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 White Collar the American Middle Classes written by C Wright 1916-1962 Mills and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Social Change And The Middle Classes written by Tim Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1995. The study of the middle classes actually poses a variety of interesting challenges. Traditionally, the social scientific gaze has been directed either downwards, to the working classes, the poor and the dispossessed, or upwards, to the wealthy and powerful. For all these reasons, a collection of original papers on various aspects of the British middle classes seems an important venture that will cast valuable light on the course of social change in Britain more generally. This book is designed to bring together a series of accessible, high-quality research papers on various aspects of the British middle classes.
Download or read book Middle Class Union written by Mark W. Robbins and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the birth of the American middle class as white-collar workers used their growing consumer identity to organize politically
Download or read book Waking from the Dream written by Louise E. Walker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the postwar boom began to dissipate in the late 1960s, Mexico's middle classes awoke to a new, economically terrifying world. And following massacres of students at peaceful protests in 1968 and 1971, one-party control of Mexican politics dissipated as well. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party struggled to recover its legitimacy, but instead saw its support begin to erode. In the following decades, Mexico's middle classes ended up shaping the history of economic and political crisis, facilitating the emergence of neo-liberalism and the transition to democracy. Waking from the Dream tells the story of this profound change from state-led development to neo-liberalism, and from a one-party state to electoral democracy. It describes the fraught history of these tectonic shifts, as politicians and citizens experimented with different strategies to end a series of crises. In the first study to dig deeply into the drama of the middle classes in this period, Walker shows how the most consequential struggles over Mexico's economy and political system occurred between the middle classes and the ruling party.
Download or read book We Have Never Been Middle Class written by Hadas Weiss and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking apart the ideology of the "middle class" Tidings of a shrinking middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another absorb our attention, but seldom do we question the category itself. We Have Never Been Middle Class proposes that the middle class is an ideology. Tracing this ideology up to the age of financialization, it exposes the fallacy in the belief that we can all ascend or descend as a result of our aspirational and precautionary investments in property and education. Ethnographic accounts from Germany, Israel, the USA and elsewhere illustrate how this belief orients us, in our private lives as much as in our politics, toward accumulation-enhancing yet self-undermining goals. This original meshing of anthropology and critical theory elucidates capitalism by way of its archetypal actors.
Download or read book Middle Classes in Africa written by Lena Kroeker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume challenges the concept of the ‘new African middle class’ with new theoretical and empirical insights into the changing lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Diverse middle classes are on the rise, but models of class based on experiences from other regions of the world cannot be easily transferred to the African continent. Empirical contributions, drawn from a diverse range of contexts, address both African histories of class formation and the political roles of the continent’s middle classes, and also examine the important interdependencies that cut across inter-generational, urban-rural and class divides. This thought-provoking book argues emphatically for a revision of common notions of the 'middle class', and for the inclusion of insights 'from the South' into the global debate on class. Middle Classes in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, as well as NGOs and policy makers with an interest in African societies.
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 The Autocratic Middle Class written by Bryn Rosenfeld and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The conventional wisdom is that a growing middle class will give rise to democracy. Yet the middle classes of the developing world have grown at a remarkable pace over the past two decades, and much of this growth has taken place in countries that remain nondemocratic. Rosenfeld explains this phenomenon by showing how modern autocracies secure support from key middle-class constituencies. Drawing on original surveys, interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources collected from nine months in the field, she compares the experiences of recent post-communist countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to show that under autocracy, state efforts weaken support for democracy, especially among the middle class. When autocratic states engage extensively in their economies - by offering state employment, offering perks to those to those who are loyal, and threatening dismissal to those who are disloyal - the middle classes become dependent on the state for economic opportunities and career advancement, and, ultimately, do not support a shift toward democratization. Her argument explains why popular support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution unraveled or why Russians did not protest evidence of massive electoral fraud. The author's research questions the assumption that a rising share of educated, white-collar workers always makes the conditions for democracy more favorable, and why dependence on the state has such pernicious consequences for democratization"--
Download or read book The Ancient Middle Classes written by Ernst Emanuel Mayer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our image of the Roman world is shaped by the writings of Roman statesmen and upper class intellectuals. Yet most of the material evidence we have from Roman times—art, architecture, and household artifacts from Pompeii and elsewhere—belonged to, and was made for, artisans, merchants, and professionals. Roman culture as we have seen it with our own eyes, Emanuel Mayer boldly argues, turns out to be distinctly middle class and requires a radically new framework of analysis. Starting in the first century bce, ancient communities, largely shaped by farmers living within city walls, were transformed into vibrant urban centers where wealth could be quickly acquired through commercial success. From 100 bce to 250 ce, the archaeological record details the growth of a cosmopolitan empire and a prosperous new class rising along with it. Not as keen as statesmen and intellectuals to show off their status and refinement, members of this new middle class found novel ways to create pleasure and meaning. In the décor of their houses and tombs, Mayer finds evidence that middle-class Romans took pride in their work and commemorated familial love and affection in ways that departed from the tastes and practices of social elites.
Download or read book The Vanishing Middle Class new epilogue written by Peter Temin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.
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 Class Strategies and the Education Market written by Stephen J. Ball and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class Strategies and the Education Market examines the ways in which the middle classes maintain and improve their social advantages in and through education. Drawing on an extensive series of interviews with parents and children, this book identifies key moments of decision making in the construction of the educational trajectories of middle class children. Stephen J. Ball organises his analysis around the key concepts of social closure, social capital, values and principles and risk, while bringing a broad range of up-to-date sociological theory to bear upon his subject. From this thorough analysis, valuable and thought-provoking insights emerge into the assiduous care and considerable effort and expenditure which goes into ensuring the educational success of the middle class child The middle classes are a sociological enigma, presenting the social researcher with considerable analytic and theoretical difficulties. Class Strategies and the Education Market provides a set of working tools for class analysis and the examination of class practices. Above all, it offers new ways of thinking about class theory and the relationships between classes in late modern society.
Download or read book Crimes of the Middle Classes written by David Weisburd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a portrait of white-collar criminals and their punishments. The authors of this book argue that white-collar crime is committed largely by the middle classes and as opportunities for financial wrong-doing increase so will people's susceptability.
Download or read book In Search of Middle Indonesia written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The middle classes of Indonesia’s provincial towns are not particularly rich yet nationally influential. This book examines them ethnographically. Rather than a market-friendly, liberal middle class, it finds a conservative petty bourgeoisie just out of poverty and skilled at politics. Please note that Sylvia Tidey's article (pp. 89-110) will only be available in the print edition of this book (9789004263000).
Download or read book The New Middle Classes written by Arthur J. Vidich and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is designed first to provide a theoretical orientation and historical perspective on the rise of the middle classes in modern civilization, and second, to portray the social and political roles these classes have played and continue to play in the United States over the past century, with particular reference to the American class structure and political economy. Our method is necessarily both historical and sociological and offers an orientation for understanding contemporary American society. The essays included here were written between 1926 and 1982: they reveal both the genealogical development of sociological thought about the middle classes and the substantive content of these classes' life styles, status claims and political orientations. The present work stresses empirical studies and puts forth neither a theoretical interpretation nor a conceptual taxonomy; rather it delineates the emergence and the social and political significance of the new middle classes in relation to the classes, above and below, that preceded them.
Download or read book China s Emerging Middle Class written by Cheng Li and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades ago, there was no distinct middle class in the People's Republic of China. Any meaningful discussion of China's economy, politics, or society must take into account the rapid emergence and explosive growth of the Chinese middle class. This book details the origins and characteristics of this dramatic change.
