Neglect Of Class Research Articles

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.

Damaged Attachments & Family Dislocations: The Operations of Class in Adoptive Family Life

This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. The first part of the paper argues that whilst class is structurally present in adoption work, the effects of class difference have been a neglected dimension of practice. This neglect of class in adoption reflects its elision in the wider social field. It isn’t that class stratification has materially or economically disappeared but that the inequalities it installs are concealed through a new privileging of individualism. This individualizing of social problems places new regimes of responsibility upon both individuals and parents. This section concludes with an exploration of the intensive field of contemporary parenting, where social background is considered unimportant. It is argued that attachment theory has become a dominant paradigm for parenting in both adoption and the wider social field because its classed notions of parenting are concealed. The second part of the paper draws upon a small scale qualitative study with one local authority adoption team where adoptive parents and birth parents were interviewed about class and parenting. Working classness assumed a structuring importance in terms of the interview material, as most participants were from this class background. Two areas are particularly foregrounded: the degree to which adopted children’s class differences are interpreted as attachment difficulties and the degree to which middle-classness operates as a silent measure for successful parenting in substitute care.

Evolutionary Economic Geography, Institutions, and Political Economy

In this response to MacKinnon et al. (2009), I argue that the theoretical development of evolutionary economic geographies is necessary in order to evaluate its unique contribution to an understanding of the uneven development of the space economy; that the distinction between evolutionary and institutional economic geographies is overdrawn; that the neglect of class, power, and the state reflect empirical rather than theoretical shortcomings of the evolutionary approach; and that there is significant potential overlap between evolutionary and political economy approaches.