Urban Middle Class Research Articles

A Flavour of Class‐Based Spatial Change: Geographies of Haute Cuisine in the Netherlands

AbstractThis paper explores the changing culinary geography of the Netherlands applying GIS methods. The changing location of Michelin star‐rated restaurants in the period 1986–2016 is put into a context of the changing relations between urban centres and their suburbs as well as the Randstad and the rest of the country. This paper suggests that the changing culinary geography of the Netherlands is related to the re‐emergence of larger cities, particularly of Amsterdam, associated with the rise of an urban middle class epitomised by processes of gentrification. High end award‐winning restaurants are argued to be a useful lens to study the symbolic geography of place, which integrates economic and symbolic perspectives on spatial change.

Waterscapes in transition: changing uses and perceptions of water in middle class homes in Kolkata, India

This article uses practice theory to examine changes in middle class water tenure in Kolkata, India, at the household level from the 1960s to present. Surveys (n = 34) and focus group discussions (n = 4) reveal that the Kolkata urban middle class have transformed not only how they engage water, but their perceptions of water itself. Over the study period, households have: (1) shifted their sources of water; (2) introduced new end uses for water; (3) adopted new water-related technologies; and (4) changed their perceptions of water quality. More specific findings include movement away from public sources towards private sources of water, which are perceived to be of higher quality and greater convenience. Furthermore, all households draw upon multiple water sources and all employ technologies to further harness, process, or transform water (e.g., 100% both filter their water and have a cistern toilet). This influence on the social hydrology of Kolkata ultimately demonstrates their middle class social position and their ability to commodify water. A diversity of water sources, personally treated supplies, and the capital required to secure such a waterscape are increasingly being used to reinforce middle class status, both outwardly and inwardly. These results are distinguishable at the household and society scales, and they can be observed in everyday practices.

The Artist as a Contemporary Pattern of Masculinity. Milieu-specific Strategies of Coping with Precariousness

Abstract Based on a qualitative study on heterosexual female breadwinner couples, this article investigates milieu-specific coping strategies vis-à-vis conditions of precariousness and insecure employment. Against the background of the decline of the male breadwinner model, the study especially focuses on the transformations of masculinity. The article develops the thesis that an “artistic” self-image functions as a specific coping mechanism in the individualized milieu of the educated urban upper middle class.

Teresa, ¿revista para todas las mujeres? Género, clase y espacios de la vida cotidiana en el discurso de la Sección Femenina (1960-1970)

La publicacion mensual Teresa, Revista para Todas las Mujeres, fue la mas duradera y la mas leida de todas las revistas de la Seccion Femenina. Funciono como el organo oficial de la organizacion de mujeres falangistas durante los anos 1954-1977, una etapa marcada por los profundos cambios politicos, economicos y sociales en la dictadura de Franco. Sus articulos, entrevistas e imagenes constituyen un esfuerzo de construccion identitaria para una mujer joven, urbana y de clase media, como parte de un proyecto mas amplio dirigido a obtener una audiencia capaz de identificarse con sus propuestas de feminidad falangista. El articulo analiza las relaciones entre genero y clase en la retorica de la Seccion Femenina que sentaron las bases del discurso y los modelos de activismo en las organizaciones conservadoras de mujeres durante la transicion espanola a la democracia. La hipotesis es que durante la segunda mitad de los anos sesenta, los asuntos relacionados con el genero fueron priorizados de manera diferente dentro de la agenda politica de las mujeres de derechas, en buena medida gracias a la creacion y utilizacion pragmatica de diferencias de clase. El articulo pretende analizar los factores de estos realineamientos de clase y genero, examinando especificamente como los escritores y editores de Teresa describian y definian el lugar de la mujer en dos espacios: el espacio del hogar y la vida familiar, y el espacio del lugar de trabajo y de la vida profesional.

都市新中間層にとっての「でろり」 : 一九二二年岸田劉生個人展覧会における麗子像の展示を中心に

都市新中間層にとっての「でろり」 : 一九二二年岸田劉生個人展覧会における麗子像の展示を中心に

Cultivating the Therapeutic Self in China

ABSTRACTFacing intensified market competition and rapid social change, many Chinese are experiencing increased mental distress. In this article, I examine how psychological training and interventions play a vital part in cultivating a new self among urban middle-classes. I ask how the Chinese notion, ziwo (self), is turned into an object of intense inquiry and how therapeutic techniques are deployed for self-development. The new forms of the self, however, continue to intersect with and complicate the existing social nexus, cultural sensibilities, and notions of personhood. My ethnography explores how this therapeutic work contributes to intricate forms of subject-making that challenge such conceptual binaries as the private versus social self, the inner versus outer life, and psychological versus social problems. Thus, what is emerging is not a usual “neoliberalism” story of self-advancement, but a more complicated picture based on assemblages.

From advocacy to service provision: state transformation and the disability rights movement in Taiwan

This research uses the development of the disability rights movement in Taiwan as a case study to analyze the impact of state transformation, in particular marketization of social welfare policy, on the disability rights movement. First, the institutionalization of the disability rights movement enabled it to expand its organizational structure and become involved in shaping policy. Secondly, when disability rights organizations started to undertake state-funded projects, their focus shifted from advocacy to service provision. Thirdly, competition for limited state-funding gave the organizations led by urban-middle class advocates a significant advantage over small, community-based NPOs and gathered significantly greater resources. Finally, this paper suggests that, in a context in which the state did not provide basic social services for its citizens with disabilities, the institutionalization of SMOs turned advocacy groups into service providers. Although the number of disability civic organizations increased, the voices of advocacy groups were weakened.

China's Changing Class Structure and National Income Distribution, 1952-2015

This article evaluates the evolution of China's class structure and the distribution of China's national income between different social classes from 1952 to 2015. As China becomes the world's leading industrial producer, China's social structure has been fundamentally transformed. China's existing social system struggles to reconcile the economic and social demands from the urban proletariat and other laboring classes (such as the rural semi-proletariat and the urban middle class) and the capitalist imperative to accumulate capital on increasingly larges scales. To the extent that the development of capitalism continues to produce an increasingly larger and more powerful working class but fails to meet its economic and political demands, China is being placed on an inevitable collision course.

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

Nitrogen management of wheat cultivars for higher productivity - A review

The increased population pressure has led to the maximum use of chemical fertilizers especially in the major crops such as rice, wheat and maize production. India has an ever growing population needing food and also the growing urban middle class with higher standards of living is on the lookout for better quality product. The introduction of improved seeds increases the utility of traditional inputs and their consumption as well. Because of genetic variation, BVC 223, Qingnong 8, IPA99, CT 01217, Luomai 8, Seher 06, Sistan, Punjab 2011, Rasco 2005, PBW 343, Halna, HP 1744, VL Gehun 892, WH 1022, PBW 621, and PBW 550 cultivars of wheat crop differ in growth and development behaviour and respond higher to different nitrogen management practices. However, ever increasing prices of Nitrogen (N) fertilizers and possibilities of environmental pollution and groundwater contamination warn for their judicious and efficient use. The application of essential plant nutrients particularly N nutrient in optimum quantity (120-150 kg/ha) and right proportion (3-4 splits) through correct methods and time of application (LCC and green seeker based) is the key to increased and sustained crop production. The increase in quality due to nitrogen fertilization (120-330 kg/ha) may be due to its role in activation of cells division, metabolic and photosynthesis process and nutritive status of wheat plant. Keeping in view above all facts in mind, performance of wheat cultivars as influenced by different nitrogen rates will be discussed in this review.

Twilight of the Proletariat: Reading Critical Balkanology as Liberal Ideology

Critical Balkanology is a sub-discipline of Central and East European Studies that deconstructs and renders arbitrary the claims of ethnic nationalisms and Western “colonial” representations of the Balkans. Yet, this critical and nominally anti-racist project is parasitic on a hegemonic Euro-Atlantic liberal ideology in that it cannot see beyond the singular individual as victim and vanguard, thereby obscuring and/or effacing an awareness of class inequality. Tomislav Longinović's Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011) is emblematic of this project. I place this text under an immanent critique and a contrapuntal reading as an example of how one can rescue class consciousness from this literature and push the limits of its politics while, in Longinović's case, reading it against the socioeconomic contradictions of post-MiloŠević Serbia. Longinović's tracing of the vampire metaphor as a way of understanding the consumptive nature of both ethnic nationalism and Western imperialism reveals a politics that stigmatizes Serbia's plebeian history in favour of a Westernized and urban middle class youth cult of techno-culture, rock music, and the disembodied voices of (male) intellectuals – a form of epistemic violence that parallels processes of privatization, social cleansing, and class oppression consuming the bodies of (sub)proletarians.

말레이시아 화인의 음식 소비 : 종족정체성과 도시 중산층 생활의 교차

15세기 이래 말레이시아에 형성되어 온 화인사회의 많은 음식들은 동남아에서 새롭게 만들어진 것이거나 중국과 동남아 여러 사회의 음식 요소들이 섞여 혼종적인 성격을 갖게 된 것들이다. 무슬림인 말레이인들은 할랄 음식만 먹을 수 있는 반면 화인들은 할랄 음식을 포함하여 훨씬 다양한 음식들을 제약 없이 먹을 수 있다. 무슬림인 말레이인들은 돼지고기와 같은 것을 하람으로 규정하여 오염, 혹은 불결함의 의미를 부여하며 이는 이런 음식을 먹는 화인들 역시 오염되고 불결한 존재라는 의미로 확장된다. 이에 대해 화인들은 ‘비할랄’이라는 용어를 사용하고 건강이라는 개념을 통해 자신들의 음식에 긍정적인 사회적 의미를 부여한다. 돼지고기 혹은 돼지기름의 사용은 화인들에게 음식의 맛과 건강을 위한 중요한 요소이다.BR 화인들의 음식 소비 장소는 매우 다양하고 공간적으로도 넓게 분포되어 있다. 다양한 음식 소비의 장소들을 찾아다니는 것은 화인 젊은이들이 여가를 즐기는 방식 중 하나이다. 이는 많은 사회의 도시 젊은이들에게 나타나는 행동으로 다양한 맛집을 찾아다닐 수 있는 가능성을 드러내는 행위이다. 화인들의 음식 소비는 그런 점에서 종족 관계와 도시성이라는 다층적 관계속에 있다.BR

(Re)making politics in a new urban Ethiopia: an empirical reading of the right to the city in Addis Ababa’s condominiums

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the Ethiopian transition, particularly its social and political dimension based on an urban situation. It contributes to the debate over the right to the city in a dynamic way by articulating the analytical fit between political experiments and city dwelling, which are apparent in an Ethiopian context in a triangle of political emancipation, urban relocation and access to private property. It focuses on the question of access to housing in a recent condominium development on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. The article uses a situated, qualitative and localist approach to analyse the social project of housing policies, and especially the drive to create an urban middle class. It breaks down the profiles and strategies of condominium dwellers and deconstructs the mechanical link between condominium and middle class. Finally, it addresses the capacity of citizens to produce a new social – and potentially a new political – order, or conversely, to reproduce the old socio-political order.

Urban Middle Classes in Colonial Java (1900–1942)

This study investigates Java’s urban middle classes and their importance in the formation of ‘modern’ lifestyles in Indonesia. They formed the backbone of both the Dutch colonial project and the resultant Indonesian nation-state. By foregrounding lifestyle as the defining factor of middle-class identity, we demonstrate how language and images provide a methodological framework to reconstruct this group’s ambitions and aspirations. Their language, an urban variety of Malay, was key to accessing and, in fact, creating discourses of modernity. This transformation was accelerated by the ‘visual turn’ in the late-colonial Netherlands Indies—and, indeed, globally. Advertisements and other visual messages, typically through the medium of the Malay language, promoted new ways to dress, work, travel, and consume. Yet Java’s middle classes were by no means uncritical recipients of these colonial and global novelties. A counter-discourse soon emerged, which questioned the consequences of being modern and the dangers of losing traditional values.

Kentucky Countryside in Transition: A Streetcar Suburb and the Origins of Middle-Class Louisville, 1850–1910 by Stephanie Bower

Reviewed by: Kentucky Countryside in Transition: A Streetcar Suburb and the Origins of Middle-Class Louisville, 1850–1910 by Stephanie Bower Katie M. Hemphill Kentucky Countryside in Transition: A Streetcar Suburb and the Origins of Middle-Class Louisville, 1850–1910. By Stephanie Bower. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 339. $61.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-200-3.) Much of the literature on class formation in United States has identified the mid-to-late nineteenth century as the period in which a distinctive American middle class began to coalesce. In her meticulously researched new work on Louisville, Kentucky, Stephanie Bower examines the roots of what she terms "a second stage of [middle-class] development" that remade the urban middle class between roughly 1890 and 1910 as a result of migration from the hinterlands (p. 1). Bower's work explores how postbellum economic development and familial resources, skills, and experiences gained over generations shaped the emergence of the new middle class and its growing orientation toward streetcar suburbs. Drawing from forty-two families who owned homes in Cherokee Triangle, a middle-class enclave constructed on Louisville's east side, Bower writes a "collective biography" that spans three generations and provides important evidence about how the middle class developed and defined itself spatially at the turn of the twentieth century (p. 19). Bower's family case studies reveal a number of interesting patterns in the backgrounds of Cherokee Triangle residents, chief among them that they were not, by and large, the descendants of members of Louisville's midcentury middle class. Instead, the Cherokee Triangle residents whom Bower studies descended mostly from rural Kentucky smallholders who made their livings by farming. In the decades after the Civil War, the progenitors of Cherokee Triangle residents relocated to small towns, lured by the expanded commercial opportunities that industrialization and economic growth presented. After a period of residence in small towns, they, or their children, relocated to Louisville in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bower's findings about Cherokee Triangle residents' migration patterns lead her to argue for the importance of small-town experiences in easing the transition from rural to urban life and in instilling the values and cultural knowledge necessary to pave the way for entrance into the urban middle class. Her findings also prompt her to reevaluate the impulses behind suburban migration. Bower does not discount push factors, such as perceptions that cities were disorderly, unhealthful, and populated by racial and ethnic others, that influenced families of sufficient means to move to suburbs. However, her narrative highlights pull factors, including a desire on the part of people accustomed to rural and [End Page 422] small-town life to reclaim aspects of county living that they left behind. White-collar workers and their families may have depended on urban commerce and industrialization for their economic and social status, but they drew on small-town customs and practices as they defined what that status meant. Bower's book is the culmination of twenty-six years of painstaking and meticulous research in censuses, city directories, and land, property, and church records, among many other sources. The sheer amount of work that it took to compile the biographies of these individuals is impressive, and it has resulted in Bower's presentation of concrete evidence for elements of class formation and patterns of migration that were previously only speculated about or discussed in a general way. The strength of the book—its incredible volume of information—may also be its weakness in the eyes of readers who are drawn to the study for what it has to contribute to the historiography on the middle class more so than for the information it contains about Louisville. The level of detail contained in family stories that span multiple chapters is at times overwhelming. Nevertheless, Bower's work is a significant achievement, and it will undoubtedly appeal to local historians and genealogists as well as to scholars interested in the history of migration, middle-class formation, and the development of suburbs. Katie M. Hemphill University of Arizona Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

New Urban Middle Classes in Colonial Java

New Urban Middle Classes in Colonial Java

Access Nollywood

Access Nollywood

Middle Classes and Rurality: The Expansion of Urban Middle Classes and New Social Inequalities in Colombia

Middle Classes and Rurality: The Expansion of Urban Middle Classes and New Social Inequalities in Colombia

Agriculture and the “Literati” in Colonial Bengal, 1870 to 1940

This paper attempts to understand the engagement of the literati in Bengal with issues relating to agriculture in colonial Bengal between 1870 and 1940. The outbreak of the Pabna Tax Revolt in 1873 led to a debate within intellectual circles on the crippling exactions levied on the peasantry by zamindars. They identified this as the primary reason for Bengal’s agrarian backwardness. From the 1880s, however, the debate underwent a change, with a section of the intelligentsia shifting it away from the issue of landlordism as a bottleneck to rural development. This group argued for agricultural modernisation as the way ahead for the agrarian sector. In this new productionist discourse, the vanguard role of introducing new technologies into agriculture was to be played by forward-looking sections of the wealthy and educated urban middle class, who were called upon to take to cooperative farming for the purpose. The advocates of such productionism believed that such progress could be achieved within the framework of existing production relations, dominated by the zamindars of rural Bengal. From the middle of the 1930s, another distinct viewpoint on agrarian relations emerged as part of the Kisan Sabha-led peasant movement. Formed in 1936, the Kisan Sabha took up popular demands that included land reform and abolition of the zamindari system. It sought to improve the material conditions of the peasantry. However, its views on agriculture did not include a demand for the modernisation of agriculture through the application of new and scientific techniques and practices. The issue of agricultural modernisation was thus left to the intelligentsia.

New Media in Southeast Asia: Concepts and Research Implications

media technologies [have] altered infrastructures and rhythms of everyday (Horst, 2012, p. 62) - this is true not only for technology-driven metropolitan areas in Eeast Asia or USA, but also, and particularly, for those Southeast Asian countries that hold some of largest numbers of social media users in world. Yet, contrary to popular expectations of an interconnected global network society (Castells, 1996), a number of ethnographic studies have exposed rather unorthodox ways in which digital technologies have become part of daily dynamics of social, cultural, and political life that depend largely on particular regional settings, infrastructures, offline relationships, and other aspects of locality (Hine, 2000, p. 27; Horst, 2013, pp. 149-151; Horst & Miller, 2006; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Miller, 2011; Miller & Slater, 2000; Postill, 2011; ,h Servaes, 2014; Slater, 2013). Focusing on New Media in Southeast Asia, this issue contributes to this project of provincializing (Coleman, 2010, p. 489) digital media, particularly social media, by following ways in which people go about organizing their social, cultural, and political lives in largely institutionalized and conflict-laden environments.Directing their focus toward political participation of urban middle classes ses in authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes, authors of this special issue explore ways in which different actors set parameters for participation in digital space, and seize digital media for their socio-political and cultural agendas. This approach allows them to avoid media-centric generalizations and various forms of technological determinism associated with early work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and others (Baym, 2015, pp. 27-44). Without disregarding importance of external forces, such as political centralization, bureaucratization, and urbanization, as well as their regional particularities, contributions place a strong emphasis on agency of Internet users. Hence, digital media feed into, reflect, and shape symbolic struggles over perception of social world (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20) by allowing for new types of exchange and socialities to emerge across gap between virtual and ® actual (Boellstorff, 2012, p.While contributions to this issue deploy terms digital and social media by addressing concrete, non-analog technologies and applications, such as Internet or Facebook, term new media is rarely discussed in detail. Inquiring what makes new media new, llana Gershon (2010, p. 10) goes well beyond factual innovations introduced by what we know today as Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2007; see also Ellison & boyd, 2013). Rather than technologies she argues, it is people's perceptions of and experiences with social media (e.g., Facebook or Instagram) that define them as new. Internet users, as Hine (2000) poses in her book Virtual Ethnography, are involved in construction of digital technology both practices by which they understand it and through content they produce (p. 38). Once embedded in everyday practices, new media and their accompanying infrastructures may appear mundane and transparent to users. Yet, emerging forms of social interaction through and with digital media do not go without a fair amount of anxieties related to these media (Baym, 2015, p. 22; Gershon, 2010, pp. 80-81), as they potentially challenge previously established technologies and patterns of exchange (Campbell, 2010, p. 9).Madianou and Miller (2011) encountered similar suspicion among Filipino domestic workers in London who today could be defined as the real vanguard troops in marching towards digital future (Miller & Horst, 2012, p. 10). Formulating their concept of polymedia, authors explore ways in which diverse media contribute to emotional repertoire of Filipino mothers in their communication with their children back in Philippines. …