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This paper explores the salience of sport in the lives of eight-year-old and nine-year-old South African primary school boys. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I argue that young boys' developing relationship with sport is inscribed within particular gendered, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Throughout the paper I show differences and durability of meanings across the social sites that affect and position blacks, white, boys and girls. It is argued that young boys' early association with sport is centrally about identity and doing sport, or at least establishing interest in sport is one important way in claiming to be a real boy. The findings have implications for the call by the South African Government to get the nation to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti-bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen-aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview-based study of girls' experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en-cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The understanding of feminist pasts has been largely ignored in the history of education. This paper suggests that the historical sociology of Olive Banks provides fresh starting points for future research exploring the relationship between the history of social and political movements and a reassessment of contemporary and historical forms of 'radical education.' The article proceeds to use group biography to explore a municipal socialism that has been over-ridden in historical memory by the classic political histories that take the view from Westminster and Whitehall. In so doing it seeks to show the contribution of six educator activists who were participants in the making of a metropolitan political elite emerging from the association between feminism, socialism and the labour and trade union movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I offer a framework for analyzing non-market oriented household activities in a way that overcomes some issues about defining the boundaries among household activities. I utilize the concept of a social process and discuss how unpaid household activities are part of labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. Next, I explain the importance of introducing economic class and social class processes into the framework, as well as the importance of making a distinction between the two. Economic class accounts for the basics of the capitalist economy, and social class opens contexts of variation. The framework allows for a multidimensionality of individuals and opens the question of unpaid activities varying in categorization based on economic class. Also, it helps the economic analysis of capitalism consider that maintaining a household lifestyle directly involves and pertains to unpaid household activities that are part of each of the delineated labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Spring 1998 (56(1): 47-57) and Fall 1998 (56(3): 295-306, 307-310) issues of this review, Howard Sherman and Geoffrey Hodgson debated, inter alia, the extent to which Veblen-Ayres institutionalism is compatible with Marx and recent Marxist work. This paper argues that the differences between Hodgson and Sherman"s positions do not rely on assumptions of "illogical" behavior, individualist arguments or structural conceptions of the individual. Instead, the debate turns on the authors' respective conceptions of the formation and role of the human mind in what it is to be a social individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses critically both the strong theoretical claims and the empirical work of a number of structural marxists in analyzing the geography of advanced societies. Such work offers a holistic mode of explanation that has important philosophical affinities with Hegelian idealism. In explanation reified entities such as capital ore treated as the formal cause while people are regarded as the efficient cause, the mere carriers of a structural logic This perspective raises a number of serious theoretical problems that are not resolved, including the status of individuals as a creative force in shaping events the ontological slams of structures the relationship between consciousness and structure and the tendency to functionalism and teleology in explanation. These shortcomings have severe consequences for empirical study. The fundamentally economic nature of the central categories provide at best a partial analysis and not a general comprehension of society as a whole. If applied literally, key categories such as the dichotomous class system, fit poorly with empirical events. However, if adjusted to march historical events, they depart markedly from the form of the theoretical structure. The result is a confused interplay between theory and empirical study, and a tendency toward the mystification of causal processes and the denigration of empirical study in order to sustain the integrity of the theoretical argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current United States presidential administration's statements and policies have, in a shockingly short time, catastrophically affected people of color and LGBTQIAþcommunities. And although these numerous discriminatory policies and policy revisions have negatively affected both US people of color and LGBTQIAþpeople, trans women of color have been disproportionately affected. Even more specifically, when focusing on vulnerability to violence--including murder--it is Black trans women who are most directly affected by the intersections of transphobia and racism in the US. This article explores a Black trans woman's experiences with mental health professionals across two decades and different regions of the US. Aims: This article argues for the necessity of understanding trans people's mental health experiences as necessarily intersectional, in order to more fully appreciate and address the degrees to which factors such as race, socioeconomic class, and geographic context matter in trans people's efforts to access ethical and effective mental healthcare. Methods: Using a theoretical framework informed by Kimberlé Crenshaw's single-axis concept, the authors fully center Aryah's intersectional experiences and counter a single-axis in exploring trans mental health issues, our article relies on a narrative-based approach. As narrative inquiry is a broad field, we selected Butler-Kisber's narrative analytic approach, "Starting with the Story" as our method. The narratives are pulled from approximately 10 intensive qualitative interviews over the course of several months. Discussion: These narratives disrupt the common threads in the literature that ignore the degrees to which race and class matter alongside being a trans woman. In addition, as we noted that nearly all of the mental health literature relied on large-scale survey-based data, this article offers a qualitative narrative exploration of Aryah's experiences and works to humanize trans mental health challenges and needs, while emphasizing the multilayered oppressions and obstacles that affected Aryah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preface for the July 2008 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology of Education" is presented.

Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that ‘predatory’ cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low-income, high-risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical-geographical context, drawing on David Harvey's theory of class-monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed-methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial-geographical discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voice as timbral entity has proved especially resistant to analysis. Focusing on the voice of black South African choralism, this essay attempts to do two things: provide an account of the colonial-historical conditions - political acts and "structural aesthetics" - in which the black choral voice was fashioned, and then, through an approach one might call the "phonetics of timbre", describe that voice's sonic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 30 years, subnational states have become significant global economic actors, yet they remain unincorporated into the main body of IPE research. This is largely because their relevance has been sought in the narrowly defined local economic milieu, when instead their real significance lies in their emergence as sites of regulation of the global political economy. In particular, through efforts to attract transnational corporate investment and create transnational business networks, sell exporting to small and medium firms, and imagineer local metropolises into 'world cities', subnational states become the structural site around which the local social foundations of transnational liberalism are built. As national Fordist blocs composed of national capital and nationally organized labour erode, a new hegemonic bloc in the Gramscian sense is emergent, organized not simply globally or locally but glocally. Such blocs have the potential to join transnational capital, small and medium manufacturers and farmers, and the consumption-oriented metropolitan middle class in and through the subnational state into a social formation supportive of the transnational liberal project. This is a key element in the re-scaling of the state and the production of new geographies of global regulation in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism is the ideological expression of the return to hegemony of the financial fraction of ruling classes. The meaning of this movement can only be understood from a historical perspective. Modern finance, linked to the real economy, appeared in the wake of the structural crisis of the late nineteenth century. It lost its unrivalled domination, when the Keynesian compromise was ushered in by the succession of the great depression and World War II. Its return to power followed the crisis which began in the 1970s. The class character of neoliberalism is evident from an examination of the available figures. It prolonged the deficient profit rates of non-financial corporations and, thus, slow growth and unemployment. It was responsible for the deficits and the growing indebtedness of the states, as well as for the crisis of the debt of Third World countries, etc. But not enough attention has been paid to the benefits that finance gleaned from its return to hegemony during the crisis: the stunning rise of the profits and growth of the financial sector, only delayed in the US by the banking and thrift crises of the 1980s. It is not that finance organized to minimize its own costs during the crisis. It actually benefited from the crisis in amazing proportions, already during the crisis as in France, or after as in the US financial sector. One should not underestimate the sufferings of the unemployed and homeless, or of Third-world countries. But perhaps the biggest cost stemming from the rise of finance is the increase in the domestic and international instability. Le néolibéralisme est l'expression idéologique du retour d'une fraction des classes dominantes, la finance, à l'hégémonie. On ne peut saisir la logique de ce mouvement qu'en le replaçant dans sa dynamique historique. La finance moderne, liée au système productif, apparut dans le sillage de la crise structurelle de la fin du 19e. Elle dut abandonner sa domination incontestée dans le compromis keynésien provoqué par la succession de la crise de 1929 et de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa remontée au pouvoir s'est opérée à la suite de la crise commencée dans les années 1970. Le caractère de classe du néolibéralisme est inscrit, très crûment, dans les chiffres: prolongation de la faiblesse du taux de profit des entreprises non financières, donc de la croissance lente et du chômage, déficits et endettement des États, crise de la dette du tiers-monde, etc. Mais le bénéfice que la finance tira de son hégémonie retrouvée n'est pas suffisamment dénoncé: hausse formidable de son revenu et explosion du secteur financier, seulement différées aux États-Unis du fait de la crise des institutions bancaires et d'épargne pendant les années 1980. Ce n'est pas que la finance s'organisât pour souffrir le moins possible de la crise, mais qu'elle en tira un profit difficilement imaginable, soit pendant la crise, comme en France, ou après, comme dans le secteur financier américain. Sans négliger la misère des chômeurs, des exclus et du tiers-monde, l'instabilité systémique dont la nouvelle hégémonie de la finance est responsable, pourrait s'affirmer comme son principal coût. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how gender and class antagonisms are coded as sexual fantasy in the text of "Cosmopolitan," magazine. "Cosmopolitan," magazine, with its familiar cover, has been an icon of feminine sexuality since the mid-1960s. The cover "Cosmo girl," dressed in costumes signifying leisure and sexual availability, levels a gaze suggesting at least pique if not downright hostility. She is flanked by provocative titles offering the customer "Love, Success, Sex, Money" at supermarket checkout counters and newsstands across the United States. "Cosmopolitan," first published in 1886, is one of the oldest mass circulation magazines in print in the United States. At one point in its history the magazine was a muckraking crusader. Later it became a monthly journal of popular women's fiction. "Cosmopolitan," because of the seemingly sophisticated leisure attire of the cover models and the up-scale tone of its ads, may appear at first glance to be targeted for a middle-income audience. One might also assume that most readers are single women, given the absence of references to home, children, or family concerns in the text.

Marxists have made conflicting claims about the political significance of residential segregation but the merits of each viewpoint have not been evaluated. Recent evidence from Kingston, Ontario indicates that segregation has had consequences that were actually contradictory for the development of local political activity. On the one hand, segregation promoted ignorance between classes, encouraging indifference and complacency on the question of class inequality and thereby sustaining political quiescence. On the other hand, it facilitated political mobilization in the form of local residents' groups and citywide organizations of tenants and the working and welfare poor. In Kingston segregation facilitated political activity outside the workplace. Some of this activity was parochial, leading to fragmentation of the working class; some transcended neighborhood boundaries and precipitated a temporary but broad political alliance among the poor, organized labor, and many middle-class people. The internal contradictions in arguments about the political significance of segregation are rooted in the contradictory political significance of the phenomenon itself. Chameleon-like, segregation reinforces existing tendencies in class politics, whether these favor apathy or mobilization. The political significance of residential segregation does not merely arise from its context. It is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxists theorize that inequality and poverty are functional components of the capitalist mode of production: capitalism necessarily produces inegalitarian social structures social structures. Inequality is transferred from one generation to another through the environment of services and opportunities which surrounds each individual. The social geography of the city is made up of a hierarchy of community environments reproducing the hierarchical class structure. Change in the system results from change in the demand for labor. Continuing Poverty in American cities results from a continued system need to produce and reproduce an industrial reserve army. Inequality and poverty cannot be eradicated without fundamental in the mode of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis that 'Capitalism does not just happen' is argued with reference to Gramsci, hegemony and the critique of state centrism. This involves a critique of the assumption that ruling classes rule effortlessly, and raises the issue: Does globalization increase the pressures on ruling classes to deliver? Global system theory is outlined in terms of transnational practices in the economic, political, and culture and ideology spheres and the characteristic institutional forms of these, the transnational corporation, transnational capitalist class and the culture-ideology of consumerism. The transnational capitalist class is organized in four over- lapping fractions: TNC executives, globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals, consumerist elites (merchants and media). Social movements for global capitalism and elite social movement organizations (ESMOs) are analysed. Each of the four fractions of the TCC has its own distinctive organizations, some of which take on social movement-like characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last twenty years have seen the rise of local economic initiatives in the developed capitalist countries. Despite the dominance of neo-liberalism at the national level, most of these local programmes are neo-Keynesian, seeking to use non-market coordination pragmatically to address market failures and to use localism to develop active cooperation. between the state, capital and sometimes labour and residents. This article argues that, despite their promise, neo-Keynesian local strategies suffer from major problems and unintended consequences. These originate in the attempt to privilege the productive, coordinated, socialized and territorially defined aspects of capitalism over private ownership, value discipline and geographical mobility; these two sets of traits in reality are both mutually dependent and inevitably in conflict. The limits of neo-Keynesian localism are ultimately set by struggle within and between classes, structured in important ways by geographical scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of International Relations have generally presumed the existence of separate and analytically distinct 'levels of analysis'. For realists and neo-realists, the state is considered to act more or less independently of domestic social forces, and explanation is sought primarily at the international systemic level, in terms of the imperatives of a given configuration of international power relations. Other theoretical traditions reject the assumption of the causal primacy of international structure, and the corollary assumption of the analytical separation of state and society. For the most part, however, 'domestic structures' have been granted a status as a second-order or supplementary variable, something to be 'added on' to systemic explanations. This has been particularly evident in theory and research on cycles of free trade and mercantilism. This article seeks to develop a more synthetic account of the relation- ship between societies, states, and the global political economy by analyzing the relationship between the dominant or hegemonic power and the evolution of international shipping. The imperatives of global structure considered in isolation from domestic social forces do not adequately explain events. The global transformation of shipping results from the mutual interaction of concrete political and economic struggles among classes and class fractions within the hegemonic power and the opportunities and constraints of a given international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]