Economic Hierarchy Research Articles

The Political Attitudes and Subjective Wellbeing of the One Percent

In capitalist societies, individuals who occupy the highest positions in the economic hierarchy feature prominently in the political discourse under the moniker of the One Percent. However, little is known about how the psychology of One Percent might differ from that of the average person. Using a large, nationally representative sample in New Zealand (N = 14,650), we aimed to fill this gap examining the political attitudes and subjective wellbeing of the top one percent of the income distribution. We found that, compared to general public, the One Percent in New Zealand more strongly legitimize the political and economic systems in society, and express lower support for redistributive taxation. They also report higher life satisfaction, self-esteem and belongingness compared to everyone else. Thus, the One Percent benefit not only economically and politically from the current system, but also psychologically. Moreover, their political beliefs serve to bolster the inequality from which they benefit.

Love in the Time of Aging: Sociological Reflections on Marriage, Gender and Intimacy in India

Drawing from a group of older and middle-aged (50 years above) women and men who have re-partnered (includes both marriage and cohabitation) through the assistance of a marriage bureau based in the city of Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India), we examine the sociological notions of relatedness and the “practices” of family and intimacy. We ask whether this “non-normative” process of becoming kin in the post-reproductive lives of these participants, holds promise for a democratization of the private sphere as noted by Giddens (1992) where the social process of relatedness is privileged over its biological/procreational forms. In the process, we examine how our study participants tend to organize their newly established relationships through contradictory tensions of negotiations, commitment, social obligation and personal autonomy. In-depth interviews conducted in a dyadic format revealed gendered expressions of personhood, intimacy and sociality. For example, men expected their relationship to bring in nostalgic ideals of domesticity, whereas women associated re-partnering with increased social status, kinship support and economic security underscoring the expected social benefits associated with caste-endogamous idealized heterosexual unions. Significantly, caste relations were instrumental in determining partner preferences and relationship formation with family members among older couples. We show that despite being circumscribed by conventional social scripts, women in these relationships use their (post-reproductive) age to an emancipatory advantage by bargaining with patriarchal compulsions of verilocality and lack of say in partner decisions. In a context where cultural norms prescribe a social pathology of asexuality and familial dependence in later life, this new form of relatedness offers an uplifting narrative of self-disclosure and intimacy, although ultimately reproducing social, economic and symbolic hierarchies of gender and generation.

Conjugated oppression within contemporary capitalism: class, caste, tribe and agrarian change in India

ABSTRACTNeoliberal globalisation has resulted in the bypassing of agrarian transition-led industrialisation and classic proletarianisation, and class-for-itself class struggles are rare. Drawing on analyses of class relations, racism and other forms of social oppression, this contribution explores how processes of ‘conjugated oppression’ are central to the spread of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on India and on how the co-constitution of class relations and social oppression based on caste, tribe, gender and region is entrenching Dalits and Adivasis at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies. The analysis has deep-seated consequences for how we think about political struggles, in this case ones that foreground caste and tribe and focus on both labour and land.

Temporal Spaces of Egalitarianism: The Ethical Negation of Economic Inequality in an Ephemeral Religious Organization

In this article, we illuminate how a consumption practice in an ephemeral religious organization subverts systems of economic inequality that otherwise prevail in, and structure, society. Drawing on a rich ethnographic study in Pakistan, we show how the practice of food consumption in the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ)—an Islamic organization originating in South Asia that is practiced intermittently by its followers—represents temporal spaces of egalitarianism. Within these temporal spaces, entrenched economic hierarchies that are salient in organizing Pakistani society are challenged. We found that while the fundamental principles of the Tablighi Jamaat advocate for subversion of the economic hierarchies that propagate myriad inequalities by demarcating local Muslims into spheres of different social and economic classes, it is in the practice of food consumption when ethical transgression from these hierarchies are rendered most intelligible. Finally, we consider the implications of this study to the emerging field of Islamic business ethics.

Differentiation Theory and the Global South as a Metageography of International Relations

In this article, I argue that while the Global South has replaced the Third World as the prevalent term for describing structural global inequalities in International Relations, little research is directed at its theoretical implications. I discuss the conceptual evolution of the term from the Third World narrative, interpreting the literature as an implicit rejection of myopic ontologies relying on economic, cultural, or political hierarchies. I then suggest connecting the terminology to the theory of functional differentiation. By avoiding forms inherited from classical social theory, the Global South can be conceptualized in a more productive way that is better attuned to contemporary theoretical discussions.

Data analytics on census data to predict the income and economic hierarchy

Data analytics on census data to predict the income and economic hierarchy

Consuming the Tiger: Experiencing Neoliberal Nature

This is an ethnographic account of urban middle class Indian tourists' experience of seeing the tiger in the national parks (NP) in India, based on participant observation in Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, and Kanha and Bandhavgarh National Parks in Madhya Pradesh, India. This experience of seeing the tiger emerges as a specific form of commodity located within the process of commodification pervasive under neoliberal capitalism, circulated and sustained through a range of media, attainable through competitive exchange of economic and social capital. While the experience is prefigured, standardised and fetishised, actual embodied experience of the tiger safari in NP adds form and content to this commodity. Specific practices including the economy of tiger sighting, forms of access to NP and safari regulations reinforce wildlife experience as a scarce market commodity. The tourist gaze, mediated through global and new social media and materialised through ubiquitous photography, make the tiger simultaneously wild and familiar, cosmopolitan and parochial, universal commodity sign and specifically unique. Material experience through which the tourist ‘consumes’ the tiger reinforces ideas of nature as enclosed, separated and rationed space accessible through the market to those with money to spend, and the tiger as accessible through social status and economic hierarchies. This research unravels a basic contradiction between a sustainable conservation ethic, and subjectivity created by this form of competitive consumption of commoditised nature.

The Rise and Fall of Ignacio Perez Sr. and Jr., Patriarchs of the Most Powerful Family in Early Nineteenth-Century Texas

The Rise and Fall of Ignacio Perez Sr. and Jr., Patriarchs of the Most Powerful Family in Early Nineteenth-Century Texas Bradley Folsom* Click for larger view View full resolution The Spanish Governor's palace in San Antonio, August 1963. This building was purchased by Ignacio Pérez Sr. in 1804 and home to the Pérez family for decades thereafter. Used by permission of the Texas Historical Commission. Downloaded from the Portal to Texas History, a digital repository hosted by the UNT Libraries, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth953744/ [Accessed July 20, 2018]. [End Page 144] In the first days of October 1823, Ignacio Pérez lay dying. At that time, he was the most powerful, influential, and wealthy resident of Texas. He was Texas's most successful rancher, having amassed thousands of heads of cattle on his five leagues of property outside San Antonio de Béxar.1 Many considered Pérez to be northern Mexico's most capable military officer. He had fought numerous sorties against the Comanches and Apaches, whose raids made life difficult for Mexican residents of Texas. He had also defeated revolutionaries and invaders from the United States on multiple occasions, personally leading two expeditions that drove famed filibusterer James Long from Texas. In addition to his economic and military success, Pérez had served in high political offices, including a stint as governor of Texas.2 Having lived such an accomplished life and having willed a substantial fortune to his family, it would be reasonable to assume that the Pérez patriarch closed his eyes for the last time content that he had secured his family's wealth and legacy for future generations. [End Page 145] On October 26, 1852, Ignacio Pérez's first son and namesake, Ignacio Pérez Jr., stood adjacent to the San Antonio River aiming a gun at his head. In the twenty-nine years since his father's death, Pérez had seen his family's fortune, reputation, and prominence in Texas politics diminish. There were many reasons for the Pérez family's fall from grace, but Pérez blamed himself.3 Unlike his father, who was often willing to use cruelty and cunning for gain, the younger Pérez was known to be kind to a fault. Ignacio Jr. also lacked his father's foresight and military prowess. Throughout his life, the elder Pérez had consistently and successfully predicted the various political shifts that had occurred in Texas and had acted in ways that protected and promoted the best interests of his family. As evidenced by his decision to withhold support for the revolutionaries in the Texas Revolution, the younger Pérez had attempted to do the same but had met with much less success. His actions not only marked Pérez for retaliation from the Anglo Americans who had come to dominate post-revolutionary Texas, but saw his family's fall from the top of Texas's political and economic hierarchy. Within a few years of the revolution, Anglo Americans had chased the Pérez family to Mexico, the new government had seized much of their livestock, and squatters had claimed portions of the familial land. The guilt of losing this fortune drove Pérez Jr. to the brink of insanity, and it would cause him to pull the trigger on his firearm that October evening.4 The rise and fall of the Pérez family illustrate the changing realities in the Texas economic and political system during the first half of the nineteenth century. Under Spanish rule, bold men like Ignacio Pérez Sr., often used military accomplishments, family connections, and profit from raising livestock to become wealthy, achieve high social status, and gain political offices in Texas.5 This formula for success began to change when Mexico gained its independence and invited Anglo Americans to populate Texas. Following the Texas Revolution, Anglo Texans drastically transformed Texas politics in ways that marginalized Tejano elites. These changes also made it easier for Anglo Americans to use the legal system and violence to divest Tejanos of their property.6 Nowhere was this change more evident than in the fall...

Data analytics on census data to predict the income and economic hierarchy

The US Census Bureau conducts the American Community Survey generating a massive dataset with millions of data points. The rich dataset contains detailed information of approximately 3.5 million households about who they are and how they live including ancestry, education, work, transportation, internet use and residency. This enormous data encourages the need to know more about the population and to derive insight. The ever demanding requirement in exposing the subtlety in case of economic issues is the motivation behind to construe meaningful conclusions in income domain. Hence the focus is to concentrate on bringing out unique insights into the financial status of the people living in the country. These conclusions delineated might aid in delivering wiser decisions in regard to economic growth of the country. Using relevant attributes, demographic graphs are plotted, aiding the conclusions drawn. Also classifications into various economic classes are done using well known classifiers.

Mar de plástico: Masculinity, Whiteness, and Eastern European Migrants in Spanish Prime Time Television

Author(s): Connolly, Kathleen | Abstract: The following essay analyzes representations of whiteness and its imbrication with both masculinity and the construction of Eastern European migrants in the Spanish TV drama Mar de plastico (2015). The violent, white masculinity of the protagonist, Hector Aguirre, frames him as a protector of the weak and victimized, and the type of man needed to resolve the many problems plaguing Spanish society. By contrast, the whiteness of Eastern European migrants is portrayed as insidious and threatening to the safety and social structure of the community. Both of these engagements with whiteness stem from feelings of uncertainty and anger in broader Spanish society with entrenched economic and class hierarchies, as well a reaction to changing demographics and new influxes of immigrants. The innovative aspects of the show: a desire to create a well-produced, cinematic experience as well as engage with socially-relevant topics, unfortunately are only skin deep, because the narrative falls back on stereotyped portrayals of immigrants and a white, warrior-hero masculinity.

Another Country: everyday social restitution by Sharlene Swartz

Reviewed by: Another Country: everyday social restitution by Sharlene Swartz Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh (bio) Sharlene Swartz (2016) Another Country: everyday social restitution. Cape Town: Best Red, HSRC Press In Another Country, Swartz addresses the problem of racial injustice in South Africa. As a result of unjust legacies of the past, South Africa is a very unequal society in terms of economic and status hierarchies, each having a strong racial component. The central question, therefore, is how this past, along with its historical and contemporary consequences, can be transformed into something good that restores dignity, opportunity, belonging and memory. The author offers social restitution as a conceptual and pragmatic framework within which these possibilities of transformation in South Africa are explored. Restitution herein, is defined as the actions and attitudes that make good again the damage done to our individual and collective personhood (246). The notion of personhood grounds the morality of restitution through two claims: (1) injustice damages our individual and collective personhood. It is something that affects us all. Herein, there is a tacit appeal to self-interest as a basis for moral action; (2) at the same time, this is not self-interest in a narrow individualistic sense. Swartz also appeals to an understanding of personhood as socially emergent. Here, as an ontological point, we are called upon to abandon fantasies of absolute autonomy and recognise the permanence of relations of debt and indebtedness (Nyamnjoh 2017). Because we are constituted by the relationships we are enmeshed in, we have moral obligations to honour them. In order to restore personhood, restitution is implicated in a theory of change whereby South Africans are exhorted to ‘Know, See, Feel, Locate and Act’ (57). Swartz contends that knowledge, seeing [End Page 146] clearly, feeling and self-location in narratives of injustice are necessary and sufficient to create at the very least a desire to act to disrupt injustice. South Africans, especially white South Africans, are encouraged to educate themselves about past injustice and its effects in the present and act against it. As such, Another Country reflects an understanding of change as a relationship between knowledge and action, between moral cognition and moral action. Although the book appears to be primarily directed at white South Africans in these calls for self-education on our history of injustice, the audience remains all South Africans. This is because for Swartz, the gap between moral cognition (knowing) and moral action (acting) is bridged through dialogue. As argued within the text, everyday acts of social restitution are produced through intergroup dialogue aimed at producing consensus on what is possible. Dialogue is a check against reducing restitution to charity, or carrying it out in ways that perpetuates oppression by reinforcing unequal relationships of power. The potential of social restitution as a resource in mobilising for social justice is developed by the author in conversation with 60 South Africans across the boundaries of race, class and gender, elicited through semi-structured interviews. The book comprises of ten chapters divided across four parts. Chapter 1 outlines the hopes for restitution and its urgency. The author maintains that most South Africans are actually united in that they have a common vision for what the post-apartheid future should look like (nonracialism, wellbeing broadly defined). The chapter also describes what the government has done to overcome the legacy of apartheid as an obstacle to these integrated visions, discussing the TRC, affirmative action, land reform, and land redistribution. In this discussion, we find an appreciation of not only where we want to go, but what we have done to get there so far, and their limitations. Restitution is further shown to be urgent because South Africans project an ominous and apocalyptic future in its absence, with war and revolution likely to result from intensified social conflict. Despite the common vision for South Africa described in chapter 1, chapter 2 argues that there is deep polarisation regarding how South Africans perceive the past and the responsibilities and obligations that emerge from one’s connection to this past. While there exists a common vision, South Africans are conflicted about how to realise it. In particular, South Africans are polarised around the relevance of the...

Gendered vulnerabilities to climate change: insights from the semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia

Emerging and on-going research indicates that vulnerabilities to impacts of climate change are gendered. Still, policy approaches aimed at strengthening local communities’ adaptive capacity largely fail to recognize the gendered nature of everyday realities and experiences. This paper interrogates some of the emerging evidence in selected semi-arid countries of Africa and Asia from a gender perspective, using water scarcity as an illustrative example. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the counting of numbers of men and women to unpacking relations of power, of inclusion and exclusion in decision-making, and challenging cultural beliefs that have denied equal opportunities and rights to differently positioned people, especially those at the bottom of economic and social hierarchies. Such an approach would make policy and practice more relevant to people’s differentiated needs and responses.

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

The Rural-Urban Interface: New Patterns of Spatial Interdependence and Inequality in America

America’s rural-urban divide seemingly has never been greater, a point reinforced by large geographic disparities in support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But it is also the case that big cities and rural communities are more tightly integrated than ever and are increasingly interdependent, both economically and socially. This new rural-urban interface is highlighted in this collection of articles, which are organized and developed around the general concept of changing symbolic and social boundaries. Rural-urban boundaries—how rural and urban people and places are defined and evaluated—reflect and reinforce institutional forces that maintain spatial inequality and existing social, economic, and political hierarchies. This volume makes clear that rural-urban boundaries are highly fluid and that this should be better reflected in research programs, in the topics that we choose to study, and in the way that public policy is implemented.

Television’s “Leftover” Bachelors and Hegemonic Masculinity in Postsocialist China

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the renegotiation of Chinese masculinities by analyzing the gendered performances of participants of a popular TV dating show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao). As symptomatic media texts, the reality TV show points to the quandaries of evolving gender politics faced by singletons of China’s one-child generation within the country’s neoliberal restructuring. The textual evidence shows that male participants follow the rule of a market economic hierarchy and uphold the hegemonic ideal of versatile, successful, and upper-middle-class manhood, which hinges on the patriarchal, heteronormative model of love and marriage. Paradoxically, this disempowering ideal is reinforced by female participants in their relational reconstruction of masculinities. The article argues that the Chinese state media not only discipline masculinities but also naturalize a regressive gender mandate in alignment with neoliberal values and the state’s pursuit of capitalist economic development. Consequently, the multiple, hybridized versions of masculinities emerging in media discourse and popular parlance complicate the cultural repertoire of gender relations yet without challenging deeply entrenched structural gender inequality.

Racial hierarchies and contradictory moral regimes in lifestyle destinations: Older, Western residents in Ubud, Bali

This article examines how older, Western residents make sense of racial and economic hierarchies in the context of relations with Balinese employees and a modern service infrastructure of cafes and restaurants in Ubud, Bali. I examine how these residents engage with contradictory moral regimes that reflect a desire to downplay white privilege, yet place the self at the forefront of narratives of life and lifestyle in Bali. The spatial management of such concerns, I argue, is complicated by a desire to impose fixity on socio-cultural process, in ways that bring symbolic pollution beliefs to the fore in this lifestyle destination.

Crossing borders to buy sex: Taiwanese men negotiating gender, class and nationality in the Chinese sex industry

As a rising economic power in East Asia, Taiwan once served as a destination of sex tourism, now gradually it is becoming a country of buyers seeking sex abroad. Currently, China appears to be one of the most popular destinations. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 40 Taiwanese male sex buyers and ethnographic data collected by traveling with a group of five men, this article aims to explore how buying sex abroad appears to be the complicated site of power struggles where sexuality intersects with gender, nationality, and global economic hierarchy. By conceptualizing men’s buying of sex abroad as sexual migration, I illustrate the ways in which men’s border crossings for buying sex are complexly embedded in the gender, sexuality, and class relations in Taiwan, and how their sexual encounters with Chinese women are always contaminated by the politics of nationalism which derive from the unsettled political atmospheres across the Taiwan Strait. I argue that sexual migration is made attractive mainly because of the sexual discontent caused by the stratification of the Taiwanese sex industry and the sexual constraints and routineness of heterosexual monogamy. Buying sex abroad therefore appears as a temporary escape from this mundaneness and banality. Conceptualizing men’s buying sex abroad in dynamic transnational contexts, we could illustrate how men actively negotiate sexual desires at both ends of the Taiwan Strait, and go further to analyse how sexuality serves to shape regional migration, and how it interweaves with gender, class and nationality.

Against Conservative Internationalism

Europe’s integration and its broader postwar reconstruction, some scholars now claim, were conservative projects, geared toward bolstering traditional social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution is a sweeping political and institutional history that reconstructs a transnational movement of conservative politicians and thinkers, who established the European Court of Human rights (ECHR) in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Samuel Moyn’s narrative, Christian Human Rights, the postwar popularity of human rights signals the triumph of conservatism. Udi Greenberg reviews Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti and Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn.

The Ethics of Collective Sponsorship: Virtuous Action and Obligation in Contemporary Tibet

A significant strand of anthropological work on Buddhist generosity practices in Therāvādin and Tibetan Buddhist societies has examined their role in reproducing and reinforcing social and economic hierarchies. Inspired by the recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology, this article addresses the moral dimensions of these practices by analyzing debates, decisions, and judgments about what to sponsor and how to do so during times of accelerated ‘modernizing’ change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Tibet (Amdo) conducted between 2008 and 2015, I focus on a mode of collective sponsorship that has, in different contexts, been considered good, problematic, or even wrong. The moral grounds for such evaluations show that sponsorship is evaluated and experienced not only as a Buddhist practice but also as a social and economic practice with direct consequences for both individuals and communities. The moral stakes of generosity practices are shown to extend beyond individual ethics to the common good.

Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama by Sarah L. Hyde

Reviewed by: Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama by Sarah L. Hyde Alisha Johnson Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. By Sarah L. Hyde. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2016. 240 pp. Cloth $42.50. Asserting that "one must jettison the historiographical bias that measures all academic progress in relation to the establishment of schools in Massachusetts," Sarah Hyde treats us to a long-due examination of white education in the antebellum South (170). Such a conceptual reorientation is fundamental to Hyde's central claim that education was valued and sought by Southern inhabitants during this period, a conclusion that has been obscured in critical comparisons of Northern and Southern educational achievement. Hyde's referenced body of literature further makes the point; the topic appears to have long ago fallen out of vogue under the presumption of Southern apathy toward education—there's nothing to see here, folks. Stepping back from the customary focus on outcomes as a means for determining inhabitants' intentions, however, the author reopens the conversation by highlighting Southerners' persistent efforts to expand schooling during this period. Hyde chooses Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama as representative settings by which to better understand the broader Southern educational context during this time. Several common threads run throughout these three cases. Most notably, schools were established at the insistence of community members. According to Hyde, in the 1840s Southerners began to see access to schooling as a right, and they "demanded that their state governments provide it" (105). Hyde traces the roots of statewide public schooling to early successful urban efforts in New Orleans, Mobile, and Natchez. These efforts provided blueprints for schooling across each state as lawmakers and citizens agitated for state-sponsored public schooling. Interestingly, Carl Kaestle (1980, 1983) and Nancy Beadie (2008) have pointed out a reverse trend, but a common process, in the North; common schooling began not in the cities, but in rural locales. In the urban South constituents were able to exercise their consolidated political will to move local and state governments on their demands. Likewise, Northern rural communities rallied their collective will and resources around the local schoolhouse. [End Page 468] To this end, Hyde uses governmental and voting records, to illuminating effect. In all three locations, governors regularly lobbied state legislatures for greater action in establishing state-sponsored school systems. Nonetheless, progress was consistently achieved as a result of community will. As evidence, Hyde points out that Louisiana and Mississippi governors held much greater power than did Alabama's governor, yet Alabama alone ultimately realized a stable statewide system. The author reasons that this was because Alabama legislators were more directly accountable to the public will. Moreover, Hyde contends that local administrative control was instrumental to the quality and operation of schools across the state; absent local administrations accountable to state-level authority, many schools foundered and closed. This work promises to open up renewed inquiry as it presents several opportunities for further study. To begin with, although the title alludes to a focus on schooling, the author takes an expansive view of education in the South. A full chapter is spent on home instruction. Indeed, universal common schooling was yet a relatively new innovation and children received formal instruction in myriad ways prior to its advent. Relying on modest evidence, exploration of informal education is difficult, but it is an integral part of the American educational legacy ripe for further exploration. Likewise, the author spends some time exploring private schooling, and there is still much to be known about this venue in the Southern antebellum context. Until the development of state-sponsored public schooling, formal education was obtained almost entirely in private schools. In many states, such as Louisiana, this mode of education proliferated even after the advent of public schooling, further supporting Hyde's claim that Southerners valued education. One difficulty touched upon by the author also begs further study: class certainly played a substantial role in the Southern social and economic hierarchy. Hyde points out the wealthy elite's frequent opposition to public school funding as the larger community...