Search

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, 'middle-class' individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle-class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. 'Authentic' middle-classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle-class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of 'inauthenticity', 'pretension' and 'misrecognition'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental choice of school is one of the main platforms of government education policy and is the centre piece of the Parents Charter. But sociological understanding of choice and choice-making is woefully underdeveloped. This paper draws on an ESRC study of market forces in education to explore social class variations in choice of school in one specific locality. The complexity of choice-making is portrayed using data from interviews with parents and it is argued that middle-class parents are taking full advantage of `the market' to sustain or re-assert their class advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'New Working Class' theory, popularised in French sociology during the 1960s and 1970s, envisages the advent of a politically inspired class movement that rekindles the vision of a new social order as the technicians rise to become its vanguard. According to writers like Mallet and Touraine, these technical 'white-collars' tend to take over from the traditional manual groups in posing as the 'standard-bearers' of class-based industrial radicalism and solidarity. This paper proposes to trace the recent vein of discussions on the class implications of occupational and technological transformation from such a neo-Marxian perspective. It also attempts to apply these arguments to interpret the characteristics of a new occupation in Hong Kong -- the technicians working m the electronics and related industries, with reference to an empirical study carried out in the early 1980s.[1]. [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]