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This paper reports the results of a one-year service-learning project that excited students about sociology, and created useful analytic tools fir a modest-income African American community. In the course of deepening our understanding of one neighborhood including collecting extant demographic data, conducting surveys and interviews, site visits, and simply "hanging out," - it becomes possible to demonstrate how using formal demography and community ethnography together provide better understandings of the processes of social stratification, segregation, arid gentrification than would be possible using only one of the methodological orientations. The paper begins with an introduction theoretical and didactic challenges, proceeds in describing Lynwood Park demographically using insights derived from qualitative evidence, and then describes our eclectic means of investigating the community. The second half of the paper situates Lynwood Park demographically and ethnographically in terms of the larger Atlanta community, and then in increasingly smaller and more socially meaningful units. once we focus the demographic lens as much as possible, we must again rely on qualitative information to probe the multiple meanings of Lynwood Park. The paper closes with recommendations about how the people of Lynwood Park can use the data, and suggests how these technique can he implemented theoretically and practically in sociology as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of class cleavages among Black Americans have taken on a new importance since the growth of a sizeable black middle class during the postCivil Rights era. Less often analyzed are the cleavages within the black middle class itself; small employers, well-educated professionals and others in supervisory positions often have divering interests and beliefs. Wright's (1985) 12-celled class typology provides a means of obtaining a more nuanced view of the position and beliefs of the black middle class by defining class on the basis of access to exploitative assets. Using data from the National Survey of Black Americans, 1979-1980, a good approximation of Wright's class structure developed for a largely white sample is applied to a sample of over 1100 Black Americans. This indicates that the black middle class is more concentrated in positions with less access to exploitative assets than their white counterparts. An analysis of beliefs about black separatism utilizing this class schema finds that separatist beliefs are concentrated among the proletariat, while expert managers and the petty bourgeoisie are the least supportive of separatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings Karl Marx uses the concept "labor process" to denote the general, historically transcendent process whereby humans interact with nature to produce use values to meet their needs. This process is composed of three elements: (1) purposeful human activity, that is, work itself (2) the object of that work, the object that humans modify to meet their own needs; and (3) the instrument of that work. The last two elements Marx groups together and calls variously "means of production" and "productive forces." He also calls them the "objective conditions of production," distinguishing these two elements from work itself, the subjective condition of production. The specific manner in which these objective and subjective factors of the labor process combine provides the basis of Marx's classification of social structure. "Whatever the social form of production, laborers and means of production always remain factors of it. But in a state of separation from each other either of these factors can be such only potentially. For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another." Marx labels these "economic epochs" which form the basis for all the rest of social life "modes of production."

This article aims to locate the social reproduction theory within the overall trajectory of socialist feminist thought, emerging out of the debate over dual systems theory as a materialist alternative to cultural feminism. Socialist feminism as a vibrant intellectual and political current has stalled in the mid-1980s, unable to muster a cohesive response to the critics of dual systems theory, the theory that social power was bifurcated into a patriarchal system of gender oppression and a parallel, though intersecting, capitalist system of economic class exploitation. A few socialist feminists retreated into an economic reductionism while others moved increasingly toward a purely cultural explanation of women's oppression that has culminated in feminist postmodernism. In the late 1990s, however, with globalization foisting upon, a host of unwelcome economic realities, even many postmodern feminists have begun to search for a materialist explanation. Although economic reductionism has little to offer in this regard, one often neglected strain of socialist feminism, social reproduction theory, is allegedly more promising. If socialist feminism is to exist as anything more than an intellectual artifact, it is essential to engage with the anti-capitalist insights promoted by those working within the social reproduction framework.

Two stratification courses, one at an elite private liberal arts college and another at a regional state university were joined through a listserve or computer mailing list. Students were required to participate in the “virtual salon.” The primary goal of the virtual salon was to increase the diversity of students discussing topics common in the courses. The virtual salon was successful in achieving this goal as well as making it a meaningful learning experience by creating passionate engagement in the material, the students shared knowledge, and a sense of community was created where students from diverse backgrounds felt comfortable expressing themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Dorothy Smith, the author identifies the ideological practices he discovered during participant observation of a treatment program for men who batter their wives. The struggles between the counsellor and the men took place within a discourse that drew heavily on feminism, but which, ironically, often seemed to end up reinforcing rather than challenging sexiest attitudes and behavior. To understand how this happened, the author begins an institutional ethnography, exploring the complex processes of social organization through which the particular site was entered into the relations of ruling of patriarchal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces a series of articles on social class structure and class analysis.