Middle-class Aspirations Research Articles

In Transit: The Making of Urban Migrants in India

The neo-liberal transformation of India was aided by the restructuring processes launched by the SAP in 1991 and brought the open market to the centre of economic imagination for new India. As the Indian economy opened up to the global financial capital systems and the private sector expanded, a large proportion of labour was relocated to the private, unorganized sector in India. This sector swallowed a majority of the migrant population that was flowing into the urban centers of India. The “middle class aspirations” that the migrants to the cities harbored materialize as a part of the larger neo-liberal aspiration of being upwardly mobile and living a ‘good life’. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in two phases, this paper accounts the narratives of men and women migrants who are employed in the various service sector units of two shopping malls in the city of New Delhi. This paper maps the diversity in the migrant experience by comparing the experiences of two distinct groups of migrants employed in these sectors in India- the indigenous migrants from North East India and the migrants from the rural hinterlands of North India. By comparing the narratives of two groups of migrants my paper tries to argue that in addition to education and credentials, classifications of caste, community and ethnicity play an important role in determining ‘life chances’ and employment opportunities for migrants in urban India.

Food City: Ahmedabad as a Globalised Vegetarian Space

Existing studies, highlighting that dining out forms an important part of public cultures in India, have focused on the growing influence of consumer cultures on India’s middle classes and their identity formation. However, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to the distinctly different ways in which middle-class experiences with modernity and cosmopolitanism unfold across different cities in India and in the worldwide South Asian diaspora. This article argues that in the major Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, middle-class engagement with new and global culinary practices is couched within dominant, regionally coloured vegetarian cultures, redefining vegetarianism as integral to the project of modern middle-class identity among certain upwardly mobile social groups. This ethnographic study of popular pizzerias sheds light on the transformative capacity and significance of vegetarian food. From being a symbol of exclusionary bourgeois hegemonic cultures, it has turned into a consumer item regarded as accessible and desirable for supporting middle-class aspirations to experience ‘global’ forms of consumption. The concluding analysis suggests that, since there are many diverse, cosmopolitan urban spaces like Ahmedabad, more research is needed especially on how global Gujarati food culture has been developing.

Critical Estimation of Rohinton Mistry’s Novel ‘Such a Long Journey’

The present paper emphasizes on the presentation of the predicament of Parsi community in Indian context as reflected in Rohinton Mistry’s novel ‘Such a Long Journey’ (1991). The novel selected for the study provides sufficient background to grasp the socio-political status of marginalized group of Indian society viz. Parsi in post-colonial era. Rohinton Mistry being associated with Indian Diaspora in Canada utilizes his fictional writing to explore the life, struggle, frustration and middle-class aspirations of an average, lower middle-class Parsi family in Bombay in the novel under scrutiny.

The Power of Laughter: A Study of the Comedies of Badal Sircar

Comedy, unlike tragedy, is often overlooked as a lower form of art and less important. But comedy plays crucial role in entertaining as well as making people aware of real-life issues. Badal Sircar (1925-2011) is a widely recognized playwright of post-independence Indian theatre. While there is much scholastic focus and discussion on his absurd dramas and Third Theatre plays, his comedies have been mostly overlooked and have rarely drawn critical attention. By filling this gap in existing literature, the present research establishes the significance and value of Sircar’s comedies. It analyses situational pure comedies as well as black comedies from both the proscenium and the non-proscenium phases, namely Solution X, Boro Pisima, Shanibar, Ram Shyam Jadu, Ballabhpurer Rupkatha, Kabikahini, Bichitranushthan, Jadi Ar Ekbar, Abu Hossain, Hattamalar Oparey, Bagalacharit-manas, and Khat Mat Kring. While giving relief to the daily routines of the audience, Sircar presents serious matters in non-serious ways that simultaneously compel them to think about the surrounding worlds and grave issues (capitalist exploitation, corrupt politicians and hypocritical nature of political parties, dowry deaths, nuclear holocaust, unemployment, middle class aspirations and frustration in life, Brahmans-Dalits conflict, social changes, etc.). The study asserts that comedy cannot be merely dismissed as a non-serious art having no social purpose, but it can prove itself to be a powerful tool in raising socio-political awareness.

Investigating Postcolonial Affective Online Communities: A Computational Analysis of Reader Reviews for Contemporary Nigerian Fiction

Abstract: This article approaches postcolonial affect through the combined perspectives of postcolonial and affect studies, audience research, and the digital humanities. It examines more than ten thousand online responses to recent Nigerian diasporic novels with various computer-based methods that bring to the fore the ideologies of emotion informing contemporary postcolonial reading practices. Using a theoretical and methodological framework covering socio-historical, materialist, and linguistic conceptions of community and emotion, this article demonstrates how platforms such as Amazon, Goodreads, and YouTube market postcolonial literary consumption by creating affective online communities of locally and ethnically diversified readers, allowing them to adjust their affective lexicon to the socioeconomic demands of the digital age. The results show that the online distribution and discussion of contemporary Nigerian fiction sideline national, ethnic, and cultural differences in favour of shared middle-class aspirations. Finally, this article illustrates that computational research designs do not exclude but rather invigorate the study of postcolonial issues such as domination, subordination, and exclusion.

Structuring middle-class aspirations: the role of place-based habitus and higher education

This qualitative case study provides an analysis of the structuring of middle-class aspirations at one rural university in the United States. Using a Bourdieusian framework offered by Zipin and colleagues, findings suggest that although student participants in our study are similarly positioned relative to social class background, those from distinct geographic areas (i.e. rural and urban) displayed key differences in expressions of college-going and future aspirations. We argue that place, as an important feature of one’s habitus, structures students’ college-going and future aspirations. Within the highly stratified context of higher education in the United States, few scholars have acknowledged the power of geography and place in shaping behaviors, choices, and possibilities for students. In doing so, this research contributes to a growing global body of literature examining the role of place in shaping students’ higher education aspirations, access, experiences, and outcomes.

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Desk and Derrick: The Women's Petroleum Industry Club That Envisioned Oil's Technocratic Future

AbstractThis article uncovers the hidden history of Desk and Derrick, a female-only petroleum industry employees’ club, to emphasize the importance of clerical work and support staff to oil industry development. In doing so, it demonstrates that despite the oil industry's mythology of individual inventors and lucky wildcatters, oil was remarkably similar to other large-scale scientific and engineering enterprises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, oil's white-collar and administrative jobs expanded rapidly. And in this industry as in others, women were fundamental to oil industry technological development and labor conflicts. Desk and Derrick's was a haven for working women, providing community, training, and leadership opportunities in an industry deeply hostile to female employees. The club provided numerous outreach and educational campaigns included seminars, workshops, fieldtrips, and conventions. These events showcased female competence and technical knowledge, clashing with union derision and corporate dismissal. The club's vocal emphasis on scientific education and credentialization represented a bid for female inclusion within an increasingly technically complex professional world. However, entrenched workplace sexism and union hostility to changing labor structures limited member opportunities. Ultimately, Desk and Derrick's middle-class aspirations allied the club with industry rebranding efforts and helped support industry automation and union-busting. Desk and Derrick valorized industry engineers and scientific professionals, spreading narratives of prosperity through technology that coincided with industry-wide efforts to repair oil companies’ reputations as greedy, wasteful, and exploitative. In turn, midcentury oil companies promoted Desk and Derrick as a convenient, grassroots way to spread their message.

Universal access to higher education: Trends, barriers and drivers

This paper develops a global analysis on access to higher education and how it has evolved between 2000 and 2018, and the associated drivers and impediments to its achievement. The paper also addresses the concept of higher education’s importance to human, social and economic development, as well as from a human rights’ perspective. The study draws from a two-pronged methodology. First, a data analysis on the main indicators used to monitor access to higher education, disaggregated by region, gender and income group. Secondly, a comprehensive literature review on the drivers and barriers to achieving access to higher education. This access has increased globally, however, stark differences are noticed at region, gender, and income-group level. Economic development of nations and the rise of middle-class aspirations, the growth of private institutions and the expansion of distance education institutions have been major contributors to this increase in access. Poverty, crises, adverse institutional admission practices and the location of institutions pose continuous challenges to universal access. A combination of policies and actions can be adopted and taken by national governments and higher education institutions to further increase access, taking into particular account populations which are falling behind.

A small car for a small family: building India’s first ‘people’s car’

ABSTRACT The Maruti Suzuki joint venture between the Government of India and the Japanese Suzuki Motor Corporation in 1983 launched India’s first ‘people’s car’ – the Maruti 800. This article argues that the conceptualisation and promotion of the Maruti 800 as the ideal car for a small, middle class family revealed subtle continuities with the controversial family planning programme of the state which had reached its peak during the internal ‘Emergency’ of 1975. By associating the Maruti 800 – an object of aspiration for an emerging middle class and of at least potential mass consumption – with a small family, the state reiterated its message of population control albeit subliminally. The article further suggests that the adoption of Japanese management practices at Maruti, which laid emphasis on hard work and loyalty to the company-family, was in line with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s desire to enforce discipline and enhance labour productivity, a notion also vocalised during the Emergency. Finally, the article illustrates how the ‘people’s car’ project placed the Indian state as the ‘driver’ of middle class aspirations and mobility in 1980s’ India, a full decade before the liberalisation reforms of 1991.

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Phonography Culture

Phonography Culture

Review: Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia

Review: <i>Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia</i>

Amateur real estate investing

ABSTRACT About half of the rental properties in the U.S. are owned by small- to medium-sized investors, many of whom enter the trade with little prior experience. This paper considers the factors that motivate these amateurs to purchase real estate in high-poverty neighborhoods—an investment that involves high levels of financial risk for the inexperienced. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 93 investors in three real estate markets—Baltimore, Maryland; Dallas, Texas; and Cleveland, Ohio—this paper finds that amateurs decide to become investors due to anxieties regarding their financial position, specifically professional dissatisfaction and a lack of retirement savings. Real estate is particularly appealing because it provides a cultural repertoire aligned with middle class aspirations of independence and self-sufficiency. Consequentially, these ideologies motivate and legitimize strategies of action that allow for sometimes imprudent investments, presenting risks to the investors themselves and the communities in which they invest.

“We Have Many Options, But They are All Bad Options!”: Aspirations Among Internal Migrant Youths in Shanghai, China

This article explores the considerations internal migrant youths in Shanghai make as they orient themselves towards the future. Unlike their parents, these youths come of age with dreams and desires that mirror those of their local middle-class peers, yet they are funnelled into the vocational educational system since they do not have local household registrations. Cast as non-aspiring and failed students that break with doxic middle-class aspirations, I contend these youths still find ways to aspire and strategize to achieve a better life. As such, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the grounds on which vocational education is chosen. Rather than a negative choice, I argue that migrant youths who attend vocational education may do so as a compromise between potential material gains, prestige, feelings of belonging, filial piety and closeness to family and friends. Therefore, educational aspirations cannot be untied from broader desires for the future.

The Facade of Neoliberal Merit: Empty Work and Unethical Subjects at a Business School

In this study, we interrogate how the professional managerial class-in-making at an Indian business school reproduces neoliberal discourse of merit. Specifically, we attend to the local social and political formations of discourse of merit and examine its consequences. Empirically, this qualitative study draws on student interviews, qualitative questionnaire responses and a student’s poem titled, ‘A scheduled caste girl’. We found that neoliberal merit is refracted through Indian middle-class aspirations, while responsibilizing those from disadvantaged caste and class backgrounds for educational attainment, English language fluency, and access to networks. Simultaneously, discourse of merit creates a façade which shields ‘empty work’ and the production of unethical subjects who discriminate on the basis of caste and English language skills, and are indifferent to public interests. We introduce the concept of ‘empty work’ and elucidate the implications of an empty work ethic in higher educational institutions. We contribute to critical management studies on the normalization of unethical behavior in the managerial class-in-making and shed light on the caste and post-colonial contours of merit in Indian higher education.

Public sector employment, class mobility, and differentiation in a tribal coal mining village in India

ABSTRACT India's adivasi, or tribal, communities have most often been depicted as homogeneous and egalitarian, at least compared to the entrenched social hierarchies that characterise rural caste society. This article draws on fieldwork in a mining-affected adivasi village in Jharkhand, eastern India, to consider how compensatory public sector employment for mining-induced land dispossession has contributed to new processes of stratification within adivasi society. On the one hand, compensatory employment allowed those who attained it to pursue increasingly common middle-class aspirations, and a considerable degree of class mobility. But on the other hand, it fostered new, enhanced forms of intra-adivasi differentiation – not only in terms of income but also consumption and lifestyle, education and children's life chances, and household and gender dynamics. New internal disparities, in turn, have acted to erode pre-existing elements of adivasi society that revolve around values of egalitarianism.

Introduction: The Middle Class in Post-socialist Europe: Ethnographies of Its “Good Life”

In this special section, drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in Estonia, Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria between 2013 and 2017, we argue that in post-socialist Europe the notions of “middle class” and “good life” have become interchangeable. Related dialectically, each can be substituted for the other as a signifier of a field of aspirations and possibilities. In the current period of persistent economic crisis, deepening social inequality, and growing political turmoil, this interchangeability is a significant ideational conjunction, making it possible to declare middle-class aspirations inherently ethical and thus depoliticise them. Equally important, this interchangeability sustains the continuous idealisation of middle-classness in the face of accumulating frustrations, disappointments, and disillusionments among both the aspiring and the more established middle classes. Nevertheless, our interlocutors differ in their understanding of the kind of “good life” that middle-classness supports. Beyond individual horizons of expectations and socio-economic positions, these differences stem from their experience of recent economic and political crises and from their location at the more, and the less, prosperous local and global “margins.” These differences illustrate the fluidity of these signifiers, which unify an otherwise heterogeneous set of meanings, practices, and relationships.

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

AbstractThis article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle class seek to embody a liberal ideology of “autonomy”, while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Second, members of the lower middle class attempt to create enclaves to experiment with forms of privatisation normally only accessible to a privileged elite. Through this examination of the ways in which a spectrum of privileged urbanites attempts to secure their position in the face of a precarious future, the article outlines middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.

Place Narratives and the Experience of Class: Comparing Collective Destigmatization Strategies in Two Social Housing Neighborhoods

A growing body of literature has investigated the various ways in which residents of stigmatized neighborhoods respond to and cope with stigmatization. However, these approaches have fallen short in tackling the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization. In this article, I take seriously the question of context and, based on a comparative ethnography of two social housing neighborhoods in Finland, show how residents in similar social structural positions differed in terms of the cultural milieus they inhabited, presenting them with different cultural resources for dealing with stigmatization. In the article, I suggest that non-recognition is an understudied but significant consequence of stigma related to social housing neighborhoods. Further, I suggest that depending on the historical and cultural context of the neighborhood, different destigmatization strategies are employed when residents face non-recognition. My data shows that locally lived collective place narratives informed residents’ experiences of class: In one neighborhood, the defining element of the locally acknowledged place narrative was class struggle, whereas in the other it was middle-class aspiration. These narratives served as building blocks for their destigmatization strategies.