Classical Theory Research Articles

Sport, Choice and Social Class: Reading Indian Female Sports Life Writings

Sports form a continuous part of any culture, created and sustained for entertainment, pleasure, competition and bonding; founded on certain standards, interests, requirements, and resources of the sports community. Yet, the classification of some sports as ‘elite’ goes unrecognised simply because it appears to be natural and moreover it is always ‘how things are’. Traditional theories of class indicate that economic differentiation is the reason for various choices in the society. On the other hand Bourdieu has suggested that economic capital is not the only element influencing one’s choice and there are other multiple non-economic criteria too. Taking into account Bourdieu’s class concepts we seek to identify the non-economic factors that have led sportspersons in India to their choice of sport. Narrative analysis is performed for autobiographies of two female sportspersons, Saina Nehwal and Mary Kom, to highlight the different parameters that have influenced their choice of sport. The identification of such non-economic factors like a person’s mental strength, level of angst, resilience, emotional and financial well-being, and others, provide insight into the stratifications that impact sports culture in India.

Critical Reflections on Economy and Politics in India: A Class Theory Perspective, written by Das, Raju. J.

Critical Reflections on Economy and Politics in India: A Class Theory Perspective, written by Das, Raju. J.

Asymptotic Theory for a General Class of Short-Range Interaction Functionals

Asymptotic Theory for a General Class of Short-Range Interaction Functionals

How social class shapes breast cancer risk perspectives and prevention practices of Australian midlife women: a qualitative study using the concept of ‘breast cancer candidacy’

BackgroundThe increasing incidence of breast cancer and disease burden is a significant public health concern. While 30% of breast cancers could be prevented through addressing modifiable risk factors, misconceptions among women about breast cancer risks hamper primary prevention. In the absence of primary prevention, secondary prevention such as mammography increases the early detection of breast cancer and improves health outcomes. However, current population-level screening rates indicate secondary prevention is suboptimal. More effective public health efforts to improve breast cancer prevention are required. Given breast cancer is socially patterned, this work explores how social class impacts women’s breast cancer prevention practices. This study uses the concepts of lay epidemiology and candidacy as a mechanism to understand women’s breast cancer risk perspectives. It engages Bourdieu’s relational social class theory to unpack how women’s social, cultural, and structured life contexts shape these perspectives and their considerations regarding primary and secondary prevention.MethodsIn this qualitative study 43 Australian midlife women (aged 45–64 years), were interviewed to explore their understandings of breast cancer risks, how they perceived their own risk, and how this shaped their prevention behaviours. A theory-informed thematic analysis applying Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and fields to understand how women’s social class positions shapes risk perspectives and prevention practices was conducted.ResultsThis social class analysis showed differences in how women engage in breast cancer discourse, consider risks, and participate in breast cancer prevention. Middle-class women prioritise health promoting practices and were more likely than working-class and affluent women to attend mammography screening. Working-class women experience structural factors, like low income, stress and difficult life circumstances, which hamper primary prevention practices and for some screening is not considered or prioritised, and their decisions not to screen are less active. Affluent women often do not consider themselves at-risk due to their healthier ‘lifestyles. ’They suggest that this, and their knowledge of screening benefits and harms allows them to make informed decisions not to screen.ConclusionsWomen interpret and understand breast cancer risks differently and enact prevention practices within the parameters afforded by their social class positions. These findings are useful to inform improved public health approaches regarding both modifiable breast cancer risks and increasing mammography screening. To improve equity in breast cancer prevention efforts, such approaches must respond to limitations based on social class and address structural factors that impact prevention practices.

Conceptualizing precarious employment through the lens of social reproduction: Potential implications for health research and action

Research on the health and well-being impact of precarious employment (PE) commonly conceptualizes employment as a relation of power between workers and employers, a perspective informed by power relations and relational social class theories. Social reproduction theory is a less common but complementary conceptual lens that can be used to investigate PE and health, in which the nature of work has relevance for the quality of employment. Social reproduction theory points to relations between groups of workers who are valued differently based on the capacity of their work to generate profit. Attending to relations between workers based on value, in addition to the well-established power relation between workers and employers, may point to consequences for health and well-being that are worth exploring empirically, and could serve as another tool to spur collective action around PE and its health effects. We provide an illustration and discuss the potential implications of this theoretical approach using data from in-depth interviews conducted in 2022 among precariously employed food workers in New York City.

An idea that refuses to die. Rise, fall and resurgence of “housing class”

In 1967, John Rex and Robert Moore published an influential book on ethnic housing inequality in Birmingham, titled Race, Community and Conflict. The book presented a theory about classes formed in the housing market, inspired by a particular reading of Max Weber’s ideas about class. The basic idea of the housing class is that people’s relation to the means of housing is a class-forming factor that is not reducible to their relation to the means of production. This paper presents the original housing class theory and its revision by Peter Saunders, property class theory, and criticisms of the two theories. Since the 1980s, both theories have disappeared from housing research. In the 2020s, the basic idea of the housing class was revived in Lisa Adkins’ and her co-authors’ asset class theory. This paper discusses the history of the idea of the housing class and its contemporary relevance. It also raises questions about the conceptualization of class and housing inequality.

Modularity of the Schur index, modular differential equations, and high-temperature asymptotics

In this paper we analytically explore the modularity of the flavored Schur index of 4d N=2 superconformal field theories. We focus on the A1 theories of class-S and N=4 theories with SU(N) gauge group. We work out the modular orbit of the flavored index and defect index, compute the dimension of the space spanned by the orbit, and provide complete basis for computing modular transformation matrices. The dimension obtained from the flavored analysis predicts the minimal order of the unflavored modular differential equation satisfied by the unflavored Schur index. With the help of modularity, we also study analytically the high temperature asymptotics of the Schur index. In the high temperature limit τ→+i0, we identified the (defect) Schur index of the genus-zero A1 theories of class S with the S3 partition function of the SU(2)×U(1)n star-shaped quiver (with Wilson line insertion). In the identification, we observe an interesting relation between the linear-independence of defect indices and the convergence of the Wilson line partition functions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Conquerors of poverty – a case study of Colombo slum dwellers

PurposeWhile extensive research has explored poverty in various dimensions, there remains a notable dearth of studies focusing on success stories of slum dwellers overcoming adversity. This research seeks to address this gap by investigating the strategies employed by individuals to transcend poverty. Moreover, it evaluates the practicality and effectiveness of existing theories in real-world contexts through careful interpretation.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered from two distinct cases through comprehensive, in-depth interviews. These narratives were subjected to scrutiny employing the Description Analysis Interpretation method. Subsequent interpretation and theoretical exploration were guided by Bourdieu’s class theory. The overarching goal was to shed light on the remarkable journeys of specific slum residents who surpassed the constraints of poverty. This endeavor not only highlighted the practical efficacy of these theories but also underscored their relevance in illuminating real-world scenarios through interpretation.FindingsThe findings underscore the capacity of slum dwellers to rise above poverty, thereby emphasizing the practical utility of specific theories aimed at poverty alleviation in elucidating their experiences. Notably, social capital, a cornerstone of Bourdieu’s class theory, emerges as equally pivotal as economic capital in shaping individuals' trajectories.Research limitations/implicationsThe study’s scope is confined to narratives within the Colombo slums, offering a platform for future researchers to extend their investigations beyond this context. By employing alternative methodologies and exploring diverse geographical regions, scholars can broaden their understanding of poverty alleviation strategies and their applicability across varied socioeconomic landscapes. This calls for wider research for comprehensive exploration and comprehension of poverty dynamics beyond singular locales.Practical implicationsThe study provides invaluable insights for policymakers, governmental bodies and nongovernmental organizations, urging them to reconsider and reformulate policies, educational strategies and community development programs tailored to the needs of slum dwellers and their children. These insights offer a pathway toward more effective interventions aimed at fostering sustainable upliftment within these marginalized communities.Originality/valueThis research fills a critical gap in poverty literature by exploring success stories of slum dwellers overcoming adversity, an area often overlooked. It uniquely investigates the strategies these individuals employ to transcend poverty, offering fresh insights into the practical application of poverty alleviation theories. Utilizing Bourdieu’s class theory, the study highlights the importance of both social and economic capital in these success narratives. By focusing on real-life experiences, it underscores the relevance and utility of these theories in real-world contexts, enriching the theoretical discourse and providing valuable perspectives for policymakers and practitioners.

Beyond the precariat: Trajectories of precarious work and its determinants in South Korea

AbstractThis study examines the evolving patterns of precarious work in South Korea over a 20‐year period, challenging conventional understandings of labour market segmentation and class formation. Using group‐based trajectory modelling on Korean Labour and Income Panel Study data (2002–2021), we identify five distinct trajectories of labour market experiences. Our findings reveal that 34.4% of the sample, categorised into persistently high precariousness and persistent precariousness groups, provides evidence for an emerging, heterogeneous precariat class. This new class formation transcends traditional occupational boundaries and challenges existing class theories. Multinomial logistic regression shows that low‐skilled service workers and women are more likely to belong to precarious groups. Our study contributes by (1) providing empirical evidence for a diverse precariat class, (2) demonstrating the need for a multidimensional approach to precarious work, and (3) highlighting the dynamic nature of precarious work over time. We argue for bringing class discussion back into labour market inequality analysis through a new theoretical framework that synthesises traditional class theory with contemporary precariat discourse, offering insights for policy and theoretical development in understanding modern labour markets.

Changing Britain through the frame of snooker

This paper considers snooker’s rise to popularity, and its relative decline, through the frame of recent British social history. The paper situates an ostensible decline in snooker spectatorship and a demonstrable decline in participation across the UK, against a backdrop of shifts in economic activity, class structure, cultures of masculinity and urban space. Drawing on theories of gender, class, subculture, media and critical urbanism, the paper argues that a sociological frame lends a lot to understanding snooker in the UK. At the same time, it argues that the frame of snooker might also lend a lot to a sociological understanding of industrial, and later, post-industrial Britain.

Determining the Best Work Behaviour of the Laboratory Head Using The Technique For Order Of Preference By Similarity To The Ideal Solution

Vocational education is in high demand because it prepares students to be job-ready. In learning, it is more about work practices, internships, and in the laboratory than theory in class. Therefore, the existence of laboratories is essential in vocational schools. The research was conducted at the maritime school of SMK Putera Samodra, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, using the quantitative approach of the TOPSIS method to determine the best work behaviour performance from the head of the laboratory. Work behaviour assessment criteria include service orientation, integrity, commitment, discipline, and cooperation. According to the assessment results by the principal and 31 colleagues, the best work behaviour is that of the head of the merchant ship engineering laboratory. Overall, the best work behaviour analysis results can have a positive impact, such as recognition, improved leadership practices, and enhanced performance in all laboratories in vocational schools. Other potential implications of work behaviour research results for schools can be developing leadership with the best strategies, identifying areas for improvement, allocating more resources to laboratories, and the positive effects of leadership qualities on vocational schools.

The social class of orthopedic rehabilitation patients: Are there differences in subjective health, return to work motivation, and participation in aftercare interventions?

This longitudinal quasi-experimental study examines the relationship between social class, subjective health, motivation to return to work (RTW) following medical rehabilitation, and participation in aftercare interventions, utilizing the Social Cognitive Theory of Social Class. To do so, a prospective multicentric study was conducted. The analysis was based on data from N = 1044 orthopedic rehabilitation patients in three clinics in Germany. Latent growth curve models, fixed-effect linear regression models, and multilevel binomial logistic regression were employed for data analysis. As hypothesized, the findings demonstrate that lower social class is associated with poorer subjective health, while higher social class is linked to increased solipsistic motives, characterized by pursuing personal goals in the context of RTW. Conversely, individuals from lower social classes exhibit contextualist motives, which indicate a focus on social and environmental threats influencing their motivation to RTW. Surprisingly, social class does not significantly impact participation in aftercare interventions, probably due to low variance and potentially the successful inclusion within the German healthcare system. These findings emphasize the importance of considering diverse motivation profiles derived from the Social Cognitive Theory of Social Class. The study contributes to our understanding of the social determinants of health and has implications for reducing health disparities by highlighting the motivational aspects, including solipsistic and contextualist motives, associated with social class.

Transnational Capitalist Class Theory: An Assessment

Transnational Capitalist Class Theory: An Assessment

QUALITY WORK LIFE BALANCE OF SELF-FINANCING COLLEGE TEACHERS IN PALAKKAD DISTRICT IN PERSPECTIVE OF TOILING CLASS THEORY

Kerala’s performance in the area of higher education is widely recognized. Self-financing college have played relevant role in educational sector . Teachers from self-financing colleges faced different problems to balance their work and family life together. The schedules are busier than ever before. They should impart all types of qualities for doing their job. When they satisfied and doing, they are given a skilled society or world. According to the KM Mani Theory of the toiling class, there is a group included farmers, teachers, labours, and those belong to working class who survive not merely on labour power alone but marginal ownership of production-management, entrepreneurship and tradeable skills and they jointly ensure their rights. By the way qualified teachers of self-financing college are not getting adequate mental and financial support from the superiors of the institutions, definitely lead to job dissatisfaction. For the successful running of the self-financing college is possible only by retaining satisfied teachers. In this study an attempt to throw light on work-life stress issues of 50 self-financing college teachers in Palakkad district.

Class versus climate? Transformation conflicts in the automotive industry

ABSTRACT Major ecological threats such as climate change affect everyone, but do not level out social inequalities. The neglect of class in ecological politics means that measures against global warming often encounter social barriers and the social-ecological transformation becomes conflict-ridden. Based on in-depth empirical research at two German car manufacturers, the article shows how management and labour in a carbon industry deal with the transformation. With the help of concepts from class theory, the car plants analysed are described as class societies in miniature. They constitute social fields in which the transformation changes the rules of the game by which the company actors act. Company interest groups and trade union structures, as well as external veto players (climate movements, the far right) have a significant impact on conflict dynamics. In each case, it can be seen that institutionally contained class conflicts in co-determined companies are increasingly turning into social-ecological transformation conflicts. These are multi-level conflicts in which ownership-based decision-making power plays a central role. No ecological class is emerging beyond production. Instead, a transformation corporatism is asserting itself, which is coming up against class-specific limits in the decision-making monopoly over business models.

Heritability of class and status: Implications for sociological theory and research

Most individual-level outcomes of interest to sociologists are indirectly influenced by genetics, including socioeconomic outcomes like education, income, wealth, and occupational status. Despite this knowledge, an integration of sociological theories of class and status with the research literature on genetic heritability is largely lacking, and no previous studies have investigated the role of genetics specifically for class attainment – a central concept in sociology. To amend this, we estimate how much variation in such positions can be attributed to genetic and environmental factors in roughly 5000 Norwegian twin pairs. The results suggest that the variability in class and status attainment is influenced by genetics to a non-negligible degree, while shared environmental factors play a modest role as well. This is in line with previous findings using genetically informed designs to study other socioeconomic outcomes. Our study suggests that in addition to social environments, variation in class and status attainment can partly be explained by genetics.

On Orlicz classes defined in terms of associated weight functions

N-functions and their growth and regularity properties are crucial in order to introduce and study Orlicz classes and Orlicz spaces. We consider N-functions which are given in terms of so-called associated weight functions. These functions are frequently appearing in the theory of ultradifferentiable function classes and in this setting additional information is available since associated weight functions are defined in terms of a given weight sequence. We express and characterize several known properties for N-functions purely in terms of weight sequences which allows to construct (counter-) examples. Moreover, we study how for abstractly given N-functions this framework becomes meaningful and finally we establish a connection between the complementary N-function and the recently introduced notion of the so-called dual sequence.

Toward a classification of PT-symmetric quantum systems: From dissipative dynamics to topology and wormholes

Studies of many-body non-Hermitian parity-time (PT)-symmetric quantum systems are attracting a lot of interest due to their relevance in research areas ranging from quantum optics and continuously monitored dynamics to Euclidean wormholes in quantum gravity and dissipative quantum chaos. While a symmetry classification of non-Hermitian systems leads to 38 universality classes, we show that, under certain conditions, PT-symmetric systems are grouped into 24 universality classes. We identify 14 of them in a coupled two-site Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model and confirm the classification by spectral analysis using exact diagonalization techniques. Intriguingly, in 4 of these 14 universality classes, AIIIν, BDIν†, BDI++ν, and CI−−ν, we identify a basis in which the SYK Hamiltonian has a block structure in which some blocks are rectangular, with ν∈N the difference between the number of rows and columns. We show analytically that this feature leads to the existence of ν robust purely eigenvalues, whose level statistics follow the predictions of Hermitian random matrix theory for classes A, AI, BDI, and CI, respectively. We have recently found that this ν is a topological invariant, so these classes are topological. By contrast, nontopological real eigenvalues display a crossover between Hermitian and non-Hermitian level statistics. Similarly to the case of Lindbladian dynamics, the reduction of universality classes leads to unexpected results, such as the absence of Kramers degeneracy in a given sector of the theory. Another novel feature of the classification scheme is that different sectors of the PT-symmetric Hamiltonian may have different symmetries. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

The Role of Knowledge in Creative Thinking

ABSTRACT In this invited paper, I briefly review my past, current, and future lines of research. The associative theory of creativity argues that higher creative individuals have a richer semantic memory structure that facilitates broader associative search processes, that leads to the combination of remote concepts into novel and appropriate ideas. Based on this theory, in my research I investigate the role of knowledge – or semantic memory – in high-level cognition, focusing on creativity, associative thinking, and memory search, in typical and clinical populations. To do so, I apply computational tools from network science, natural language processing, and machine learning, coupled with empirical cognitive and neural research. Such computational tools are enabling the representation and operationalization of the structure of semantic memory and the processes that operate over it. This is critical as it allows us to start quantifying issues that for a very long time were studied very subjectively in creativity research – remoteness of ideas, associative thinking, flexible/richer semantic memory structure, etc. Such work is offering unique, quantitative, ways to directly study classic theories of creativity, propelling forward our understanding of its complexity.

Socioeconomic status, cosmopolitanism, and educational aspirations: A study of China’s middle-class students pursuing higher education in the U.S. amidst geopolitical tensions

As the demand for American education has been growing in China in the last two decades, it is important to understand the desire of Chinese students for pursuing their higher education in the U.S. Based on a recent survey of Chinese students in the U.S., this study intersects the desire for education abroad with social class theories, particularly on how China’s middle class view studying in the U.S. as a way of pursuing their global mobility as well as social mobility, and how their desires intersect with the interests of state, market, society as well as interests of family and self. The study employs both qualitative and quantitative research design in order to understand how Chinese middle-class students see studying in the U.S. as a means to seek cosmopolitan capital and self-development. It examines which socio-economic factors have significant impacts on the motivations of China’s middle-class students pursuing their higher education in the U.S. The findings reveal that middle-class families view studying abroad in the U.S. as a way of pursuing their global mobility, social mobility as well as cosmopolitan capital.