presence of a growing population of international migrants in western societies. At the same time, the emerging literature on transnational migration has largely neglected the question of social class. This article argues that the simultaneous privileging of the nation-state and the neglect of social class by these research traditions, respectively, has been unfortunate. Working from a Bourdieusian class perspective, the article discusses how today's enhanced international migration – whereby actors regularly cross national borders, physically and virtually, and live their everyday lives in multiple social spaces and class systems – produces class systems in which many actors hold multilocal, inconsistent and instable class identities. The discussion employs a mixed methods approach, drawing material from a community in Norway which includes a large population of Eastern European labour migrants recruited by the fish processing industry, to illustrate some key problems with Bourdieusian (and other) class theories' use of methodological nationalism as an analytical framework and to suggest how transnational theories might better incorporate class perspectives in their analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study recognizes migrants’ perception of remittances as shaped by their class position both in the home and destination countries. Following Max Weber’s idea that individuals’ rationality is produced in their sociocultural context, this ethnographic inquiry among a group of Bangladeshi temporary migrants in Japan demonstrates how their interests interact with the structural opportunities and constraints in developing a distinct perception of remittances as a means towards higher social status. Opportunities to earn higher income motivated middle-class families in Bangladesh to send their sons abroad, who persevered in low-class jobs in Japan. While supporting the families through remitting, these migrants became aware that their future social status would depend primarily on their own career in Bangladesh rather than family background. Hence, they began to perceive remittance as a productive capital to develop their future careers. This article argues that their middle-class social position led these migrants to espouse an individualistic orientation and encouraged them to negotiate with their families regarding remittance utilization to ensure both income and prestige. Thus, it highlights the importance of including the migrants’ social position in studying migrants’ perception of remittances and the impact of remittances on development in the migrants’ home countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]