Download or read book Culture and the Middle Classes written by Dr Simon Stewart and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a sociological study of a societal grouping that has the popular title ‘middle class’. It argues that it is more precise to describe the middle classes as dominant groupings, and the book draws upon a wide range of characters from such groupings. In a detailed analysis of cultural practices, those making an appearance include omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, the middle-brow, traditional culture vultures, middle class plunderers, the urban arts eclectic and the English gentleman. There is a particular focus on those expressing the ‘silver disposition’; predominantly affluent, middle-aged and white, with a taste for conspicuous consumption and established cultural forms. The book brings together a range of disparate sources on the middle classes and offers a sustained engagement with the concept of ‘culture’. It illustrates the extent to which social groups utilize the various assets at their disposal and seek to maintain the legitimacy of their cultural practices. The findings emphasise the continuing link between class and taste. Culture and the Middle Classes will be of interest to those working in the fields of class and culture across a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, social theory, media studies and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Reading Classes written by Barbara Jensen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of class make many Americans uncomfortable. This accessible book makes class visible in everyday life. Solely identifying political and economic inequalities between classes offers an incomplete picture of class dynamics in America, and may not connect with people's lived experiences. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen explores the anguish caused by class in our society, identifying classism—or anti–working class prejudice—as a central factor in the reproduction of inequality in America. Giving voice to the experiences and inner lives of working-class people, Jensen—a community and counseling psychologist—provides an in-depth, psychologically informed examination of how class in America is created and re-created through culture, with an emphasis on how working- and middle-class cultures differ and conflict. This book is unique in its claim that working-class cultures have positive qualities that serve to keep members within them, and that can haunt those who leave them behind. Through both autobiographical reflections on her dual citizenship in the working class and middle class and the life stories of students, clients, and relatives, Jensen brings into focus the clash between the realities of working-class life and middle-class expectations for working-class people. Focusing on education, she finds that at every point in their personal development and educational history, working-class children are misunderstood, ignored, or disrespected by middle-class teachers and administrators. Education, while often hailed as a way to "cross classes," brings with it its own set of conflicts and internal struggles. These problems can lead to a divided self, resulting in alienation and suffering for the upwardly mobile student. Jensen suggests how to increase awareness of the value of working-class cultures to a truly inclusive American society at personal, professional, and societal levels.
Download or read book Bridging the Divide written by Jack Metzgar and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bridging the Divide, Jack Metzgar attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other, illustrated by his own lived experiences. Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of historical circumstances, Metzgar challenges professional middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the end, he argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what he calls "standard-issue professionals" with both hard-living and settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better understanding of their differences and how to use those differences to their advantage. Bridging the Divide mixes personal stories and theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the current complex position of the working-class in American culture and a view of what it could be in the future.
Download or read book Culture Builders written by Jonas Frykman and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explains brilliantly the structures and processes of middle-class culture in historical perspective."--Robert Nye, Rutgers University " This] illuminating study of the Swedish middle class around the turn of the century . . . is one welcome sign that bourgeois, too, are once again recognized as parts of society worth studying . . . to be understood rather than to be savaged. Culture Builders is a welcome sign of yet another development: the ease with which historical studies may be integrated with neighboring disciplines."--Journal of Modern History "The authors take an impressively broad intellectual perspective. . . . The everyday routines of bourgeoisie, peasantry, and working class are dramatically portrayed through a skillful weaving together of excerpts from ethnological archives, schoolbooks, memoirs, novels, and etiquette manuals . . . provides insight into the sociocultural complexities, conflicts, and contradictions that are ignored in widely held national stereotypes."--American Anthropologist "Unites historical and ethnological approaches so as to present a way of life that will be of interest not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to historians, sociologists, and everyone trying to describe and interpret the bourgeois Western culture during the nineteenth century."--Ethnos Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren teach in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden.
Download or read book Caribbean Middlebrow written by Belinda Edmondson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The American Middle Class written by Lawrence R Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The middle class is often viewed as the heart of American society, the key to the country’s democracy and prosperity. Most Americans believe they belong to this group, and few politicians can hope to be elected without promising to serve the middle class. Yet today the American middle class is increasingly seen as under threat. In The American Middle Class: A Cultural History, Lawrence R. Samuel charts the rise and fall of this most definitive American population, from its triumphant emergence in the post-World War II years to the struggles of the present day. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, powerful economic, social, and political factors worked together in the U.S. to forge what many historians consider to be the first genuine mass middle class in history. But from the cultural convulsions of the 1960s, to the 'stagflation' of the 1970s, to Reaganomics in the 1980s, this segment of the population has been under severe stress. Drawing on a rich array of voices from the past half-century, The American Middle Class explores how the middle class, and ideas about it, have changed over time, including the distinct story of the black middle class. Placing the current crisis of the middle class in historical perspective, Samuel shows how the roots of middle-class troubles reach back to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The American Middle Class takes a long look at how the middle class has been winnowed away and reveals how, even in the face of this erosion, the image of the enduring middle class remains the heart and soul of the United States.
Download or read book The Global Bourgeoisie written by Christof Dejung and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection presents a global history of the middle class and its rise around the world during the age of empire. It compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods and was a result of international connections and entanglements. Grouped by theme, the book shows how bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.
Download or read book Suitably Modern written by Mark Liechty and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment. Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.
Download or read book The Origins of Middle class Culture written by John Smail and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smail argues that a group's class identity depends on a culture that its members share, one that encompasses economic, social, and political factors in a common worldview. He traces the emergence of an increasingly prosperous manufacturing and middle-class elite in Halifax when large-scale and capitalistic textile operations began to undercut the small-scale, independent clothiers and yeomen. The new manufacturers and the elite professionals associated with them, he shows, became involved in distinctive economic forms and relationships of capitalistic production. They developed their own attitudes toward credit, investment, and money, with a distinctive consumer orientation toward a whole range of luxury items and fashionable goods.
Download or read book Charleston and the Emergence of Middle class Culture in the Revolutionary Era written by Jennifer L. Goloboy and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Very humble servants": colonial merchants and the limits of middle-class power -- The revolution, John Wilkes, and middle-class mob rule -- City of knavery: trade before the War of 1812 -- Friendship and sympathy, family and stability -- The War of 1812 and commercial disaster -- Mercantile professionalism and Charleston as a cotton port
Download or read book Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century written by L. Young and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on expressive and material culture, Young shows that money was not enough to make the genteel middle class. It required exquisite self-control and the right cultural capital to perform ritual etiquette and present oneself confidently, yet modestly. She argues that genteel culture was not merely derivative, but a re-working of aristocratic standards in the context of the middle class necessity to work. Visible throughout the English-speaking world in the 1780s -1830s and onward, genteel culture reveals continuities often obscured by studies based entirely on national frameworks.
Download or read book The Rise of Middle Class Culture in Nineteenth Century Spain written by Jesus Cruz and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his stimulating study, Jesus Cruz examines middle-class lifestyles -- generally known as bourgeois culture -- in nineteenth-century Spain. Cruz argues that the middle class ultimately contributed to Spain's democratic stability and economic prosperity in the last decades of the twentieth century. Interdisciplinary in scope, Cruz's work draws upon the methodology of various areas of study -- including material culture, consumer studies, and social history -- to investigate class. In recent years, scholars in the field of Spanish studies have analyzed disparate elements of modern middle-class milieu, such as leisure and sociability, but Cruz looks at these elements as part of the whole. He traces the contribution of nineteenth-century bourgeois cultures not only to Spanish modernity but to the history of Western modernity more broadly. The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain provides key insights for scholars in the fields of Spanish and European studies, including history, literary studies, art history, historical sociology, and political science.
Download or read book Money Morals Manners written by Michèle Lamont and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class—the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else. Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation. "A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come."—David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology "A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come."—R. Granfield, Choice "This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft."—Lewis Coser, Boston College
Download or read book Culture and the Middle Classes written by Simon Stewart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a sociological study of a societal grouping that has the popular title ’middle class’. It argues that it is more precise to describe the middle classes as dominant groupings, and the book draws upon a wide range of characters from such groupings. In a detailed analysis of cultural practices, those making an appearance include omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, the middle-brow, traditional culture vultures, middle class plunderers, the urban arts eclectic and the English gentleman. There is a particular focus on those expressing the ’silver disposition’; predominantly affluent, middle-aged and white, with a taste for conspicuous consumption and established cultural forms. The book brings together a range of disparate sources on the middle classes and offers a sustained engagement with the concept of ’culture’. It illustrates the extent to which social groups utilize the various assets at their disposal and seek to maintain the legitimacy of their cultural practices. The findings emphasise the continuing link between class and taste. Culture and the Middle Classes will be of interest to those working in the fields of class and culture across a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, social theory, media studies and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book The Global Middle Classes written by Rachel Heiman and published by School for Advanced Research Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surging middle-class aspirations and anxieties throughout the world have recently compelled anthropologists to pay serious attention to middle classes and middle-class spaces, sentiments, lifestyles, labors, and civic engagements. Middle classness has become a powerful category for self-identification, as political and corporate leaders increasingly hail "the middle classes" as the ideal subject-citizenry. Ethnographically rich and culturally particular, the essays in this volume elucidate middle-class experience and discourse and in so doing add critical nuance to theories of class itself.
Download or read book The Good Life written by Loren Baritz and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the American middle class? What does it want? In search of these answers The Good Life tackles the assumptions Americans make and have made about their own culture—about the meaning of equality, success, personal and national security, acceptable ways of dressing and loving and raising children, and, most important, individual freedom. Loren Baritz, a noted observer of American society, leads us to discover not only what Americans are after, but what they usually get in the end. Revealing the realities, the illusions, and the myths of the American middle class, The Good Life makes an exceptional contribution to the understanding of the American way of life. Its broad, incisive, scholarly commentary is sure to arouse controversy and debate.
Download or read book Road to Whatever written by Elliott Currie and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
