White‐Collar Government in the United States

Introduction to the Debate: Does Descriptive Misrepresentation by Income and Class Matter?

This paper analyzes the story “Hansel and Gretel” from the Marxist point of view. This children’s story is the story of haves-and-have-nots. The conflict between these two classes: the upper class and the working class is a non-stop process. There is a conflict between the witch and the children: the upper class and working class, feudalism and Marxism. Theoretically, feudal society is out of practice but it is still going on. This conflict is because of discrimination. The working-class people are suffering from the upper-class people’s domination and discrimination. The findings of the study show that the discrimination between upper-class and working-class people is never ending process. Society still has a feudal mentality. In every sector, discrimination is as usual. The upper class or high-ranking people dominate the working class or low-ranking people. This paper focuses on how to minimize the feudal discriminating mentality. The grounded feudal system is more dangerous than the surface-level feudal system. The study adopts the Marxist approach to analyze the story. Millions of people struggled and sacrificed for providing economic freedom to the working class people for ages so that the gap between them would fill up, but their sacrifice has not been meaningful. The change, which is nominal, is not satisfactory. Monetary power beats almost all kinds of power in the world. Exceptionally, intellectual powers seldom beat some orthodox power but money, which is all in all in the world of the American dream, is the major cause of discrimination.

Mexico’s 2012 presidential election was fought between two affluent career politicians and a millionaire businesswoman. The 2013 race in Chile pitted an economist against a physician. And the top candidates in last year’s presidential election in Brazil were both millionaire economists. The pattern is clear: Latin American democracies – like democracies all over the world – are disproportionately run by the rich. Although working-class jobs (informal workers, manual labor, and service industry jobs) make up the vast majority of the labor force in every Latin American country, only a tiny percentage of Latin American lawmakers come from those kinds of jobs. Like most places, Latin America is run by white-collar governments. Many journalists, pundits, and political observers take this aspect of the governing environment for granted in Latin America and elsewhere. (In 2013, commentators in Chile buzzed about having two female frontrunners in the presidential race. But they failed to note that both came from affluent backgrounds.) Perhaps they are so accustomed to welloff politicians that they simply see them as a natural feature of the political landscape. Or perhaps they believe that it does not matter whether politicians are drawn from one class or another. In the 1970s, scholars of comparative politics reached exactly that conclusion. After a handful of studies (which, in hindsight, probably had serious methodological problems) found that policymakers from different classes behave about the same in office, the eminent political scientist Robert Putnam concluded that “the assumption of a correlation between attitude and social origin lies behind most studies of the social backgrounds of elites, . . . most of the available evidence tends to disconfirm this assumption” (R. Putnam, unpublished manuscript: 93). A decade later, a sweeping review of the evidence available in the mid-1980s concluded that the existing data were “scattered and inconclusive” and “certainly [did] not add up to a finding that the social . . . [or] economic . . . biases of legislative recruitment result in a . . . policy bias of legislative institutions” (Matthews 1985: 25). In the mid-1990s, another review of the research reached the same conclusion: scholars had “not clearly established that the social background of politicians has a significant influence on their attitudes, values and behavior” (Norris and Lovenduski 1995: 12). Ever since, the idea that a legislator’s class does not matter has been the de facto conventional wisdom in the scholarly community. This conventional wisdom has helped fuel indifference about the overwhelmingly unequal social class makeup of the world’s political institutions. But new evidence suggests that the scholarly consensus may be wrong (Carnes 2013, and his contribution to this Swiss Political Science Review 21(2): 229–236 doi:10.1111/spsr.12162

Introduction: class still matters: Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the analysis of some of the main concepts of social stratification, such as class and status. The paper then examines the particularities of social stratification in the US, including factors leading to the stratification of society (e.g. wealth, income, education, occupation) and the three types of social classes in this country: upper class, middle class and lower class. In comparison, social stratification in Romania is influenced by historic circumstances (e.g. ex-communist elite members identified in the upper class). There are three social classes in Romania, too, but the upper and middle class are still coagulating, while the lower class is well established.JEL Codes: A14; Z13Keywords: social stratification; class; status; US; Romania1. IntroductionThe analysis of social inequality is one of the most important concerns of sociologists, economists, scholars and many others. Inequalities have always existed and will continue to exist in human societies. Even in the most primitive communities, where wealth and property are minimal, there is inequality among individuals, men and women, young and old, and the list can go on. How certain groups in a society have became richer or more powerful than others, how unequal modem societies are, what chance someone coming from a less privileged background would have to reach the top of the economic hierarchy and for what reasons poverty still exists in developed countries - are questions that sociologists are attempting to answer in order to clarify the ways in which societies were stratified and the processes through which status was achieved.In order to draw attention to the unequal positions occupied by individuals in society, sociologists speak of social stratification - structural inequalities between different groups of people. Societies are composed of several layers in a hierarchy, the most privileged on top and the less privileged at the bottom.2. StratificationThere are four major types of stratification systems: slavery, caste, estates and class (Giddens, 2010: 263-309). Slavery is an extreme form of inequality in which some individuals are actually owned by others. Caste is associated with the cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The term caste is not of Indian origin; it comes from the Portuguese word casta, meaning race or purebred. The caste system is highly complex and structurally varies so much from one area to another, that it is not basically a single system, but a diversity of insufficiently linked beliefs and practices. Estates were part of European feudalism and consist of social strata with different obligations and rights, some of these differences established by law (the nobility, the clergy and the commoners).Class differs in many respects from slavery, caste or estates. It can be defined as a large-scale group of people who share common economic resources which strongly influence their lifestyle (Giddens, 2010:267). Unlike other stratification systems, class membership is not based on a position specified by law or by custom. Class systems are more fluid than other types of stratification, and the boundaries between classes are not clearly defined. Class membership is at least partially acquired. Classes depend on economic differences between groups of individuals (inequalities in the possession and control of material resources). Class systems mainly operate through large-scale impersonal links (e.g. unequal working conditions).Specialists in various domains consider that society is made up of a certain number of classes. According to Giddens (2010), in a society we distinguish the upper class, the old middle class, the upper middle class, the lower middle class, the upper working class, the lower working class and the underclass.The Goldthorpe class scheme is more intricate: 1) higher-grade professionals, administrators, and officials; managers in large industrial establishments; large proprietors; 2) lower-grade professionals, administrators, and officials, higher-grade technicians; managers in small industrial establishments; supervisors of non-manual employees; 3a) routine non-manual employees, higher grade (administration and commerce); 3b) routine non-manual employees, lower grade (sales and services); 4a) small proprietors, artisans, etc. …

Tanning Industry

Why do so few working-class Americans go on to hold political office? This paper uses data on state legislatures to assess several common (and often untested) explanations. Contrary to the widespread view that workers are less likely to hold office because they are less qualified, I find no relationship between the qualifications of workers in a given state and their representation in the state legislature. The shortage of the working class in office appears to have far more to do with structural characteristics of the political landscape such as parties, interest groups, and institutions. Scholars who want to understand why there are so few working-class Americans in political office – and people who want to do something about it – should probably focus on these kinds of “demand-side” forces, not on the supposed “supply-side” shortcomings of the working class.

The concept of an “underclass” is an attempt to put a name on the very poor within the United States and describe supposed common characteristics among people at the bottom of the class structure. Thus, along with the upper class, middle class, and working class, there is an underclass, often characterized much as Marx described with his concept of thelumpenproletariat. The term “underclass” was popularized in the second half of the twentieth century in a book by Ken Auletta (1983) which attempted to analyze what needed to be changed among this group to raise them out of poverty and how this could be done. This label of underclass, however, attempts to describe a category of people – we can call them the poor – that have even more diverse characteristics than those who are classified as upper, middle, and working class.

Advocacy: Our Professional Responsibility

Carlos Lacerda: The Rise and Fall of a Middle-Class Populist in 1950s Brazil

Influencing Your Government

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the association has acquired a new name, a new journal, and many new members. The 2012 annual conference, convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest conference in the association’s thirty-seven-year history, with 556 members in attendance. The theme, selected by incoming president Deborah Cunningham, was “Education Finance, Policy, and Practice: The Role of Evidence in a Dynamic World,” which underscores the contemporary challenge to the association: how to apply an increasing abundance of information and sophisticated analytical tools to produce the evidence needed to guide decision making by educational policy makers and practitioners. The Boston meeting was notable not only for the number in attendance. The unique qualities and strengths of the association were in clear display: papers of unusual methodological rigor; an interdisciplinary mix of academics from the social sciences, public policy schools, and colleges of education; educational finance professionals, policy analysts, and practitioners, a mix rarely found in the same place; and sessions addressing today’s hot topics as well as issues that have endured over the years. Having said this, all indications are that AEFP is what it has always been: a small, diverse group of people tackling some really big problems. Of particular note was a trend that has been growing for years but has clearly come into full flower: the large

rthopaedic surgeons tend to be more active in political advocacy than the average physician, Thirty-one percent of AAOS fellows contributed to the Political Action Committee (PAC) in 2015, which is almost three times the physician participation of the American Medical Association's PAC However, many orthopaedists still have no idea what political advocacy is, how to do it, and why it is so important. They know political advocacy has something to do with the

The knowledge of how and to whom one may offer a compliment, as well as the ability to interpret the social meanings implicit in compliments, is one of the crucial issues to the development of communicative competence of learners of a second language (Holmes and Brown, 1987). Although Wolfson (1981), Manes (1983), Herbert (1990), Heidari, Eslami Rasekh & Rezazade (2009) and others have done a number of studies on disclosing this knowledge, little attention has been devoted to exploring it in the context of social issues like social class or social status. To this end, this study investigates the different patterns of expressing compliment used by the EFL learners of different social classes in Iran. 40 Iranian teenage EFL learners (20 from upper middle class and 20 from working class) who were all intermediate level students participated in the study. One of the major findings of the study was that language learners’ social class seems to be neutralized in second language context; in other words, both working class and upper class learners make use of the same formulas in expressing compliment. Therefore, while first language mirrors the social class of the learners, the second language conceals it.

Why Employment During and After COVID-19 Is a Critical Women's Health Issue.