Two Studies in the Middle Class Vote: I--The Middle Class Elector

Despite copious studies on the middle classes, there is no single, widely held definition of the middle class. Some scholars define the middle class in terms of the relation to the means of production, others in terms of relative incomes, and still others in terms of consumption patterns. A common working definition might include those with incomes in the middle third of the income distribution; who work as upper- or lower-level managers, professionals, or small-business owners; who graduated from a four-year college or university; and whose primary source of wealth is home ownership. The sociological study of the middle classes has a long and varied past and has been driven by both theoretical and empirical concerns. Theoretically, much attention has been given to conceptualizing the historical middle classes in relation to other social classes and also accounting for the emergence of the new middle class in the latter part of the 20th century. Neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist theories of class represent two influential perspectives on the middle class. Both perspectives emphasize the importance of market capacities in shaping life chances and how the middle classes differ from the working class and the upper class on this dimension. Neo-Marxist arguments differ primarily in their additional focus on the relationship to the means of production as a key dimension of the class structure. A third influential approach to studying class structure focuses on the role of tastes, consumption patterns, and cultural boundaries in defining class relations and identifying the middle classes. Empirically, the literature on the middle class addresses the structural forces shaping the emergence of the middle class in different national contexts and how the political, economic, and social trends of the time shape the experiences of the middle class. Since the late 20th century there has been considerable attention given to analyzing the “new middle class” and uncovering in what ways members of this class differ from other classes in terms of political orientations and activities. Other work has focused on how the changing economic landscape of the postindustrial economy has led to economic uncertainty for many members of the middle class, causing an increase in consumer debt, bankruptcies, and downward mobility. The notion of social reproduction and middle-class advantage (vis-à-vis the working class) is a theme running throughout work examining the education system and studies examining religion. Additional topics of research on the middle class include the intersectionality of gender, race, and ethnicity; the importance of geospatial dimensions of space and place; and cross-national comparative work and case studies of various subpopulations and nations.

This paper problematizes the relationship between the working and middle classes in socialism, which was characterized by consumer culture and state of welfare. It also tackles the extinct middle class in the post-socialist context of the economic crisis and economically defined but politically void “new” working class. The economic realization of the Yugoslav socialist model – a hybrid of planned and market economies – combined the capitalist idea of the state of welfare with the communist execution of social rights. The socialist consumer culture, “searching for welfare”, established a homogenous middle class as a proof of its own social success, leaving the “working class” to be conveniently invoked only in ideological manifests of the governing nomenclature. The discussion about the capitalist restoration of the post-socialist period gives precedence to the lament over the extinction of the middle class and its high standard of living over the issues of class relations. On the other hand, the majority of the 286,075 unemployed and 15,230 of the employed who did not receive their salaries in the first quarter of 2015 are low-skill or vocational workers, i.e., the working class. This new relationship between the working and middle classes problematizes the socialist inheritance of transformation of the working class into the middle class, the recent phenomenon of economically defined working class without a political meaning, the post-socialist class inequality between the employed and the unemployed, and the emancipation of the worker as “the scorned subject” and his mobilization without being necessarily included in the middle-class political activism for the “general good”. Kljucne rijeci self-management, post-socialism, working class, middle class

This article aims to identify and characterise the Chinese urban middle class. We propose to improve the description of the middle class using an innovative approach combining an economic approach (based on income) and a sociological approach (based on education and occupation). The empirical investigations conducted as part of this research are based on the China Health and Nutrition Survey (2009). First, we define the middle income class as households with an annual per capita income between 10,000 yuan and the 95th percentile. On this basis, approximately 50% of urban households may be said to belong to the middle class. Second, we use information on employment and education to characterise the heterogeneity of the middle income class. Using clustering methods, we identify four groups: (i) the elderly and the inactive middle class, mainly composed of pensioners; (ii) the old middle class, composed of self-employed workers; (iii) the marginal middle class, composed of skilled and unskilled workers; and (iv) the new middle class, composed of highly educated wage earners in the public sector. We show that the different groups have distinctive features based on variables such as housing and household appliances and equipment.

The purpose of the article is to determine the role of the middle class in political democracy and economic democracy in Ukraine. The role of the Ukrainian middle class in the revolutionary events of 2004 and 2013-2014 – the Ukrainian Maidans, the influence of the middle class on the results of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine and its presentation in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine are noted. The pendulum-like oscillation of self-identification of the middle class between "service to the oligarchs" and "resistance to democracy," the basis of civil society, is noted. The emphasis is placed on the fact that democracy is the rule of the middle class, and the principle of equal freedom is at the core of economic democracy. The compromise between capitalism and democracy is the need to distribute the public good under the supervision of political democracy in the interests of the middle class. Methodology. The theory of economic democracy was used to study the essence and characteristics of the middle class in Ukraine. By means of sociological methods of empirical research middle class identification by indicators of income, education, labor (employment), consumer behavior is given. Differences of "European" middle class from Ukrainian middle class are marked. In connection with the fact that the level of income of the Ukrainian middle class does not correspond to the indicators of EU countries, the necessity of application of subjective indicators to determine self-identification of middle class representatives in Ukraine is substantiated. The definition of the middle class from the opposite, i.e., what the middle class is not (not the oligarchs, not the authorities, not the working class, etc.) is also applied. Results. The trajectories of the middle class in Ukraine have been defined – from active participation in the Ukrainian revolutions to the role of a servant of the oligarchic regime. The middle class is well positioned to establish a regime of political democracy and to oppose the oligarchic-lumpen alliance. What hinders this is the insufficient activity of the middle class during election campaigns and especially after them. The oligarchs' established monopoly in the economy and media space allows for effective election campaigns in the mass media and the financing of political parties. This nullifies attempts of the middle class to establish political democracy in Ukraine. The growing role of the new middle class – intellectuals and representatives of the creative industries – has been noted. The self-identification factors of the middle class include a sense of justice, responsibility for the future and the practice of democratic values. According to sociological research, representatives of the Ukrainian middle class strive for democratic changes, overcoming corruption, deconstruction of the oligarchic regime, and implementation of market reforms. They have higher education, are interested in art, go to restaurants, and can sometimes afford vacations abroad. The political parties that declared support for the middle class and defined it as a target group in the elections included the "Team of Winter Generation," "Veche," "Self Reliance", and "Voice". The first two were perceived as oligarchic projects, while the last two parties made it to parliament, respectively, in the eighth and ninth convocations. Separately, the 2019 elections, in which the voice of the middle class became truly powerful, are examined separately. The "old faces," representatives of the post-Soviet oligarchy, and bureaucrats lost in the majoritarian districts. The middle class refused to support those politicians and parties that had become "servants of the oligarchs" in parliament, taking an important step in building not only a political democracy, but also an economic democracy. Practical implications. The results of the study can be used in the process of European integration of Ukraine, the implementation of reforms to develop political democracy as the rule of the middle class and economic democracy as a democratic system of redistribution of public resources. Value/originality. This study of the middle class and economic democracy allows us to understand the economic factors that influence politics, the role of the middle class and its characteristics in the process of establishing political democracy and economic democracy in Ukraine.

It is sometimes difficult to tell which group is more distressed about the purportedly deteriorating well-being of Canada’s middle class: Politicians courting middle-class voters, or the Canadians who actually identify as middle class. Even more difficult to discern is whether either group truly understands precisely who it is they are worrying about. There is no firm consensus on where the upper and lower boundaries of the middle class lie, with economists and statisticians disagreeing on the income levels and brackets that should be included in the definition of middle class, and some even arguing that income itself may be an inappropriate measure (preferring instead, for instance, consumption and lifestyle). And yet, despite all the conflicting approaches to measuring the middle class, what emerges from a review of the array of definitions and data sources is that the politicians and voters can at least partly justify their angst. While the middle class has seen its income grow, it has not kept pace with the income growth rate of higherearning groups. But not all members of the so-called middle class face the same plight. The workers who have lost the most ground relative to higher-income groups, are those with below-average human capital (that is, lower skill and education), and are at the lower end of the middle-income bracket. The largest source of downward pressure on middle-class incomes has been the decline of Canada’s manufacturing industry. Beginning in the postwar years, factory jobs developed a misplaced reputation for being well-paying middleclass work. In fact, the work provided generous pay and benefits only relative to the low human capital that was necessary to find employment in manufacturing. As manufacturing has declined across all industrialized countries, lower-skilled workers have been forced to accept lower rates of income growth. Meanwhile, more gains have been made by those with high levels of human capital. Public-sector professionals in particular have come to share the human-capital and income characteristics of Canada’s highest-paid managers and professionals, often enjoying greater job security as well. In reality, anxiety over the state of the middle class and its future is actually about the working class. Lumping middle-class factory workers and clerical assistants in with middle-class teachers and nurses — as current political discussion tends to do — obscures the truth about which members of that group are genuinely struggling to keep up. As long as politicians continue to promote policies aimed at helping everyone within such a vague and broad target group, they can only end up misdirecting resources by enriching those who are already doing reasonably well, rather than focusing on those working-class Canadians who truly are not. Already net transfers through the tax system to middle-income groups have grown markedly. These transfers have managed to offset about half the erosion of middle-class incomes in the marketplace. Those transfers have been financed through increased tax payments from high-income groups, but also through shrinking transfers to low-income groups. These developments raise serious policy issues for which there are no simple answers. The breadth of Canada’s middle class obviously means that it encompasses the largest proportion of families, by far. Any further policies aimed at transferring wealth from other income groups to appease middle-class voters will be costly. Given that the main cause for concern is the worsening situation of lowerskilled workers, politicians who truly want to help those struggling in the “middle class,” should focus their efforts on helping Canadians acquire more education and more skills.

Book Review From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960–2015, by Myungji Yang. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 204 pages. ISBN-10: 1501710737. $45.00 hardcover. The early 2000s ushered in an academic discussion surrounding South Korea’s social woes and concerns for the collapse of its middle class. It is, as the author epitomized, because of the importance of the middle class as a “carrier of economic and political modernization or as a coalitional actor for political transformations” (p. 8). The aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s has delineated someone who can be still categorized as the middle class from another who does not belong to the middle class anymore. That is to say, chicken restaurants owners who invest their lump sum retirement pay would be straddling on the boundary between the two categories. A more pertinent observation is that of socioeconomically vulnerable people who struggle to survive by enduring longer working hours and severe working conditions—most of whom have probably been thrown from the race for upward mobility. Likewise, the un-making of the middle class has signaled turbulent circumstances across different classes. The collective anger for the collapse of the “middle class myth” followed by exacerbating inequality and economic polarization is expressed in the Korean Studies © 2019 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 1 term “Hell Chosun,” which Yang Myungji discussed at the beginning of the concluding chapter. In From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960–2015, Yang explains the political, social, and economic circumstances surrounding the emergence and development of the middle class in Korea, as well as the articulation by the middle class against transient circumstances threatening their social status. Chapters in this book are simple and each chapter carries a clear theme. Excluding the introduction and conclusion chapters, there are three chapters which are periodically aligned: the birth of the middle class as the ideal national goal during the 1960s and 1970s; the heydays, focusing on those who settled down in the Gangnam area during the 1980s and 1990s; and the unmaking process of the middle class myths from the 1990s to the present. As Yang mentioned, the notion of “class,” and by extension “middle class,” is a contestable term that is not neatly defined. Rather than delving into an elaborate definition of class in Korea, this book focuses more on the process and dynamics underlying the making and unmaking, via the educational system and investments on real-estate, particularly high-rise apartments in the Gangnam area. This book is additionally centered on the urban middle class in Korea, including three distinct groups: professionals and technical elites; salaried employees; as well as old middle class or petty bourgeoisie including self-employed small business owners, merchants, and shopkeepers. By complementing the definition of urban middle class based on the elaboration of socioeconomically positioned subjects, the book accords attention to the middle class as a contested notion and structural category, one that is not fixed but dependent on historical dynamics and structural forces. Addressing the dynamics of the middle class in the third chapter, their contradictory position in terms of “dubious” characteristics is described well: when their interests are well-represented by the society, they are a main group supporting the system; however, they can be the most threatening element of the society when their social and economic values are in conflict with the system. When the stable, mundane lifestyle of middle class is threatened, their frustration and collective actions can be articulated into social conflict followed by civil movement. Likewise, the strongest and most stable allies of current political regime can turn into their strongest opponents. In this sense, the most interesting chapter is the concluding chapter that highlights the issue of the dwindling middle class. 2 Korean Studies 2019 It briefly provides parallel situations in other countries that share similar issues regarding the crisis of the middle class, which have resulted in political chaos or economically unstable situations. By positioning Korea’s middle class issue into contemporaneity in the globalized world, the concluding chapter...

Making Sense of the Postwar Middle Class Charles L. Ponce de Leon (bio) Lawrence R. Samuel. The American Middle Class: A Cultural History. New York: Routledge2014. 174pp. Selected bibliography and index. $135.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Janice M. Traflet. A Nation of Small Shareholders: Marketing Wall Street after World War II. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. xiv + 242 pp. Notes, essay on sources, and index. $45.00. Louis Hyman. Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011. 392pp. Illustrations, notes, references, and index. $24.95. For several decades, politicians and much of the American public have obsessed about the fate of the “middle class,” a concept so protean and elastic it has become almost meaningless. Being middle class can refer to income, net worth, or one’s material standard of living. It can mean education or having a particular kind of job or career. For most Americans, however, it also stands for something more nebulous: beliefs and values that transcend socioeconomic categories and make “middle class” a more widely embraced identity in the United States than in other advanced industrialized nations. The vast majority of Americans—roughly 90 percent in most surveys—think of themselves as middle class, making appeals to the middle class the modern equivalent of nineteenth-century appeals to “the people.” Social scientists have long been interested in this phenomenon and have produced some notable works exploring its political and cultural implications. So, too, have historians. But our contributions have mostly focused on “middle-class formation” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, we know a great deal about how the eighteenth-century “middling sort” became a middle class of entrepreneurs and small proprietors, and how the emergence of a corporate economy gave rise to new professions and white-collar occupations and made the middle class more diverse. And we know much about how gender, religion, cultural practices, and political activism [End Page 168] helped such people see themselves as “middle class”—and distinguish themselves from the majority of Americans. We know far less, however, about the middle class in the decades after World War II, the years when, thanks to the postwar economic boom and the expansion of education, the ranks of the middle class grew. And the whole process of how so many Americans, including people who, in other countries, would have proudly identified as “working class” came to see themselves as “middle class” remains quite mysterious. Thankfully, historians have begun to turn their attention to this subject, inspiring hope that we may eventually be able to explain what it meant to be middle class in the second half of the twentieth century and why being middle class remains so appealing today. The boldest recent attempt to address the subject is Lawrence Samuel’s lively and engaging “cultural history” of the middle class. Samuel’s book is quite ambitious for so slender a work. It purports to be both a history of the postwar middle class and a history of ideas about the middle class, drawn largely from journalistic sources and notable works of social criticism. It begins after World War II and examines the growth of the middle class amid postwar prosperity. Samuel then discusses the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their impact on middle-class Americans in particular. For Samuel, this was an important period of transition, when a variety of factors contributed to a “fragmentation” of the middle class. The second half of the book covers the last three decades of the century, when it seemed that the middle class was in “crisis.” In these chapters Samuel assesses developments that encouraged this belief. The best sections of the book are those that cover periods when the state of the middle class was a major source of discussion: the 1950s and early 1960s, when commentators were struck by the impact of rising incomes and living standards and concerned about the spread of conformity; and the 1980s and especially the 1990s, when it became clear that political and economic trends were threatening the privileges and expectations middle-class Americans had long taken for granted...

ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2004, pp. 263-275. Commentary THE MIDDLE CLASS IN ASIA-PACIFIC: SECOND-PHASE RESEARCH AND FUTURE TRAJECTORY Alvin Y. So Issues in Studying the East Asian Middle Class Despite the existence of many journalistic accounts on Asian middle classes, very few systematic inquiries have been carried out on them in an Asian country, let alone any cross-country comparative studies.1 In this respect, the EAMC (East Asian Middle Classes) Project and the SEAMC (Southeast Asian Mid­ dle Classes) Project sponsored by Academia Sinica (Taiwan) rep­ resent the first phase of large-scale empirical investigations on the middle classes in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Sin­ gapore as well as on the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.1 2 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the International Work­ shop on Prioritizing the Middle Class Research in Asia Pacific, spon­ sored by the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPAS), Academia Sinica from October 31-November 1, 2003 in Taipei. An earlier version also appeared in Asia-Pacific Forum, No. 22, pp. 12-19. I want to gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Hagen Koo, Mel Gurtov, and the conference participants. 2. Michael Hsin-Huang, ed., Discovery of Middle Classes in Fast Asia (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1993); Michael HsingHuang Hsiao, ed., Fast Asia Middle Classes in Comparative Perspective (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1999); Michael HsingHuang Hsiao, ed., Exploration of the Middle Classes in Southeast Asia 264 Alvin Y. So The EAMC and SEAMC projects have focused on four issues. First, is the boundary issue: How can we distinguish the middle class from other classes? What criteria and class scheme should be adopted to draw class boundaries? Second, is the soci­ ological profile issue: What are the social characteristics of the Asian middle class in terms of family background, marriage pat­ terns, and homogeneity? The lifestyle and class identity issue is third: What are the lifestyles of the middle class? Do its mem­ bers identify themselves as middle class or some other class? Fourth, is the class politics issue: What are the attitudes of the middle class toward the state, social justice, and democratic transitions? How active is the middle class in political move­ ments and elections? Preliminary analyses of the EAMC project show that the East Asian middle class defies any simplistic stereotyping. First, although many members of the East Asian middle class came from working class families, they are starting to develop class closure through intra-class marriage. Second, the East Asian middle class is generally pro-labor and anti-big capital; but a significant minority is pro-establishment, supports the state, and thinks that the society to which it belongs is not ready for democracy. As a third example, the East Asian middle class is morally committed to electoral politics; but a majority of its members have a low degree of political participation and are not active in social movements. Or again, although the East Asian middle class possesses a set of distinctive status symbols to dif­ ferentiate itself from the working class, it has yet to transfer its "cultural capital" into the political realm and emerge as a new class to challenge the state. Based on these findings, it seems that the middle class in East Asia is still in the process of making itself. Having emerged only in the post-World War II decades, the East Asian middle class is still haunted by its working class origin. Reaping in the benefits of rapid industrialization in the 1970s and the 1980s, the affluent East Asian middle class is still enjoying its current privi­ leges. Confronting the challenge of democratic transitions in the late 1980s and the 1990s, many members of the East Asian mid­ (Taipei: Program for Southeast Asian Area Studies, Academia Sinica, 2001). The Middle Class in Asia-Pacific 265 die class are still unsure whether chaotic democracy is better than benign authoritarianism.3 Despite their contributions, the EAMC and the SEAMC pro­ jects are not without limitations. First, there is the problem of drawing class boundaries. As Hagen Koo points out, "it is a wellknown fact that class boundaries of...

The EADI General Conference 2014, under the title ‘Responsible Development in a Polycentric World. Inequality, Citizenship and the Middle Classes’, happened to be more mainstream than perhaps anticipated at the time when the topical focus was discussed and decided upon by the Executive Committee. This was, however, no disadvantage for the deliberations. Rather the opposite: thanks to an already ongoing process of critical engagement, the exchanges turned out to illustrate the diversity of assessments. While the verdict on the current role of the middle class(es) remains pending, it became obvious that more scholars than originally expected had started to reflect on this phenomenon.Not by accident does Goran Therborn (2012) wonder whether we are entering a century of the middle class. He observed that the working class had seemingly been removed from our memory. The project of a worldwide emancipation under the leadership of the proletariat was instead replaced by a universal desire to obtain a middle-class status. He takes his evidence from the OECD report on global development perspectives (OECD, 2011), which emphasized the need to consolidate the growth of the emerging middle classes, and the advocacy role by Nancy Birdsall (2010) and the Center for Global Development she heads as an influential think tank. Therborn’s conclusion is that in a world in which the relevance of the working class and socialism has been declared obsolete, the middle-class society emerges as the symbol of an alternative future (Therborn, 2012, p. 17).

It is sometimes difficult to tell which group is more distressed about the purportedly deteriorating well-being of Canada’s middle class: Politicians courting middle-class voters, or the Canadians who actually identify as middle class. Even more difficult to discern is whether either group truly understands precisely who it is they are worrying about. There is no firm consensus on where the upper and lower boundaries of the middle class lie, with economists and statisticians disagreeing on the income levels and brackets that should be included in the definition of middle class, and some even arguing that income itself may be an inappropriate measure (preferring instead, for instance, consumption and lifestyle). And yet, despite all the conflicting approaches to measuring the middle class, what emerges from a review of the array of definitions and data sources is that the politicians and voters can at least partly justify their angst. While the middle class has seen its income grow, it has not kept pace with the income growth rate of higherearning groups. But not all members of the so-called middle class face the same plight. The workers who have lost the most ground relative to higher-income groups, are those with below-average human capital (that is, lower skill and education), and are at the lower end of the middle-income bracket. The largest source of downward pressure on middle-class incomes has been the decline of Canada’s manufacturing industry. Beginning in the postwar years, factory jobs developed a misplaced reputation for being well-paying middleclass work. In fact, the work provided generous pay and benefits only relative to the low human capital that was necessary to find employment in manufacturing. As manufacturing has declined across all industrialized countries, lower-skilled workers have been forced to accept lower rates of income growth. Meanwhile, more gains have been made by those with high levels of human capital. Public-sector professionals in particular have come to share the human-capital and income characteristics of Canada’s highest-paid managers and professionals, often enjoying greater job security as well. In reality, anxiety over the state of the middle class and its future is actually about the working class. Lumping middle-class factory workers and clerical assistants in with middle-class teachers and nurses — as current political discussion tends to do — obscures the truth about which members of that group are genuinely struggling to keep up. As long as politicians continue to promote policies aimed at helping everyone within such a vague and broad target group, they can only end up misdirecting resources by enriching those who are already doing reasonably well, rather than focusing on those working-class Canadians who truly are not. Already net transfers through the tax system to middle-income groups have grown markedly. These transfers have managed to offset about half the erosion of middle-class incomes in the marketplace. Those transfers have been financed through increased tax payments from high-income groups, but also through shrinking transfers to low-income groups. These developments raise serious policy issues for which there are no simple answers. The breadth of Canada’s middle class obviously means that it encompasses the largest proportion of families, by far. Any further policies aimed at transferring wealth from other income groups to appease middle-class voters will be costly. Given that the main cause for concern is the worsening situation of lowerskilled workers, politicians who truly want to help those struggling in the “middle class,” should focus their efforts on helping Canadians acquire more education and more skills.

Since its ancient origin in Aristotle's Politics, the idea of the middle class has had three major boom periods, with periods of marginalization in between. The first was during the early nineteenth century in Europe. The middle class was the first explicit class, and it was hailed as a rising actor, against the aristocracy and monarchical absolutism, and as carrier of the new ideology of liberalism. Then followed a long decline, when the middle class was overshadowed in the global North by the worker question, the working class, and the labor movement, and in the South by the colonial question and anti-imperialism. After World War II the idea had a triumphant return, but largely confined to the United States, where it came to eclipse the working class in public discourse.The third boom, which began in the twenty-first century and currently seems to be ebbing, had its center in the global South, whence continental development banks and international organizations sent out reports on middle-class prosperity and growth into the demographic majority. Southern political leaders—from Brazil's two left-of-center presidents, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, to Vietnam's deputy prime minister Hoang Trung Hai—proudly announced the arrival of the middle class. After some resistance the notion was accepted in China after 2000, as a force of social stability. In the North too, there was a revival of interest in the middle class, but as part of lamentations of its decline or destruction.The Middle Classes in Latin America is part of the third middle-class boom, with some academic lag. It shares much of the post-nineteenth-century middle-class boom mood, uninterested in inequality, capitalism, social conflict, and protests, comfortable in the status quo, preoccupied with being modern, self-centered, and interested in social climbing and distantiation. There is no self-reflexivity, despite the fact that one of the editors, A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (in his introduction), and one author, David Parker, deal extensively with middle-class historiography and sociology. Nor does self-reflexivity appear in Barbara Weinstein's engaging but surprisingly little explicitly evidenced plaidoyer for a middle-class interpretation of São Paulo, launched from a critique of neglect of the middle class in previous treatments.However, geohistorical context—in this case, postrevolutionary, postindustrial, still aspirationally modernist Latin America—might illuminate but by no means define a work of scholarship. This is a work of very interesting scholarship, and your reviewer, a global sociologist rather than a Latin Americanist historian, read it with fascination—in spite of its format. The collection stems from a conference and has 24 contributions without any systematicity and connectedness, although they are given some order by active editing. Its sprawling size makes a fair review of individual contributions impossible. Its strengths are discourse analysis and ethnography, its wide national range (covering seven individual countries, from overrepresented Mexico to Brazil and Argentina), and its methodological and theoretical contributions to middle-class investigations from Latin American experiences, primarily in the introduction by López-Pedreros and the essay by Parker.The critiques of theories lionizing the middle class (modernization theory) as well as those neglecting it (Marxism, dependency theory, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory) hit their targets, to varying extent. But the remedy proposed is a historian's abstention from theoretical development: only “to question the binary understanding,” as López-Pedreros puts it (p. 18), or to let different approaches talk to each other, as Parker argues (p. 399). A book with The Middle Classes in the title could do better than that.Because of its tensions between, on one hand, social and economic heterogeneity and ambiguity and, on the other, an assertive ideological essentialism—as carrier of reason, moderation, democracy, and so-called sound economics—the middle class is an exciting scholarly subject, particularly in times, like today, hung up between social stasis and social catastrophe.There are, at least, two sets of intriguing questions, one referring to the Aristotelian idea of social middleness, the other to the modern idea of the middle class in different cultures and societies. What does social middleness mean in different cultures and societies with their hierarchies, in terms of characteristics and in terms of distance? What does middleness mean and look like in economic terms? To what extent and how has there been a middle-class formation in different modern societies? What role, contemporarily perceived or as found by today's historians, did the middle class play in nation formation? How significant has the middle class been as a political interpellation across times and societies, in relation to competing others—the poor, the working class, workers, and the people, to name some? How does the middle class operate as personal aspiration or differentiation, and as social force?This is a book of its time and place, illuminating them from many angles and raising a number of challenging questions without formulating them.

This study uses qualitative interviews with 50 working and middle class African-Americans to explore how they use social capital resources from their strong and weak ties to obtain education and jobs. As expected, the strong tie relationships of middle class blacks provided college information, while the working class did not discuss such assistance. The working class respondents relied primarily on strong tie relationships for social capital resources, but this did not always improve their career trajectories. Conversely, the middle class interviewees' networks consisted of both strong and weak ties who offered social capital resources that helped with their careers. Still, while both class groups had social ties that provided information about jobs, neither group knew many people who could actually hire them. Thus, while the middle class respondents had greater access to social capital resources, their advantages were not as large as one might expect, given their class divisions.

Schlüsselwörter: Brasilien, Indien, Klassenkonflikte, industrielle Streiks, Straßenproteste, ArbeiterInnen-Klasse, Mittelklasse-----Mass Strikes and Street Protests in India and Brazil. Abstract This article provides a post-2008 comparative perspective on mass strikes and street demonstrations in India and Brazil and looks as the relationship between the different forms of protests in the two countries. While the street protests gained considerable international attention, in contrast, the strikes received relatively little media attention beyond the national contexts, even though the mass strikes were going on for years and followed a coherent agenda. Following this, the article argues that the street demonstrations were politically diffused and dominated by the middle classes, which quickly shifted their political positions from left to right. The different protest dynamics of the working and middle classes reveal the enormous challenges that coalition attempts face. Subsequently, different definitions of the middle classes and their relationship or congruence with urban working classes are discussed. Keywords: Brazil, India, class conflicts, industrial strikes, street protests, working class, middle class-----Bibliographie: Nowak, Jörg: Massenstreiks und Straßenproteste in Indien und Brasilien, PERIPHERIE, 1-2015, S. 74-102. http://dx.doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v35i137.23013

The long‐standing stability of the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–1979) in South Korea rests on the construction of political consent through appeasing the middle classes at the expense of the working class. In the 1960s, both working class and middle class were the beneficiaries of a rapid economic developmental project and hegemony was formed corresponding to the rapid expansion of the entire economy. In the 1970s when income disparity deepened and political repression grew severe, however, we witnessed divergent reactions to the state between middle and working class. While the working class began to challenge state policy, the urban middle class tacitly supported the Park regime and remained indifferent towards the opposition movement. Even when antiregime worker mobilization intensified, the urban middle class opted for the status quo, aligning itself with state ideology. Working‐class exclusion and middle‐class inclusion constituted the central mechanism for the generation of regime hegemony that blocked democratization.

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.