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In this paper, I examine a Chinese family’s oral history, which revolves around their tumultuous life transformations under the impact of China’s communist movement between 1940 and 1977. Using interviews with four siblings who have distinctive personalities and life narratives, I focus on how they apply fatalistic thinking—a phenomenon popular among ordinary Chinese but is rarely analyzed by scholars—to make sense of the vicissitudes of the fates of the family members. I position the Chinese family’s oral history in macro and micro contexts. In the macro context, since the land reform in 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had attempted to replace peasants’ fatalistic thinking with class analysis to explain the roots of hardships in their lives. As the communist movement and class struggle receded, fatalistic thinking—which has never been eradicated—revived. In the micro context, fatalistic thinking is expressed through distinctive memories and narratives, which are linked to personalities and identities. I argue that fatalistic thinking is a mean of self-construction that people consciously or unconsciously resort to when facing absurdity. By using fatalistic thinking, people develop narratives about the self and create a sense of mental balance.

Informal workers in Africa are very often portrayed as primarily self-employed entrepreneurs and unemployed individuals largely excluded from capitalism, and thus insulated from class analysis and ...

Background: Substance use motives refer to an individual's reasons for engaging in substance use. Although the respective alcohol and cannabis literatures have linked specific substance-use motives to indices of use, less is known about motives in concurrent users, particularly examination of cross-motives (e.g., cannabis motives predicting alcohol use). Methods: The present work examined motives for use in a sample of concurrent users to assess relations between motives and alcohol and cannabis outcomes (quantity, frequency, and use disorder symptoms) using both variable- and person-centered approaches. Finally, the present work aimed to discern the impact of timeframe selection for defining concurrent use (i.e., past year, past two weeks). Participants (N = 524) consisted of individuals that endorsed having used both alcohol and cannabis in the past year with subsample (N = 192) of individuals endorsing past two-week concurrent use. Results: Univariate linear regression analyses revealed small to medium positive relations between all alcohol motives and alcohol outcomes and small to medium positive relations between cannabis social, coping, enhancement, and expansion motives and cannabis use. Regressions examining cross-motives and multivariate models revealed wide variability in relations. Mixture analyses revealed a three-class solution (i.e., High Motives, Positive Alcohol, and Low Conformity) for past year concurrent users and a two-class solution (i.e., Low Motives and High Motives) for past two-week concurrent users. Discussion: Examination of motive classes revealed differences in substance, particularly cannabis, outcomes as a function of class membership. Findings are useful in classifying concurrent users' motives and highlight the importance of timeframe selection.

The current study examined patterns of Black adolescent boys' socioemotional competence (SEC) in the midst of racial (in)congruence of their neighborhood and school contexts and the associations of these patterns with self- and teacher-reported social adjustment. Data collected from 417 Black adolescent boys in 7th-11th grade were analyzed using a multilevel class analysis to derive student-level classes of SEC and neighborhood racial composition and school-level classes of school racial composition. Class associations with social adjustment were examined via analysis of variance and analysis of covariance among a subsample of 258 Black males. Four patterns of SEC-neighborhood racial composition and two patterns of school racial composition were identified; the former were associated with self- and teacher-reported social adjustment. Interactive patterns of SEC-neighborhood racial composition classes and school racial composition classes were associated with teachers' reports of negative social adjustment. Study findings suggest that considering SEC within racialized contexts is important for understanding Black adolescent boys' adjustment.

The article engages in a discussion with Martin Müller’s article In Search of a Global East through the categories of class and class distinction. While recognizing the potential political value of the “Global East” project, the author questions the ideological mechanisms which naturalize the stereotype of “Eastness as forsakenness.” As she points out, one of the effects of the “political and epistemological pro-ject” of the North–South divide (as well as stereotypical categorizations of the East) is obscuring the internal class dynamics of Northern, Southern and Eastern societies. In contrast, introducing class analysis – which includes exami-ning such practices as producing and buying counterfeits of original, luxury-brand commodities – allows us to uncover similar patterns of class distinction and reproduction across global capitalist societies of the North, South and East, and perhaps also to forge solidarities amongst classes which are regularly oppressed by the dominant global capitalist order.

A theory of the state presupposes the conceptual demarcation between “internal” and “external” actors to the state. In Resnick and Wolff’s theory of the state, the contestation between “external” a...

This article presents an exercise in ‘cognitive class analysis’ by tackling the question of when young children first develop the ability to perceive and judge stereotypical representation of class identity. With the aid of a specifically designed visual methodology, 82 children aged 5 to 12, were asked to combine a series of figures into a set of ‘class families’, to assign different amounts of money to these families, to attribute an occupational status to the parents of each family and to indicate their most and least likeable family. Results show that children prove capable of perceiving and judging class stereotypes at a younger age than previous studies have suggested. A considerable number of 5- and 6-year-olds already demonstrate the ability to classify people on the basis of differences in dress and appearance and effectively recognize these classifications as based on differences in class position. In addition, visible markers of class-status also appear to play a role in shaping children’s preferences for different types of families and playmates.

How do we make sense of the ways in which COVID-19 has developed and been responded to in the United States? How can nondeterminist class analysis help us to understand why the pandemic has impacte...

The relevance of workers’ mobilisations in the 2011 Arab uprisings and – more recently – in the Algerian movement for democracy and social justice has encouraged a renewed interest in labour–state relations in the region. This article presents a class-based perspective on labour institutions, taking Morocco as a case study. In contrast to institution-based approaches, this research argues that it is problematic to treat the trade unions as analytical proxies for the working class, because this heuristic move conceals how class struggles – from below and from above – can transcend and transform labour institutions. The article proposes a framework to study labour–state relations, highlighting the relative autonomy of union officials from workers and vice versa. In this way, it shows how, in the neoliberal phase, the Moroccan state increased inducements to the unions while decreasing those to the workers and maintaining significant constraints on workplace organising. To use a simplified formulation, the regime included the unions to exclude the workers. In such a context of low union representativeness, the dangers of reducing the working class to the trade unions emerge clearly.\ud \ud

Neste trabalho apresentamos a análise de uma aula com enfoque histórico e investigativo na qual buscamos identificar normas e práticas científicas estabelecidas na sala de aula. Essa aula foi desenvolvida em uma turma da primeira série do ensino médio em uma escola de tempo integral da rede estadual do Espírito Santo e teve como foco o desenvolvimento de um debate sobre duas correntes de pensamento sobre o movimento dos corpos (pensamento aristotélico e galileano). Os dados foram produzidos por meio da gravação em áudio e vídeo da aula e anotações em diário de campo. Para análise utilizamos as categorias propostas por Nascimento e Sasseron (2019) que elencam uma série de características da cultura cientifica que podem ser incluídas em um contexto escolar. Os resultados indicam a presença de características importantes, como a argumentação, a receptividade crítica, a realização de perguntas e a construção de explicações. Além disso, foi possível estabelecer a constituição de uma igualdade moderada pela natureza da atividade didática que contemplava maior envolvimento dos estudantes na construção das ideias na sala de aula.

This article contends that the arguments developed within and beyond Development and Globalization: A Marxian Class Analysis are vital to the project of building twenty-first century socialism. My ...

In this rejoinder, I respond to four essays on my book, Development and Globalization: A Marxian Class Analysis, by focusing on the following main themes: the contingency of theory, reading for cla...

Purpose While migrant women entrepreneurs (MWE) have been studied extensively through the lenses of gender and ethnicity, social class, as an axis of difference, received scant attention in entrepreneurship and migrant enterprise literature. The purpose of this paper is to make an intersectional analysis on migrant women’s cultural capital development processes on the basis of not only gender and ethnicity, but also class relations. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on empirical insights generated through listening to the life story narratives of 17 women entrepreneurs from Turkey. This is a small, yet diverse group consisting of women who followed their male kin who have migrated to Sweden in the late 1960s as a labour force, and of highly educated political refugee women who have migrated to Sweden following the military coup in Turkey in the 1980s. Findings By linking pre-migration and post-migration lives through Bourdieusian class analysis, the analysis yielded three distinct types of habitus of the women-intersectional identity constructed through interweaving of certain historical and cultural practices and conditions, labelled as women (immigrant) entrepreneurs, migrant (women) entrepreneurs and hybrid entrepreneurs. Life stories demonstrated the ways the MWE relationally defined, and in turn, contested being the right kind of entrepreneur drawing on their type of habitus and forms of cultural capital within the rules of the game in the specific context of entrepreneurship. Originality/value This study shows how MWE generate diverse, yet at times similar, but historically and culturally conditioned responses in actively shaping the relationship between entrepreneurial resources and context-specific structural powers and aspects. This way, the study calls for enriching the extant debate on migrant women entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it suggests that the strategic fit between resources and opportunities does not entail an automatic and arbitrary process. Rather, it takes an effort and contestation carried out by the entrepreneurial actors, among whom the individual entrepreneur is the primary actor. In particular, it draws attention to the conditions of possibilities for agency as a result of struggle and intersectional power relations: social class, ethnicity and gender, which provide a differential degree of powers to the individual entrepreneur.

ElizavetaPolukhina – PhD (kandidat nauk) in Sociology, Associate Professor in Sociology, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, Russian Federation. Email: epolukhina@hse.ru Alexandrina Vanke – PhD (kandidat nauk) in Sociology, Doctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; Research fellow at the State Academic University for the Humanities; Research fellow at the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation. Email: a.vanke@postrgad.macnhester.ac.uk This article is an examination of working-class identity based on various theories of cultural class analysis and genetic structuralism. Workers at the Uralmash factory, the largest of the Soviet enterprises still functioning in Russia today, were selected as the focus of empirical research. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted from May to June 2017, when the researchers became temporary residents of the Uralmash district. The example of the Uralmash case shows that contemporary workers in the post-Soviet space bear multiple and fragmented identities that combine Soviet and post-Soviet practices and values. Workers describe themselves as 'ordinary' and 'good' people, reflecting personal traits and values such as honesty, industriousness, sociability, dignity, simplicity, as well as in terms of identity in private life, e. g. a family person, a pensioner, a gardener. Many representatives of elder generations perceive themselves as people 'living in the past', 'Soviet people'. Thus, the Soviet past remains the main resource and a 'universal' prop supporting subjective perception of factory workers of elder generations. 'District-level' patriotism is another significant sense-making resource for the identity of Uralmash workers. However, as our interviews and observation show, workers in the post-Soviet period have become an 'invisible' group in the district due to their tendency to reject new lifestyles offered by new actors such as developers, cultural activists, and representatives of the entertainment industry. Consequently, a factory worker in the post-Soviet period suffers the loss of the class identity typical for the Soviet period. As a result, workers reproduce or re-appropriate other identity types while retaining memories about the Soviet past and trying to find a new foundation for identity in private life.

Social scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, we uncover three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, we also uncover two alternative belief systems: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g., ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g., rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely-held assumption that all people organize their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agenda’s and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.

Target subject is a module called ‘AI Technology’, which applied the ideas of blended learning. Firstly, lecture-style teaching was conducted with presentation slides in order to explain the contents of a textbook. Secondly, students were required to do exercises and quizzes. By using the last eight weeks, they were asked to create presentation slides outside a class to introduce the up-to-date topics on artificial intelligence. These slides were mutually evaluated among them so that they developed their own slides based on the feedback before the tenth week of the course for the second round of mutual evaluations. Questionnaires concerning students’ understanding technical terms of the field and consciousness-raising towards competence were also conducted before and after the programs. The learning effects of a module in ‘AI Technology’ are compared with my previous research outcome of the module, ‘Artificial Intelligence’. The reasons of difference between both modules are discussed. This paper reports their results.

In this paper I develop a race-centered, intersectional critique of concerted cultivation. First developed by Annette Lareau inUnequal Childhoodsto describe the dominant middle-class cultural style of parenting, this powerful concept continues to shape scholarship on parenting and the social reproduction of social inequality through culture and class. I critique and reconstruct this concept based upon: 1) Existing research on racial identity and racial socialization, and racialized parenting techniques, and 2) Alternative readings of selected ethnographic material presented inUnequal Childhoods. First, I argue that concerted cultivation is a racialized parenting practice and that families negotiate and navigate a complex race- and-class-based social context of childrearing. Second, I present a re-reading of excerpts fromUnequal Childhoodsto show how families of color, and in particular Black families, cultivate racial knowledge and skills in their children. Third, I make a case for the larger sociological usefulness of a layered race and class analysis of parenting culture, and argue that such a framework adds more depth to core arguments made by Lareau. In the last section, I discuss the social tensions that exist within concerted cultivation and intensive parenting culture. I reflect on possible implications for normative parenting culture that matches well with neoliberal market rationality, exists within racial capitalism, but at the same time connects to anti-racist socialization and rejection of hegemonic cultural ideologies.

Since the 1970s, prisoners have regularly been engaged in large-scale revolts in France. Although there is not an exhausting research on it yet, the history of the French penal abolitionist movement is rich. It has included prisoners and ex-prisoners but also prisoners’ relatives, law professionals, intellectuals (the most famous being Michel Foucault), and activists. Despite its heterogeneity (especially considering its repertoires of action and political goals), the penal abolition movement in France is strongly characterized by its focus on prison (rather than on the penal system), its class analysis (over race and gender, for example), and its close links to anarchist movements. The chapter aims at encompassing the prison abolition movement in France since the 1970s. It draws upon the analysis of data (public and private archives and interviews) gathered for previous research by the two authors. It elaborates on (1) the articulation among the prison abolition movement, prisoners’ revolts, and prison reforms; (2) the critical analysis of the prison system that has fueled the prison abolition movement; and (3) the strategic and organizational options debated within the prison abolition movement.

Author(s): Mutua, Athena D. | Abstract: This essay chronicles the development of ClassCrits, an organization of US legal scholars that seeks to ground economic analyses in progressive legal jurisprudence. Today, ClassCrits ideas may resonate with a broader audience. I attribute this institutional success partly to ClassCrits’ commitment to: an interdisciplinary “big tent” openness, safe and responsive space, and praxis and collaboration. I then explore three key topics in a selection of ClassCrits writings on class and law: (1) neoliberal entrenchment and preservation; (2) class oppression; and (3) the intersecting oppression of class and race. I argue that ClassCrits scholarship on law and neoliberalism is productively viewed through and anticipates Wendy Brown’s recent work, and that Erik Olin Wright’s approach to class analysis may add more theoretical cohesion to ClassCrits work on law and class. Finally, I suggest that Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism holds promise for ClassCrits scholarship on the intersection of race and class.

By the demonstration effect, China is a model to be emulated, but more so theoretically rather than by replication. If anything, nations of the global South must rid themselves of neoliberally imposed ‘one-size-fits all’ models, which are instrumentalised to shift value to empire. They are best practices in reverse: they serve the interests of the US empire. They rob nations of their history and resources. Theoretically, identification with a model is an impossibility; hence, developing nations need to search for the theory that corresponds to their own conditions and strategies of development. China’s experience, anchored in labour as the historical agent, offers numerous theoretical cues to develop such a model. Thinking development with a subject, as opposed to only substance in mind, voids reductionist politics in favour of more sober class analysis. This work is about the relevant social and economic underpinning of the Chinese development experience vis-a-vis the preponderant neoliberal model.

This chapter is structured in terms of the two terms, reform and then opening-up, and book-ended by the two related topics of collective-individual and ‘one country, two systems’. The chapter opens with the dialectical relation between collective and individual, as it was manifested in the ‘household responsibility system [lianchandaohu]’. From there, the main section on reform deals with the dialectical process of deepening reform, the need to see reform in the context of revolution, and how the many problems of ‘wild 90s’ were incidental rather than systemic and would be solved by the dialectic of reform itself. The section on opening-up deals with the contradiction of engaging with developed capitalist countries while maintaining self-reliance, sovereignty, and thus China’s socialist project. This reality leads to a recalibration of class analysis: internally, the focus is on non-antagonistic relations between classes under socialism (including the rural and urban workers who have been lifted out of poverty and make up a new ‘middle-income’ group). Externally, class conflict continues, now in terms of the efforts by some capitalist states to ‘scold’ or even ‘contain’ the ‘threat’ of socialist countries like China. The chapter concludes with a final example of contradiction analysis: Deng Xiaoping’s breakthrough policy of ‘one country, two systems’. The two systems are socialism on the mainland and capitalism in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan—all of them contained within one country where the socialist system dominates.

Populist attitudes are generally considered to consist of three types of beliefs, viz. people-centrist, anti-elitist, and Manichean beliefs. There is less agreement, however, on how populist attitudes are related to liberal democratic attitudes. Some argue that populist attitudes are incompatible with liberal democratic attitudes (e.g., pluralism and elitism). Others assert that these attitudes are compatible. Starting off from the concept of belief systems, we analyze the different ways in which people interrelate populist, pluralist, and elitist attitudes. Using correlational class analysis, we uncover four belief systems that differ in (a) how consistently people support populist beliefs and (b) the direction of the relationship between populist and pluralist beliefs. We also find that the differences between belief systems are related to people's support for populism. People holding populist beliefs tend to associate populist attitudes with pluralist attitudes, while people who do not hold populist beliefs associate populist attitudes with anti-pluralist attitudes.

INTRODUCTION In his ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi (2014:50) argues that ‘“class” has become a category that has lost relevance for the social sciences’ in Pakistan and that ‘the country has been forced into an analytical Islamic framework as if no other sense of existence or identity existed’. This chapter confirms Zaidi's observation by referencing it against Alavi's (1988) thesis on women, class and Islam. The comparison reveals how Alavi's earlier class analysis has since been replaced by the privileging of Islam as a category of analysis in a body of post 9/11 scholarship. It also demonstrates how defensive apologia, offered by those who claim a left identity, has prevented the emergence of a new and gendered reading of Pakistan's political economy, since it has been busy saving Islam and the Muslim man from feminist critique and global imperialism. The first three decades of the newly independent state of Pakistan were marked by successful pressure from women's groups and activists for the feminisation of its policies and institutions. The 1977 military coup by General Zia ul Haq was followed by a regime under which the earlier ambitious modernisation period was replaced by an aggressive conservatism enforced by a social and legal Islamisation campaign. This was met with resistance from a small but vocal Pakistani women's movement during the 1980s. According to Hamza Alavi, the decade [was] truly [the] decade of the women of Pakistan. A powerful women's movement made a dramatic impact on Pakistan's political scene, all the more so in the light of the total failure of political parties to inject any life in the movement for restoration of democracy in Pakistan to bring an end to its oppressive military regime. (1988:1328) This acknowledgement of the agency of women's resistance to a masculinist state and of the importance of their contributions towards Pakistan's democratisation is a departure from Alavi's (1972) original un-gendered thesis of the overdeveloped Pakistani state in which women are an invisible category. But the criticism regarding Alavi's gender blindness warrants deeper investigation. Women's rights movements in Pakistan have held contradictory relations with military regimes. These relations have been hostile and confrontational at times and at others, yielded advantageous or beneficial policies for women.

Despite the pendulum swing from utopian to dystopian views of the Internet, the direction of the popular and academic literature continues to lean toward its liberatory potential, particularly as a tool for redressing social inequality. At the same time, decades of digital inequality scholarship have shown persistent socioeconomic inequality in Internet access and use. Yet most of this research captures class by individualized income and education variables, rather than a power relational framework. By tracing research on how fear, control, and risk manifest itself with inequalities related to digital content, digital activism, and digital work, I argue that a narrow stratification approach may miss the full cause and effect of digital inequality. Instead, a class analysis based on power relations may contribute to a broader and more precise theoretical lens to understand the digital divide. As a result, technology can reinforce, or even exacerbate, existing patterns of social and economic inequality because of this power differential.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

This chapter redresses one set of evidence in its entirety as a way to demonstrate the impact of the new perspectives presented in the book. That evidence consists of the funerary monuments of eight bakers, who range from wealthy businessmen from major urban centers to modest bakers from small towns.

The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.

SUMMARYRecent interest in the growth of middle classes in Africa (and elsewhere) has been characterised by immense theoretical diversity. While this diversity indicates the complexity (and limitations) of class analysis, it remains important for the latter to be guided by the classic concerns around power, wealth and inequality which characterise radical debate.

Traditional class theories invariably embrace the ‘proposition of economism’, either extruding politics from the causality of class formation or treating politics as epiphenomenal. Similar ideas of...

Attitude data can reveal culture’s secrets, but only if analysts acknowledge and transcend two problematic forms of heterogeneity. The first, relational heterogeneity, reflects the fact that the meaning of a response to a survey attitude question emerges from its relation to other attitudes: considered singly, the same response may mean different things to different respondents, depending upon the meanings with which they associate it. The second, population heterogeneity, a common problem in survey analysis, reflects the fact that attitudes may be related to one another in systematically different ways for different respondent subsamples. To overcome these challenges, we must use analytic methods that (a) focus on relations among attitude responses rather than on single responses and (b) partition survey samples into subsets based on patterns emergent from those relations. We use two such approaches, Latent Class Analysis and Relational Class Analysis, to examine Americans’ attitudes toward science and religion in the late 20th century, at the onset of a period of acute cultural contention between religious conservatives and secular liberals. Employing an unusually rich data set that enables us to take into account spiritualism (supernatural experience not sanctioned by formal religious institutions), as well as science and religion, we find that both LCA and RCA identify large subsets of respondents for whom science and religion are allied, rather than opposed. Moreover, RCA enables us to examine how the determinants of attitudes toward science, religion, and spiritualism are conditioned upon respondents’ construals of the relationships among them. This diversity of opinion among religious Americans and the presence of a previously overlooked religious constituency of science supporters, has important implications for science policy and science advocacy.

This article examines the trends in inequality in rural Tamil Nadu between 1993–1994 and 2011–2012 based on consumer expenditure data of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Using “class” as an analytical category in broad Marxian sense, it offers a class perspective to understand inequality by grouping rural households into 11 classes. The article argues that the increase in rural inequality in Tamil Nadu between 1993–1994 and 2004–2005 is partly because of an increase in inequality between the classes, while the inequality within classes remained constant. Thereafter between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, rural inequality declined following a decrease in the inequality between classes. The article contextualizes and explains these results in the light of other empirical studies.

Economic sociologists agree that economic rationality is constructed and that morality and economic interests intersect. Yet we know little about how people organize economic beliefs or judge the morality of markets. We use Relational Class Analysis to identify three subsets of respondents whose members construe economic markets in distinct ways. Subsamples display more structure than the full sample in associations among attitudes, and between attitudes and sociodemographic predictors. The economically advantaged favor market solutions in each subset, but religious and political identities, respectively, predict pro-market views uniquely in subsamples that construe markets through a religious or political lens. Results illustrate the value of distinguishing between construals and positions, and of examining population heterogeneity in opinion data. Self-interest drives faith in markets, but only when people construe markets in ways consistent with their religious and political faiths.

Los estudios sobre género y clase en la historia del movimiento obrero han estado escindidos durante largo tiempo porque se ha interpretado que las categorías de clase social y de género no eran compatibles y se hacía hincapié en las causalidades unilaterales. En este trabajo pretendo avanzar en una perspectiva que incluya en la historia social los análisis de género y clase de manera conjunta y no excluyente. Para llevar adelante mi examen he puesto en consideración los abordajes del feminismo, de los estudios de género y de la historia social. A través del análisis de estas teorías propongo categorías para llevar adelante este entrelazamiento de relaciones sociales, llego al concepto fundamental de clase generizada y demuestro lo imprescindible de un análisis complejo. Los estudios sociales, sobre todo los de la clase obrera, deben incluir en su mirada la opresión específica de la mujer trabajadora.

This article aims to refresh class analysis in order to develop a better understanding of different modalities of reproduction of labour quite often without economic and social security in different historically specific contexts. It draws attention to the pertinence of exploring the ways in which the individuals comprising a particular movement experience specific moments of collective will formation within an authoritarian state form. In this regard, it focuses on the implications of the privatization of SEEs since the 2000s for workers who were made redundant and deprived of their social rights. On the basis of a field research with more than 100 former workers of TEKEL (a major privatized SEE) who staged a resistance to the AKP government’s offer of precarious employment status during the winter of 2009–10, the article provides a critical evaluation of this momentous experience pondering why such a moment of collective will formation failed to pave the ground for the development of a counter-hegemonic strategy. While aiming to assess the impact of this common experience on the ex-workers’ awareness of their class belonging who actually carried the brunt of the neoliberal assault on their economic and social well-being, the article argues that the particular employment policy did not simply introduce informalization into public sector but functioned as a labour containment strategy by the AKP government.

In this article, we address whether and how contemporary social classes are marked by distinct lifestyles. We assess the model of the social space, a novel approach to class analysis pioneered by Bourdieu's Distinction. Although pivotal in Bourdieu's work, this model is too often overlooked in later research, making its contemporary relevance difficult to assess. We redress this by using the social space as a framework through which to study the cultural manifestation of class divisions in lifestyle differences in contemporary Norwegian society. Through a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of unusually rich survey data, we reveal a structure strikingly similar to the model in Distinction, with a primary dimension of the volume of capital, and a secondary dimension of the composition of capital. While avoiding the substantialist fallacy of predefined notions of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' tastes, we explore how 168 lifestyle items map onto this social space. This reveals distinct classed lifestyles according to both dimensions of the social space. The lifestyles of the upper classes are distinctly demanding in terms of resources. Among those rich in economic capital, this manifests itself in a lifestyle which involves a quest for excitement, and which is bodily oriented and expensive. For their counterparts rich in cultural capital, a more ascetic and intellectually oriented lifestyle manifests itself, demanding of resources in the sense of requiring symbolic mastery, combining a taste for canonized, legitimate culture with more cosmopolitan and 'popular' items. In contrast to many studies' descriptions of the lower classes as 'disengaged' and 'inactive', we find evidence of distinct tastes on their part. Our analysis thus affirms the validity of Bourdieu's model of social class and the contention that classes tend to take the form of status groups. We challenge dominant positions in cultural stratification research, while questioning the aptness of the metaphor of the 'omnivore', as well as recent analyses of 'emerging cultural capital'.

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.

Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, the study uncovers three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, two alternative belief systems are also uncovered: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g. ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g. rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely held assumption that all people organise their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agendas and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.

This article presents the main types of class schemes of modem society in Western sociology. Class compatibility with society individualization is shown, to which a variety of sociologists addresses to deny the concept of classes. Authors of class schemes rehabilitate the concept “class” and state the class polarization in society. There are three class schemes: dual, plural and mixed. Some of the authors’ ideas of class schemes are objectionable. This concerns understanding of the precariat as a class. Critics of this approach help clarify the class concept and class structure outlines of modern Western society. Class analysis in modern Western sociology is not limited to economic explanation of class formation and introduces the possession of non-economic forms of capital as an important criterion of class divisions. The authors of class schemes show the changing nature of upper and lower social classes. In the upper class, the role of owners of non-economic forms of capital increases, while the lower class consists of people who are either in unstable situation in the employment system or excluded from the economically active population. Precariat and underclass appearance shows the weakening of social integration mechanisms and the strengthening of social differentiation processes. Misbalance between both types of social and structural processes threatens the stability of society. Loss of confidence in the future creates in people a sense of “uncertainty”, turning into resentment, because of which G. Standing’s “new dangerous class” is formed. Comparative analysis of class schemes indicates the growth of the class structure dysfunction of modern society.

Recent immigrants and refugees are the growing edge both of religious diversity and of working poverty in the United States. In light of this phenomenon and the rise of the "religion of neoliberalism," it is time for intentionally interfaith programs to include class analysis and theological reflection on class in their work. Drawing on examples from fieldwork, this article contends that inter-faith dialogue and interfaith organizing models should learn from each other to(a) prioritize the leadership and issues of religiously diverse low-wage workers and (b) develop theologically rich foundations for this work. The article closes by offering one such Christian resource: an empire-critical read of Galatians 2 that calls us to unite across abiding doctrinal difference by "remembering the poor."

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.

The development of class analysis since the early 1970s has greatly enhanced the understanding of how capitalist class interests are advanced and clarified the definitional problems involved in studies of the middle class. Studies adorned with the terminological rubric of class analysis are plentiful, but real confrontations with the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues have generally been avoided by their authors. The success of Marxist-led revolutionary movements abroad led to a renewal of interest in classical Marxist analysis and especially to the proposition that the working class would play a central role in the transformation of capitalism. The unit of analysis continued to be the individual or, as it was for Braverman, the properties of individual job positions. Working-class power was equated with aggregated individual sovereignty, albeit sovereignty in the workplace rather than in a political process. The task of retheorizing the US working-class experience lies ahead.

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.

Why is there a distinct lack of debate around prostitution and the sex trade in the academy? What motivates these academics to follow a particular line? To understand that, you have to look at how class analysis, largely prevalent within sociology and anthropology as a way of understanding institutionalised power relations, has been usurped by essentialist identity politics, the rise of market doctrine within universities, and how these have joined forces with old-fashioned sexism and male libertarianism.

This chapter extends class analysis of school choice through a consideration of gender and ethnic values, including religious and cultural values. School choice for this group of mothers is not only affected by parents’ access to class resources, but also by cultural modules linked to honour and reputation, grounded in some cases in their interpretation of Islamic rules. This chapter argues that school choices are heavily gendered and contribute to the gendered structuring of family and community. It provides deeper understanding of the complex and varied outlooks of migrant Muslim mothers on education and gender in their everyday practices of raising and educating their children. Although the selection of ‘good’ schools based on education quality was important, mothers’ choices were simultaneously defined by the struggle for recognition of family position, respectability, status and reputation with reference to their ethnic community as well as wider society.

In the view of many commentators and pundits, all citizens have an entitlement to be relieved of their poverty, and this may best be accomplished by throwing other people’s money at the poor. This chapter makes the case that not only do the impoverished not have any such right, but the attempt to furnish them with wealth earned by others constitutes theft, and does not help them in any case. Given, however, that such entitlements exist, how is the moral person to react to them? In order to approach an answer to this question, this chapter defines and then applies to it “libertarian class analysis,” and derives from this some counterintuitive conclusions regarding poor welfare recipients and reparations for past invasions of person and property.

With its prominence as one of the top-performing systems on international tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Singapore’s education system is often regarded as a reputed one in the international arena. This is often seen as a result of much investment in education both at the individual family and the societal level. Having transformed from an underdeveloped country to a largely middle-class developed society within a few decades, education is seen as holding the meritocratic key to a better life. With increased literacy, wealth and fewer children in families over the 50 years of Singapore’s independence, parents focus on more spending and efforts on supporting their children. However, in recent years, there has been a rising concern that the meritocratic promise the Singapore’s education system holds is diminishing (Koh, Doing class analysis in Singapore’s elite education: unravelling the smokescreen of ‘meritocratic talk’. Glob Soc Educ 12(2):196–210, 2014). Growing income disparity in Singapore has led to concerns about an emerging “parentocracy” (Ong, Beware growing ‘parentocracy’: NIE don. The Straits Times. Retrieved May 24, 2015, from http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/beware-growing-parentocracy-nie-don, 2014). Children from better-off families are seen as having competitive advantages through their parents’ ability to provide better resources such as quality private supplementary education and/or even old school connections to enable their enrolment in prestigious schools. With greater globalization and demographic trends in recent years, understanding the needs of Singapore’s diversified low-income families becomes even more crucial in order to better support students from these families so as to mitigate the ills of “parentocracy”. This chapter aims to contribute to the knowledge on the profile and parents’ educational support of low-income families through a study on migrant mothers’ involvement in their Singapore citizen children’s education. It attempts to throw some light on who these families are, the kind of parents’ educational support offered to these students and the challenges faced in rendering that support.

This book argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. It does so via a trans-disciplinary approach that draws on case studies from Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The book illustrates and explains the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. By illuminating the diversity of social formations, this book illustrates the depth and complexity present in Marx's method. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This paper explores the changing contours of politics and democracy in our times by examining the ways in which populations and privileges are increasingly being distributed in cities and countries...

SUMMARYThis Briefing/Debate article critically engages with the middle class phenomenon, which emerged as a prominent focus in Development Studies a decade ago and has more recently also become the subject of more informed African Studies, adding necessary and more nuanced analysis.1 It critically examines the background and assumptions of the debate, pointing out the lack of class analysis, and suggests that the current focus still partly distracts from the underlying issues.