The class lens: How social class shapes hotel employees’ beliefs about how customers see them

Research demonstrates that social class affects where high-achieving students apply to college, but the processes through which such effects come about are not well understood. This chapter draws on 46 in-depth interviews with high-achieving students in the Bay Area to examine how social class impacts college application decisions. I argue that the upbringing and experiences associated with students’ social class shape their narratives regarding how much autonomy or constraints they perceive in making college decisions. Higher-SES students present a narrative of independence about what they have done to prepare themselves for college and where to apply. In contrast, lower-SES students speak of experiences and considerations that reflect a narrative of interdependence between themselves and their parents that is grounded in the mutual concern they have for one another as the prospect of college looms. As a result, higher-SES students frame college as an opportunity to leave their families and immerse themselves in an environment far from home while lower-SES students understand college as a continuation of family interdependence. Consequently, higher-SES students are more likely to apply to selective private universities in other parts of the country, while lower-SES students tend to limit their choices to primarily selective and nonselective public colleges closer to home. This research enhances our understanding of the mechanisms by which social class differences in family experiences contribute to the perpetuation of social inequality.

Building on the notion that cognitive processes vary across social classes, we predict that social class shapes thinking style, which in turn affects consumer judgments. In doing so, we employ service failure domains as a way to understand social class effects. Across four studies, we show that, when faced with a failure incident occurring in one service dimension (e.g., rude employees), consumers in the low social class, relative to those in the high social class, carry over to influence their evaluations of the other service dimensions (e.g., food quality) that are unrelated to the failure incident. We further show that low‐class consumers favor a holistic style of thinking, whereas high‐class consumers favor an analytic style of thinking and that these differences in thinking style account for the carryover effects on evaluations. The pattern of the effects exists when the service failure is perceived to be severe rather than minor.

Concerns about rising levels of economic inequality are widespread and cut across culture, political ideology, and social class. Not surprisingly then, in recent years, management research has become increasingly interested in understanding how social class and economic inequality affect organizational processes. However, extant research has tended to focus on either (a) understanding how social class shapes thought and behavior or (b) investigating how people in general rationalize inequality. In this symposium, we bring together five papers that speak to the intersection of these topics. Specifically, we examine the cognitive mechanisms (including motivation, attributions, and framing) that both bias the evaluations of others based upon their social class and shape support for policies that either reinforce or redress inequality. In so doing, they shed light on how common organizational policies and practices may in fact amplify cognitive processes that ultimately perpetuate social class and economic inequity. Together, the papers show that, while people actively desire less economic inequality, they nevertheless support mechanisms by which inequality is reproduced. By integrating research from psychological and organizational sciences, such work can deepen our understanding of barriers to addressing inequality, while helping researchers and practitioners alike identify strategies for increasing support for policies that increase socioeconomic diversity and equity in organizations. The Vicious Cycle of Social Status: Poverty, Motivation, and Redistribution Preference Presenter: Holly Engstrom; U. of British Columbia Presenter: Kristin Laurin; U. of British Columbia Inequality Blindness: Motivated Perception of Inequality and Support for Policies in Organizations Presenter: Daniela Goya-Tocchetto; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. Presenter: Keith Payne; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Benefitting from Blood-Lines: Perceptions of Inherited Privilege and its Transmission Over Time Presenter: Elinor Flynn; New York U. Presenter: L Taylor Phillips; NYU Stern The Consequences of Revealing First-Generational Status Presenter: Peter Belmi; U. of Virginia Presenter: Kelly Raz; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Presenter: Margaret A. Neale; Stanford U. Presenter: Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt; Vanderbilt U. Adjusting Decisions about Low and High Performers Based on their (Dis)Advantages Presenter: David Mauricio Munguia Gomez; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Presenter: L Taylor Phillips; NYU Stern

Social class shapes the form and function of relationships and selves

This study advances research on business planning by integrating and reconciling the institutional and strategic planning perspectives to explore the performance implications of both formal and informal business planning. We also examine how an entrepreneur's prior experience and social class shape the planning‐performance relationship. Using a dataset of two waves of interviews with 313 founders in C hina, we found that both formal and informal business planning can benefit new ventures. Interestingly, as a unique contingency factor in the C hinese context, social class moderates only the link between formal planning and performance, whereas prior work experience moderates the effects of both formal and informal planning on performance. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.

A growing amount of scholarship on lifestyle journalism and role conceptions has shown its relevance in the context of consumption cultures and societal changes. However, the existing literature has tended to focus on countries with relatively prosperous economies, neglecting to explore those with greater socio-economic inequality. Likewise, scholarship has offered some insight into what audiences expect of political journalists, but we know little about expectations of lifestyle journalism. Exploring role conceptions and expectations in socio-economically unequal societies gives rise to the question: How may social class shape these? To examine this, our study draws on 22 in-depth interviews with lifestyle journalists and three focus groups with audiences from different class backgrounds in South Africa. Findings suggest that lifestyle journalists’ awareness of class disparity and the country’s history of racial segregation and oppression shapes their roles in three ways. First, journalists expressed strong support for roles typically associated with political journalism, albeit interconnected with lifestyle roles. Second, journalists acted as ‘ responsible’ cultural intermediaries, mediating the worlds of luxury and inequality. Third, journalists expressed a strong role orientation toward providing aspiration, as did audience expectations, indicating a level of congruence. Applying a Bourdieusian framework, we argue that lifestyle journalism allows audiences who live under ‘conditions of scarcity’ and who have been conceptualized as having a ‘taste of necessity’, to perform a ‘ taste of aspiration’. We suggest a need to reconceptualize scholarship’s approach to studying journalistic roles by moving beyond a politics-lifestyle binary, and to more closely examine the role of aspiration in lifestyle journalism.

Chaotic conditions are a prevalent and threatening feature of social life. Five studies examined whether social class underlies divergent responses to perceptions of chaos in one's social environments and outcomes. The authors hypothesized that when coping with perceptions of chaos, lower class individuals tend to prioritize community, relative to upper class individuals, who instead tend to prioritize material wealth. Consistent with these predictions, when personally confronting chaos, lower class individuals were more communally oriented (Study 1), more connected with their community (Study 2), and more likely to volunteer for a community-building project (Study 3), compared to upper class individuals. In contrast, perceptions of chaos caused upper class individuals to express greater reliance on wealth (Study 4) and prefer financial gain over membership in a close-knit community (Study 5), relative to lower class individuals. These findings suggest that social class shapes how people respond to perceptions of chaos and cope with its threatening consequences.

ABSTRACTWe verified whether social class shapes different models of the self in China, by integrating individuals’ social mobility beliefs and exploring the mediating effect of sense of control. Participants were randomly assigned to one of 2 (subjective social class: upper vs. low class) × 2 (social mobility beliefs: high vs. low mobility) manipulation conditions. They then completed the sense of control questionnaire and self-focused attention task. High mobility belief could alleviate the difference in perception among different subjective social classes and improve lower classes’ control perception. Sense of control mediates subjective social class effects and social mobility beliefs on self-focused attention.

The coherence and solidarity created through legal discrimination that defined black people’s experience in the United States up until the civil rights era created an abundance of indigenous institutions that black people relied on for their survival and that simultaneously served as spaces where resistance was practiced and developed (Cohen, 1999; Morris, 1984); one of which was the black press. The black press has historically and contemporarily contested the representation of black people in the mainstream, white press (Cohen, 1999; Dates, 1990; O. Davis, 2005; Huspek, 2005a, 2005b). While prior to the civil rights era the power of racial oppression obscured the significance of alternative identities that black people experienced, today, analysis must take into account how social class, gender, sexuality, culture, and other identities shape how people of African ancestry experience the world (Cohen, 1999; Collins, 2005; McGruder, 2009; Nagel, 2003).

Confronting Katrina: Social Class and Race Shape Responses to Disaster

This paper uses a personal narrative format to recount an emeritus professor of public administration’s ongoing study of how social class and socioeconomic origins shape various aspects of bureaucracy, with special emphasis on the sorting function of formal education and its subsequent effects on personnel selection. Following an account of his family background, he summarizes his recent findings on the relationship between class and administration, followed by a sampling of remedies he proposes for bringing socioeconomic issues, especially the effects of inherited social, financial, and cultural capital, into the mainstream of our discipline. The author argues that by implementing these changes, we will not only prove we are the “cutting edge” enterprise we claim to be, but our actions will provoke other fields to enact similar democratic and egalitarian reforms.

Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work

Book Review: <i>Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work</i>

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTop Student, Top School? How Social Class Shapes Where Valedictorians Go to College. By Alexandria Walton Radford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xii+281. $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).Joshua KlugmanJoshua KlugmanTemple University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 119, Number 5March 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674780 Views: 182Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Top Student, Top School? How Social Class Shapes Where Valedictorians Go to College by Alexandria Walton Radford (review)