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This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates with different class profiles determined by occupation, education and income. Existing survey‐experimental literature on this topic suggests that respondents are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high‐status occupations and high incomes. We find that respondents are biased against upper middle‐class candidates as well as routine working‐class candidates. While the bias against upper middle‐class candidates is primarily a bias among working‐class individuals, the bias against routine working‐class candidates is most pronounced among middle‐class individuals. Our supplementary analysis of observational data confirms the bias against routine working‐class candidates, but not the bias against upper middle‐class candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the ontological lens of sociomateriality with the theoretical notion of struggle, this critical ethnography explores interactions within an unemployment support organization run by white collar workers who train working class populations for skilled blue collar occupations. Results illustrate how sociomaterial struggle is enacted in two ways: struggle against embodied others and struggle against discursive forces. The first theme, struggle for control, occurs between blue collar trainees and white collar trainers. Second, the struggle for upward mobility, occurs when trainers and trainees struggled alongside one another in collaboration toward the goal of upward mobility. Participants' struggles organize in a complex combination of materiality and discourse throughout this unemployment support organization, mirroring social class relations in the United States. [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]

The article discusses social classes in Great Britain throughout the 20th century, including the role they play in understanding experiences and British social history during this period. An overview of Great Britain's historiography of social classes, including of the country's working class and class relations, is provided.

So far, the concept of classism has not found much resonance in the German Scientific Community. Nevertheless, its relevance rises. The article explains and criticizes the previous conceptions of classism and tries to give some theoretical impulse for a new concept of classism which could reveal how capitalist structures produce class discrimination within the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon qualitative interviews with women students, this article explores the meaning of ‘class’ and ‘studenthood’ at a ‘new’ university in a large post-industrial town in the north of England. Classed experiences were evident in the way interviewees interpreted the locale predominantly in terms of its ‘working-classness’ and the social problems associated with deindustrialisation. Findings support the accepted notion of a distinct student identity and perceived divides between students and local people based on spatiality, locality, class and student habitus, which also intersected with gender to produce ‘locally specific’ experiences of space and safety within this setting. However, the article confounds the middle-class student and working-class local dichotomy by exploring accounts from a varied sample of women in terms of age, class, ethnicity and domestic background, which reveal alternative university experiences and shifting class relations as a result of deindustrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Çalışma ve Toplum is the property of Calisma ve Toplum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the increasingly atomized, isolated nature of social life, as well as the apparent splintering of the working class under neoliberal capitalism, media serve a pivotal infrastructural function for generating the necessary commonality between the fractured sectors of the contemporary working class. This article ethnographically and textually examines how the media driven practices of the Philadelphia-based Media Mobilizing Project helps collectively suture fragmented groups of workers into a class formation that begins to resist and challenge the hegemony of neoliberal practices. As our detailed analysis of MMP's 2007 to 2009 montage reels show, MMP videos serve the primary purpose of fostering class alliances not only through their viewing, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through their making. As such, we do not consider media in general and the MMP videos in particular as an endpoint unto themselves, but instead as catalysts for further organization building and the renewed suturing of the multiple components of what we understand as a contemporary urban working class. Through a host of old and new media platforms (radio, video, web) MMP works with different segments of the neoliberal working class, such as immigrants, urban youth, and low-wage workers, to create a class identity at the local and regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization provides the material basis for the existence of a global proletariat. However, the worldwide working class is not homogeneous. The global proletariat is fractionated on the basis of workers' physical mobility relative to nation-states and regions, as well as the geographic scope of workers' labor-power expenditure relative to the circuits of production in which they are engaged. On that basis, three transnational fractions of the global working class are observed: the dynamic-global, the static-global, and the diasporic-global; and three local fractions of the global working class are observed, including the dynamic-local, the static-local, and the diasporic-local. In order to theoretically locate this fractionated perspective on the global working class this paper reviews Marxian class theory, class and contemporary perspectives on globalization, global social formations and the global proletariat, as well as labor-capital relation and the global proletariat as it relates to Marx's concept of simple reproduction. After a discussion of the fractions and directions for future research a typology is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the work of bodily affect in three Victorian reform treatises about the industrial working classes: Kay's The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, and Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England. Employing a gothic technology that graphically illustrates and appeals to the sensations, these treatises provide a striking instance of the extent to which Victorian attempts at social reform were routed through the visceral, sensible knowledge of the body. Since, however, the gothic tends toward the excessive, a second crucial feature of its technology entails the arousal of conflicting sensations that problematize class relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how bodies are both constituted by and constitutive of the workplace and the racialized and gendered class relations. The authors believe that the incorporation of race, gender, sexuality and disability into working-class history have transformed the narrative of industrial development and enriching the understanding of class. They conclude that a bodily turn can illuminate the injuries of class in manifold dimensions, including the representational, psychic and physical.

The author comments on the article "The Body as a Useful Category for Working-Class History," by Ava Baron and Eileen Boris. He recommends a complementary direction for scholarship both in working-class history and the history of body in a class-structured society. He mentions the growing gap between mind and body. He claims that the displays of bodily skill and prowess have never been limited to the workplace.

This article considers the relationship between working class struggle and popular protest in Africa over the last 40 years. We argue that the form and content of class relations which developed in the period of nationalist struggle and early `national development' have been fundamentally restructured by the process of globalisation. From the late 1970s, a great wave of widespread popular protest and resistance was noted around the world, including Africa (Parfitt & Riley, 1994; Walton and Seddon, 1994). The strikes, marches, demonstrations and riots that characterised this wave of protest and resistance (often termed `bread riots' or `IMF riots') usually involved a variety of social groups and categories and did not always take place under a working class or trade union banner or with working class leadership - if this term is used in its narrow sense. A broader array of popular forces did, however, challenge not only the immediate austerity measures introduced as part of structural adjustment and `economic reform', but also the legitimacy of the reforms themselves and even, sometimes, the governments that introduced them. They also frequently identified the international financial institutions and agencies that led this concerted effort to further enmesh `the developing world' and the ordinary people who live there, into the uneven process of capitalist globalisation in the interests of major transnational corporations and the states that gain most from their operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the holy grail myth from the perspective of a medieval scholar of working class origin. Presentation of the idea of Perceval as a "smart kid"; Construction of a critique of education and its effects on instilling class values; Parallels between the quest for knightly fame and achieving an education; Need to find a way to link the good and the real of both working class and middle-class worlds into education.

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on race and class relation in the U.S. capitalism. Adolph Reed is surely right to censure analyses that ignore or "underestimate the significance of struggles over civic status", particularly the "ascriptive status" of race in shaping the concrete class dynamics of the U.S. capitalism. The article examines the historical meaning of the most significant interracial working class struggles of the past century and their impact on the confluence of race and class in the U.S. Communists and their radical allies organized and led the Congress of Industrial Organization's most principled interracial unions. They not only demanded and won more egalitarian workplace practices and increased black/white employment equality but also fought against Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination in the community and revivified nearly dormant civil rights organizations. Rather than viewing racial inequality as a mere "artifact of capitalist production relations," which is a position Reed attributes to an unidentified "more radical left", Communist unionists recognized and emphasized the specificity of black oppression which they saw as an inherent evil to be fought and extirpated.

From the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, logging, mining, agriculture, and fishing have distinguished the Pacific Northwest and the gendered character of its work. Through in recent decades high tech, service and other industries have employed greater number of workers, many of the nations of work remain frozen in the early twentieth century and the concept of a white, male "wageworkers frontier." These perceptions persist because scholarly as well as popular treatments of work perpetuate them. For example, a fine recent anthology featuring literature about work in the Pacific Northwest includes some selections about contemporary urban, high-tech and industrial agriculture realities but for the most part, the book focuses on the region's mines, woods and rural enterprises of the first half of the twentieth century. Historians exploring white male working-class experiences have expanded traditional narratives about the Northwest by considering capital and class relations, but they have neglected the roles of women and people of color in shaping the region's political economy.

The homogeneity (mass-elite) paradigm exerts inordinate influence over social research on East and Central European socialism and its transition. I explore the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of this paradigm and argue that it has masked the importance of class relations for grasping the dynamics of these societies. I help retrieve class in general, and the working class in particular, from the analytic obscurity to which the homogeneity paradigm has relegated them by juxtaposing workers' and intellectuals' perceptions of economic inefficiency. Finally, I suggest ways that inattention to class under socialism has retarded understanding of the political struggles that have accompanied its demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a common assumption of much of the research on class relations in capitalist economies that workers' collective action improves the economic standing of the working class. Specifically, we utilize a quarterly, time-series analysis to test hypotheses about the impact of changes in union membership and strike activity on changes in labor's share and its three components--changes in employment, compensation, and net revenue--during the post-World War II U.S. economy. We examine these hypotheses during a period of transition in the capital-labor accord that has dominated the U.S. political economy since 1949. We identify three periods during the capital-labor accord--the peak, the transitional, and the post-accord periods--and anticipate changing effects of strike activity and union membership on labor share and its components in the different periods. Our results provide mixed support for the hypotheses, but generally confirm our expectations that trends in strike activity and union membership were more instrumental for impacting labor's share and its components as hypothesized during the peak period of the capital-labor accord and less instrumental in later periods. In the post-accord period, in particular, strikes and unions become virtually irrelevant for the economic standing of workers, a result that bespeaks the changing configuration of class relations in the postwar U.S. economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reasons why the U.S. Congress failed to enact health care reform. It states that the explanation for the Congress' failure in passing health care reform was the ambivalence of the people as they were not ready and were confused even if they wanted health care reform. It mentions that government experts have the responsibility to form public policies but was insufficient to foster an understanding of the failure of a reform and ignores the sociopolitical context. Furthermore, the country lacks a national health care program due to it specific class relations whereby it strengthened the working class and weakened the capitalist class.

The article insists youth responses to state training must be grounded within an analysis of class relations, and a recognition of their clear-eyed awareness of the futility not only of their training, but also the work they will eventually enter. In this sense and in opposition to cultural explanations youth's resistance to training constitutes part of working class struggle and must be understood as historically constituted 'in and against' the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a view on the significance of the labor aristocracy to Marxist accounts of the development of social class relations during the Victorian and Edwardian period in Great Britain. The relation of aristocracy to the respectable divide in the working class involved the hierarchies of skill, pay and personal qualities. Respectability is associated with the ideology and practice of femininity, with work-based ideologies of skilled male workers and gender roles.

A response to a series of comments about their article "The Body as a Useful Category for Working-Class History" is presented. The authors claim that bodies remain invoked rather than conceptualized in most studies. They believe that the development of the bodily turn might marginalize attempts to incorporate the body into labor history. They mention how working-class historians are recording ways that bodies have mattered historically.