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This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants' relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the 'gift' of the residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writings of the Brontës have frequently been studied in relation to conceptions of heroism. More specifically, critics have focused on the influence of war heroes such as the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon in the early writings of the siblings, principally those authored by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë. This article, however, explores the conception of 'everyday heroism' in Anne Brontë's novel Agnes Grey (1847). It argues that the ordinary characters portrayed in Brontë's work embody qualities usually associated with the heroic. Further, the analysis of heroism can reveal new insights into the representation of gender roles and class relations in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities, such that privilege prevails. Drawing on interview data from a project undertaken in Australia with female postgraduate students from low SES backgrounds, we bring a pluralised affective capacities approach to bear. We argue that thinking class (dis)advantage with affect has considerable political potential. Affect emerges as a key site through which the normative and transformative capacities of the classed subject emerge. Attuning to affective dissonance, responsivity and capacities, we challenge the advantage afforded high socio-economic status in HE. We demonstrate how a focus on affective relations creates more complex constructions of 'advantage' and disrupts deficit framings – shifts the normative class positions on which HE relies and does so affirmatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has revealed a connection between news consumption and class, both in terms of how much and what kind of news is consumed. By deploying a cultural sociological perspective on how young people from different class positions make sense of their differences, this study breaks new ground in the study of news use and inequality. Focus group interviews with young working-class and middle-class people show how social groups mobilize differences in news consumption to draw symbolic boundaries between each other. The moral economy surrounding "productive" or "unproductive" approaches towards news and journalism is a venue that allows social groups to construct an other, over whom a sense of social, cultural, and moral superiority can be maintained. The study takes the understanding of news consumption inequalities beyond the standard concern with gaps in knowledge and participation by locating news consumption inequalities in relation to symbolic struggles between social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comment considers the article by Durrenberger and Doukas as part of a broader field of research focused on class relationships. It points to identify key theoretical and epistemological topics emerging from recent theoretical discussions, retrieving some Latin American labor anthropology and labor history insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociological insights into the relationship between consumption and class are mostly borne out by current research in the Chinese context, it is important to consider the implications of applying such an analytic framework-which arose within American and European social contexts-to contemporary China. This paper examines the relationship between consumption and class relations. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with young urban professionals in Beijing and Nanjing and young rural migrants in Shenzhen, it asks how individuals from these two socioeconomic cohorts participate in the ritual of romantic consumption. In particular, the paper asks how individuals from these groups think about and rationalise their decisions surrounding two wedding-related consumer items: bridal photography and diamond engagement rings. The discussion reveals some distinct features in class formation in contemporary China, where class structures are fluid, unstable and still in the process of being defined. [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]

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]

Political consumerism is often criticized for its failure to cross class lines, a failure linked to the economic resources and cultural capital of affluent consumers. The early history of the National Consumers' League (NCL) illustrates how an alternative model of consumer citizenship can lead privileged shoppers to draw social boundaries in different ways. The NCL included lower-class women and children as beneficiaries and occasional allies in consumer campaigns, but distanced itself from the organized labor movement. This alternative model of political consumerism is traced to the gender and class cultures of reformist women in the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is urban politics really about? Despite decades of research, there is still considerable disagreement about the relative roles of race, class, ideology, partisanship, and other factors in shaping the urban vote. In this article, we assemble a wide range of data on a diverse set of urban elections and offer a more explicit empirical test of what shapes urban politics. Our results suggest that local elections are partly an ideological battle, partly a partisan contest, and at least marginally linked to class, religion, and morality. Race, however, is the dominant factor in the local electoral arena. Local elections are in no small part a competition between blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans over the leadership of their cities. We also assess how and why these divides vary across cities and electoral contexts finding that a theory of realistic group conflict best predicts patterns in the vote. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article evaluates the long-standing but rarely-tested proposition that nationalism and nationhood mask the extent of class divisions in a society. Specifically, it examines three possible routes by which state-nationhood might subjectively mitigate the importance of class. Nationhood may shape people's perception of the magnitude of economic inequalities, their perception of the magnitude of class conflict or their assessment of their own class position. An analysis of a mass public opinion survey from Ukraine in 2011 demonstrates that contrary to theoretical arguments advanced by a wide variety of scholars, national identity and national sentiments have very little or no impact on the perceived salience of class divisions in Ukraine. Contradictory forces within the national idea itself are identified to explain this outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critique is presented of the 1977 Philippine film "Ang Manok ni San Pedro" (St Peter's Rooster) directed by Joe Macachor in the Cebuano language, adapted from a popular Cebu radio play. Themes of gambling, class relations, and religion in the film are discussed, as well as the depiction of the poor character Teban. The social aspects of Spanish ancestry in the Philippines and product placement in the film are also discussed.

In 1957, local newspaper the Princeton Packet announced plans to develop integrated housing in Princeton and West Windsor Townships, New Jersey. These developments and the events surrounding them illustrate the racial and class implications of integration in the 1950s. Decisions made about the occupancy of these developments highlight decisions that would lead to an affluent suburb by 1970 that was decreasingly affordable and accessible to middle- and low-income African Americans and whites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion—against ethics as propounded by some on the Left. It focuses on the deployment of ethics as a means for relating responsibly to the other, dealing initially with the problematic proposals of Terry Eagleton and Judith Butler. More promising are Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who question this concern with the other. I go further, exploring how the other is constructed and arguing that ethics produces the other through its own discourse, concealing both its relations with alternative discursive productions of alterity and its socioeconomic connections. Moreover, ethics has good reason to conceal its socioeconomic connections, which are persistently of the ruling class. These connections emerge by investigating the etymological minefield ofethikos,ethosandmos, via Aristotle. With the senses of custom, habit, and accepted social norms, ethics emerges as a ruling class ideology, which leads to the final question: can ethics as a ruling class term be appropriated and filled with different content, or are other terms needed, such as unethical and unmoral? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this short essay, we try to assess the utility of class analyses for understanding the contemporary Estonian society. Erik Wright (2009) identifies three strands of class analysis: a stratification approach, a Weberian approach and a Marxist approach. We address the following questions: Which kind of class analysis is most present in Estonia today? Which is most needed? The main conclusion is that due to this marginalisation of class discourse, as well as the power of national/ethnic discourse and transitional culture, those most economically vulnerable were deprived of the cultural and discursive resources to resist the most the extreme market-oriented policies. The conditions for structuration of class relations were created, while the class and inequality discourse was marginalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 'power and the pain of class relations' (Ortner 2006) through the experience of Scottish men working in the global shipping, offshore oil, and fishing industries: industries in which the nationality of workers has changed significantly since the 1980s. It combines recent anthropological literature on subjectivity and cosmopolitanism with a Marxist understanding of class as generated through differing relationships to production. The article describes how British seafarers have experienced the cosmopolitanization of their workplaces, as workers from Portugal, Eastern Europe, and the Philippines have been recruited by employers in order to reduce wages, working conditions, and trade union organization. Drawing on Therborn (1980), it concludes that the experiences gained through this process have led to the development of multiple and often contradictory subjectivities, which people draw on as they choose how to act in moments of crisis, and as they imagine possible futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the relationship between caste and class in India with an emphasis on their connection to social disadvantage. The author evaluates the results from the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)'s Indian National Election Study 2004, finding a connection between class and the extremes of caste system, defined as the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the higher castes. Topics include the caste-class association, class origin and destination, and preferential policies known as "reservations." The influence of professions on class are discussed, including the mobility of Routine Non-Manual (RNM) workers. Graphs are also included which illustrate a congruence between particular castes and classes.