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Noting limited attention by international development agencies to inequalities compared to global poverty, we ask how these two challenges have been framed in agencies’ policy publications during the past several decades. Following a recent application of algorithmic analysis to health policy narratives in the UK, we use text-mining software to compare the frequency of two alternative conceptualisations of poverty and inequality in three different document categories: the World Bank's World Development Reports, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports and a set of white papers by bilateral donor agencies. In a second step, we visualise each document's degree of contextual similarity in using the two conceptualisations of poverty and inequality with all documents in the same source category. We find that while references to poverty have, on average, been twice as prominent as references to inequality, conceptualisations of poverty and inequality as well as the textual contexts in which they appear differ both temporally and substantively between agencies included in our sample. We show how such agency-specific framing patterns can be leveraged politically to forge more effective social policy coalitions. We also outline follow-up research capable of capturing the politics of language underpinning our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Western European welfare states, research shows that support for welfare chauvinism, or the notion that welfare benefits for immigrants should be restricted, is highest among white, blue-collar working-class voters. On the other hand, higher-educated, middle-class voters are more likely to reject welfare chauvinism and support the inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state. For social democratic parties, this might pose an electoral dilemma between generous welfare states and open borders: They rely on both middle- and working-class constituencies and are ideologically tied both to a universal welfare state and the protection of (national) workers. To what extent does such an electoral dilemma between classes exist for social democratic parties? How do social democratic parties solve this dilemma when in government? In this paper, we postulate that a class divide around welfare chauvinism exists within the electorate for social democratic parties and that these parties' policies in government reflect these divides: If the social democratic electorate has a high share of working-class voters, they should act more welfare chauvinist than if their electorate is mostly middle class. We test these hypotheses by combining survey and macro-level policy data in 14 Western European countries from 1980 to 2018. We find consistent evidence of the existence of a working-class/middle-class divide regarding welfare chauvinism, even within social democratic electorates. On the macro-level, we find partial evidence that social democratic parties in power respond to the class demands of their electorate: They are less welfare chauvinist when they have a higher proportion of middle-class voters, whereas their working-class vote share does not significantly condition their policies at all, contrary to assumptions in the literature. We therefore conclude that as social democratic parties become parties of the middle classes, the likelihood that they will retrench immigrant welfare rights reduces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing the special issue, this paper provides a state-of-the-art on established and new trends in the study of international retirement migration (IRM) and summarises the five papers that follow. Early studies on IRM were mainly within Europe and drew on the conceptual framework of lifestyle migration, with some reference to the transnational and mobilities paradigms. New frontiers in IRM are presented under three heads. Firstly, new geographical frontiers extend IRM to new destinations within and proximate to Europe, and to new locations in the global South such as Thailand and Ecuador. Secondly, new typological frontiers involve a broadening of the class and wealth backgrounds of the retirees, including the 'return of retirement' of labour migrants to their countries of origin, and attentiveness to IRM's gendered aspects. Thirdly, new conceptual and theoretical frontiers of IRM involve a more in-depth investigation of its transnational aspects, exploration of the various regimes of mobility and, most importantly, a political economy perspective which stresses global inequalities and histories of colonialism in shaping access to privileged lifestyles. In the final part of the paper, the original features of each paper in the special issue are highlighted, demonstrating how they are collectively integrated and contribute to the advancement of IRM research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulatory protection of credit consumers, in general, is paramount due to the considerable use of credit, the imbalanced bargaining positions of the contracting parties and the adverse effect of over-indebtedness on individuals and society alike. These concerning factors are worsened in the case of High-Cost Short-Term Credit (HCSTC) consumers owing to their disadvantaged financial position and other recognised vulnerabilities. In this respect, the paper argues that direct regulatory intervention, despite its importance, is not always a silver bullet. Through the analysis of the overhauling of the UK HCSTC regulatory framework, this paper demonstrates the shortfalls of these regulatory changes. Accordingly, the paper shifts the argument towards improving the decision-making mechanisms of HCSTC consumers, ie the role of 'libertarian paternalism'-based interventions. By using a bespoke experimental survey, the paper demonstrates the type of behavioural interventions that can assist in this endeavour and which the regulator could possibly mandate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines' observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across different types of place, and that some of the mortality differences by social class might actually reflect the contextual effects of healthy and unhealthy places. Although this line of argument has received a considerable amount of attention in health geography literature, it has rarely been examined for a specific historic period, and then only within particular urban areas. In this paper, we apply multi-level models to a complete count individual-level dataset of the 1911 census of England and Wales, comparing influences on infant and child mortality at the level of the individual couple and for two spatial levels. We find that although most variation in infant and child mortality operates at the individual level, there is also important variation at the two spatial levels and part of the mortality differences between social classes is better explained by the areas in which people lived rather than by their social class. A consideration of independent variables at all three levels suggests that different spatial scales capture different sorts of influences on early age mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy responses to population ageing have focused on lengthening working lives, overlooking inequalities in older adults' participation in unpaid activities. This paper examines participation in paid and unpaid activities between the ages of 55 and 70 to answer two questions: how do people navigate pathways of paid work, informal care, volunteering, civic participation and housework in mid to later life?; and how do these pathways relate to gender, socio-economic and health inequalities? Two-staged latent class analysis was used to identify activity pathways using data from the British Household Panel Survey (1996–2008). Multinomial logistic models assessed associations between latent pathways and socio-demographic and health characteristics. Three pathways were observed: full-time work to low activity (49%), part-time and in-home work (34%) and multiple activities (16%). Aside from retirement from full-time work, the pathways of participation in paid and unpaid activities were characterised by continuity; substitution between different forms of paid and unpaid work was not observed. Participation in multiple paid and unpaid activities was more common for respondents in better health and of higher socio-economic status. Since the promotion of paid work and volunteering in later life may mainly benefit individuals in advantaged circumstances, policies should avoid taking a blanket approach to encouraging participation in multiple activities, a key component of active ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age has become an increasingly contested form of division within contemporary society, with some writers suggesting age has become 'the new class' while others point to increasing 'ageism' in society. In exploring such competing claims, this paper examines the basis for considering age as a social class, category or group. Drawing upon Bourdieu's writings on classification and the criteria for what constitutes a social class or category and the 'objective' and 'symbolic' criteria defining it, the paper argues that the material criteria for distinguishing between 'retired' and 'working-age' households have almost disappeared. At the same time, the symbolic representation of age is no longer confined to the parameters of poverty. Shorn of its objective distinction, the symbolic representation of old age seems to have bifurcated, between a generational identity where older people are represented as an advantaged group and an aged identity still essentialised as old and weak. The dissolution of an objective material basis for framing age has taken away much of the underlying basis for a coherent symbolic categorisation of age. Later life might better be seen as a contested symbolic space, framed by the dual axes of socio-historical generation and corporeal, chronological agedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the question of whether, as is often popularly believed, there may be systematic linguistic differences between different neighborhoods within a city by testing the independence of "part of town" as a factor separate from social class in the north-force merger in Manchester, UK, in a sample of 122 speakers. The phonemic contrast is explored in minimal-pair tests, Cartesian distance, and Pillai scores. In opposition to most dialects of English, the north-force contrast is still present in Manchester, displaying a pattern of fine social stratification, with lower socioeconomic levels having a stronger distinction. The merger is in progress in the city, but it is slower in north Manchester, showing a significantly greater distinction than the rest of the city, independent of social class. The results indicate a degree of social evaluation of the vowels, with implications for the question of the social meaning of a merger in progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment strongly influences a person's economic resources and life chances. Especially for unemployed individuals who have to rely on means-tested benefits, episodes of unemployment often go along with substantial material restrictions. Therefore, from a policy perspective, measures or regulations that might shorten unemployment episodes and reduce overall unemployment are particularly important. In this paper, we analyse whether concessions regarding the characteristics of the job searched for influence an individual's unemployment duration. In doing so, we focus on a particular aspect of availability requirements in Germany. This is the fact that for unemployed recipients of means-tested benefits almost all types of jobs count as suitable employment and, therefore, recipients are obliged to make job-related concessions if offered a job requiring such concessions. The results indicate that there is no positive effect of making concessions regarding qualification requirements or status on employment chances. In contrast, there are positive effects of wage concessions. However, searching for a job in a different occupation (that does not necessarily imply a concession) has a comparable, positive effect on finding employment. Thus, it appears that being generally flexible regarding one's future occupation might be at least as important for employment chances as making concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that investigators should consider replacing the popular practice of comparing individuals varying in gender, social class, and/or ethnicity on one or more continuous measures with a search for kinds of individuals defined by patterns of properties that include not only their values on outcome measures but also their gender, social class, and ethnicity. Investigators who believe that a particular predictor contributes to an outcome independent of the gender, class, or ethnicity of the participants often implement statistical procedures that promise to remove the contributions of the above categories. These analyses lead to misleading conclusions when the controlled category is correlated with the dependent measures. The final sections summarize the properties of genders, classes, and ethnic groups that make distinctive contributions to many psychological outcomes. The paper ends by noting that a society's ethical beliefs constitute a defensible basis for ignoring the biological properties associated with these categories in order to allow members of these groups access to whatever educational or occupational goals they desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the social divisions of later life. Although research in this field has focused on class, gender and, more recently, sexuality as sources of division in later life, the division between the fit and the frail has tended to be ignored or viewed as an outcome of these other divisions. This paper challenges this assumption, arguing that corporeality constitutes a major social division in later life. This in many ways prefigures a return to the 19th-century categorisation of those ‘impotent through age’, whose position was among the most abject in society. Their ‘impotence’ was framed by an inability to engage in paid labour. Improved living standards during and after working life saw age's impotence fade in significance and in the immediate post-war era, social concern turned towards the relative poverty of pensioners. Subsequent demographic ageing and the expanding cultures of the third age have undermined the homogeneity of retirement. Frailty has become a major source of social division, separating those who are merely older from those who are too old. This division excludes the ‘unsuccessfully’ aged from utilising the widening range of material and social goods that characterise the third age. It is this social divide rather than those of past occupation or income that is becoming a more salient line of fracture in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the possibility that life-long learning promotes intergenerational class mobility. The following two research questions are asked. Is it the case that further education provides individuals coming from less advantaged origins with a second chance to improve on their educational attainment? Is it the case that the returns to further qualifications, in terms of chances of upward class career mobility, are greater for children from less advantaged backgrounds than for children from more advantaged backgrounds? The analyses – that are based on the complete educational and class histories of men and women in a British birth cohort – mainly produce negative findings. Children coming from managerial and professional backgrounds seem to benefit most from further education. More specifically, further education appears to be an effective means of career advancement for individuals of managerial and professional origins who start out in their working lives in relatively low-level class positions. Via further education they can increase or update their qualifications, and in turn enhance their chances of being counter-mobile back to their class of origin. Overall, based on the findings of this paper, we can conclude that qualifications attained through life-long learning primarily serve to maintain, rather than to narrow, inequalities attached to social origins in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The decline in cigarette smoking in high-income countries is attributed to the increasing social unacceptability of smoking, a cultural shift in which tobacco control policies are identified as playing a major part. While seen as essential to protect public health, there is a growing appreciation that these polices may have contributed to a social climate in which smoking is stigmatised. The paper reviews this debate on smoking and stigma. It notes that individuals are represented by their smoking status; other social differences are typically treated as secondary. Thus, while the links between disadvantage and smoking are acknowledged, social class remains on the margins of the debate. The paper argues instead that class provides an essential analytic lens through which to understand the stigma of smoking and the stigmatising impacts of tobacco control policies. In support of its argument, it discusses how the stigmatisation of smoking has occurred against a backdrop of widening socioeconomic differentials in smoking and the increasing importance of the body and behaviour in public discourses about social class and moral worth. The paper concludes by underlining the importance of embedding tobacco control research and policy in an appreciation of social class, and social inequalities more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups' mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential cases have been provided that seem to suggest that one can fail to have knowledge because of the social environment. If not a distinct kind of social defeater, is there a uniquely social phenomenon that defeats knowledge? My aim in this paper is to explore these questions. I shall argue that despite initial appearances to the contrary, we have no reason to accept a special class of social defeater, nor any essentially social defeat phenomenon. We can explain putative cases of social defeat with our existing epistemological apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social division of welfare literature emphasises the extent to which occupatiorial-pension provision is distributed on the basis of class and gender. As most previous commentators have at least implicitly recognised, however, a significant proportion of less advantaged people are covered. This paper argues that the patterns of access and their distributional consequences must be considered more systematically, and that in this context, the diversity of employers' pension schemes are investigated. When this is done, it emerges that in the United Kingdom, the spread of occupational provision beyond the most privileged workers means that some vulnerable individuals avoid poverty in retirement. At the same time, however, the main determinant of which less advantaged people are covered and which not is chance. While class and gender are important predictors of who receives occupational pensions, access for the disadvantaged arises mainly as an accident of an employment decision made for reasons unrelated to savings or pensions criteria. This paper argues that the implication is that unsustainable justice-based arguments are currently used by policy makers to sanction the current distribution of UK pension incomes. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the appropriateness of recent UK policy proposals and for international debates about pension reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that urbanisation, population ageing and international migration constitute major societal developments of our time, little attention has been paid to studying them together in a comprehensive manner. In this paper, we argue that, when treating age and ethnicity as practical processes for addressing and identifying with social groups, it is necessary to do so from a 'doing' perspective. The question we ask focuses on which social memberships are made relevant or irrelevant in residential environments and how that relevance or irrelevance is established. Drawing upon a quantitative study among individuals of Turkish migrant origin living in Vienna, Austria, we find that it is rather common for the respondents to have been assigned to multiple intersecting social groups and that they were treated unfairly in their own neighbourhoods. However, such ascriptions do not necessarily correspond to objective categorisations of research or subjective identifications. Hence, the discrimination that is present in a neighbourhood does not necessarily lead to decreased place attachment or a diminishing sense of home. In fact, we find that the 'satisfaction paradox' is quite common in environmental gerontology and that it may actually intersect with the 'immigration paradox'. Applying processual intersectionality is not only fruitful for research, it can also improve the conceptualisation of age-friendly cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a youth-centred culture, where ageing is associated with physical and mental decline, investment in a youthful appearance promises access to socially valuable resources. The need for regular care for the self, primarily through consumption, constitutes part of the narrative of successful or positive ageing. Due to its emphasis on self-reliance and efforts to remain healthy, productive and youthful, the discourse of successful ageing has been seen as intersecting with a neoliberal rationality, or a shift of responsibility for risks associated with ageing from the state to the individual. While some authors criticise an emphasis on individual effort to maintain personal wellbeing for a lack of attention to structural factors, others view such an approach favourably as a way of transcending state paternalism. In this paper, I engage with the discourse of 'responsibilisation' drawing on the interviews with middle-aged, middle-class women from Moscow about their experiences of ageing. I employ the theoretical framework of 'governmentality' to demonstrate how the interviewed women's attempts to make sense of what it meant to age 'appropriately' within their milieus informed both their awareness of a need to improve and reinvent the self constantly through consumption in the context of post-Soviet Russian society, and their questioning of and resistance to this pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the concept of the liberal welfare state within welfare state regimes discourse fails to account for some important aspects of the historical development of liberalism. It is argued that two key aspects of liberalism have been neglected. First, that liberalism essentially arose in opposition to ascribed status, seeking to replace it with a form of "achieved" status. Second, that a major stream of historical liberalism sought to equalize individual opportunity by suggesting that the state should provide some basic social and economic supports to individuals in need. This paper uses OECD health data to identify welfare state clusters based on the measurement of welfare (rather than neo)liberalism. The emerging cluster model is then compared with other welfare state regime typologies with regard to its ability to predict important social and political outcomes. The paper concludes that the emerging "welfare-liberal" typology may be a better predictor of certain social and political outcomes than other regimes configurations, indicating the usefulness of considering alternative aspects of liberalism when examining welfare state regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the ‘working poor’ that have often constrained ethnographic and historical analyses of India's working classes. Inspired by Marxist historiography, this forum engages with the historically contingent emergence of Indian working classes through different types of labour, gender and ethnic struggles, and considers the complex political boundaries that are produced by such processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last three decades or so, neoliberal policies have had a significant effect on housing sectors across a wide range of societies. State rental sectors, in particular, have been in the ideological firing line. Portrayed as inefficient, unresponsive, monopolistic and anachronistic, they have been typically marketised, privatised and downsized. At the same time, wider societal changes have impacted on their social role and social composition. The overall effect on many public rental sectors is now very familiar – growing social and spatial segregation, enclaves of concentrated and multiple disadvantage and increased stigmatisation. Against this background, Hong Kong's public rental sector has survived relatively unscathed and continues to accommodate around a third of its households. This paper examines the experiences and perceptions of Hong Kong public rental housing among those within and outside the sector. How are public tenants perceived in relation to ideas of social status and social equality? How do public tenants see themselves? The paper draws on a survey of 3,000 individuals in Hong Kong which is part of a larger study concerned with housing provision and social change in the Special Administrative Region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the 'wealthy' and the 'super rich' with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one's family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants' own and others' insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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In recent years, the employment rates of people of pension age have increased considerably. However, longitudinal evidence on the effects of this employment on wellbeing which might contribute to an evaluation of this late-life work is scarce. Based on empirical findings so far and on theoretical approaches to wellbeing, work and retirement, both negative and positive effects of post-retirement work on life satisfaction are plausible. In this paper, we investigate the effects of taking up work again between the ages of 65 and 75 on life satisfaction in different occupational classes in Germany and the United Kingdom. We expect that not only the heterogeneous conditions and experiences of working are crucial for the consequences that post-retirement work has for life satisfaction, but also the institutional arrangements surrounding this form of work. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey, covering the 1990s and 2000s. Based on fixed-effects regression modelling, we find positive effects of working in both countries, although not all effects are significant. Differentiating by the class of the job in which the older person works, we find mainly positive effects and no significant differences between those who work in a lower-class job and all others. In addition, we find that the positive effect of working on life satisfaction is partly explained by increased satisfaction with household income for those working in a lower-class job in the United Kingdom. We conclude that many of the pessimistic assumptions about people working after pension age cannot be confirmed for our time of observation. However, there are several reasons for believing that the results will be different in the future or for differently defined populations of people working past pension age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is substantial evidence that voters' choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of US news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the richest households, with little sensitivity to income changes among the non-rich. Further, we present evidence that this pro-rich bias emerges not from pro-rich journalistic preferences but, rather, from the interaction of the media's focus on economic aggregates with structural features of the relationship between economic growth and distribution. The findings yield a novel explanation of distributionally perverse electoral patterns and demonstrate how distributional biases in the economy condition economic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This transcript is a record of the proceedings of a conference organized to react to commissioned papers, which are published in the October 15, 1976 issue of the journal Law and Society Review. The papers were presented in abbreviated form on the morning of the first day of the conference. According to researcher Lester Brickman, the purpose of this conference is to react to the papers and to assist the conference consultants in devising research priorities for improving the delivery of legal services to middle class consumers. Researcher Charles H. Baron draws the attention of participants on characteristics of systems for eliminating the need for legal services. Research should be done to determine the relative costs and benefits of delegalization and of simplifying legal procedures. Researcher Douglas Rosenthal is of the opinion that merely removing lawyers from the process is not always going to make the problem easier or clearer or less expensive for the concerned recipient of the service, the one who has the need for the service.

The conventional belief since the publication of the Black Report is that social inequalities in health have been increasing since 1931–32 although it has been argued that the measure of inequality used is inappropriate. All analyses have been based on mortality rates which, in large part, reflect inequalities in health over the previous 50 years and not current trends. This paper argues that time trends should be assessed with a current health status measure and suggests using height at age 20 as a good measure of the achieved health status of a group. Analysis of a government survey shows that inequalities have stayed the same since 1940, both for men classified by their own occupation and for women classified by their father's occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is generally thought that birthweight varies with the sex of the infant, gestational age and parity; there is, however, some controversy as to whether birthweight increases monotonically with parity. Further, some have suggested that maternal height and social class are also important, whilst earlier authors stressed the importance of genetic factors. This paper re-examines these relationships on the basis of an analysis of data on 6472 women who had a sequence of two or more singleton live births. The analysis shows first that the raw birthweights increase up to the fourth birth and that there are strong correlations between successive birthweights. However, when the birthweights are standardized for gestational age, maternal height, parity and sex, the relation between birthweight and parity almost disappears. On the other hand, the correlations between successive birthweights remain among the standardized scores, suggesting that there are other features specific to the mother which affect birthweight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recognition of which girls are at risk of becoming pregnant before the age of 16 years is of interest to legal, educational, social and medical services. In this paper a large amount of data, available for a total population of schoolgirls, has been used to show that prediction is indeed possible. It was found that compared to a group of girls matched on a number of sociodemographic characteristics, those who became pregnant during adolescence were more likely to have been academic underachievers at age 11, to have made an appearance in a juvenile court, and to have been referred to a child guidance or psychiatric clinic at an early age. Difficulties over matching also suggest that they are more likely to have five or more siblings, to be illegitimate and to have mothers who were themselves teenagers at the time of their daughter's birth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper tests the hypothesis that the inverse relationship between population density and migration distances in pre-industrial Europe results from variation in the social class composition of communities. Data from two pyrenean valleys in Navarre, spain, provide support for the hypothsis. Further effect on mugration distances may result from vatiation in the settlement pattern of communities. Seasonal movement associated with certain occupations seems to be unimportant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents the results of five polymorphic systems in a sample of 999 individuals from Nottinghamshire. The results are classified by the socio-economic grouping of parents and self.The results show that social class differences for the genetic attributes exist and are almost linear when aggregated distances are computed. There are differences, however, between parental and offspring results. These differences may be the result of changes in social class over the last generation. This social mobility is investigated and it is shown that an upward movement in social class is associated with characteristic genotype groupings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trans people – those whose gender identity does not match that assigned to them at birth – are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, reflecting their marginalized legal, bureaucratic and socio-economic status. Recent substantial international expansion to the medico-legal rights afforded them operates in tension with cisnormative welfare structures. Based upon a Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with 35 trans people with experience of homeless in Wales, UK, alongside 12 workers in the system, I argue that anti-discrimination legislation is insufficient in its current form to prevent discrimination against trans people. I suggest that, without addressing deeper structural cisnormativity, service provision for trans people experiencing homelessness and other forms of social marginalisation will remain inadequate. This argument rests upon the following findings. (1) Failing to consider exclusion at a structural level leads to system-gaps and misunderstandings, producing poor service experiences. (2) The specific needs of trans applicants are under considered in system planning, reducing scope for meaningful homelessness interventions. (3) An equalities approach can produce a reductive and potentially pathologizing focus upon trans identity, diverting from specific individual needs. I conclude that provision of inclusive services necessitates consideration of the impact of deep cisnormative assumptions in service design and delivery, and their resultant exclusion of trans people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adult obesity disproportionately affects lower socio-economic groups in high-income countries and perpetuates health inequalities, imposing health and socio-economic burden. This review evaluates the effectiveness of behavioural strategies in reducing weight and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risks among low-income groups based in high-income countries. We searched major databases for randomised controlled trials published between 1 November 2011 and 1 May 2023. Meta-analyses and subgroup analyses were undertaken to analyse the pooled and individual effects of behavioural strategies. Cochrane Risk of bias (RoB 2·0) tool and Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) criteria were used to assess the quality and certainty of evidence. Fourteen trials (3618 adults, aged 40·2 ± 9·7 years with BMI 33·6 ± 2·8 kg/m2) and nine unique interventions were identified. Three trials with high RoB were omitted. Meta-analysis favoured interventions, demonstrating significant reductions in body weight (MD: −1·56 kg, (95 % CI –2·09, −1·03)) and HbA1c (MD: −0·05 %, (95 % CI − 0·10, −0·001)) at intervention end. Sub-group analysis showed no differences in waist circumference, blood pressure or serum lipids. Financial incentives and interactive feedback produced greatest amounts of weight losses ≥ 2 kg (GRADE: moderate). Behavioural strategies are effective weight loss interventions among lower socio-economic groups living in high-income nations. However, the impact on CVD risk remains unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-regional correlations between average IQ and socioeconomic development have been documented in many different countries. This paper presents new IQ estimates for the twelve regions of the UK. These are weakly correlated (r=0.24) with the regional IQs assembled by Lynn (1979). Assuming the two sets of estimates are accurate and comparable, this finding suggests that the relative IQs of different UK regions have changed since the 1950s, most likely due to differentials in the magnitude of the Flynn effect, the selectivity of external migration, the selectivity of internal migration or the strength of the relationship between IQ and fertility. The paper provides evidence for the validity of the regional IQs by showing that IQ estimates for UK nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) derived from the same data are strongly correlated with national PISA scores (r=0.99). It finds that regional IQ is positively related to income, longevity and technological accomplishment; and is negatively related to poverty, deprivation and unemployment. A general factor of socioeconomic development is correlated with regional IQ at r=0.72. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Childhood is a crucial neurodevelopmental period. We investigated whether childhood reading for pleasure (RfP) was related to young adolescent assessments of cognition, mental health, and brain structure. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional and longitudinal study in a large-scale US national cohort (10 000 + young adolescents), using the well-established linear mixed model and structural equation methods for twin study, longitudinal and mediation analyses. A 2-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis for potential causal inference was also performed. Important factors including socio-economic status were controlled. Results: Early-initiated long-standing childhood RfP (early RfP) was highly positively correlated with performance on cognitive tests and significantly negatively correlated with mental health problem scores of young adolescents. These participants with higher early RfP scores exhibited moderately larger total brain cortical areas and volumes, with increased regions including the temporal, frontal, insula, supramarginal; left angular, para-hippocampal; right middle-occipital, anterior-cingulate, orbital areas; and subcortical ventral-diencephalon and thalamus. These brain structures were significantly related to their cognitive and mental health scores, and displayed significant mediation effects. Early RfP was longitudinally associated with higher crystallized cognition and lower attention symptoms at follow-up. Approximately 12 h/week of youth regular RfP was cognitively optimal. We further observed a moderately significant heritability of early RfP, with considerable contribution from environments. MR analysis revealed beneficial causal associations of early RfP with adult cognitive performance and left superior temporal structure. Conclusions: These findings, for the first time, revealed the important relationships of early RfP with subsequent brain and cognitive development and mental well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal caregiving for older family members is increasingly recognized and encouraged by public policies. This is even more the case in familialistic countries such as Austria. This article aims to examine the role of the family in the care culture of a familialistic care regime through the experiences of care dyads combining upwards intergenerational family care and formal care services. The analysis is based on framework analysis of 48 face-to-face interviews, almost all conducted separately, with 24 care dyads of older care users (average age 86 years old with moderate to high care needs) and their main informal carers in Austria combining formal and informal care. A quarter of caregivers and care receivers were male. We identified four different ideals (family care, preferences, involvement, gendered care) which were distributed across different groups of Socio-Economic Status (SES) and described by women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case study of informal sector construction labour in the central Indian steel town of Bhilai, this paper explores the intersection and the mutually constitutive relationship between social class on the one hand, and gender (and more specifically sexual) relations on the other. It is part of an attempt to document and analyse a process of class differentiation within the manual labour force between aspirant middle class organized sector workers and the unorganized sector ‘labour class’. With some help from the (pre-capitalist) ‘culture’ of their commonly work-shy men-folk, their class situation forces ‘labour class’ women onto construction sites where they are vulnerable to the sexual predation of supervisors, contractors and owners. That some acquiesce reinforces the widespread belief that ‘labour class’ women are sexually available, which in turn provides ‘proof’ to the labour aristocracy that they themselves are a different and better breed, superior in culture and morals. Class inequalities produce a particular configuration of gender relations; gender relations (and in particular sexual relations) produce a powerful ideological justification for class differentiation. This proposition has strong resonances with processes reported from other parts of the world; but in the Indian context and in its specific focus on sex it has not been clearly articulated and its significance for class formation has not been adequately appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early 1960s, Norbert Elias led a research project on the adjustment of young workers to work situations and adult roles. The data from this project, which consisted of 851 interviews with young people, were recently rediscovered and the participants, now approaching retirement, were re-interviewed as part of a restudy. In this paper we argue, that, in the context of the dramatic changes to the transition to retirement that have taken place in the United Kingdom, it is possible to use Elias's unpublished work on the transition to work as a theoretical framework for understanding of the transition from work and to retirement. In particular, we focus on the themes of fantasy and reality in the perception of retirement; changing interdependencies in the transition to retirement and the extent and impact of retirement preparation on the perception of the change in status from full-time worker to retiree. We conclude by suggesting that the implied advantages of being the ‘baby-boomer’ generation are far from the reality, with the experiences of this group being similar to those who have gone before and face an adjustment to retirement marked by uncertainty and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an increasingly ageing society, its older members are receiving considerable political and policy attention. However, much remains to be learnt about public perceptions of older age, particularly the views and experiences of older individuals themselves. Drawing on qualitative interviews carried out with members of two British cohorts (N = 60) who have reached the ‘third age’, this paper discusses perceptions of age, focusing particularly on how perceived advantages and disadvantages differ by respondents' self-reported physical capability. The interviews were carried out in 2010 as part of the HALCyon (Healthy Ageing across the Life Course) collaborative research programme. Findings suggest there is some difference in the way older people view aspects of ageing by capability and that although advantages are widely perceived, physical decline and associated health concerns were the overwhelming theme across the conversations. The article concludes by making tentative suggestions to inform the positive ageing agenda and its related policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper maps the changing nature of European equality regimes in order to establish the extent of variation or convergence across Europe and to evaluate the role of transnational policy paradigms and state-level institutions in shaping the emerging European equality regimes. We identify two significant tendencies in respect to European equality institutional regimes. First, a growing complexity in the institutional arrangements designed to address inequalities, with pre-2000 institutional arrangements increasingly augmented by newer equality institutions that adopt a judicialized approach to dealing with inequalities. Second, a Europe-wide tendency to widen the scope of equality policy thinking from a very small number of privileged inequality grounds (most frequently gender and ethnicity) to a much wider range of inequalities to be addressed by state policies. The overall impact of these two changes has been to create equality regimes characterized by a wide variety of forms and levels of protection for the different inequalities. This suggests that while a transnational policy paradigm has framed the evolving nature of equality regimes across Europe, the implementation of this paradigm is moulded by the power dynamics embedded in national and local equality institutions, creating a fragmented and complex patchwork of equality regimes that defy easy regional classification and complicate overly generalized narratives about the influence of global policy paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early years of the Turkish Republic, modern architecture became an active tool in the representation of the bourgeois ideal of domesticity. The most significant component of the new Turkish family was the image of the "republican woman" as a nationally-constructed icon. By comparatively examining Ernst Egli's İsmet Paşa Girls' Institute (1930) and Ankara Girls' High School (1936) with Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's unbuilt annex project for the latter (1938) this paper argues that girls' technical schools and girls' high schools contributed to the making of this much idealized image in considerably different ways. Such diversity enabled the governing elite in Turkey to make a class-based and spatially constructed categorization of women as economic actors: enlightened housewives specialized in one of the so-called "female arts" and upper-class professional women who would participate in public life. It is further argued that this categorization allowed Schütte-Lihotzky, in her design for the unbuilt high school annex in Ankara, to rework the broader "redomestication" issue which marked her earlier career in Weimar Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the institution of caste and its operation in a micro-level village setting of West Bengal, an Indian state, where state politics at grass roots level is vibrant with functioning local self-government and entrenched political parties. This ethnographic study reveals that caste relations and caste identities have overarching dimensions in the day-to-day politics of the study villages. Though caste almost ceases to operate in relation to strict religious strictures, under economic compulsion the division of labour largely coincides with caste division. In the cultural–ideological field, the concept of caste-hierarchy seems to continue as an influencing factor, even in the operation of leftist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BackgroundUnderstanding how common mental disorders such as anxiety and depression vary with socio-economic circumstances as people age can help to identify key intervention points. However, much research treats these conditions as a single disorder when they differ significantly in terms of their disease burden. This paper examines the socio-economic pattern of anxiety and depression separately and longitudinally to develop a better understanding of their disease burden for key social groups at different ages.MethodThe Twenty-07 Study has followed 4510 respondents from three cohorts in the West of Scotland for 20 years and 3846 respondents had valid data for these analyses. Hierarchical repeated-measures models were used to investigate the relationship between age, social class and the prevalence of anxiety and depression over time measured as scores of 8 or more out of 21 on the relevant subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).ResultsSocial class differences in anxiety and depression widened with age. For anxiety there was a nonlinear decrease in prevalence with age, decreasing more slowly for those from manual classes compared to non-manual, whereas for depression there was a non-linear increase in prevalence with age, increasing more quickly for those from manual classes compared to non-manual. This relationship is robust to cohort, period and attrition effects.ConclusionsThe more burdensome disorder of depression occurs more frequently at ages where socio-economic inequalities in mental health are greatest, representing a ‘double jeopardy’ for older people from a manual class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, relationships between old age, retirement and social inequalities, as marked by participation in leisure activities, are examined. Two issues are tackled: first, whether old age and particularly the transition into retirement have an effect on participation in three selected activities ; and second, whether the social inequalities underlying these activities change with older age and retirement. The empirical investigation uses data from the first two waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), which included variables on having a hobby, being a member of a club, and an index of participation in cultural events (cinema, theatre/opera/classical music performances, museums and galleries). The different socio-economic backgrounds of different age groups explain a considerable part of the observed age differences in these activities. Longitudinal analyses show that respondents tended to continue their activities regardless of changes in work and age, with two exceptions, namely that retirement was positively related to having a hobby, and those who stopped working because of an illness experienced a significant decline in all three of the examined categories of activity. The pattern of continuity also applied to socio-economic differences in patterns of participation in leisure activities. Some indications of slightly growing inequalities with age require further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which structural and practice-based social constraints contribute to the maintenance of nonstandard were in Bolton, England. Using data from a school ethnography, 2747 tokens of first- and third-person singular was/were are analyzed according to informants' social class, community of practice, self-identification, and place of birth. Varbrul analyses reveal consistencies in the linguistic constraints on variation irrespective of the type of social analysis undertaken. These patterns generally confirm the findings of previous was/were studies. However, comparisons of log likelihood results suggest that although different social factors constrain this variation with varying degrees of accuracy, no one factor alone sufficiently explains it. Comparisons of groups and individual speakers reveal that nonstandard were maintenance is in fact explained by the combined effect of an established correlation between nonstandard were and local social structures and on-going revitalization of the form in contemporary forms of social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human societies are formed by different socio-economical classes which are characterized by their contribution to, and their share of, the common wealth available. Cheaters, defined as those individuals that do not contribute to the common wealth but benefit from it, have always existed, and are likely to be present in all societies in the foreseeable future. Their existence brings about serious problems since they act as sinks for the community wealth and deplete resources which are always limited and often scarce. To fight cheaters, a society can invest additional resources to pursue one or several aims. For instance, an improvement in social solidarity (e.g. by fostering education) may be sought. Alternatively, deterrence (e.g. by increasing police budget) may be enhanced. Then the following questions naturally arise: (i) how much to spend and (ii) how to allocate the expenditure between both strategies above. This paper addresses this general issue in a simplified setting, which however we believe of some interest. More precisely, we consider a society constituted by two productive classes and an unproductive one, the cheaters, and proposes a dynamical system that describes their evolution in time. We find it convenient to formulate our model as a three-dimensional ordinary differential equation (ODE) system whose variables are the cheater population, the total wealth and one of the productive social classes. The stationary values of the cheater population and the total wealth are studied in terms of the two parameters: f (how much to invest) and s (how to distribute such expenditure). We show that it is not possible to simultaneously minimize the cheater population and maximize the total wealth with respect to f and s. We then discuss the possibility of defining a compromise function to find suitable values of f and s that optimize the response to cheating. In our opinion, this qualitative approach may be of some help to plan and implement social strategies against cheating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines differences of non-standard employment among parenting couples on the basis of qualitative research carried out in Rome and Naples. Although there is a growing interest in Europe in issues of flexibility and job security, there has been little focus upon the social differences among non-standard workers. Social class differences are assumed to be represented by the polarization between protected and secure employees on the one hand and casual and unprotected ones on the other, as if the latter represented a homogeneous group of marginalized workers. The research presented here offers evidence about three types of social differences among Italian couples of non-standard workers: job insecurity, the impact of various types of work-flexibility, and the organization of home?work boundaries. These vary widely depending upon the content, technological organization and prestige of professional positions that non-standard workers hold. This paper shows how social and economic differences within the group of non-standard workers affect family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]