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Research on Indian overseas students in Australia has shown that there is an intricate connection between class and migration processes. Yet most of this work has focused on the experiences of students already abroad. Research on the formulation of migration-decisions and class dynamics from the sending side has been slow to emerge. This paper fills this gap and locates the analysis of migration desires within the literature on the Indian middle classes. I demonstrate how a middle-class culture of education that articulates hegemonic experiences, aspirations, and trajectories drives many aspiring middle-class young men to consider migrating as an alternative path to social mobility. Migration emerges as a temporary strategy geared towards accruing economic and cultural capital necessary for the fulfilment of class-based personal ambitions and wider social responsibilities at home. Migration is shown to stretch the boundaries of processes of class formation that now straddles multiple sites, resources, and aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the entrepreneurial and consumptive habits of Mexican Americans in Downey, California, during the 1980s and 1990s. It shows how Mexican Americans avoided ethnic entrepreneurship as they moved into and became the demographic plurality of middle-class Downey. By relying on existing networks of ethnic commerce, Mexican Americans in Downey could simultaneously partake of ethnic entrepreneurship or consumption while acceding to anti-Mexican standards of acceptable business. These place-specific commercial habits allowed Mexican Americans to pursue their new class interests as homeowners without sacrificing their cultural heritage through assimilation. In narrating the complex history of demographic change in Downey, this article suggests how racist assumptions survived as ideas of good business. It also takes seriously the tension between assimilation and ethnic retention, and considers the creation of a Mexican American middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1900s, industrial firms embraced research as a key element of corporate strategy. In order to internalize scientific research, firms constructed laboratories many of which were located away from factories. The development of these laboratories was part of a larger shift in the socio-spatial division of labor – the separation of mental from physical work. These laboratories were sites for developing new technologies and production processes and for creating and reproducing a techno-scientific workforce that allied itself with management. Using the example of Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse, in this paper I argue that industrial firms built research laboratories in order to enlist a skilled techno-scientific workforce that was essential for further profit making. By exploring the longer history of the industrial research laboratory, I expose how the “knowledge economy” and “tech workers” did not originate in the suburbs of the 1950s or the tech-boom of the 1990s, but rather emerged in concert with industrialization, the emergence of corporations, the professionalization of science and engineering, and suburbanization at the turn of the 20th-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sheds light on 'embourgeoisement' and self rated class. In a paper published in the periodical "The Sociological Review," sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, have convincingly argued against the view that post-war affluence has made manual workers and their wives 'middle-class' in attitudes and styles of life, and have put forward a model which gives the notion of 'embourgoisement' a precise and testable meaning. This paper sets out to show that figures for self-rated class in Great Britain can, on the contrary, be used to elucidate both these questions provided that respondents have been asked about the meaning of their self-rating. The data on which this conclusion is based are taken from a national sample survey carried out in the spring of 1962. The embourgeoisement thesis is of course not new. Before the Second World War many different observers spoke of a visible assimilation between the manual and non-manual classes. Proper examination of the embourgeoisement thesis requires, however, that the relationship with income should be more fully considered. The embourgeoisement thesis would presumably lead people to expect that the frequency of Conservative support should be highest among those manual workers (or their wives) who have reached the top third of the overall income distribution, and perhaps it would also lead people to expect that the correlation with self-rating should hold within all three levels of income.

This article based on primary research including collections from the Alan Lomax Collection from the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, The Chicago Historical Society, The Pullman Company Papers from the Newberry Library, and the recently discovered Michael van Isveldt Collection from Amsterdam, Netherlands, argues that within Chicago’s rapidly developing Black Metropolis between World War I and II, Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy treaded lightly between a world of black and white “Old Settler” ideas and those brought from the South by migrant “New Settlers.” By doing so, he helped establish a new dimension of the Great Migrations to Chicago’s Black Metropolis that centered on black creativity and a new kind of entrepreneurialism. This new dimension, moreover, nurtured a new identity in the emerging black urban consciousness that involved, in equal parts, southern cultural pathways and new ones created by city life. Scholarship on the development of Chicago’s Black Metropolis and the Great Migrations to the Windy City has viewed the development of race and class dynamics in terms of power negotiations between Old Settlers, African Americans who arrived to Chicago before World War I, and New Settlers, who arrived after. Each group’s respective approaches to community development, class formation, and racial respectability often clashed. To many scholars of the Black Metropolis, most African Americans fell into one of these two camps and many of the studies on these intercommunity dynamics place the problem in a negative light. An examination of Broonzy’s life in Chicago, however, demonstrates that the lines of power and personal politics in the city of Chicago were fluid and he learned to navigate the city by pushing the boundaries of race, class, and public respectability. By pushing these boundaries, moreover, Broonzy developed an identity based on his blues persona that exemplifies African American community and identity development within an urban environment that moved beyond migrants’ industrial labor purists. Broonzy and probably many others straddled both sides of the Old Settler–New Settler paradigm. A laborer by day and musician by night, Broonzy navigated these two spheres with ease, and he, therefore, reveals an entirely new component of community development within the Black Metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Almost without exception, defenders and critics of the (Weberian) project of class analysis have denied the validity and utility of what they take to be Marxist conceptions of class. It is argued here that: first, the aims and structure of Marxist class analysis are quite different from those of Weberian class analysis; second, sociological contributions to the current debate have failed to address the most significant insights of Marxist class analysis, namely the labour theory of value; and third, Wright's supposedly exemplary Marxist research programme, being also deficient in this respect, shares common ground with its Weberian critics. Thus the case for Marxist class analysis has gone by default, a situation which this paper attempts to redress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical methodologies assume 'resolution into simple elements' as a necessary preliminary stage of scholarly investigation. They explicitly, or more often implicitly accept, therefore, that the conclusions reached reflect not only the phenomena analysed, but also the applied system of analytical subdivision. The paper explores and compares the main systems of analysis in current sociology: institutional, class and communal. It suggests a taxonomy of analytical systems and a cross-classification which is introduced to throw light on their conceptual properties at the societal as well as the individual level. It proceeds by discussing the issues of: (A) The societal roots of selection of analytical schemes in sociology; (B) The advantages and blind spots of the specific analytical systems; and (C) Attempts at the integration and reduction of analytical systems in contemporary sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although temporal processes are fundamental to the ‘spatialization of class’, they remain understudied. This article thus provides empirical evidence of residential pathways in the Oslo region over the life course; it does so by using population-wide data in a 24-year panel, while focusing on residency in affluent and deprived areas. By utilizing sequencing and clustering techniques, the analysis shows that exposure to dense poverty and affluence is reproduced and intensified within individual biographies; this is indicative of vastly limited life experiences from late adolescence into adulthood. Accordingly, the relationship between class origins and class destinations that is often reported in studies of class mobility is likely to be reinforced due to prolonged experiences in advantaged or disadvantaged surroundings over time. Rather than being ‘stuck in place’, however, the disadvantaged are more geographically mobile and less spatially isolated than their affluent counterparts. The socio-spatial patterns suggest that the affluent employ strategies of spatial withdrawal that may be enabled by a dual process of closure consisting of the extensive marketization of housing and classed sentiments of belonging. The article argues that revealing the way in which spatially mediated contexts unfold throughout the life course seems to hint at spatialized processes of class structuration, thereby shedding light on contemporary inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to 'A new model of social class?' by Savage et al. (2013), I take issue with their claim of carrying out an inductive, data-driven approach to the construction of a new class scheme. They emphasize that theirs is not just another occupational- or employment-based class schema. Rather, their objective is to illustrate how cultural and social boundaries are drawn up. Their class classification is multi-dimensional, with the combination of economic, social, and cultural capitals to delineate distinctive class boundaries. My main concerns fall into three areas: (1) what are the problems of their proposed inductive approach? Can we draw up class boundaries without going back to a political economy analysis of contemporary capitalism? (2) How successful have they been in introducing new social classes to their classification of class? Do their descriptions of the seven classes in their class scheme add up in ways that present us with a sociologically meaningful analysis of a class structure of contemporary Britain? (3) And, finally, how useful is their framework for conducting comparative class analysis? Drawing upon the case of contemporary China, it is suggested that it is important to recognize that the effects of social and cultural capitals vary, both quantitatively and qualitatively, according to the wider institutional environment. In each of the above areas, the approach suggested by Savage et al. is found short of fully satisfactory answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internationalisation of Gulf capital throughout the economies of the Middle East has been a striking feature of regional capitalist development over the last two decades. This article traces the nature of Palestinian class formation in light of this trend (drawing empirically on 2006-2007 data), arguing that a full understanding of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip needs to integrate the internationalisation of Gulf capital with the exigencies of Israel’s occupation. The theoretical and political implications of this are discussed in light of the projection of both US and Israeli power in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of 'advanced marginality'—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of 'place', and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the 'precariat' in postindustrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue of organized prostitution in London during the 1820s, a crucial time and place in which modern middle-class values were developing and being asserted in an essentially urban setting. An account is given of a prolonged and expensive campaign conducted by one City parish in an effort to suppress the brothels within its boundaries. Analysis of the parish's motivation, procedural steps, and the eventual outcomes of its activities provide insight into lower middle-class attitudes toward prostitution and the limitations of the legal means available for its control. The study accordingly attempts to provide a dynamic perspective on the early mobilization of representatives of this class against a particular and threatening aspect of urban disorder. It further suggests that this need to confront public behavior incompatible with the values of a modernizing world in this way was peculiar to the lower middle classes and perhaps even helped to create their identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By wedding a historical materialist understanding of class formation to pedagogical efforts at teaching ethics in the professional writing classroom, language-arts instructors can intervene at an important postindustrial juncture between culture and economics. They can take a vital role in the formation and political development of elite and influential knowledge workers, making them more critical of the links between diachronic economic developments and locally experienced institutions such as communication practices and organizational constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis has two basic objectives: First, to understand as precisely as possible the inner structure of Weber's concept of class, its similarities and differences from Marx's concept, and its relationship to the problem of exploitation; second, to use this interrogation of Weber's work to defend the importance of the concept of exploitation for sociological theory. To understand the foundations of Weber's class analysis one must look beyond his most synoptic treatments of class in Economy and Society and see how his concept of class is intimately linked to his investigations of the broad problem of rationalization in modern society. Class, in these terms, is the way economic power is distributed when economic action is organized to the greatest degree in an instrumentally-rational manner. The problem of exploitation--the extraction of labor effort from workers--is treated, in this framework, primarily as a problem of technical efficiency and economic rationality in creating work incentives and effective discipline. This conceptualization leads to a relatively impoverished understanding of the nature of antagonistic interests generated by class relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the class formation procedures used in 22 elementary schools from two districts, as well as the influence these procedures had on the class composition of 200 classes, 56 of which were combination classes (classes with students from two grade levels). Principals were interviewed about their procedures for assigning students to classes, and students completed pretest measures. The major finding was that principals, in an effort to ease the burden that combination classes placed on teachers, assigned higher ability and more independent students to these classes a strategy that raised the ability level of combination classes but lowered it in adjacent single-grade classes. This study suggests that it may be profitable to conceptualize both elementary and secondary school student assignment procedures as the same mechanism, a mechanism that creates particular K-12 curricular paths for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between the fathers and sons, demonstrating that there is substantial variation within social classes with respect to the reproduction of advantage and that there is no evidence for the existence of boundaries between classes. The empirical evidence from the study of social mobility is inconsistent with the standard argument that occupations are grouped into relatively homogeneous social class categories separated by clear boundaries, with such groupings being derived from economic location. There is a continuum of social advantage, measured by the Cambridge Scale, such that the location of the father can be used to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the position, on average, of the son. One of the concerns of conventional social mobility analysis has been with the consequences for class formation. The division between class and status that has informed most stratification analysis is based on a false division between the social and the economic.

The article examines process of class structuration and focuses on common experience in the stratification process. Until recently, research on social class paid little attention to the process of class structuration, i.e., the social process by which economic or political categories are transformed into socially structured forms. Agreement has not been reached concerning the conditions to be fulfilled before a social class can be regarded as a fully structured form. Basic or slightly expanded models of the stratification process have been used to evaluate the position of various categories distinguished on the basis of sexual, racial, or ethnic characteristics. In general, these analyses have shown that the stratification processes differ between the groups considered, and that the categorical characteristics have both additive and interactive effects. A similar approach has never been used to evaluate the intergenerational relevance of distinctions based on the socio-technical aspects of the work activity.

The article discusses the establishment of social classes as a historical process including analyses of some of the main features of class structure and class conflict in Latin America. Also included are the studies that follow underline that classes are not empirical entities, but changing social relationships. It is suggested that the most important social relationship is that of capital to labor. It is inferred that throughout the history of capitalist growth on a world scale, the polarization of class relations has been the central feature.