Rising exclusion rates indicate the continuing marginalisation of many young people in education in the UK. Working-class boys, children living in poverty, and children with additional/special educational needs are among those experiencing a disproportionate rate of exclusion. This book traces the processes of exclusion and alienation from school and relates this to a changing social and economic context. Jean Kane argues that policy on schooling, including curricular reform, needs to be re-connected to the broad political pursuit of social (...) justice, and presents compelling case studies of excluded pupils, showing the multi-faceted identities of pupils, with a particular focus on masculine and feminine identities. This invaluable contribution to the literature offers an alternative analysis where the social identities of pupils are shown to be tied up with their exclusion from school. Themes investigated include: the meanings of school exclusions social class, gender and schooling social identities of excluded pupils negotiating identities in school: moving towards exclusion exclusions and young people’s lives improving participation in schooling. Providing fascinating reading for teachers, social workers, researchers and policy-makers this book considers how educational disadvantage might be addressed through recognition of the gender and class identities of pupils. (shrink)

Previous studies suggest that social class, class background, and social mobility have important consequences for family life. Exploring hypotheses derived from these studies, as well as the literature on intergenerational relations, the authors focus on one key aspect of family relations: adult daughters' ties to their mothers. Analyzing data from the National Survey of Families and Households, the authors explore how employed women's relations with their mothers are shaped by race, social class memberships and backgrounds, and (...) family arrangements. Their results suggest that social class and mobility exert powerful effects on women's sense of their relations with their mothers, especially among Whites. In addition, however, it is shown that mother-daughter ties among African American and White women are also influenced by family arrangements that operate somewhat independently of social class and mobility. (shrink)

Explanations of how identity is constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and social theory. In this important addition to the literature, Beverley Skeggs demonstrates that class needs to be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity, and power. Class has been marginalized in feminist and cultural theory and it has become increasingly difficult to teach, research, or speak about class. Formations of Class and Gender identifies the neglect of class issues in favor of gender (...) issues, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. In a sustained examination of the production of knowledge, detailed ethnographic research is used to explain how ôrealö women modify and reformulate our understanding of class, subjectivity, and sexuality. A critical examination of cultural representationùinformed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre BourdieuùFormations of Class and Gender is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice. Engaged with theoretical and methodological issues, this will be the standard referenced ethnography on class and gender. It will be required reading for students and researchers in womenÆs studies and sociology. (shrink)

This chapter brings together important contributions from geographers, historians, sociologists and media theorists, and looks at these through the lens of social philosophy on the nature of resistance and oppression, to articulate and understand both the positive and negative ways in which industrial nostalgia shapes present-day working-class identities. Celebrations of abandoned industrial sites have been criticised by some as inflicting a form of violence on working-class people (High and Lewis 2007), transforming sites of working-class loss into objects of nostalgic (...) appreciation in ways which marginalise those who worked there, and which close the past off from the working-class present (Lasch 1991). More positive views about industrial nostalgia argue that it provides a way to assert working-class pride in hostile environments, serving as a basis for present-day solidarity (Loveday 2014; Gibbs 2021). By examining this existing literature on deindustrialisation through a social philosophical perspective, our aim here is to shed some light on this phenomenon, in which industrial nostalgia can function both as a tool of oppression but also as a form of resistance against oppression. (shrink)

Acting classes and theatre education have long been framed as activities during which children can learn skills that transfer outside the acting classroom. A growing empirical literature provides evidence for acting classes’ efficacy in teaching vocabulary, narrative, empathy, theory of mind, and emotional control. Yet these studies have not been based in what is actually happening in the acting classroom, nor on what acting teachers report as their pedagogical strategies. Instead, previous work has been unsystematic and fragmented (...) in its measured transfer outcomes, and absent mechanistic explanation. Expanding research on this topic requires more grounding in teachers’ beliefs about the acting classes they teach, as well as observation of the classes themselves. As a first step, we surveyed 173 acting teachers online, asking them about the activities within acting classes they believed caused change in their students, as well as which outcomes they believed were changed as a result of acting classes. Teachers taught across educational levels (elementary to professional) and had a variety of training in teaching acting. Overall, teachers rated almost every activity within classes as important for and causing impact on students, and almost every outcome as being positively influenced as a result of acting class. When forced to rank order outcomes, teachers focused on collaboration, communication, creativity, confidence, and empathy as most likely to change. Teachers rated importance of class activities and outcomes differently depending on what level they taught. This study shows the difficulty of surveying highly motivated teachers, given the globally high rankings, but also proposes candidate psychological skills likely to change as a result of acting classes, and the mechanistic behaviors that may cause change. (shrink)

Media reflect and affect social understandings, beliefs, and values on many topics, including the lives of autistic and disabled people. Media analysis has garnered attention in the field of disability studies, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and for promoting social justice for – autistic people, who remain underrepresented on scripted television. Additionally, existing portrayals often rely on stereotyped representations of disabled individuals as objects of pity, objects of inspiration, (...) or villains. Television may also serve as a primary source of public knowledge about disabled people and the concept of disability. It is therefore essential that such portrayals avoid stigma and stereotyping. We take a disability studies lens to critically analyze and compare representations of diverse people, who may sometimes be conflated in the popular imaginary, across television series about autistic characters, those with cerebral palsy, and a character with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. We employ an intersectional analytic framework to problematize representations of autistic and disabled people, using television, feminist, and critical disability studies literatures. We analyze how the formal structure of television storytelling can either enable or disable its characters, as well as how portrayals of disability that display a sensitivity to concerns raised by critical disability discourse do not necessarily display the same sensitivity when they intersect with marginalized experiences of gender, sexuality, race, and class. (shrink)

Abstract This essay provides a critical engagement with neo?Gramscian perspectives on European integration, dealing with their core theoretical assumptions as well as empirical analyses of individual aspects of European integration. It is argued that by drawing on Gramsci's rejection of economic determinism, his thinking on the agency?structure problem, as well as his work on how to conceptualise the role of ideas, neo?Gramscian perspectives as a critical theory are able to analyse the social purpose of European integration. The conclusion identifies (...) several shortcomings in the neo?Gramscian literature on European integration, namely (1) the neglect of national and European institutions and their structural impact on social forces as main collective actors; (2) the related oversight of possibilities for change within the existing institutional structure; (3) the neglect of studying resistance to neo?liberal restructuring in Europe; and (4) the missing analysis of trade unions and labour as potential actors within movements of resistance. (shrink)

The family poses problems for liberal understandings of social justice, because of the ways in which it bestows unearned privileges. This is particularly stark when we consider inter-generational inequality, or ‘class fate’ – the ways in which inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next, with the family unit ostensibly a key conduit. There is a recognized tension between the assumption that families should as far as possible be autonomous spheres of decision-making, and the assumption that we should (...) as far as possible equalize the life chances of all children, regardless of background. In this article I address this tension by way of recent liberal egalitarian literature, and consideration of the different dimensions of class fate. I argue, firstly, that the tension may not be of the a priori nature which liberals have tended to identify – and secondly, that as well as distributive and recognition-based aspects, the notion of contributive justice provides a particularly illuminating way of analyzing what is wrong about class fate, and the role of the family in promoting it. (shrink)

There is a class of critics who are dissatisfied with the academic status of literary criticism and who want to re-establish for literary criticism the status it possessed in the early and mid nineteenth century as simultaneously cultural and social criticism. This is an impossible task. The 'cultural critics' of the nineteenth century possessed their authority because they were without competition and because they could command the attention and respect of the whole of the literate audience. However, at the (...) end of the nineteenth century intellectual authority came to be based in specialised academic disciplines and individual authority was undermined and ultimately disappeared. At the same time, the arrival of universal literacy in Britain fragmented and ultimately destroyed the generally educated audience to which the cultural critics addressed themselves. Consequently there is today no role for the cultural critic. Literary critics cannot speak with authority about social, political, or cultural questions. They can, however, speak with authority about literature. Whether or not this criticism can be grounded in disciplinary knowledge, it serves a necessary function for an audience that no longer possesses the skill of reading literary works and lacks the background knowledge that is necessary to make sense of literature. (shrink)

Feminist literature on care has extensively addressed inequalities that cut across the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity in relation to care work. One category that has received less attention in theories of caregiving so far is age. Built on the feminist literature of care and taking young (female) carers as its subject matter, this article tackles age as a third social category of intersectional inequalities along with class and gender. Firstly, through dealing with Nancy (...) Fraser’s justice framework of participatory parity, it is argued that addressing the intersectional inequalities that young (female) carers face necessitates a justice framework that contemplates both the distributional and recognitional aspects of care. In this respect a dual conceptualisation of care is presented – both as a social good and a social process. Secondly, a critical analysis will be presented of the elements of the justice framework of Fraser, where the notion of subordinated status will be related to the identities of young carers. Lastly, the normative framework participatory parity will be discussed in relation to the politics of need, as care practices define the needs of young carers that are contextualised in the care processes, but also in a childhood space. (shrink)

Le mosche del capitale [The Flies of Capital] is Volponi’s last novel, and it is inspired by autobiographical events, which are depicted at a historical level. The end of a progressist industrial paradigm entails the end of social conflicts (i.e., the end of the working class) and the passage from manufactured capital to financial capital. The pervasiveness reached by capital is criticized through some formal choices that ridicule the language of power and the subjugation of the managers to it. (...) The main objective of this paper is to show how Volponi depicts a double breakdown: on the one hand, and in dramatic forms, the breakdown of the working class; on the other hand, and in comic forms, the breakdown of industry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Place for Healing:A Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher's TaskJulia Kellman (bio)Introduction[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection. Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. After (...) the first wound the bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies. Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer; among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command. Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling to their memories of them.1Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious,"2 by its nature orients us to a particular perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography, pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors.3Our hearts, too, are embedded in such places; and in this article, through this "act of personal witness," this "inscription of a self and a description of an object" as the anthropologist and writer Ruth Benhar4 describes it, we will see how the members of an art class for people with HIV/AIDS at a local hospital have similarly become grounded in their art space and in the tiny art community that has grown up around it. Additionally, we will discover the importance of a more descriptive style of writing as means for examining the role of art in the lives of people who are ill, for their various difficult [End Page 106] situations call for particular clarity and empathy that both honors and relates the stories of their lives. It will become clear as this article proceeds that the personal engagement of a researcher/writer in such a situation is critical as well. For not only must she be open—vulnerable, as Behar suggests—to the people with whom she works as a means of spanning the chasm between a life of illness and a life of health, but she must also be sensitive to the reader's needs, for she is the reader's guide and surrogate.5 This role as guide and alter-ego demands that the researcher tell the story of other lives in a manner that enables the reader to empathetically and eagerly undertake a journey with the researcher into a world unlike her own.6Personal Engagement: The Researcher/WriterHoward Brody, doctor and medical ethicist, explains the necessity for stories of illness to be descriptive.7 He asserts that the stories in which we are most interested are not merely factual recitations; they are about what the illness means to the individual—they include how that person understands events. "It is far too simple-minded" he writes, to assume that "the writer of literature presents to us a world of fantasy that never existed whereas the author of a nonfictional pathography has some special insight into the world as it really exists, even if the relevant world is nothing but his own subjective experiences."8 He concludes "in stories of that sort (stories of the meaning of things) the line between so-called truth and fiction becomes more blurred and ceases to affect the uses we make of the stories for the deeper understanding of the human response to illness."9 Further, Brody continues, one must understand stories of sickness in order to truly develop a philosophical understanding of what it means to be ill. Such an understanding, Brody suggests, not only provides ethical guidance for health care workers and others but also will lead to improved care for patients and better education of health professionals.10 This view of... (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes (...) extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which ideologies of aspiration, inclusion, and women’s empowerment associated with India’s globalizing knowledge economy are re-framed by young women workers in a small-town business-process outsourcing center two hours outside of Bangalore. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews, I show that, in contrast to their managers’ expectations of individualized work aspirations, women workers draw on both individualistic and domestically embedded articulations of the future in a formulation I call “flexible aspirations.” In articulating flexible aspirations, they draw (...) both on the gendered language of neoliberal self-improvement for the global economy and on the nationalist ideal of rural middle-class feminine domesticity. While insisting that the future is uncertain, young women use flexible aspirations as a symbolic resource to distinguish themselves from both old-fashioned village housewives and promiscuous urban call center girls. I briefly compare these flexible aspirations to young men workers’ strategic articulations of aspiration, which, rather than relinquishing hopes to an unpredictable future, adjust plans to fit known social limitations. This article, drawing on feminist interpretations of Bourdieu, extends the literature on the Indian middle classes by analyzing young women’s aspirations in non-elite social locations. It builds on this feminist scholarship by highlighting ways in which young women use articulations of flexible aspiration as a mode of gendered class distinction. (shrink)

Education is a key factor for human development and social progress. However, in the context of capitalism, education is also influenced by economic inequalities and power structures. Scientific information selected through a critical review has identified the main theories and findings regarding education conceived within the capitalist model and inherent social mobility. The results demonstrate that in more egalitarian states, wage increases associated with education vary only slightly based on socioeconomic status. However, significant class disparities exist in states (...) with moderate to high levels of inequality. While some argue that education can be a tool for upward mobility, others emphasize how capitalism and pre-existing inequalities can limit such mobility. Understanding this relationship is crucial for addressing issues of equity and social justice in capitalist societies. (shrink)

Class effects in Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania are compared in the framework of the Neo-Weberian social class theory (EGP class schema), using European Social Survey (ESS) Round 4 (2008–2010) data, just at the time when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania completed their transition to market economy and liberal democracy. Finland, perceived in the post-communist Baltic countries as a model or a “real utopia” state, is used as benchmark for a comparative estimation of the strength of class effects. The (...) main findings of the statistical correspondence analysis are the following: (1) Class inequality of life chances is more pronounced in the post-communist Baltics than in Finland; (2) Paradoxically, class effects on ideological orientations and party voting are more prominent in Finland, where class inequality is less pronounced. (shrink)

In the present research, based on the game research paradigm, the research tools are the dictator game and the trust game, and the research objects are Chinese university students. We adopt 2 × 2 between-subjects design experiment to investigate the influence of social class on university students’ prosocial behavior. Across the experimental study, we find that in the two situations of dictator game and trust game, self-social class has no significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior; in the (...) situation of dictator game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and it is regulated by self-social class. Under the condition of low self-social class, the higher the target social class, the more prosocial behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of status and negates “if you are poor, you will be good for yourself.” Under the condition of high self-social class, the lower the target social class, the more prosocial the behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of fairness and echoes “if you are good, you will be good at the world”; in the context of the trust game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and there is no interaction effect with self-social class. (shrink)

This article first surveys a significant set of issues that are intertwined in asking whether social classes are real. It distinguishes two different notions of class: class as organized social entities and class as types of individuals based on individual characteristics. There is good evidence for some classes as social entities—ruling classes and underclasses in some societies—but other classes in contemporary society are sometimes best thought of in terms of types, not social (...) entities. Implications are drawn for pluralist accounts of social classification and the individualism-holism dispute. (shrink)

Happiness is the eternal pursuit of mankind and is also the ultimate goal of social governance and national development. Based on data from the Chinese General Social Survey, this study used a structural equation model to analyze the influence of social class identity and public service satisfaction on the happiness of residents. The effect of public service satisfaction and social trust between social class identity and residents’ happiness was tested using the Monte Carlo method. The (...) empirical results show that social class identity, social trust, and public service satisfaction all had a significant positive impact on residents’ happiness. The influence coefficients of social class identity on the happiness of residents and on the satisfaction degree of public service for those born in the1970s group were greater than the 1980s and 1990s groups. The influence coefficients of social class identity on the happiness and public service satisfaction of non-agricultural household residents were greater than those of agricultural household residents. Therefore, to improve the happiness of residents, we should make new breakthroughs in the equality of quality and the quality of public services, promote the integration of urban and rural areas, highlight key areas of rural development, and increase the construction of basic public services for agricultural household residents. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a novel relational egalitarian theory of social exclusion that explains how society fails to treat socially excluded individuals – such as people experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance use disorders and mental illness and sex workers – as equals. I argue that society places and keeps excluded individuals at the very bottom of the social status hierarchy by treating them as socially invisible, or by rendering them physically invisible, or both. The upshot, then, is (...) that part of what is wrong with social exclusion is that it creates the invisible social class. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate how sex segregation, social class, and gender are analytically related to occupational stratification. Recent discussions of women and men in the labor force revolve around whether a sex-segregated model in which sex of the worker affects placement, a pure social class model using classical criteria, or a gendered social class model in which social organizational processes of a gendered social class structure affect positioning in the stratification system. (...) This article addresses the influence that social class and gender have on stratification in the labor market. Data from the 1972-82 General Social Survey on 371 occupations, representing 7,541 male and female workers, are used to formulate a social class scheme based on all workers' characteristics. In comparing the models, the analyses show that an integrated gendered social class perspective is consistent with the empirical differentiation found among women and men in the labor force. (shrink)

Last year I published a short article urging bioethicists to carefully examine the question of what ought to constitute the canonical issues topics and questions driving research and teaching in bioethics. Why some subjects dominate the field whereas other topics are regarded as matters for scholars in other disciplines is a question that has intrigued me for nearly a decade. How are the boundaries of bioethics established? What factors influence research agendas and the creation of bioethics curricula? How do funding (...) agencies, editors, and leading scholars shape the field of bioethics? These questions are increasingly receiving scrutiny from Charles Bosk, Raymond De Vries, and other researchers as they explore the sociology of bioethics and the “construction” of the “ethical enterprise.". (shrink)

Over last half of the twentieth century, a silent revolution in post-material values made significant advances around the world. The formation of post-material values also resulted in expanded participation in post-material experiences such as joining voluntary groups, pursuing creativity and independence in the world of work, and engaging in political actions—experiences that go beyond a strict focus on accumulating economic wealth and material possessions. Because social class position matters for being a post-materialist, a class divide exists between middle-class post-materialists (...) and working-class materialists who occupy the lower end of the social class spectrum. This article will show that such a divide occurs, first for participation in post-material experiences and second for the attainment of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey, evidence will be provided in this article showing that members of the working class participate less in post-material experiences than others and, as a consequence, enjoy lower life satisfaction than others, especially post-materialists. In light of working-class-supported right-wing populism’s recent emergence in the USA and Europe, this social class divide takes on a special significance in explaining shifting trends in politics and public policy. (shrink)

Motivated by historical insights, the current study examines whether speech-concomitant nonverbal behavior differs between social classes. On the basisof widely accepted concepts relating to cognitive theories of nonverbal communication and a preliminary outline of a concept of ‘communicative physicality’, a TV corpus of autobiographical narratives is analyzed according to a set of working-hypotheses. The results confirm the leading assumption of class-specific differences.

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American (...) subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

At present, the concept of «social class» is in a pauperized cultural state, fully integrated within political channels that are unfavorable to its identification, understanding and acceptance. As it has been defined in two previous works by the present author, the concept can only be associated with territorially undelimited and specialized societies, originated in postindustrial western Europe, under a division of labor based on productive objectives rather than professional roles. The notion of «social class» is nowadays subsumed within (...) the communicative peculiarities channeled by the ruling class, so that it has been practically abolished from the mass communicative scene. Given this social conjuncture, which deeply affects both its academic and popular conception, the present research intends to offer a critical and final vision, after the two previous works, of its contemporary sense. First of all, the pauperization and collapse of the concept will be addressed, to later expose the reasons that make social classes perpetual and, finally, to delineate its role within the world-system as it was defined in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Entrepreneurial agency—the individual power to change environments—is central to entrepreneurship research. Yet, from a social inequality perspective, beliefs in an entrepreneurial agency might differ based on the social class environments individuals are born into. Drawing on social cognitive theories, our findings across three data sets among students from Germany and entrepreneurs from the United States indicate that social class origins are associated with entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) beliefs in adulthood. Exploring the underlying mechanisms, we find that students’ (...) early entrepreneurial experiences in education and practice are indicative of reproducing the class gap in ESE. When individuals collect mastery experiences such as social mobility or entrepreneurial success, their lower social class origins turn out to be associated with enhanced entrepreneurial agency beliefs. We discuss the implications for further research on social class, inequality, and entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of (...) normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide an analysis about the relationship between expert and pragmatic categories used to name and categorize social space, from the point of view of the social hierarchies that structure it. Taking the case of Chile, and applying an experimental simulation methodology, we seek to contribute to the epistemological debate about the representations that individuals elaborate about social space, from a cognitive and interactionist perspective of everyday life. We analyse in particular the scope of (...) the concept of social class as an element of expert description of social reality, but also as a categorization used by ordinary subjects. We argue that although classifications used by ordinary people to describe members of society are not consistent with the most common academic class schemes, they nevertheless share the same logic and ranking system, adding evaluative and normative elements to the cognitive distinction, in the social construction of reality. En este artículo, presentamos un análisis acerca de la relación entre categorías expertas y categorías pragmáticas usadas para nombrar y categorizar el espacio social, desde el punto de vista de las jerarquías sociales que lo estructuran. Tomando el caso de Chile y aplicando una metodología experimental de simulación, aportamos al debate epistemológico acerca de las representaciones que los sujetos sociales elaboran acerca del espacio social, desde una perspectiva cognitiva e interaccionista situada en la vida cotidiana de las personas. Analizamos en especial el alcance del concepto de clase social en cuanto elemento de descripción experta de la realidad social, contrastándolo con la categorización de la misma de parte de sujetos comunes y corrientes. Postulamos que si bien las clasificaciones que ocupan las personas comunes y corrientes para describir a los integrantes de la sociedad no se condicen con las clasificaciones académicas más comunes, comparten sin embargo las mismas lógicas clasificatorias de jerarquización y ordenamiento, agregándose a la distinción cognitiva elementos normativos que aportan a la construcción social de la realidad. (shrink)

Sociology has long recognized the centrality of the body in the reciprocal construction of individuals and society, and recent research has explored the influence of a variety of social institutions on the body. Significant research has established the influence of social class, child-rearing practices, and variable language forms in families and children. Less well understood is the influence of children's social class status on their gestures, comportment, and other bodily techniques. In this essay Sue Ellen Henry brings (...) these two areas of study together to explore how working-class children's bodies are shaped by the child-rearing practices associated with their social class status, and the potential effects these bodily techniques have on their experience in schools. (shrink)

"The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and all of their productions … lies in the fact that their apartness from the world of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially crippling separation." "Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations1" "The public sphere is in this scene what one might call the factory of politics—its site of production." "Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”2"In political and cultural theory today, all roads seem to lead through the public sphere. (...) In an era of apparent political regression and economic decline, grand pronouncements of radical…. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reclaim social class as a central concern within education, not in the traditional sense as a dimension of educational stratification, but as a powerful and vital aspect of both learner and wider social identities. Drawing on historical and present evidence, a case is made that social inequalities arising from social class have never been adequately addressed within schooling. Recent qualitative research is used to indicate some of the ways in (...) which class is lived in classrooms. The article also raises concerns about the ability of the education system to positively address social class in the classroom when contemporary initial teacher training rarely engages with it as a relevant concern within schooling. (shrink)

This book argues for the use of nonideal theory in social ontology. The central claim is that a paradigm shift is underway in contemporary social ontology, from ideal to nonideal, and that this shift should be fully followed through. To develop and defend this central claim, the first step is to show that the key questions and central dividing lines within contemporary social ontology can be fruitfully reconstructed as a clash between two worlds, referred to as ideal (...) and nonideal social ontology. Ideal social ontology is characterized by consensus and cooperation, while nonideal social ontology is characterized by conflict and contestation. The second step is to show that, when taken together, objections to the standard model of ideal social ontology (the dominant version of ideal social ontology) imply that this model needs to be given up in favor of nonideal social ontology. In other words, we should look to nonideal rather than ideal social ontology for core concepts. The third step is to offer a positive account, called the power view, of nonideal social ontology. This account places the concept of social power at the core of a general theory of the social world and replaces the flat and narrow conception of power in ideal social ontology with a richer and more extensive conception. In addition, it rectifies a shortcoming in nonideal social ontology by attending to class, which has been notably and oddly overlooked in the literature. (shrink)

The article aims to reflect — also through some ethnographic examples — on the experience of adolescence in the light of a category, that of social class, rarely used explicitly in pedagogical research. In some contexts, being working-class adolescents has a decisive influence on the relationship with the school, as well with the urban environment and the imaginations of self for adolescents, while it tends to be removed by the actors of educational processes. The interpretative axis of social (...) class helps to reincarnate the theoretical construct of adolescence in the variety of material experiences that subjects have of being adolescents, favoring a clearer vision of the effects that inequalities have on life transitions and suggesting new directions of educational intervention. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one (...) is to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel. (shrink)

This paper starts from a premise relating to the act of fictional writing about eugenics and the way it may be understood as the embodiment and enactment of social imaginaries. It proposes that literature frequently, if not habitually, expresses the underside of what is expressed in public discourse. That is, far from being the implement of state policy or intervention, it acts in counterpoint to the state, constituting a type of social fantasy in that it explores through (...) the realm of the imagination what might happen. It becomes the arena for contestation, exploration, and nuancing as it essays how ideas from public, ‘real’ life, might transform when acted out. The paper considers two sorts of literary case. First it looks at that of ‘naïve’ literature, harnessed unashamedly to a specific sociological discourse of eugenics. Then, using primarily Ibsen, it considers a subset, the case of literature that does not set out to be explicitly in the service of the cause of eugenics, but is appropriated and disseminated from a platform of eugenics. Lastly, taking the example of Unamuno’s Amor y pedagogía the paper considers literature that exists in a quite different sphere of public awareness. It shows awareness of the arguments and precepts of eugenics and related beliefs and practices, but acts as a transitional space to enable such ideas to be entertained and thought about, without a requirement of acceptance or belief. (shrink)

Amid the social background of China where the Internet has penetrated into every corner of an adolescent’s life, we were concerned of the role of Internet usage in influencing the educational gap among social classes. We investigated the mediating role of Internet usage preference for entertainment in the relationship between the family socioeconomic status and the adolescent’s academic achievement and explored the moderating role of future orientation in the relationship. A total of 614 junior high school students (...) were recruited to complete a questionnaire survey, including questionnaires for family SES, Internet usage preference, and adolescent future orientation. The results showed that the relationship between family SES and academic achievement was mediated by Internet usage preference for entertainment; the indirect effect was moderated by future orientation, such that the negative association between family SES and Internet usage preference for entertainment was only indicated in adolescents with low future orientation; and the direct association between family SES and Internet usage preference for entertainment was moderated by future orientation. (shrink)

Because corporate social responsibility can be beneficial to both companies and its stakeholders, interest in factors that support CSR performance has grown in recent years. A thorough integration of CSR in core business processes is particularly important for achieving effective long-term CSR practices. Here, we explored the individual CSR-related competencies that support CSR implementation in a corporate context. First, a systematic literature review was performed in which relevant scientific articles were identified and analyzed. Next, 28 CSR directors and (...) managers were interviewed. The literature review complemented with interview data resulted in the following eight distinct CSR-related competencies: Anticipating CSR challenges; Understanding CSR-relevant systems and subsystems; Understanding CSR-relevant standards; CSR management competencies, including Leading CSR programs, Managing CSR programs, and Identifying and realizing CSR-related business opportunities; Realizing CSR-supportive interpersonal processes; Employing CSR-supportive personal characteristics and attitudes; Personal value-driven competencies, including Ethical normative competencies, Balancing personal ethical values and business objectives, and Realizing self-regulated CSR-related behaviors and active involvement; and Reflecting on personal CSR views and experiences. Based on these results, implications for further research on this topic, as well as implications for practitioners, are discussed. (shrink)

This project reflects on the way in which students in a situation of social risk construct their identity. Based on the reflections and theories originating from research conducted on individuals and collective groups in a situation of social exclusion due to disability, social class or ethnicity, this paper will analyse the conflicts these students have to deal with when constructing their identity. It also examines the challenge that education has to face to turn those conflicts into opportunities (...) that will help to build life projects with which they can freely identify. For this reason, from a critical perspective, the school’s role in constructing identity will be analysed, as will the way in which it affects children and adolescents from minority groups. In the same way, we will study and put forward some different channels aimed at providing more equal educational attention to those identities that are depreciated in neoliberal society. (shrink)

Phenomenological psychology has typically avoided the "importation" of such concepts as social class from sociology.Within the epoche, such terminology is bracketed on the grounds that it brings with it excess theoretical baggage and threatens the return to experience in itself. Yet, in uncovering the lifeworld of university students who—in what in Britain is still predominantly a preserve of the privileged—come from relatively economically disadvantaged homes, "class" or some cognate concept is found to be necessary to capture the range of (...) modes of alienation and disjunction experienced. Following Casey's discussion of the way in which Bourdieu's notion of habitus relates to Merleau-Ponty's description of the interpenetration of the natural and the cultural in the lived body, social class is shown to bring together students' accounts of their multi-faceted sense that "University is not for the likes of us"—encompassing issues of identity, sociality, and spatio-temporal dislocation. (shrink)

In their recent work, Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings challenge traditional employment-based class models, arguing that asset ownership, particularly housing, is now central to understanding class dynamics in the present conjuncture, which some critics characterize as rentier capitalism. This paper examines the historical antecedents of their analysis, especially its relationship to the work of Peter Saunders in the 1990s. It also provides commentary on some of the criticisms of their approach and reflects on the analytic utility, or otherwise, (...) of their asset-based class schema considering these criticisms. (shrink)

Based on the concept of shareholder primacy, many scholars have argued that it is more important for businesses to earn profits for their shareholders than to provide benefits to society at large. Corporate social responsibility is often regarded as an investment that comes at the expense of shareholders. In contrast, research analyzing the connections between the equity ownership structure of a company and its level of CSR engagement suggests that CSR offers benefits to shareholders that go beyond direct financial (...) returns from investments. This study provides a comprehensive review and systematic assessment of theoretical considerations and approaches regarding different forms of equity ownership and their relationships to CSR, and it discusses the relevant benefits and motivations of shareholders. The perceived value of these CSR benefits varies among different types of shareholders, as they assign unequal values to short-term financial or to rather long-term CSR benefits. Based on a literature sample of 146 publications, this review demonstrates central problems inherent in previous analyses. Given the ambiguous and partially contradictory findings of prior research, this study identifies potential moderating influences that help clarify empirical evidence. A contingency approach is suggested in future research, as this can help resolve the problem of contradictory empirical findings and theoretical arguments. (shrink)

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. (...) However, empathy had no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

1. That schools are not merely passive actors in the perpetuation of social inequality, but play a substantial role, has rarely been disputed since the studies by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977/1990)....