Social Class Location Research Articles

Neo-Marxian social class inequalities in self-rated health among the employed in South Korea: the role of material, behavioral, psychosocial, and workplace environmental factors

BackgroundThe aim of this study was to examine the pattern of social inequality in self-rated health among the employed using the Wright’s social class location indicator, and to assess the roles of material, behavioral, psychosocial, and workplace environmental factors as mediating factors in explaining the social class inequality in self-rated health in South Korea.MethodsThis study used data from the 4th Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2007 to 2009. Study subjects included the employed population of 4392 men and 3309 women aged 19–64 years. Subjects were classified into twelve social class positions based on the Wright’s social class map. The health outcome was self-rated health. Material, psychosocial, behavioral, and workplace environmental factors were considered as potential mediators in explaining social class health inequality. We calculated prevalence ratios of poor self-rated health according to social class, adjusted for age and mediating factors using Poisson regression models.ResultsNonskilled workers and petty bourgeoisie reported worse self-rated health than other social classes among men. The age-adjusted prevalence of petty bourgeoisie and nonskilled workers were about four-fold greater than that of managers. Expert supervisors in the contradictory class location had a greater prevalence of poor self-rated health than experts in men. In women, the prevalence of poor self-rated health was greater in most social classes than their male counterparts, while the differences among social classes within women were not statistically significant. Workplace environmental factors explained the social class inequality by from 24 to 31% in nonskilled and skilled workers and nonskilled supervisors, respectively, and material factors showed an explanatory ability of about 8% for both nonskilled workers and petty bourgeoisie in men.ConclusionsWe showed the inequality in self-rated health according to the Wright’s social class in an industrialized Asian country. Policy efforts to improve workplace environments in nonskilled and skilled workers and nonskilled supervisors would have a moderate effect on reducing the magnitude of social class inequality in self-rated health. Furthermore, the means to improve power relations in the workplace should be devised to further reduce the social class inequalities in health.

Masculinities in Transition? Exclusion, Ethnosocial Power, and Contradictions in Excombatant Community-based Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

This study critically examines how masculinities and intersecting ethnonational and social class identities underscore the social and political agencies of excombatants in Northern Ireland and in the specific context of community-based peacebuilding. The authors draw on interviews with female and male leaders in grassroots and governmental organizations, which illustrate how state-led practices of exclusion reshape such intersectional identities and increase the instrumentality of hypermasculinist, pseudo-paramilitary practices in maintaining excombatants’ status and control on neighborhood levels. The research documents how structural dynamics of excombatants’ social class locations and political disaffection help shape their social agencies of “resistance,” underscored by desires for autonomy and recognition, and channeled by ethnogendered scripts rooted in both violent cultures of paramilitarism and nonviolent peacebuilding masculinities. The implications on women of male excombatants’ takeover of leadership roles in the community sector are also discussed.

Elite rationalities and curricular form: “Meritorious” class reproduction in the elite thinking curriculum in Singapore

While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedagogic codes, this paper depicts how one of the most high-status forms of school knowledge – critical thinking – is taught in both an elite as well as a mainstream secondary school in Singapore. It argues that even as, or more accurately, precisely because the Singapore Ministry of Education emphasizes the teaching of critical thinking in all schools and to all students, how such knowledge is presented and performed in the school curriculum becomes crucial in differentiating elites from mainstream students. Findings suggest that whereas the pedagogic codes in the mainstream school remain oriented towards an instrumental rationality and the fulfillment of external and profane market exigencies, in the elite school they invoke a rationality that is inward-looking, personalized and that encourages the development of narcissistic, sacred identities. This paper concludes by considering how curricular form itself functions as a non-neutral mechanism for the transmission of educational knowledge, and the ways in which, in Singapore's highly stratified society where meritocracy functions as a key principle of governance, the elite identities that accrue from such a curricular form further entrench the political legitimacy of a “meritorious” class.

Civilizing Muslim youth: Egyptian state culture programmes and Islamic television preachers

This article explores the similarities and differences between artist and Islamic preacher discourses on art, culture, and youth in Mubarak‐era Egypt in order to highlight the utility and limitations of current anthropological discussions of secularism and religious discursive traditions. By focusing on the shared civilizing and transformative associations of youth, art, and religion, it argues that there is an ingraining of Islamic civilizing traditions into modern governance and vice versa. Furthermore, explaining this phenomenon of ingraining requires that we give more attention to social class and geographical location, nationalism, global and national political‐economic shifts, and the complicated ways that globally circulating discourses become entangled.

The role of the multiple sclerosis specialist nurse

M ultiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease of the central nervous system affecting around 100 000 people in the UK. MS is mainly diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 40 years of age, and in women, three times more often than men. It most frequently presents with acute relapses of neurological symptoms followed by some degree of recovery. A secondary feature is chronic, progressive accumulation of disability. Half of those affected by the illness will have accrued some disability within 15 years of diagnosis. Over the past 11 years there has been a huge increase in support of people with MS in the UK, through the government’s Risk-sharing Scheme with pharmaceutical companies to provide disease-modifying therapies to all those who meet criteria, on an access scheme free to patients, and prescribed through specialist centres. Posts have increased from a handful of MS specialist nurses (MSSNs) in 2002, to over 250 today, with a great deal of support from the two main charities—the MS Society and the MS Trust. MSSNs have developed to provide effective management of people diagnosed with and treated for MS throughout the disease trajectory, and lead the way for patients in ensuring appropriate pathways of care are designed, followed and reviewed to provide access to the best possible care in the most appropriate environment. Only a quarter of our patients will meet criteria for disease modifying drugs, so nurses must also focus on living well with a chronic, often disabling disease. There have been new developments in drug therapy in recent years with the introduction of Tysabri infusions and Gilenya tablets, which appear far superior to the now first-line injectable interferon betas and glatiramer acetate. MSSNs have been at the heart of developing new services to safely deliver and monitor novel, higher-risk treatments. Shortly ahead of us, we have National Insitute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) technological appraisals for four more new therapies (dimethyl fumarate, teriflunomide, laquinimod and Alemtuzumab) and there are challenges ahead for all MSSNs in helping patients to come to terms with these and how they fit into the new treatment pathways. With such a dynamic environment it is essential that our nurses have the highest level of peer support. This can be achieved through the UK Multiple Sclerosis Specialist Nurse Association (UKMSSNA). The UKMSSNA was developed 11 years ago to meet just such a goal. Through educational events, regional meetings, a quarterly magazine and web-based activities, it now reaches around 250 of the UK’s MSSNs. The most appreciated feature is the members queries email list, whereby any member can send a query to our administrator (who will forward to everyone on the list). Several responses can be ensured within a very short timescale, and all queries are then posted on the website. The UKMSSNA has produced several large pieces of supportive work despite having no full-time staff and all committee members being full-time MSSNs. These include a peer-reviewed care manual, an all-inclusive audit tool (CRIMSON), and the report, Adding Value, which demonstrated the cost effectiveness to the NHS of MSSN posts. This demonstrated how much income is generated to trusts by specialist nurses. We are currently stakeholders with the NICE and the Scottish Medicines Consortium for medicines appraisals and care frameworks, and work closely with the MS Society and MS Trust to ensure a fair, equitable access to medicines, services and care is available to all people affected by MS throughout the UK— irrespective of social class or geographical location. It is our hope that NHS trusts and boards will continue to see the value of MSSNs in the UK and support our posts, several of which are already under threat of dissolution, downgrading and specialists being asked to work in wards as no more than healthcare assistants. We want to continue to provide excellent services for all our patients now and in the future.

‘Gap talk’ and the global rescaling of educational accountability in Canada

In this paper, we undertake a particular policy critique and analysis of the gender achievement gap discourse in Ontario and Canada, and situate it within the context of what has been termed the governance turn in educational policy with its focus on policy as numbers and its multi-scalar manifestations. We show how this ‘gap talk’ is inextricably tied to a neoliberal system of accountability, marketization, comparative performance measures and competition within the context of a globalized education policy field. The focus initially is on how the gender achievement gap has emerged in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OCED) publication of the 2009 Program For International Student Assessment Results, but attention is drawn to questions and categories of equity that are used to define and measure socio-economic disadvantage. We illustrate that such measures and categories in use function to eschew important aspects of maldistribution, with important consequences for understanding the significance of the interlocking influences of race, social class, gender and geographical location, where there is evidence of spatial concentrations of poverty and histories of cumulative oppression. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the Canadian data to illustrate the multi-scalar dimensions of global/national/provincial ‘policyscapes’ through a politics of numbers. Contrary to the ways in which Canada and specifically Ontario have been marketed and celebrated by OECD and other stakeholders for their high performing, high quality education system in terms of achieving equitable outcomes for diverse student populations, we illustrate how the ‘failing boys’ discourse and achieving ‘gap talk’ have actually functioned to produce a misrecognition of the gender achievement gap, with boys emerging as a disadvantaged category in the articulation of equity policies.

The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities

This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and not politics at large, and the glossing over of issues of social class and geographic location, all crucial when considering the body as an instrument of communication. Opportunities afforded by using the body as a focal point include a fuller consideration of human agency that eschews technological determinism when studying power and resistance, a historically grounded analytical approach that preempts an uncritical dalliance with presentism, the body being in effect the “oldest medium,” and an analytical advantage whereby the body functions as a heuristic eye of the needle through which all empirical materials, and theoretical considerations are filtered, considered and interpreted.

Gender, Class Aspirations, and Emerging Fields of Body Work in Urban India

If some research indicates that bodies are becoming central to the life projects of “new liberal Indian” women, public debates simultaneously reveal that their bodies are entangled in satisfying traditional and modern ideals of womanhood. There are few studies, though, that have looked into how women reconcile and make use of contradictory cultural signals surrounding their bodies that arise out of a rapidly changing gender and class structure. We draw upon both followers and critics of Bourdieu to show that bodily concerns and undertakings of 48 urban Indian women, and the ways in which they resist and embrace cultural demands on their bodies, vary by social class locations. The women in the study who were most keenly aware of “options” embedded in thin or fit bodies were the ones who could take advantage of new careers and styles of living that the global economy was bringing to their doorsteps. In contrast, women who saw limited prospects for social mobility were unconvinced of the symbolic value of a thin body and rejected appearance concerns on the ground that it interfered with their mothering responsibilities. We conclude that while the fit body has indeed emerged as an important site of self-making for the modern Indian woman, the degree to which she sees costs and benefits involved in the bodywork of losing weight depends on her class location.

Maximising health versus sharing: Measuring preferences for the allocation of the health budget

Empirical evidence indicates that people consider sharing health resources to be important even in the absence of the attributes usually associated with equity (age, social class, ethnicity, disease severity or geographic location). If government is to take account of these preferences then survey methods are needed which allow their measurement. The present paper presents a new technique for measuring these preferences and reports the results of a representative survey of 626 Australians which employed the technique. The online and postal survey did not include any of the attributes usually associated with equity but was designed to quantify the respective importance of sharing life years (outcome egalitarianism), resource sharing per se and the changing importance of total health as other attributes varied. Results indicate respondents were primarily concerned with outcome egalitarianism, and that cost per life year had a relatively small effect upon their allocative decisions.

Ciguapas in New York: Transcultural Ethnicity and Transracialization in Dominican American Performance

The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.

The Political Economy of ‘Race’ and Class in Canada’s Caribbean Diaspora

While there are over 500,000 people in Canada who claim Caribbean origins or descent, they do not automatically constitute a Caribbean ‘community’ or a Caribbean diaspora. The Caribbean diaspora in Canada, often confused with something called a “black diaspora,” is smaller, more homogeneous in class terms, more racialized and more concentrated in certain neighborhoods. Because of the advantages that accrue to capital from having a pliable workforce that will eagerly accept low wages and less than ideal working conditions, it is important to have a diaspora to which capital can go in times of labor need; at the same time, given their powerlessness, the flexibility of such a workforce guarantees that such workers can be easily dismissed during economic downswings. In all of this “race,” racism and racialization play a key role, and came to a head when community leaders and parents were successful in launching a black-focused school in Toronto. At the end of the day, however, the class affiliation of members of the diaspora is clearly distinct from that of the more economically successful and occupationally mobile CaribbeanCanadians, whose social class, educational and residential locations separate them from their diasporic countrymen and countrywomen.

Pathways Toward Resilience Among Women in Rural Trailer Parks*

Abstract: Much resilience research has focused on childhood, despite a growing understanding that resilience is a lifelong process. Adulthood is characterized by turning points that might support a movement toward resilience; yet, such opportunities are not evenly distributed across social class and geographic location. Employing a life course perspective, we examined the pathways of 8 mothers within the context of 3 rural trailer parks to understand how they managed a trajectory toward resilience. Multiple turning points throughout the life course focused on building support, and distancing from nonsupportive influences emerged as particularly salient. The persistence of economic hardships and limited social support, however, continued to present significant and daily challenges to navigating resilient pathways. Policy and program implications are discussed.

Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink: Pani Politics (Water Politics) in Rural Bangladesh

This article looks at the nature of water politics (pani politics) in the context of arsenic contamination of drinking water in rural Bangladesh. Pani politics is found to be a product of intersecting similarities and differences among women and men, where water comes to have material and symbolic power that people can exercise, which can lead to conflicts, marginalization and suffering vis-à-vis water. Gendered location makes a difference in arsenic contaminated areas, where gender differentiated impacts are being observed, in terms of water access, control and ramifications of water poisoning. However, gender has to be understood as intersecting with other axes of differentiation such as social class, age and geographical location, to understand the nuances and multiple ways that arsenic poisoning and water hardship affect lives of men and women in different ways. Attention to such differences highlights the variations in gendered hardships, labor, rights and resources vis-à-vis water, and the way that everyday politics comes to play a role in the ways that people negotiate their lives around water and arsenic in landscapes of social inequality and heterogeneity of arsenic contamination.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: A Window on the ‘New’ Sociology of Childhood

Teaching and Learning Guide for: A Window on the ‘New’ Sociology of Childhood

Picturing economic childhoods: Agency, inevitability and social class in children's picture books

This article considers ideological, pedagogical and constitutive functions of children's picture books, with particular emphasis on the ways in which texts construct children and childhood in economic terms. Through an analysis of Lauren Childs' Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent and Anthony Browne's Voices in the Park, the article interrogates the ways in which these texts' depictions of individuals and families function to locate children and childhood as central to notions of individual, family and social economies. Drawing on insights from feminist poststructuralist research concerned with the textual production of gendered subjectivities, I consider how gendered notions of childhood agency and the inevitability of social class location are implicated in the production of subject positions that are defined by the navigation of socioeconomic circumstances. The argument is made that the subjective, relational, and social processes associated with picture book reading map onto and (re)produce discourses of children and childhood as explicitly economic categories.

Young Jamaicans' attitudes toward mental illness: Experimental and demographic factors associated with social distance and stigmatizing opinions

AbstractTwo large‐scale studies assessed the nature and correlates of young Jamaicans' attitudes toward mental illness. In study 1, students viewed a videotaped job interview for a teacher whose history was manipulated to include a history of mental illness, or not. Students desired significantly less social distance (i.e., more contact) with the “normal” confederate, followed by those with a mental illness history. The putative cause of the mental illness (biomedical vs. psychosocial) made no difference. Study 2, a survey study, revealed the presence of negative attitudes toward people with mental illness and several demographic (age, gender, social class, and rural vs. urban location) differences. Implications of the results for community public health, education, and stigma‐reduction programs, as well as a comparison with research on stigma and attitudes toward mental illness in American culture, are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Navigating Cultural Crosscurrents: (Post)anthropological Passages through High School

This article presents a (post)anthropological framework for understanding adolescent coming-of-age in U.S. public high schools. Coming-of-age is conceived as a complex, fluid, seemingly contradictory process of identity formation and community integration in which adolescents representing diverse ethnic, racial, gender, and social class locations navigate myriad conflicting cultural crosscurrents through cultural productions within the institutional structures of their schools as well as economic, kinship, religious, and political domains of community life. A case study of an underachieving Mexican American senior shows how these navigations may open up creative possibilities as adolescents make their passages through high school.

Class, Cohort, and Consumption: The British Experience of the Third Age

This study examines the relative effect of historical and social class location on engagement in consumerism within two different cohorts of retired people in the United Kingdom. With use of self-reported data from the retired members of a nationally representative survey, an index of consumption was constructed. Its internal reliability was analysed and analyses of variance performed to examine the impact of class of origin, cohort, and class at exit on levels of self-reported "consumerism." The index demonstrated sufficient internal reliability to provide an operational measurement of "consumerism" within this retired population. Analyses of variance confirmed that class at exit and cohort but not class of origin contributed significantly to variation in levels of consumerism. These effects were not mediated by cohort differences in health. Occupational standing immediately before retirement was associated with "consumerism" after retirement. This is unsurprising. The results also show that birth cohort exercised a stronger historical influence on current consumption in later life than did class background (i.e., paternal social class). This supports our thesis that the limited but increasing immersion in mass consumer society of successive cohorts who were born and grew up earlier in the 20th century continues to be reflected in levels of "consumerism" in retirement.

Les déterminants de la saine alimentation chez les Canadiens à faible revenu

This paper draws on four bodies of literature to consider the determinants of healthy eating for low-income Canadians: a) the social determinants of health; b) socio-economic gradients in diet; c) food security; and d) the sociology of food. Though there is a paucity of data for Canada, it is very likely that, as in other industrialized countries, there are socio-economic gradients in diet such that those who are better off consume healthier diets than those less well-to-do. The available evidence suggests that income affects food intake both directly and indirectly through the dispositions associated with particular social class locations. Thus, there may be both economic and cultural thresholds for some food groups or particular foods in food groups. Understanding these thresholds is especially important in addressing the issues facing those who are the most vulnerable among Canadians with low incomes: the food insecure. The literature reviewed suggests that improved nutrition for low-income Canadians may be difficult to achieve a) in isolation from other changes to improve their lives; b) without improvement in the nutrition of the general population of Canadians; and c) without some combination of these two changes. Four major areas of research need were identified: a) national data on socio-economic gradients in diet; b) sociological research on the interaction of income and class with other factors affecting food practices; c) sociological research on Canadian food norms and cultures; and d) research on the costs of healthy eating.

More Good Times and Hard Times: Family Diversity in a Rural Michigan Community

Rural America is widely assumed to be a positive and wholesome environment for families. The experiences of the women studied here do not uniformly fit that optimistic construction. This study joins a significant literature that challenges the idealization of rural family life (e.g., Bokemeier & Garkovich, 1991; Egan, 2002; Gringeri, 2001; Willits & Luloff, 1995). This article presents the results of a follow-up study to a 1995-1996 case study of White rural families in a small Michigan community. In the summer of 2002, I returned to the research community to interview a subgroup of women who had participated in the initial study. In this paper, I summarize the results of the initial study and present key findings from the new research. [2]The central concerns of the initial study were family structure, economic subsistence, and difference. I explored family structure by asking: How are the family households in this sample configured? Are current household arrangements longstanding or are they characterized by substantial fluidity? I addressed economic subsistence by asking: What decisions do family members make and what actions do they take to sustain their households economically? I examined difference in the experience of rural families by analyzing them through the lens of social class, asking: How does family experience vary by social class? How do the ways that families are structured and sustain themselves economically differ by social class?Diversity is doubtlessly a hallmark of contemporary family life. Family scholars recognize that race, class, and gender create a multiplicity of social locations from which individuals create and maintain their family lives. Among this sample of White women, diversity in family experience appeared along the lines of social class. Both family structure variation and differentiation in patterns of resource generation were associated with the social-class position of families. Middle-class families had secure economic resources and stable family circumstances. Moving down the social-class ladder, I found increasingly insecure economic resources and unstable family circumstances. Research participants in higher social-class locations generally described their family lives in terms of good times while individuals in lower social-class locations were more likely to describe hard times. The follow-up study finds that patterns identified in the initial research generally continued in the years between the initial and subsequent studies.A substantial body of literature documents how macrostructural changes in recent decades have created diverse and challenging economic contexts for constructing and maintaining family life (e.g., Edin & Lein, 1996; Nelson & Smith, 1999; Rubin, 1994; Stacey, 1990; Wilson, 1987). This literature illumines the interrelationship between households and the communities in which they are situated. The salient point for this research is that individuals make family-related decisions (for instance, when and whether to marry or divorce) and strategies for making ends meet (for instance, when and whether a primary breadwinner moonlights or a mother takes a job) in specific social and economic contexts.I studied a sample of families in a rural setting to explore how this unique social and economic context shapes family outcomes that may be particular to this situation. While space limitations here preclude a wide-ranging discussion of either rural family demographics or labor markets, two general points are particularly relevant to this analysis. First, rural workers encounter a more restrictive set of employment opportunities than do urban workers. Rural labor markets tend to offer low-skill, low-wage work that is frequently part-time or seasonal (Gibbs, 2001). Per capita income in rural areas is approximately 70 percent of income in urban areas (Economic Research Service [ERS], 2003). Second, while the percentage of nonfamily households and female-headed family households continues to rise in all spatial contexts, nonetheless rural residents continue to be more likely to live in married couple households than are their urban counterparts. …