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In this article, I investigate the logic underlying household food consumption in Portugal and how it relates to class positioning, like other expressions of culture. Therefore, the paper examines the Bourdieusian hypothesis of homology between the field of food and the configuration of social positions in Portuguese society against the hypotheses that emphasise homogenisation and individualisation of consumption patterns. I start by remapping the Portuguese social space, using an approach inspired by the analysis pioneered by Bourdieu on Distinction and recently taken up by several streams of research. Drawing on the national Household Budget Survey, I then develop a Correspondence Analysis of expenditure on a wide range of foodstuffs. The analysis is supplemented by data from the Second Large Survey on Sustainability in Portugal, seeking to examine patterns in ethical dispositions concerning food and drink in contemporary Portugal and their homology with class. Concluding on a degree of similarity between the space of food consumption and the space of social positions engendered by differences in the overall volume and composition of capital, I close with reflections on the methodological challenges of this approach and on the broader significance of these results for our understanding of consumption in Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of photo ranking exercises together with qualitative interview data to study migrants' perception of social status. It draws on data from a mixed-method study, involving in-depth interviews with migrants from different socio-economic backgrounds and mobility experiences in Germany. The paper focuses on how photo ranking exercises can be combined with more traditional interviewing techniques in order to elicit peoples' subjective perceptions of status mobility in transnational spaces. It demonstrates that ranking exercises can be helpful in the effort to design data collection methods which are combining substantialist and relational approaches to the study of social class and social positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of photo ranking exercises together with qualitative interview data to study migrants' perception of social status. It draws on data from a mixed-method study, involving in-depth interviews with migrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and mobility experiences in Germany. The paper focuses on how photo ranking exercises can be combined with more traditional interviewing techniques in order to elicit peoples' subjective perceptions of status mobility in transnational spaces. It demonstrates that ranking exercises can be helpful in the effort to design data collection methods which are combining substantialist and relational approaches to the study of social class and social positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media driven interpretations of fear and risk have failed to notify the general public that the most likely victims of violence are females who are attacked by a male partner. Domestic violence is pervasive throughout virtually all cultures, occurring across all social classes, all ethnic groups, and all age groups. Yet the true extent of domestic violence is generally agreed to be unknown. Domestic violence is a private fear and as is shown within this paper the search for sanctuary spaces that are offered by refuges is an important component in the acquisition of safe places. However, this paper examines how the 'professionalisation' of some refuges as well as other processes of institutionalisation may have had a negative impact upon the victims of abuse and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Status characteristics theory predicts the emergence and structure of power and prestige orders in task groups from members’ status attributes. This paper argues that application of the burden of proof assumption, central to the theory, is inconsistent with a key concept, generalized expectation state. A reformulation is proposed that eliminates the inconsistency and gives competing predictions for a wide range of situations. The reformulation predicts that, when not directly relevant to task performance, specific characteristics (e.g., athletic or analytical ability) have less impact than diffuse characteristics (race, gender, or education) on performance expectations. The original formulation predicts equal effects. Critical tests are proposed and the paper concludes with additional comparisons of the two formulations on the grounds of parsimony and implications for intervention in settings characterized by status-based inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews certain theories outlined by Taylor, Clarke, Critcher, Dunning et al. which try to set out the relations between professional football and working class culture and which, as part of this, seek to explain football hooliganism as resulting from changes in these relationships. Such theories draw on English evidence and English forms and this paper provides some historical and contemporary evidence, concerning hooliganism and community ties, about a major Scottish club -- Rangers FC -- to indicate that the parallels and causal trajectories these theories suggest do not seem to hold good north of the border.
In conclusion, some additional points are made about English theories and Scottish football in order to argue that a good deal more research is required if we want to understand either the symbolic significance of football in working class culture or football hooliganism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing data on social mobility in Britain demonstrate a disparity of up to 4:1 in the relative chances of children from different social class backgrounds ending up at the top or bottom of the occupational class system. In an earlier paper, it was argued that such disparities should not necessarily be seen as the result of social advantages or disadvantages associated with different class origins, for they are also consistent with a model of meritocracy in which class differentials in average levels of ability are reflected in the class destinations achieved by people from different social backgrounds. That paper has been criticised, both analytically and empirically, and this paper addresses some of these criticisms through an analysis of data from the National Child Development Study. The analysis shows that ability is an important factor influencing social mobility chances, and through a series of logistic regression and multiple regression models, it demonstrates that meritocratic factors (individual effort and ability) outweigh social advantage/ disadvantage factors in predicting the occupational class achieved by over 6,000 men and women by age 33. The paper ends by answering the analytical criticisms made against the earlier paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended as a contribution to the formal theory of stratification systems. The paper has five sections. In Section I, a method for analytically inducing an order over a multi-dimensional status is discussed. It is believed that such a technique can aid in the specification of conceptual tasks within stratification theory, as well as serve as a baseline in actual measurements. It is subsequently employed in the axiomatic work of Sections 3 and 4. In Section 2, there is a brief discussion of the axiomatic method as a prelude to the system developed in the following two sections. In Section 3, the axioms are stated. In Section 4, various elementary consequences of the axioms are shown; most importantly, various concepts which are intuitively important in stratification theory are shown to be definable (e.g., a class system with a determinate number of classes). Finally, in Section s, there is a concluding discussion of the picture of stratification which emerges within this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN A RECENT paper Mr. Runciman concludes by inviting replies to his argument that it is logically and conceptually useful to employ the tripartite distinction between `class' `status' and `power' in the analysis of social stratification. Mr. Runciman does not, of course, deny the existence of links between these three dimensions, but suggests that such links must be seen contingent empirical relationships and not necessary logical ones. I hope that the following paper will provide such a reply. It must be clear that the following criticism is directed, in the main, to those parts of the paper in which Mr. Runciman is concerned with the logical and conceptual problem. The essay in question also contains a clear and valuable assessment of the problems encountered in any attempt to measure the three types of inequality. In the first part of the paper I propose to give a critical assessment of certain central aspects of Mr. Runciman's argument and, in the second part, I will put forward a very brief formulation of what I consider to be a more meaningful alternative view of the relationships between class, status, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive mobility between class of origin and class of destination has been a characteristic feature of societies in Europe and North America since the middle of the twentieth century. Most mobility has been upward, and most of that has been explicable by occupational change – by the rise in the proportion of the labour force which works in service-class jobs and the decline in the proportion in manual jobs. This pattern may now be changing, because parents of younger cohorts (people born since the 1960s) have themselves benefited from upward mobility and so there is less scope for further upward movement by their offspring. The paper uses a large new data source for Scotland to investigate these topics. It finds that there is still a great deal of mobility, and that, although upward mobility still predominates, its amount is lower in younger cohorts than in older. Nevertheless, relative mobility has not changed as upward mobility has declined, just as in earlier studies it was found not to have changed as upward mobility rose. These patterns are similar for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about the issue of "Re-Placing Whiteness," which is an amalgam of two very different papers about immigrants' residential patterns. Assimilation theory anticipates progress toward the mainstream as immigrants and especially their children experience social mobility, including shifts in the kinds of neighborhoods where they live. Of course, assimilation is not the only possible trajectory. A longstanding counterclaim is that American society obstructs the mobility of some groups, and a more recent argument is that some groups may not value residential assimilation as a goal. But from any theoretical perspective, there are good reasons not to focus solely on residence in white suburban neighborhoods as indicators of advancement. It would be constructive to offer a theory to explain why some early arrivals turn out to be very highly concentrated.

The article presents abstracts of papers published in the July 2002 issue of the journal "Current Sociology." A discussion of Poor Chic, or an array of fads and fashions in popular culture that make recreational or stylish "fun" of poverty, or of traditional symbols of working class and underclass statuses, challenges the reductionism of the view that "lifestyle" consumption has displaced consumption as a means of expressing social status. It is argued that the multiplicity of symbols involved in Poor Chic collectively represent lower class status and have referents in the material realities of poverty. Using numerous examples of Poor Chic in the United States and internationally since the 1980s, this article shows how the rational consumption of poverty symbols distinguishes class boundaries between the wealthy and the poor. Quantitative cross-national analysis (CNA) is one of the most frequently used research methods in empirical sociology, particularly in research on developing countries. Its frequent application implies that CNA is a useful instrument that yields trustworthy result.

If class theory has explanatory and descriptive power it should be possible to provide evidence that social classes exist as phenomena generic to modern industrial societies. This paper addresses this issue by examining the structure of class situations, as defined by job attributes, in two central European, post-communist societies--Hungary and Poland--and then comparing them with a benchmark Western society, Britain. Classes are identified through a latent structure analysis of job attributes and by assessing the correspondence between the latent classes estimated through this procedure and positions on two alternative indicators of class position--the Goldthorpe class schema and self-rated class identity. The structure of latent classes is found to be generally similar across all three societies, as is the correspondence between these latent classes and positions in the Goldthorpe schema in the two societies in which it is measured, and class identification. The main exceptions to this shared pattern relate to variations in the size and organisation of the agricultural sector and the distinctiveness of 'intermediate' class positions. The evidence indicates the presence of a considerable degree of cross-national consistency in the structure of class situations across diverse social and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender has frequently been identified as the most controversial issue confronting class analysis. In this paper we make use of data from the Republic of Ireland to assess the extent to which the incorporation of women in class mobility analysis alters our understanding of the central processes of social mobility. We find that for married women their husband's class is a more powerful predictor of household poverty and life-style than their own 'class' as indicated by current or previous occupation. With regard to employment mobility we find that the sole source of gender variation in mobility chances relates to differences in the objective opportunity structures faced by men and women. Applying a measured variable model to 'men only' and 'complete' mobility tables reveals only modest differences in the patterns of social fluidity. The inclusion of women in class mobility tables requires little in the way of substantial modification of our understanding of the pattern of class relationships underlying the observed pattern of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its frequent use by sociologists there has been relatively little discussion of the practical difficulties involved in operationalizing the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) system of social class allocation. Using social class coding data from a national study of child development this paper examines one problem which occurs when using the OPCS scheme - illegal combinations of employment status and occupational codes. Attention is only focused on occupations falling into Social Class I and for these professional occupations it is shown that illegal combinations are the result of the OPCS conceptualization of the professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues there is a new theoretical current in Western sociology - `game- theoretic Marxism'. It situates the current in what seems to be a more general paradigm shift from the mid-1970s, that is, from a focus on structure to an emphasis on agency. In this context we consider the debate between the new theory's foremost proponent Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, advocate of functional explanation. It is shown, then, how this new theory of collective action draws on Mancur Olson's formulations of the mid-1960s, after which its central tenets are developed in a discussion of two significant variants of it. Finally, the shortcomings of game-theoretic Marxism are analysed and an alternative notion of explanation by collective agency is proposed: one that centres upon the `causal powers' of social classes and breaks with both Cohen's functionalism and Elster's intentional explanation. This alternative version (1) can account for non-intentional causation and (2) considers social classes (and other collective actors) as possessed with organizational and cultural resources. It is argued that this alternative version is more fruitful for the understanding of social processes and that it contributes to the attempts to supersede the strict dichotomy of structure versus agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews a number of recent conceptual statements and empirical studies concerning British workers attitudes to class and class relationships. It then presents some evidence from a survey in Barking, London, in 1972-73, a feature of which is a comparison of the responses of the same people to the same questions at dates some months apart. On the basis of this evidence some points are made concerning the nature and prevalence of consciousness of class amongst the British lower class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines certain aspects of the relationship between class structure and clientelistic politics by focusing on a specific case: that of modern Greece. In particular, by looking at the way in which functionalist sociology and anthropology, on the one hand, and certain brands of Marxism, on the other, deal with the problem of political clientelism (mainly in the Greek context but also more generally), an attempt will be made (a) to formulate some general metatheoretical[1] guidelines on the manner in which such a relationship should be conceptualised; and (b) to give a brief sketch of the way in which the class-clientelism relationship has changed with the historical development of Greek capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the transformation as well as the reproduction of conventional role sets of women in the family and in the larger society, particularly at work. The analysis is based on a representative sample of families belonging to different social classes and strata. The empirical research strategy was to compare socio-economic status and gender, and thereby to identify typical patterns according to the criteria `socially homogeneous' (spouses with the same SES) and `socially heterogeneous' (spouses with different SES). Inequalities of employed women, especially regarding income distribution and power relations, also persist in a socialist society though the participation of the female workforce is indispensable. They are closely linked with an unequal division of household tasks. In conclusion, social policy concepts are discussed to empower women at work, with special emphasis on the use of their acquired high level of general and vocational knowledge and skills (`qualifications'), and to empower men, particularly those belonging to the working class, to change conventional patterns at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically reviews the major class interpretations of contemporary mass movements, including the fascist movements, Polish Solidarity and Western Green (eco-pax) movements, and argues that these accounts are deficient. A paradigmatic shift from the class interpretation of movements to `post-Marxist' and `post-modernist' accounts has been occurring in movement literature. This shift follows the processes of social change and broadening of research horizons. Contemporary conflicts, and the mass movements that articulate them. seem to be more diverse, more detached from structural- economic divisions, and less linked to class identities than the nineteenth- century conflicts analysed by Marx. This limits the heuristic value and theoretical utility of class theories in analyses of mass social movements and brings to the fore alternative accounts in terms of generation, status politics and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to argue that the widely accepted `class-culture conflict model' is not adequate in describing the relationship between children of different social classes to the social structure of the school. It leads to a number of inferences about the psychological dispositions of working-class children which are questionable. In an empirical study of pupil attitudes towards in general, and the English lesson in particular, it was predicted, in contradiction to what might be expected using the `class-culture conflict model', that these social classes would not differ in respect of general orientation to school but that working-class children would evaluate the English lesson more positively than middle-class children. Hypotheses were also entertained in respect of the influence of type of school on positive evaluation. The results largely confirmed the predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]