Social Class Divisions Research Articles

Turning the Country into an “Immense and Clamorous Stadium”: Perón, the New Argentina, and the 1951 Pan-American Games

During the Peronist regime (1946–1955), the Argentine government encouraged and financed a wide variety of sports activities. This investment bore fruit internationally and Juan Perón tried to make political capital out of the achievements of Argentine individual athletes or national teams in international competitions. Such achievements were presented as a collective victory of Argentine society, transcending the divisions of social class, ethnic origins, place of residence, or political affiliation. Argentine participation in the London Olympics in 1948, the hosting of the world basketball championship in Buenos Aires in 1950, and above all the organization of the first Pan-American games in the Argentine in March 1951, all, served to promote patriotism and national unity at home and improve the country’s image in the international scene. This paper focuses on an analysis of a 250-page book published by the sports magazine Mundo Deportivo, sponsored by the Peronist government, on the eve of the games. Both the text and the images attest to its populist character, its quest for modernity, emphasis on social mobility, and an authoritarian way of imposing national unity. The initiative to hold such games in Argentina dated back to 1940 but it had to be postponed twice: first to 1948 because of the Second World War, and then to 1951 because of the London Olympic Games. Perón’s government wanted these games to serve as a proof of the regime’s success. To that end, the president urged the organizers to ‘spur no effort’, promising them any financial assistance they might need. A year and a half before the inaugural ceremony, held at the Racing stadium (officially named the President Perón Stadium), the organizational effort moved into high gear, and Perón supervized it personally. Argentina was indeed the big winner in this event, its athletes capturing a total of 153 medals.

Meios de Transporte do Século XIX em Campos dos Goytacazes: Intensificadores da Divisão Social?

The objective of this study is to analyze some modes of transportation used in Campos dos Goytacazes in the nineteenth century, in order to discuss the justification of their influence on social class division. Another objective is to analyze the importance of the means of transportation for the culture of the people from Campos in that period. This text is based on the writings of Julio Feydit, Herve Salgado Rodrigues and Horacio Souza, and on photos from that time provided by the Historical Museum of Campos dos Goytacazes. The method used in the project is the analysis of images associated with the aforementioned theoretical bibliography.

Class and Representation in Latin America

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

White‐Collar Government in the United States

White‐Collar Government in the United States

DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION FROM INDUSTRIALISM TO POST-INDUSTRIALISM

In a situation of transition from industrial to post-industrial stage social structure development of society undergoes significant changes. This article discusses the new forms of social stratification, analyzes the causes of the transformation of social processes. According to the author, the changes of social processes are the result of transition to the information economy and production system. The article presents the rationale of the new forms of social stratification. Access to information and the level of professional competence are the basis of social stratification and class division. The complexity of predicting changes of class structure caused rapid updating of transition from one stage of social development to another. The analysis revealed heterogeneity and contradictory scientific views on the class structure of the post-industrial society. The author identifies and organizes the three groups of research positions of class stratification. The basis of the study carried out by the classification serves economic and value, political, scientific and technical specificity of the post-industrial society. The paper contributes to the study of the social structure in post-industrial society advances grounds to predict further transformation of the class system.

Is social class still working? Revisiting the social class division in tourist consumption

The effects of social class division have been extensively examined in tourist behaviour studies, but mostly on specific tourism forms, attractions, or activities. Limited empirical research has looked into the effects of social class difference (as well as other demographic variables) on tourists' destination consumption in a holistic and comprehensive way. To revisit the role of social class in today's tourist consumption, this study stratified a group of American tourists based on their social class and compared their participation patterns in four types of destination activities: cultural, hedonic, nature-based, and shopping-related. The empirical data were from a conversion and destination branding study conducted for Thoroughbred Country, South Carolina. The analysis gained mixed results, as social class was found to have significant impacts on tourists' consumption of certain destination products/activities, but not on others. It was expected that this study could not only contribute to the research endeavours in tourist consuming behaviour, but also provide practical implications for more effective destination marketing and market segmentation strategies.

Video Game Culture, Contentious Masculinities, and Reproducing Racialized Social Class Divisions in Middle School

AbstractThis short article examines how the mutual shaping of gender and technology can contribute to the reproduction of racialized class divisions. The article is based on an in-depth ethnographic study of the launch of a progressive New York City public middle school. The school aimed to integrate twenty-first-century digital technologies and skills into the curriculum while promoting student-centered learning and social equity. The article argues that educators and privileged parents constructed an educational context that facilitated and legitimized students who enacted masculinities rooted in video game culture even as it disciplined and purged students who enacted masculinities rooted in more canonical forms of boy culture. In doing so, the school paradoxically helped perpetuate the racialized class divisions that it hoped new media would help it overcome.

Legitimacy and social class in Catalan language education for adults

Adult students of Catalan are worthy of study because they reveal complexities underlying taken-for-granted assumptions about Catalan speakers and Castilian speakers. Far from fitting into neat bundles aligning language of origin, social class, and national orientation, the students in this study exemplify the breakdown of boundaries traditionally assumed to exist between Catalan speakers and Castilian speakers. These findings point to a disjuncture between public discourse and the lived experience of language users. Close examination of actual speakers' motivations, classroom performance, and national orientations reveals much more nuance; in this classroom, the fault lines run along social class divisions, which are themselves contrary to stereotypes. This finding advances studies of linguistic authority, suggesting that native speakers may be positioned differently in different sociolinguistic contexts, depending on their social class and whether the language in question is an institutionalized code or a minoritized one.

Class-ifying London

Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class of 2002 ends with a clarion call for a post-industrial, post-class sensibility: ‘The task of building a truly creative society is not a game of solitaire. This game, we play as a team.’ Florida's sentiment has been echoed across a broad and interdisciplinary literature in social theory and public policy, producing a new conventional wisdom: that class antagonisms are redundant in today's climate of competitive professionalism and a dominant creative mainstream. Questions of social justice are thus deflected by reassurances that there is no ‘I’ in team, and that ‘we’ must always be defined by corporate membership rather than class-based solidarities. The post-industrial city becomes a post-political city nurtured by efficient, market-oriented governance leavened with a generous dose of multicultural liberalism. In this paper, we analyze how this Floridian fascination has spread into debates on contemporary urban social structure and neighbourhood change. In particular, we focus on recent arguments that London has become a thoroughly middle-class, post-industrial metropolis. We evaluate the empirical claims and interpretive generalizations of this literature by using the classical tools of urban factorial ecology to analyze small-area data from the UK Census. Our analysis documents a durable, fine-grained geography of social class division in London, which has been changed but not erased by ongoing processes of industrial and occupational restructuring: the central tensions of class in the city persist. Without critical empirical and theoretical analysis of the contours of post-industrial class division, the worsening inequalities of cities like London will be de-politicized. We suggest that class-conscious scholars should only head to Florida for Spring Break or retirement.

“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Maria J. Lopez (bio) It is revealing that Margaret Atwood should have chosen for her 1996 novel the title of Alias Grace, which points to two central and interrelated aspects of this literary work. On the one hand, it indicates that the fictional world it denotes revolves around one individual, namely, the historical figure of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted in 1843 for her involvement in the murder of her household employer, Thomas Kinnear, and of his housekeeper and lover, Nancy Montgomery. On the other hand, the introduction into the title of the term “alias” suggests that in their search for the truth about Grace Marks, both readers and characters may be frustrated by their continuously encountering duplicity and falsity. This process takes place because Grace resists being comprehended by the knowledge and discourse of what I would like to call communities of power, namely, the scientific, religious, and legal communities and by the Foucauldian disciplinary system created by them. She belongs, on the contrary, to the marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people, who share strong bonds of solidarity based upon vulnerability and secrecy and who challenge the rigidity of social categories, together with official middle- and upper-class constructions of national identity. [End Page 157] In her essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” Atwood asserts, in relation to Canadian history and historical writing, that “it’s the very things that aren’t mentioned that inspire the most curiosity in us. Why aren’t they mentioned? The lure of the Canadian past, for the writers of my generation, has been partly the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (218). In her novel, Atwood is precisely concerned with a mysterious story, Grace Marks’s, an individual who escapes all attempts to enclose and apprehend her. The textual excerpts and fragments that we find at the beginning of each chapter, coming from newspapers, letters, poems, and other textual sources, denote a collective eagerness to translate her story into meaningful and articulate terms, although the fragmentary and incoherent result points to the impossibility of doing so. In this sense, the scrapbook owned by the penitentiary governor’s wife, a collection of newspaper cuttings on famous crimes and criminals, can be seen as a microcosm of the novel as a whole. Grace herself has looked at it many times, finding both “lies” and “true things” and what constitutes the “chief concern” of “the gentlemen and the ladies both”: not whether or not she killed anyone, but whether or not she was “really a paramour” (30). The scrapbook underlines, then, where Grace stands in relation to social class divisions: as a marginal figure on which the upper- and middle-class desire for sensationalism and feminine stereotypes comes to be projected. The scrapbook also presents Grace as spectacle, an object everyone can look at and examine. This condition is one of which she is aware, as we see her reflecting upon the hanging of James McDermott—the fellow servant who supposedly committed the murders and with whom Grace is complicit—in front of the jail in Toronto: “It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure” (32). Not only were executions public spectacles, but so too were penitentiaries and asylums. It is in this way that the nineteenth-century settler Susanna Moodie approached Grace Marks, to whom she refers in Life in the Clearings (1853), the text in which Atwood first encountered Grace’s story, as she explains in the “Author’s Afterword.” Pointing to Moodie’s descriptions, in Life in the Clearings, of the provincial penitentiary in Kingston and the lunatic asylum in Toronto, Atwood explains that “such public institutions were visited like zoos, and, at both, Moodie asked to see the star attraction, Grace Marks” (538). Grace, as a low-class woman, becomes the object...

Youth Culture, Postmodernism, and Social Divisions: An Exploration of Activities, Restrictions, and Expenditures in the Leisure of Spanish University Students

The aim of this research was to establish whether there are class differences in the leisure patterns of university students in Southern Spain. Social class was operationalized using three indices that combined cultural and economic factors: family sociocultural status (FSCS), family economic level (FEL), and family socioeconomic status (FSES). The results show that there were no important differences in the frequency of leisure activities between social classes. With respect to monthly expenditures and restrictions on leisure activities, differences existed by FEL, but not by FSCS. Therefore, the results indicate a certain homogeneity in youth leisure activities, but also indicate social class divisions within which leisure activities are experienced and consumed. Economic factors are shown as the most influential in these differences among the university student population.

Widening Participation, Aimhigher and the Coalition Government: Narratives of Freedom and Efficiency

This article responds to the decision of the United Kingdom's coalition government to abolish Aimhigher, a programme for widening higher education participation among disadvantaged young people in England. It examines recent research into widening participation and shows how the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students has narrowed slowly but significantly over the past decade. Aimhigher's role is explored, and the strengths of its partnership approach considered. Drawing on the notion of assemblage, the article then compares the values that underpin the narrative of Aimhigher with those embedded in the coalition government's proposals for widening participation. The article concludes that the gains made over the past decade will be reversed and that social class divisions in university study will become further entrenched.

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.

A Power-theoretical Approach to Meaning-making of the Design Profession - A Case Study of the Design Profession in the Design Museum London -

The purpose of this study is to examine socio-cultural and political interventions in meaning-making by the design profession by investigating members of that profession as an audience in a design museum. Professional meaning-making in this study is addressed from the viewpoint of theoretical understandings of the way in which the design profession makes meaning and gains knowledge. In particular, the study examines the interventions embedded in professional meaning-making by employing three of Bourdieu`s concepts, namely, `field`, `habitus`, and `practice`. In doing so, it suggests why the world of design and relevant institutions including design museums are so closed and private, and showed some ways in which meanings differ according to social position, emphasizing the notion of social class divisions in structuring meanings. However, this power-theoretical approach to meaning-making is criticized for seeing people as passive recipients of knowledge and as differentiated agendas rather than active producers. The latter part of this article will, therefore, investigate the limitations of theories of practice, which provide links between the field and the formation of meaning-making through the field.

On the Salience of Ethnic Conflict

A classical theme in social analysis views economic class divisions as the main cause of social conflict. Yet many, if not most of the conflicts we observe today appear to be ethnic in nature. It appears that the "vertical" nature of class divisions is often dominated by the "horizontal" antagonisms across groups delineated by noneconomic markers. This paper highlights the perverse synergy of economic inequality within ethnic groups, and its role in the salience of ethnic conflict. In a model of group formation which allows both class and ethnic groupings to emerge, we show that ethnic, as opposed to class, conflict may be focal, and precisely in the presence of economic inequality. (JEL D72, D74)

Racial health inequalities in the USA: The role of social class

Racial health inequalities in the USA: The role of social class

Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (review)

Reviewed by: Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders Andrew Lawson Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders. By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracinco Zboray. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2006. "Neighbors knowing the value an elderly man placed upon his library risk their lives to save it from a devastating fire. A young woman mourning the loss of a literary confidante inscribes ghostly verses from her via a spiritual medium. . . . Characters from a novel by James Fenimore Cooper enter the dreams of homesick Salem woman in China" (xvii). These examples, from the extraordinary range of "socioliterary" experience examined in this volume, testify to the central place of literature in the daily lives of antebellum New Englanders. The Zborays draw on a sample of 931 men and women, from a range of occupations, faiths, and age groups, from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Civil War—a period in which economic "destabilization" scattered people across a region linked not just by roads and railroads, but by paper, ink, and print. Their emphasis is on the various [End Page 281] ways in which ordinary, intensely literary folk used literature "to maintain a world of social relations" (69). The Zborays' inductive approach involves "accumulating material, structuring and engaging it, and developing generalizations from it" (xix). They examine popular literary production in diaries and letters, scrapbooks and commonplace books, unpublished effusions, valentines, valedictions, and quilts (where the literary was literally woven into the material of everyday life). Reading matter was disseminated in letters, mailed newspapers, and bundles filled with quotes, excerpts, and clippings: a more popular form of consumption than direct purchase (72). The Zborays estimate that half of all reading was done orally, as New Englanders read aloud at home, in sewing circles, in boarding houses, and on picnics and strolls. Silent reading went on everywhere—in work places, passenger cars, and ship's cabins—leading the authors to challenge a scholarly emphasis on the bourgeois parlor which sees reading "primarily as a genteel activity" (338 n.2). Finally, literature was received collectively, by lecture audiences whose chatter and commentary framed the performances of popular speakers, and through a "homespun literary criticism," generated in "barnyard salons, sitting-room debates, and kitchen lyceums" (244). For all its archival richness, the Zborays' inductive-taxonomic method tends to blur important social differences and class divisions. Amongst the chatter of "like-minded literati" listing books read, it jars somewhat to hear a mother writing of the death of her daughter, "an overworked mill girl," without further elaboration (18). The lack of any analysis of social class means that links between specific literary practices and social formations are obscured or elided: if commonplace books acted as "a form of social capital" for the "socially mobile," then we need some sense of how this practice worked, and what kinds of mobility it facilitated (32, 311 n.8). But these are possible directions for future research, opened up by this finely detailed "experiential history." To read this book is to sense the determining pressures and the creative possibilities of a specific cultural moment—to begin to grasp the luminous details of a culture as, in Raymond Williams's words, "a whole way of life." As the intrepid Salem voyager, Harriet Low, told her journal, in China, on August 1, 1832: "Oh tempora. O Mores. What an amalgamation" (13). Andrew Lawson Leeds Metropolitan University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Profession, market and class: nurse migration and the remaking of division and disadvantage

This article aims to analyse the part played by successive waves of nurse migration in changing patterns of division and disadvantage within nursing. We argue that migration has in part acted to reinforce disadvantage based on class and gender, race and ethnicity and identify the influence of changes in nursing structure and commercialization of care in these processes. BACKGROUND, DESIGN AND METHODS: The historical analysis of division within nursing and the impact of migration are based on secondary sources (literature review) and primary research undertaken by ourselves and colleagues. The paper develops a concept of 'remaking' disadvantage drawing on analysis in social history of the interplay between agency and economic position in the 'making' of class. It uses the extended case method to focus on the residential care sector, showing how global and national influences operate at the frontline of service delivery. We show how social class and gender, race and ethnicity have interacted and are reflected in the division of labour within nursing. We demonstrate how the employment conditions of nurse migrants have reinforced patterns of disadvantage. The case study of the residential care home sector deepens our analysis of intersecting sources of professional disadvantage including aspects of commercialization, in a sector where they have severe effects for vulnerable staff and patients. In the UK, migrant professional nurses have repeatedly acted both as a highly valued labour force on whom patients and clients rely and as involuntary contributors to remaking disadvantage. This situation is sustained by the current international labour market and rising commercialization which facilitate nurse migration and the segmentation of care work based on a 'pecking order' of specialties that reinforce existing divisions of social class, gender and race within nursing. Migrant nurses play a key role in the delivery of 'frontline' care to patients. The role many currently play reinforces disadvantage within nursing in ways that are problematic for the profession, patients and clients. The recognition and valuing of their skills is critical to the promotion of their own morale which in turn has an impact on their relationship with colleagues and the delivery of patient and client care.

‘NQOC’: Social Identity and Representation in British Politics

This article develops a critique of the ‘economistic’ approach to understanding social bias in parliamentary representation. It asks why it is so difficult to reduce social bias and achieve change towards a more demographically representative parliament. It argues that what is needed to understand political representation and social identity is a theory that does not polarise subjectivity and social structure in the way the economistic approach polarises ‘supply’ and ‘demand’. The article proposes that paired concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ provide tools that enable an understanding of the relationship between the ‘general social field’, structured as it is by divisions of social class, sex/gender and ‘race’/ethnicity, and the ‘habitus’ and ‘strategies’ of actors competing to enter one of the major fields of power, in this case, the field of politics, recognising that these two levels are mediated in their interconnections by the specific form taken by the British political system. The research is based on extended autobiographical interviews with male and female members of the British parliament. The article focuses on class, the ‘difference’ that has been sidelined in feminist debates on the politics of difference, and also on sex/gender in the form of masculine identity. The article suggests that remedies are needed at each of the three levels of field, system and habitus if parliamentary politics is to be opened up to a wider demographic base, and in so doing, to move towards political justice.

Legacies of Advantage and Disadvantage: The Case of Teen Mothers

The life trajectories of teen mothers and their children were examined with data from a larger longitudinal study. All 5 waves of the study were designed from the hermeneutic tradition. Sixteen families began the study in 1988-1989 (Time 1) and were invited to participate in subsequent studies (1993, 1997, 2001, and 2005). Twenty-eight informants participated in the fifth wave of the study (Time 5). This analysis capitalized on the diversity of teen mothers' family backgrounds to examine the life chances of mothers and their first-born children as mothers entered their 30s. Three domains are addressed: teen mothers' educational attainment, their social class status, and their oldest child's school progress and sexual activity. Teen mothers' life trajectories reflected legacies of unequal life chances that began in childhood and persisted into their 30s. Mothers with childhood advantages fared better over time than impoverished mothers, and a legacy of advantage contributed to a cushion of safety and opportunity for their teenaged children. The powerful legacy of social class and racial divisions on teen mothers' long-term outcomes challenges the view that teen mothering leads to a downward spiral with negative repercussions for mothers and children.