Social Class Structure Research Articles

Current Situation, Existing Problems and Prospect of the Study of Social Stratification in Contemporary China

Introduction. Under the backdrop of market economy and social transformation in China, the class structure of society has undergone profound changes, and the traditional class division is no longer relevant. However, there are still some unresolved problems in the study of social strata in China. The lack of diversity and comparability of research methods limits the depth and scope of research. Relatively few studies have been conducted on some emerging classes. Research on the relationship between social class and other social issues is insufficient, such as the relationship between class and education, class and income distribution, etc., are still limited. Methodology and sources. At present, a social classification model has been proposed to study social stratification in China, taking into account the characteristics of China's national conditions. A large number of empirical studies have revealed the evolution and characteristics of China's social class structure. The mechanism of social class formation and the factors influencing them have been studied, which has provided theoretical support for social development. Modern stratification models of Chinese authors have been used for the analysis in comparison with traditional models. Results and discussion. The study of social stratification in China inherited the theoretical framework and empirical research methods of Western social scientists, and there are also attempts to develop its own model of social stratification in combination with the actual situation in China. The structure of social stratification in China is characterized by the need to take into account the state redistribution system and the market economy model. However, there is a consensus that government officials are at the top of the social hierarchy, and the class of peasants and unemployed are at the bottom of society; mental workers (white collars) are higher than manual workers (blue collars). The results of studies on the impact of human capital on social stratification show that gender and educational level have universal significance in society; household registration system and housing type are special independent variables that affect social stratification in China more than in other countries, etc. However, there is a lack of relevant empirical studies that could provide specific quantitative data showing how independent variables affect social stratification in China. Many new social and professional groups have emerged in Chinese society. In recent years, some Chinese scholars have studied such specific social and professional groups, the most widespread and in demand in the labor market in China, taking into account the digitalization processes. Conclusion. It is necessary to further explore the methods and models of social stratification suitable for China's national conditions so as to cover the characteristics of social class diversity. It is necessary to strengthen the research on the relationship between social class and other social issues so as to provide more effective policy recommendations for social development. It is also necessary to strengthen the research on emerging classes, pay attention to their social status, mobility and responsibilities, and provide more effective support and guidance for their development.

Analysis of the Arab singer Shadia’s lyrics

AbstractIn this work, we analyze the lyrics of one of the most famous and influential Arab artists in the twentieth century, namely "Image missing" (Shadia). Lyrics analysis provides a deep insight into the artist’s career evolution and her interactions with the surrounding environment including the social, political, and economic conditions. In order to perform such analysis, we had to collect and compile the lyrics of Shadia accompanied with the necessary meta-data into an organized and structured form. The data are preprocessed by removing stop words and doing some normalization operations over the songs prose. We did not perform any lemmatization or stemming as the original form of the tokens conveys much more information than the source words. We performed a lexical analysis in order to study both the lexical diversity and density over the course of Shadia’s career life. We have as well studied the most significant words, idioms, and terms played in the songs using tools such as word clouds and more quantitative measures such as term frequency–inverse document frequency. We have divided the career life of Shadia into sub-decades of length 5 years, and all analyses are done both in a yearly fashion and more coarsely over such sub-decades. Our quantitative analyses show strong correlations between the artistic lyrical work of Shadia and the state of affairs in Egypt and the Arab World during her time. In particular, Shadia’s lyrics reflect the radical changes in all aspects of the social, political, and economic conditions. This is especially relevant knowing that Shadia is very much truly considered the daughter of the generation of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. The significance of Shadia and her lyrics stem essentially from being contemporaneous to radical changes in Egypt across all sectors including political (support of liberation movements across the world and the conflict with Israel) and socioeconomic (especially changing the social class structure in Egypt). We also investigated the potential effectiveness of PoS (Part-of-Speech) tagging in genre analysis and classification.

English language and employability in locally produced ELT textbooks: Clashes between neoliberal ideals and social class structures in the pedagogical space

Abstract While a growing body of literature has illustrated how neoliberal discourses of English and employment have come to shape English language teaching (ELT) textbooks in a globalized world, little is known about how the translation of these discourses into pedagogical practices is mediated by the social class structures in postcolonial societies. In this article, we draw on a larger qualitative case study to address this gap in the Bangladesh secondary schooling context. We utilize Bourdieu’s conceptual resources and analyze interview and classroom observation data to illustrate how discourses of English and employment introduced into the secondary education-level ELT textbook are enacted in a high socio-economic status school. As our findings illustrate, the students from this school rejected how English was linked to low-profile jobs in the textbook, as this representation contradicted their social class and career aspirations. These findings contribute to the political economy in applied linguistics literature by illustrating how the enactment of the neoliberal discourses of English and employment constructed in the locally produced ELT textbooks is mediated by social class.

Social class and lunch: differences in midday meal format in Santiago, Chile

PurposeThe social sciences have extensively studied meals; nonetheless, a few have investigated the menu format, with all the data originating from European countries. Within this framework, the novelty of this research is that it analyses the relationship between social class and lunch structure among adults in a Global South city: Santiago, Chile.Design/methodology/approachThe study worked with data from the Survey of Commensality in Adults (>18) of the Metropolitan Region, which used a questionnaire and a self-administered eating event diary. The analysis unit was lunches (n = 3,595). The dependent variable was the structure of the lunches (single course, starter with a main course, a main course with dessert or a full-course menu with starter, main course and dessert). The independent variable was the individual’s social class (either the working, intermediate or service class).FindingsThe data showed that lunches are mostly semi- or fully structured (only 44.5% of the lunches reported by the participants contained a single course). The odds of eating a single course were lower in the service class than the working one and the odds of eating a full-course meal were higher in the service class than the working one.Originality/valueThe results provide new quantitative evidence from a representative sample of a Global South city about the relevance of social class as a differentiating factor in food, specifically regarding the existence of simpler meals among the lower classes.

Bourdieu revisited: new forms of digital capital – emergence, reproduction, inequality of distribution

ABSTRACT Based on Bourdieu’s theory of capital, we discuss in this paper the extent to which economically utilizable individual-level data can be seen as the foundation of an independent form of a new digital capital. A variety of digital practices, business models and data-analytical processes are based on these data. They are unfolding massive impact in all social fields and affect the reproduction strategies of actors from various social classes. Individual-level data are the subject of field-immanent conflicts, which we discuss using the example of a general digital field (which is mainly driven by the Big 5 tech companies) and the subfields (1) of software engineering, (2) of prosumption, and (3) of social media content creators. We consider individual-level data not only as relational positions within the digital field and its subfields, but also in relation to the structure of social classes. As a valuable and contested commodity, individual-level data are unequally distributed in favor of the upper class and a new digital elite. The middle and lower classes try to compensate for their limited power of disposal over digital capital through practices of status investments and singularistic counter-strategies.

Passenger Rolling Stock of Indian Railways in the First Half-Century of Their Operation

In India, as in many countries, railways originated as industrial gauge tracks for the transportation of ore, timber, stone, and other building materials. These were the first industrial railways in India to deliver supplies to construction sites, in particular, Chintadripet in Madras (1835), Red Hill Railroad line (1837), Godavari Dam Construction Railway (1845), and others. Initially, the promoters of the construction of railways, based on the general social and economic situation in the country, did not count on the development of passenger traffic, taking into account the virtually impoverished situation of the vast majority of the population. Efforts were focused on freight transportation. The colonialists proceeded from the need to develop railways as an important exploitation tool for exporting the country’s natural resources to the parent country and to the world market. Throughout almost the entire period of British colonial rule, passenger transportation was intended for a narrow stratum of colonizers and a few of the richest representatives of the country’s indigenous population. By the 1860s, there was a system of dividing passenger traffic on the railways of India into four classes. Saloon coaches were used to serve the ruling elite. The difference in travel conditions in luxury saloon coaches and first-class compartment carriages in comparison with third- and fourth-class carriages was huge. It reflected the social class structure of Indian society. At the same time, railway passenger transportation did not affect the interests of the majority of the population at all, as with their level of wealth they could not afford to travel by rail at all, remaining outside the line of progress in transport of the 19th century.

European solidarity and social class. An uneasy alliance

ABSTRACT In response to various crises and a growing Eurosceptic electorate, the European Union (EU) has taken steps to implement solidarity measures aimed at mitigating economic risks and inequalities among member states and their citizens. However, the social basis of support for such redistributive policies in a supranational context remains largely unexplored, despite the ongoing relevance of social class for crucial political outcomes related to European integration.To address this gap, this article distinguishes between transnational and member state solidarity, scrutinizing how the post-industrial division of social classes shapes these two dimensions of European solidarity. The research reveals that the post-industrial structure of social classes, significantly affects both forms of European solidarity, independent of attitudes toward redistribution and European integration. Furthermore, it highlights the transformative potential of supranational redistribution in fostering political support and social cohesion among production workers manifesting exclusive national identities.

The changing social class structure of London, 2001–2021: Continued professionalisation or asymmetric polarisation?

The changing class structure of cities has been a topic of considerable importance and debate for over a 150 years, since the industrial revolution created a large industrial proletariat in many western cities. But the rise of post-industrial society, the decline of the manufacturing industry, a shrinking industrial working class, and the growth of the professional and managerial class from the 1970s onwards has provoked fresh debate about this, as has the emergence of gentrification in many cities. This paper looks at the changing social class structure of London from 2001 to 2021 using data from the population Census. It shows that the higher professional and managerial class continued its long term growth after a pause in 2001–2011. But the number and proportions of small employers, the self-employed and routine workers have also grown. There is therefore continuing professionalisation but also ‘asymmetric polarisation’. The paper also examines the geography of social class change by borough over the period and shows that while the professional and managerial class grew in all boroughs, suggesting a gradual upward class change across London, it was highest in the most gentrified inner London boroughs. However, the percentage point growth of the self-employed and routine groups was generally higher in the mostly suburban boroughs where professional and managerial class percentage point change growth was smallest (and vice versa) which suggests an intensified social class sorting and divergence across London with the lower class groups growing most rapidly in suburban outer London where housing costs are less.

Middle-class occupations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: impact factors and policy implications

ABSTRACT After 1975, Vietnam experienced a series of dramatic changes in social class structure, and these changes continue to have strong impacts in the present period. A significant change is the emergence of a growing middle-class, and this class tends to have an essential role in economic development, as seen in many countries around the world (ADB, 2011). However, studies of the theoretical significance of the middle-class exploring practical applications of the concept in Vietnam are still quite limited. By integrating quantitative and qualitative research, this article analyses the characteristics and factors affecting the occupation of middle-class groups in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).

The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Social Inequalities: The Case of Eskişehir

This study aims to relate how the Covid-19 pandemic affects social life, what kind of inequalities it creates, and how it affects existing social inequalities with the social class structure. In this context, the differentiation of the results of the pandemic according to class position has been problematized in the study, based on the daily life practices of individuals. In the literature review, it is seen that the social dimension of the Covid-19 pandemic is generally neglected. From this point of view, in this article, the social dimension of the pandemic has been discussed within the scope of class perspective. In this study, a total of 30 participants from different socioeconomic classes were interviewed using the semi-structured in-depth interview technique. In the interviews, it is understood that the main reason for the different experiences of individuals during the Covid-19 epidemic process is class differentiation. In the interviews conducted for this study, it was observed that individuals in the lower socioeconomic class experienced more income and job losses than other individuals, and therefore they faced more social risks. Considering the participants' experience of alternative working forms which was implemented in this period, it is one of the important findings that the participants in the lower socioeconomic class are the class with the least experience of alternative working styles, and accordingly, these individuals feel more insecure during the pandemic period. In the study, it is evaluated that the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the social inequalities that already exist in the society.

Rethinking Queer (Asian) Studies: Geopolitics, Covid-19, and Post-Covid Queer Theories and Mobilities

ABSTRACT This paper considers queer studies in the global geopolitical hotspot of Asia, as well as how we can reimagine queer theories through both the Covid-19 pandemic and the intensified regional and global superpower competition and geopolitical tensions. It argues for a rethinking of queer studies through today’s international relations and geopolitical complications in a sociological political economy. The aim is to connect critical studies with analyses of economic and social class structures, an approach that has been substantiated by the current crises, and to present an expanded queer mobility theory with two brief case studies (mini-critiques) of the current socioeconomic conditions facing marginalized people under Covid-19 and the changing geopolitical landscape. In so doing, this paper actively explores what queer studies can do and can be through the current historical turning point of the pandemic and geopolitical rivalry toward potential post-Covid socioeconomic revival and recovery.

Structure of Society From the Rugby to the Rubik’s Cube: A Stability Perspective on Social Structural Transformation

The Rugby-shaped society is considered a nearly ideal type of social structure, becoming an essentially stereotyped elite theory in the global mainstream sociology, which is fundamentally based on the practice and theoretically repeated confirmation of the super-stability function of the Rugby-shaped society in developed capitalist countries. As a result, the Rugby-shaped society has become a theoretical goal of social transformation and a general social consensus. The feasibility of localized social groupings exhibiting a Rugby-shaped structure is not necessarily adequately replicable under the condition of closer global social linkages, and the occupation-based social class structure is not always hyper-stable. The more multidimensional Rubik’s cube society contains both uncertainty and hyper-stability, and the proposed Rugby-shaped society for China should take into account the more complex influencing factors in the systemic global social structure of a Rubik’s cube society. Non-occupational factors may also increase the risk of social instability.

"Post"-pandemic Capitalism: Reform or Transform? Comment on "Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy".

This commentary expresses appreciation for Professor Labonté's work, along with some hopefully constructive suggestions. Professor Labonté's editorial shows ambivalence about reforms within capitalism. Such reforms remain contradictory and unlikely to prevail. Transformation to post-capitalist political economies is an exciting focus of moving beyond the hurtful effects of capitalism. Can "the state… mitigate capitalism's inherent inegalitarianism"? Problematically, government resides in the capitalist state, whose main purpose is to protect the capitalist economic system. The state's contradictory characteristics manifest in inadequate measures to protect health, as during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Social determination," referring to illness-generating structures of power and finance, is replacing "social determinants," referring mainly to demographic variables. Problems warranting attention include: capitalist industrial agriculture causing pandemics through destruction of protective natural habitat, structural racism, sexism and social reproduction, social class structure linked to inequality, and expropriation of nature to accumulate capital. Transformation to post-capitalism involves creative construction of new solidarity economies, while creative destructions block smooth functioning of the capitalist system.

Lyrics Analysis of the Arab Singer Abdel ElHalim Hafez

In this work we analyze the lyrics of one of the most famous and influential Arab artists in the twentieth century, namely, (Abdel ElHalim Hafez). Lyrics analysis provides a deep insight into the artist’s career evolution and his interactions with the surrounding environment including the social, political, and economic conditions. In order to perform such analysis we had to collect and compile the lyrics of Abdel ElHalim accompanied with the necessary metadata into an organized and structured form. The data are preprocessed by removing stop words and doing some normalization operations over the songs’ prose. We did not perform any lemmatization or stemming as the original form of the tokens convey much more information than the source words. We performed a lexical analysis in order to study both the lexical density and diversity over the course of Abdel ElHalim’s career life. We have as well studied the most significant words, idioms, and terms played in the songs using tools such as word clouds and more quantitative measures such as term frequency-inverse document frequency. We have divided the career life of Abdel ElHalim into sub-decades of length 5 years and all analyses are done both in a yearly fashion and more coarsely over such sub-decades. We have found a strong correlation between our statistical analysis and the socio-political status in Egypt and the Arab world during that time. This is especially relevant knowing that Abdel ElHalim is very much truly considered the son of the generation of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. The significance of Abdel ElHalim and his lyrics stem essentially from being contemporaneous to radical changes in Egypt across all sectors including political (support of liberation movements across the world, and the conflict with Israel), and socio-economic (especially changing the social class structure in Egypt). We also investigated the potential effectiveness of PoS (Part of Speech) tagging in genre analysis and classification.

Council code and the socio-political evolution of Russia in the second half of the 17th century

The article is devoted to the study of the place of the Sobornoje Ulogenie Code in the evolution of social institutions in Russia by studying the legislative activity of the government and administrative practices. The purpose of the study is to find out where the gap lay to a greater extent, and where the continuity can be traced in the system of state building and law - between the law of the 1620s-1640s. and the Code, or between the Code and the law of the second half of the XVII century. It is concluded that the continuity can be traced to a greater extent between the law of the 1620s-1640s. and the Council Code, which inherited from the previous legislation a set of legal norms that were revised and generalized in the new code of laws. The legal norms of the Code and new decree articles, including the concept of a crime against the state, a ban on the reception of fugitives, and the reconstruction of settlements, adopted in the second half of the 17th century, were formed by reworking the previous legislation. The evolution of the system of state building and the legal registration of the social class structure of society in the second half of the 17th century was of a discrete nature. Many essential segments of law in the Code are declarative and lack legal and technical tools: the proclaimed indefinite investigation of fugitive peasants could not be effectively implemented without an established system of state investigation, which arose only in the 1660s. The vast majority of articles of the Code were significantly changed in the legislation of the second half of the 17th century; these changes affected the norms describing the estate-class structure of society, including the forms of exercising the rights of the ruling elite to serfs, the rights and status of townspeople and other categories of taxable people.

An Application of Spatial Dispersion Industrialization Model Towards Income Distribution, Employment Opportunity, and Economy

Industrialization is expected to bring positive impacts for the indigenous people in the form of the emergence of social change. The occurred social change is expected to present sufficient room availability, especially on social income, employment opportunity, and economy. Industrialization consequences lead to spatial dispersion problems, which the policymakers do not expect. The impacts are the emergence of the new social class structure change, the high urbanization flow, life necessity fulfillment competition, and the emerging social gap. This study is expected to discover and develop a spatial dispersion model to focus on the three cities in the industrialization process in terms of income, economy, and employment opportunities. To see the compatibility among the three spatial dispersion indicators (income distribution, employment opportunity, and economy) compared to industrialization, the researchers applied Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach to test the hypotheses and analyze the empirical data retrieved through the covariance matrices. The research findings showed the correlation among the three variables by analyzing the retrieved CR values and the probabilities. It can be concluded that income distribution, employment opportunities, and the economy significantly influenced industrialization in Bunder Village, Pademawu Sub-district, Pamekasan Regency. Future research should cover other variables or areas to broaden the insight into how these variables impact industrialization.

Stratification of poverty risk: The importance of social class in four European countries

Social class structures life chances and exposure to socioeconomic risk, but the extent to which this is still the case is subject to debate. While some assert a relevant middle-class squeeze and consequent polarisation, others argue for the disappearance of social class and a ‘democratisation’ of social and economic risk for all segments of postmodern society. We focused on relative poverty to interrogate the extent to which occupational class still matters and whether traditionally ‘safe’ middle-class occupations have lost their capacity for sheltering people from socioeconomic risk. The class-based stratification of poverty risk suggests pronounced structural inequalities between social groups, given its consequences in terms of deprived living standards and the reproduction of disadvantage. We used the longitudinal component of EU-SILC data (2004–2015) to analyse four European countries: Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. We developed logistic models of poverty risk and compared class-specific average marginal effects obtained under a seemingly unrelated estimation framework. We documented persistence of class-based stratification of poverty risk with some indication of polarisation. Over time, upper-class occupations preserved their secure position, middle-class occupations showed a slight increase in poverty risk and working-classes showed the greatest increase in poverty risk. Contextual heterogeneity exists mainly in the levels while patterns are relatively similar. The particularly high-risk exposure of less advantaged classes in Southern Europe can be attributed to the prevalence of single earner households.

Social-class conditioning of the perception of social inequality in Ukraine

In recent decades, domestic sociology has been successfully developing class analysis, i.e. the study of modern Ukrainian society as a class society with the corresponding identification of the structure and composition of social classes and the various effects of class belonging to individuals. The next stage in the development of class analysis in Ukraine was the participation of Ukrainian researchers in the implementation of a representative study under the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) with the main survey module “Social Inequality” and the publication of its analytical results in the monograph “Dynamics of Perception of Social Inequality in Ukraine according to the International Program of Social Research 2009 and 2019” (2020). The analytical work presented in the article is a thorough examination and clarification of the results of the ISSP-2019 study, in particular, regarding the social-class conditioning of the perception of social inequality. A number of research hypotheses were tested: in particular, that social classes differ statistically significantly in terms of emotional perception of social inequality; there is a relationship between support for redistributive policies through changes in the tax burden for people with high incomes and social class; there are statistically significant differences between classes in choosing a dominant strategy for achieving life success; there is a connection between the recognition of the importance of using informal practices to achieve life success and the class position of the individual; there is a connection between the recognition of the importance of socio-ascriptive characteristics for achieving life success and the class position of the individual. It is confirmed that there is a weak connection between the class belonging of individuals and the specified irrelevant variables, as well as the presence of a number of significant differences between social classes regarding the perception of various aspects of social inequality in society, in particular, regarding the classes of the petty bourgeoisie and the working class.

THE MOTIVE OF FREEDOM IN JACK LONDON’S NOVEL «MARTIN EDEN»

Jack London used a variety of motives in his works: mythological motives, the motive of adventure, the motives of friendship and love, the motive of lust for profit and true humanity, and also, the motive of freedom takes honorable place in this list. Freedom is a magnificent word, and it is also main purpose for humans, even if it might not be the only one. The freedom is not philosophical speculation, but the possibilities for human action under the restraints of existential conditions in real life. Free people are not abstract concepts, but real individuals in real life, because this is precisely what concerns literature. Due to the individual’s numerous difficulties in socialized life, how to obtain freedom, that is, the possibility of choice for the individual in life, has been an important topic in literature from ancient times to the present. From this another topic is produced, so-called fate and whether it can be predicted. The philosophical question of what is freedom and how to use it in real life is very popular in literature. «Martin Eden» by Jack London offers insights on the American social class structure during the early- to mid-20th century, which is still relevant today. The protagonist is a representative of the lower-class, having worked a blue-collar job before deciding to become a writer. The motive of a person’s destiny is broad and multifaceted, it is closely related to the motives of fate and the motive of freedom. A person's destiny can be influenced by character, human values, and fate. The desire for freedom is one of the important factors that influence a person's destiny.

Class Identification, Deferred Elimination, and Social Reproduction in Education: ‘Ontological Ambivalences’ Experienced by Working-Class Students at Elite Universities in China

China’s transition from a redistributive economy to a market economy has created an evolving and intensifying social class structure that requires a class perspective and class analysis tools to capture reconfigured social relations and new patterns of social inequalities. Drawing on a three-year life-story study of working-class students at elite universities in China and working with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, this article highlights the emotional costs of class mobility and two associated forms of ‘ontological ambivalences’. The findings show ‘mundane reflexivity’ in class struggles against classifications but more importantly, demonstrate the symbolic violence involved therein and indicate the difficulties of individual agency to achieve politically effective resistances. Although based on the specific context of China, this article contributes to reflections on neoliberal policies elsewhere by shedding light on how neoliberalism relates to and enhances class struggles and the significance of adopting a relational class perspective to understand and address social inequalities.