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Once discouraged or viewed as dangerous, Masters athletes are now seen as exemplars of how people should age. This paper qualitatively examines the sporting pathways, embodied experiences and the moral formation of ageing identities among 'young-old' athletes competing in the 16th Australian Masters Games. Held in regional Tasmania (Australia), the Games attracted over 5000 participants competing across 47 sports over an 8-day period. Contributing to a critical body of scholarship on Masters athletes, the paper shows that class and gender inequality shape processes of becoming and being a Masters athlete that are rarely acknowledged in the 'heroic ageing' accounts the participants narrate. Further, the paper develops a unique spatial perspective on Masters sport that recognises the potential of the Games to disrupt place-based stigma but also identifies its class dimensions both as a site of middle-class shame and consumer opportunity for affluent sports tourists. We draw upon Allen-Collinson's concept of 'intense embodiment' to spotlight the sensory pleasures, pain and injuries of training and competing as an older athlete but also as an important lens for analysing the construction of ageing moral identities that can stigmatise and exclude the inactive old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While critical marketing studies have discussed algorithm-driven marketing's role in governmentality, subjectivity formation and capitalist accumulation, its role in shaping class inequalities is less studied. Drawing on the performativity of marketing, 'classification situations' and critical algorithm studies, this paper uses the case of credit marketing to propose a twofold framework to analyse how algorithmic marketing shapes the cultural and economic inequalities of class. First, algorithms used for categorizing consumers and matching them with marketing messages and products provide access (1) to different symbolic resources and (2) to credit products with different financial consequences to different consumers depending on their categorization, which contribute to the creation of cultural and economic inequalities, respectively. Second, algorithms of financial advice devices overtake parts of consumer choice. Insofar as different financial preferences and rationalities are scripted into the devices for different client groups, these technologies constitute an additional process that affects social divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the everyday gendered lives of Velichappad men. The focus of the paper is on understanding imprint of rituals of possession beyond the space of enactment to the everyday social and material life of the persons who are possessed. Focusing on the experiences of men gives a deeper insight into the gendered dimensions of possession and its differentiated experiences. In addition, this paper examines the social and economic structures that limit and transform the Velichappads. Meanings of possession are understood by situated ethnography and the non-homogeneity of male experiences is reflected through the narratives. The narratives point toward the need for a conceptual framework that understands possession within the intricacies of gender, caste, and class. Furthermore, this study supports the contention that studies of masculinity be informed by the experiences of the marginalized. Interrogating the experiences of Velichappad men charts the histories of the region's sexual economies, and its social and material embedding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the neighborhood of Bushwick from the post–World War II (WWII) era to the onset of the neighborhood's gentrification, this paper traces the fundamental significance of race in the policy decisions that led to the evolution of Bushwick from a vibrant middle-class community to one of concentrated poverty and blight by the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on firsthand accounts, senate hearings, court trials, media accounts, as well as the secondary literature, this paper shows how policy actions and inaction led to the inevitable destruction in the neighborhood during the blackout of 1977. Although the blackout marks one of the most turbulent periods in the neighborhood's history, the community's resilience is accentuated throughout the destruction and its aftermath. Today, as Bushwick's residents face a new threat in the form of gentrification, this paper seeks to situate this contemporary development within the historical and ongoing significance of race in urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu's influence on the study of lifestyles in the United States has been profound, yet the vast majority of relevant research operates with methods and assumptions at odds with Bourdieu's own. His specifically relational or geometric understanding of social structures, and lifestyles, has been overlooked, meaning that no one has yet done for the contemporary United States what Bourdieu did for France, that is, construct a model of the "space of lifestyles" and its homologies. This paper does precisely that, deploying Bourdieu's own favored technique of multiple correspondence analysis on survey data from 2017 to 2018. It finds a remarkable continuity between 1970s France and the contemporary United States, specifically in the existence of axes relating to economic and cultural capital. The paper also explores the correspondence of sociodemographic factors with the space, and importantly, it unveils associated patterns of symbolic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the space of lifestyles in Germany in order to assess whether its structure resembles that famously uncovered in France by Bourdieu. Mobilising multiple correspondence analysis and using data from a bespoke national survey of tastes and lifestyles fielded in 2017–18 (n = 2244), it unveils a two-dimensional system defined by tastes for the culturally exclusive and the economically exclusive. These dimensions are strongly associated with indicators of cultural capital and economic capital, and reveal differences by both capital volume and capital composition, but they are also structured by age and ethnic origin. While age is indicative of Bourdieu's concept of trajectory, the effects of ethnicity underscore the relative autonomy of the space of lifestyles and suggest its determination by more than one structural force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how residential property was constructed as a financial asset and how government policies helped to generate the phenomenal house price inflation and unequal capital gains of recent years. Proceeding in close conversation with Thomas Piketty's work on inequality and recent sociological contributions to the question of class, we argue that employment and wage-based taxonomies of class are no longer adequate for understanding a process of stratification in which capital gains, capital income and intergenerational transfers are preeminent. We conclude the paper by outlining a new asset-based class taxonomy which we intend to specify further in subsequent work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the narratives of young lower-middle-class women employed in cafés, call centers, shopping malls, and offices in Delhi, India, in this paper I identify malleability or "plasticity" of the body as an important feature of contemporary service work. As neophyte service professionals, young women mold themselves to the middle-/upper-class milieu of their workplaces through clothes, makeup, and body language. Such body plasticity can be experienced as enabling: Identifying with the image of the "New Indian Woman," young women enter the bourgeoning service economy. However, they also experience this body plasticity as threatening; bodily changes to meet the requirements of work can, at times, feel inauthentic as well as be read as promiscuous by others. I draw attention to how women appraise plastic bodies as both generative of change and a site of labor discipline, thus offering insights into the relationship among bodies, social inequalities, and contemporary service work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many recognize that families shape the likelihood of getting into college, few examine variation in families' involvement during college or its implications for sustaining inequalities. Using interviews with 51 Black and 61 Asian American college students, our analysis reveals that class and race jointly shape students' perceptions of the financial assistance that they receive from and give to family—whether in the short term (during college) or their plans for the long term (post-college). Advantaged students across race receive more and provide less assistance than disadvantaged students. Both disadvantaged Black and Asian American students share future intentions of support, but only disadvantaged Black students give their families money during college. Race and class affect students' framing of family and designation of the particular family members (whether parents, siblings, extended kin, or fictive kin) included in these exchanges. Lastly, we analyze the ways these different forms of assistance shape students' college struggles; Black students experience the most strain due to their working and giving back during college. Drawing on and developing theories addressing the models and practices of familial diversity, this paper shows how class and race intersect to shape family assistance and its consequences for the persistence of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This paper examines the co-occurrence of drinking alcohol and eating in Great Britain. Applying a practice-theoretical framework, it attends primarily to the nature and characteristics of events – to social situations. It asks whether drinking events involving food are significantly different from those without, whether differences are the same at home as on commercial public premises, and whether differences are the same for men and women. The focus is especially on episodes of drinking with meals at home, an infrequently explored context for a substantial proportion of contemporary alcohol consumption. Data: Employing a secondary analysis of commercial data about the British population in 2016, we examine reports of 47,645 drinking events, on commercial premises and at other locations, to explore how eating food and consumption of alcoholic beverages affect one another. Three types of event are compared – drinking with meals, with snacks, and without any food. Variables describing situations include group size and composition, temporal and spatial parameters, beverages, purposes, and simultaneous activities. Basic sociodemographic characteristics of respondents are also examined, with a special focus on the effects of gender. Results: Behaviours differ between settings. The presence of food at a drinking episode is associated with different patterns of participation, orientations, and quantities and types of beverage consumed. Gender, age, and class differences are apparent. Conclusions: Patterns of alcohol consumption are significantly affected by the accompaniment of food. This is a much-neglected topic that would benefit from further comparative and time series studies to determine the consequences for behaviour and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds to the literature on cultural stratification by revisiting cultural voraciousness, nearly two decades after it was first introduced as a measure of cultural participation designed to capture inequalities in the pace and variety of cultural activities. Specifically, using the UK 2014–15 Time Use Survey, we compare measures of cultural voraciousness in the UK in 1998 and 2015, focussing in particular on the way cultural voraciousness is associated with both gender and class. We find continuity over time in the patterns of relationship between cultural voraciousness, gender and class, which are not explained by income or hours worked. While women at the bottom of the class scale are still the most disadvantaged in terms of unequal access to cultural participation, high level managerial women now equal equivalent men in their voracious cultural participation. We conclude that not only is cultural voraciousness still useful in depicting cultural inequalities delineated by gender and class, and not only do gender and class gaps in cultural voraciousness persist over time, but also that there is evidence for accentuated class inequality over time in cultural voraciousness among men and among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing economic and political roles of the so-called emerging powers in sub-Saharan Africa have attracted particular attention following the apparent decline of Western powers in the face of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. The AKP's "proactive" foreign policy has manifested Turkey's burgeoning role in the region. This paper draws upon Marxism to explore the diffusion of Turkish capital and the enhancement of military relations in the region in harmony and in contradistinction with Western and Gulf countries. It discusses the AKP's proactive foreign policy vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africa as a particular sociohistorical form of sub-imperialism that is characterized by and reproduces economic and geopolitical rivalries and alliances among Turkey and Western and Gulf countries. JEL Classification: F5, P1, O1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the ways in which gender and class emerge in relation to the altered soundscape that follows technological change. As such, it takes seriously not only practices of noisemaking and disruptive sounds, but also the implication of silence and different modes of listening. The findings call for an enhanced understanding of the ephemeral qualities of sound, as well as the subsequent listening practices, and how these factors contribute, both to enforce and challenge the ways in which gender and class are enacted. This paper also adds to the discipline of ethnography, the importance for an ethnographer of acknowledging production of sound as well as subsequent listening practices as part of meaning-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how newsworkers resisted workplace reorganization in the pre-digital news industry. It analyzes how and why the Thomson Corporation reorganized the workplace and unions resisted workplace change from 1994 to 1995 as a case study of corporate control and worker resistance. Developing the concept of alternative communication resistance practices, it conducts a thematic analysis of untapped archival documents: union, company, legal, and news content. This concept articulates historically-contingent institutional conditions that facilitate corporate strategies to reorganize the workplace and union resistance practices. This article contributes an original relational framework to understand what is distinct about workplace reorganization at a particular setting. It considers workplace actors' heterogeneous resistance practices within a specific workplace context and how communication practices express and constitute resistance. The article outlines five propositions of this framework that could be tested and potentially refined beyond a single case study in future (digital) journalism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working paper focuses on women in leadership roles in the Entertainment Department of BBC North, based at New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road, Manchester and subsequently at Media City UK. In so doing, it considers the role of the department's founder, Janet Street-Porter, and her leadership of the then Youth Programmes department in the late 80s/early 90s. Drawing on interviews with six women professionals who worked either during or just after Street-Porter's leadership and scholarship on women in the UK media industry, this paper considers some of the reasons why this environment proved so fertile for our interviewees. We also reflect on some of the key issues the interviews provoked: the issue of balancing motherhood with a career in the UK television industry, the importance of women's networks, and the impact of class in terms of working in the BBC. In this sense, the BBC was formative for our interviewees, particularly through the leadership of an 'outsider' like Street-Porter despite structural issues of exclusion that remained present in the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the oft-asked question, ‘what counts as labour’s agency?’ this paper engages with recent developments in labour geography to argue that labour geographers would benefit from paying close attention to the nitty-gritty struggles over – and not only for – the contract. Taking the case of the United Farm Workers’ efforts to administer its newly-won contracts in the agribusiness fields of California in the 1970s, it suggests that labour’s agency is often not just expressed, but made to count, in the midst of the most mundane – and often tedious – of circumstances, like late night-grievance procedure meetings. The paper argues that not just labour’s agency, but its class power, is often formed and deployed – and sometimes countered – in the details of how the collective interests of workers, on the farm or across a region, and handled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper presents a critique of how a totalising consumer voice predominates, as does a globalised marketing knowledge. We argue that it is time to release ideas from the marginalised, the unhinged and the peripheral. We feature a fictional dialogue between two characters using vernacular language: Ọmọ Naija, a Pidgin-speaking Yorùbá woman from Nigeria, and Rab, a Glasgow Patter-speaking man from Scotland. The conversation traverses two important areas of critique regarding hierarchies of knowledge in marketing: (1) decolonisation and (2) marginalisation of the vernacular. Our characters draw upon ancient and contemporary thinkers, writers and cultural icons to substantiate their critiques. Our analysis foregrounds how hierarchies of knowledge in marketing serve academic imperialism, an untranslatability of vernacular life and ignore the terroir of everyday existences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original fieldwork data to examine the role of class and ethnicity in shaping performed identities for Muslim musicians. It claims that the emergence of a Muslim public sphere in Britain – which includes music as one important cultural component – is implicated by dominant notions of Muslimness that are developed in a field of power relations structured by class and ethnicity. The central claim of this paper is that an assertion of middle-class values and tastes can inform notions of Muslimness and that these are interwoven with the differential experiences of diverse Muslim ethnic groups in Britain. As evidence for this, the paper examines the ways in which this relationship between class and ethnicity is manifested in the Muslim public sphere through the performed identities of Muslim musicians. This includes a consideration of the influence of a broadly defined Middle Eastern/middle-class consumer culture on an 'Islamic pop' music scene in Britain, as well as the strategic responses – including acquiescence, navigation and resistance – from South Asian and Black Muslim musicians to the dominance of this cultural context. Overall, the paper concludes that the intersectional nature of Muslimness, with particular reference to class and ethnicity, must be examined further to fully understand the developing dynamics of an emergent Muslim public sphere in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a qualitative analysis of decisions of 64 community-college students in seeking a transfer in Hong Kong. In weighing a number of educational options and then offers, with a similar level of desirability in some cases, in order to achieve their transfers, advantaged-class and disadvantaged-class respondents struggled with different logics of reasoning and negotiated anxiously with their changing structural realities. This qualitative analysis addresses the contextual, processual and emotional aspects of their decision making and provides a more convincing illustration of how the secondary effect of social stratification operates against a changing landscape of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data collected from a multimethod ethnographic study to contribute to debates on the production of territorial stigmatisation through the analysis of Shirebrook, UK: a small post-industrial mining town in Derbyshire, which now houses the distribution centre and warehouse of Sports Direct, recently the subject of high-profile scrutiny in the UK over working conditions. Combining semi-structured interviews, participant observation and the analysis of documentary sources, I argue that the territorial stigmatisation of Shirebrook does not emanate from a single source. Rather, multiple institutions and agents converge in the co-production of stigma. The analysis draws attention to local antagonisms and hierarchies in the production of stigma, demonstrating how relatively powerful actors 'below' do not simply resist or deflect stigma onto less powerful others, but influence the way that territorial stigma operates, problematising Wacquant's top-down conceptualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study to examine the effects of race, class and gender on the intermarriage of Cuban and Afro-Caribbean second-generation immigrants in the United States. Results indicate that gender and racial identity are significantly related to intermarriage for this group of immigrants. Interestingly, the immigrants' socioeconomic status and family's social class have a very minimal impact on intermarriage. Using Cuban white, Cuban Hispanic and Caribbean black as racial categories, the study shows that Caribbean black men are the least likely group to intermarry, and Cuban white men are the most likely to intermarry. Cuban Hispanic men are less likely to intermarry compared to their Cuban white counterparts. Lastly, Cuban white women are the most likely to intermarrycompared to Cuban white males for this sample population. A structural explanation for these patterns posits that differences in the relative size of each racial group in marriage markets affect their chances for intermarriage. From an assimilation perspective, the literature also suggests that differences in social distance with whites influence the propensity for co-ethnic intermarriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers some theoretical resources for resistance to neoliberalised schooling and develops principles for reimagining the common school. Whilst relevant internationally, it is situated in the particular context of England, as a global epicentre of school reform – a marketised and largely privatised system where the net of surveillance and control is tightly woven from assessment data, inspections and performance pay, and where the curriculum has been systematically divorced from young people's life experience and concerns. To clarify the meaning of this crisis, the paper draws on some key ideas from the Marxist tradition, particularly class and alienation, situating neoliberal policy within the crises of late capitalism. The paper looks in two directions for resources to help overcome the current impasse. Firstly, it highlights the strengths of more creative and emancipatory pedagogies in earlier decades of English curriculum development, including the value of learners' experience, vernacular language, dialogic teaching and play. Secondly it examines the northern European paradigm of curriculum construction focused on more holistic human development (Bildung), focusing particularly on the work of Wolfgang Klafki. The value of this theorisation of curriculum and pedagogy is highlighted through contrasts with the current drive towards a 'knowledge-based curriculum'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a misreading of Willis’s Learning to Labour within the American sociology of education, arguing that his central theoretical move, the treatment of cultural production as autonomous from social reproduction, has been neglected. Willis’s concepts of differentiation and integration extend dominant cultural approaches to racial inequality in education, theorizing how youth’s oppositional countercultures emerge through conflict with the institutional logic of schools. However, Willis’s theorization must be extended to account for race in addition to class and gender. Using black working-class boys in American schools as a comparison case, this paper argues that race alters the temporality of differentiation, with black boys perceived as noncompliant and disruptive by teachers prior to participating in high school oppositional countercultures. In response, black boys develop strategies of integration, managing their cultural performances to re-establish the terms of the educational exchange. These strategies may help facilitate class mobility for black youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ottoman Empire has thus far remained at the margin of the "Great Divergence" debate. Relatedly, no systematic attempt has been made to overcome Eurocentric views about the early modern Ottoman Empire. This paper seeks to fill this gap by problematizing and re-historicizing arguably the core concept of the Great Divergence debate, that is, capitalism. Drawing from the theory of social-property relations, the paper reconsiders the question of the origin of capitalism, and by doing so, provides not only new comparative insights on the early modern Ottoman Empire, but also the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric reading of world historical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper focuses on case studies of artistic, creative and political participation by young feminists and civil society groups in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and the UAE. Central questions uncover the intersecting significance of class, gender and new media in young MENA citizens' participation; the connections between mediated cultural production and political intervention; and the role of structural barriers for online community and agency. Our conclusions challenge the notion that the democratic ethos of civic participation networks has burgeoned since digitization, and highlights that digital tools and online spaces work more effectively for youth with existing offline economic power and/or cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the ‘turn to organising’ in British unions over the past decade has largely ignored the broader questions of the purpose of such activity. As a consequence, unions have mainly focused on building solidarities between workers in their individual workplaces rather than developing a wider view of workers’ interests and the objectives of that solidarity. Using Hyman’s typology of union identities (2001), it is evident that ‘class’ identity has largely been sidelined in debates about union renewal in Britain. The paper argues that this limits the scope of union renewal both in practice and in theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the British Government's social policy (Cabinet Office, 2011: 5). However, while policy perspectives present mobility as an unambiguously progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies looking at the impact of mobility on individuals themselves. Drawing on 39 lifecourse interviews with upwardly mobile respondents drawn from the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project (CCSE), this paper examines how mobility affects the psychic and emotional life of the individual. More specifically, it examines how mobility influences social, familial and intimate relationships, as well as the ontological coherence of the self. Following Bourdieu's (2004: 127) description of his own upward trajectory, the paper argues that the concept of a divided habitus, or habitus clivé, may be particularly useful for understanding some iterations of the contemporary mobility experience, particularly its most long-range forms. Such a concept, it argues, helps explain how the emotional pull of class loyalties can entangle subjects in the affinities of the past, and why - despite prevailing political rhetoric - upward mobility may remain a state that not everyone unequivocally aspires to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper in The Sociological Review, Atkinson and Deeming argue that tastes in food are homologous to the social space, exactly as it was in Bourdieu's Distinction. This would involve differences in food tastes not only along the class hierarchy, but also a clear-cut divide by the relative weight of cultural and economic capital. However, Atkinson and Deeming base their claims on insufficient data analysis: They misinterpret their own correspondence analysis and the additional tables, which they in turn fail to subject to even the most basic statistical analysis. We show that the results they present are actually at odds with their own interpretations and main conclusions. It is not just that Atkinson and Deeming's arguments lack support; their proposition about a culinary division between cultural and economic class fractions is contradicted by their own data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The night-time economy is often described as repelling consumers fearful of the 'undesirable Others' imagined dominant within such time-spaces. In this paper we explore this by describing attitudes towards, and reactions to, one particularly contentious site: the 'lap dance' club. Often targeted by campaigners in England and Wales as a source of criminality and anti-sociality, in this paperwe shift the focus from fear to disgust, and argue that Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) are opposed on the basis of moral judgments that reflect distinctions of both class and gender. Drawing on documentary analysis, survey results and interview data collected during guided walks, we detail the concerns voiced by those anxious about the presence of lap dance or striptease clubs in their town or city, particularly the notion that they 'lower the tone' of particular streets or neighbourhoods. Our conclusion is that the opposition expressed to lap dance clubs is part of an attempt to police the boundaries of respectable masculinities and femininities, marginalizing the producers and consumers of sexual entertainment through 'speech acts' which identify such entertainment as unruly, vulgar and uncivilized. These findings are considered in the light of ongoing debates concerning the relations of morality, respectability and disgust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants' relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the 'gift' of the residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As political theorists explore work beyond traditional workplaces, how should we understand the vast class of insecure, informal, and unsalaried workers whose existence defies traditional categories of employment? In asking this question, I revisit the political theory of the Marxist feminist and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework movement, Selma James, to explore her "internationalism of the unwaged" and her writings on wagelessness. An example of political theory in service of struggle, James's internationalism was widely circulated in anticolonial, Black radical, and autonomous Marxist circles in the 1970s. In this article, I argue that it was grounded in three intertwined and mutually reinforcing arguments: an account of how capitalist life is spatially divided into distinct workplaces; an anticapitalist theory of identity that explains social difference as maintained by the international division of labor and labor market hierarchies; and a diagnosis of work organization viewed from the perspective of the wageless worker. I trace how James developed these arguments about the spatial division of labor, hierarchies of identity, and internationalist political struggle and how her view of the common exploitation and division of workers formed the basis of a class-struggle identity politics. Her political theory was an important contribution to women's international thought and transnational feminist critiques of global forms of domination and exploitation. It also offers a critique of capitalism's organization of the displacement of work and workers and an account of wagelessness as a work situation, both of which illuminate capitalist organization of work and wageless life today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the patterns of participation in organised sports of youngsters coming towards the end of primary school, with a view to identifying emergent sporting habits in relation to social class gradients. The data for the study were generated via 90 semi-structured interviews with parents and children from 62 families. The data revealed differences in organised activity participation (both at and beyond school) between an 'under-class' and combined middle-class groups of children, as well as within-class gradients among the middle-class sub-groups. There were, for example, substantial differences between the under-class group and the combined middle-class group in terms of both the average number of bouts of organised sports participation and the repertoire or variety of sports engaged with. In effect, the mid- and upper-middle-class children were already sporting and cultural omnivores by the final years of primary schooling. We conclude that while the primary school organised sporting 'offer' may be neither a sufficient nor even a necessary contribution to the emerging sporting habits of mid- and upper-middle-class children, for under-class children it is likely to be necessary even though it may still prove, in the longer run, insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 6 and 10 August 2011, acts of violence and civil disobedience occurred in 66 locations across London and other cities in England. Initial responses from politicians and the press sought to explain why the riots were happening and what responses were necessary. This paper shows how the depoliticised actions of rioters were redefined as a politicised problem, symbolic of a sick society that could be cured by Conservative social policy. This paper explores the nuanced discursive and paradoxical mechanisms of right-wing newspapers. I argue that ideological consistencies operating beyond the foreground and immediacy of individual texts override the appearance of discursive contradiction across longitudinal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which parents talk about choosing secondary schools in three areas of Greater Manchester. It argues that this can be a moment when parents are considering their own attitudes to, and shaping their children's experiences of, multiculture. Multiculture is taken as the everyday experience of living with difference. The paper argues that multiculture needs to be understood as shaped not only by racialized, ethnic or religious difference (as it is commonly understood) but also by other differences which parents may consider important, particularly class and approaches to parenting. We stress the need to examine what parents say about schooling in the context in which they are talking, which is shaped by local areas and the experiences of their children in primary schools. Based on interviews with an ethnically mixed groups of parents from different schools, we show how perceptions of the racialized and class demographics of schools can influence parents' choice of secondary schools. The paper also argues that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which terms such as 'multicultural' and 'mix' are applied uniformly to very different contexts, be they particular schools or local areas, suggesting there is a paucity of language in Britain when talking about multiculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in the autumn of 1985, this paper argued that the political economy of Britain under Margaret Thatcher had up until then been discussed largely as a national phenomenon, and one that reflected the subordination of industry to financial interests. The paper proposed that the internationalisation of British capital was in fact a crucial part of the strategy to defeat labour and roll back the state, since Thatcherism welcomed inward investment as well as outward, and was supported by industry as well as finance. A left alternative had not only to challenge this strategy at national level, but also to be resolutely internationalist in its theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the turn of the century, young people’s aspirations have featured prominently in UK education policy and practice. Governments of all sides have espoused a rhetoric and enacted initiatives which have tended to focus on somehow ‘correcting’ the aspirations of students of working-class and minority ethnic origins. This paper applies a Bourdieusian framework to the analysis of the education and career aspirations of British-born young women of Bangladeshi heritage in higher education. In doing so, it advances a theoretically informed understanding of aspirations, which accounts for the multiple factors that contribute to shape them as well as for the relative implications in terms of future pathways. Drawing on interviews with 21 female undergraduate students, and building on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital, I conceptualise aspirations as an aspect of habitus. I argue that this conceptualisation allows light to be shed on the ways in which multiple, intersecting dimensions of social identity and social structures play out in the shaping, re-shaping and possibly fading of aspirations. Additionally, it enables us to examine the mutually informing influences of aspirations and capital on practice. Findings indicate that the valuing of education and social mobility expressed by those of Bangladeshi and other minority ethnic origins are integral to collective constructions of ‘what people like us do’, which are grounded in diasporic discourses. They also illuminate the significance of social and cultural capital for young people’s capacity to aspire and actualise aspirations, as these contribute to delineate their ‘horizons for action’. This suggests that by failing to adequately recognise how structural inequalities inform differential access to valued capital, prevailing policy and practitioners’ approaches attribute excessive responsibility to students and their parents. The notion of ‘known routes’ is in this respect put forward as a way to make sense of aspirations, expectations and pathways, and the role of institutions in forging possible futures is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War injured servicemen were constructed as a better class of patient than civilians, and their care was prioritized in social and political discourses. For the mentally disordered servicemen themselves, however, these distinctions were permeable and transient.This article will challenge the reality of the ‘privileged’ service patient in civil asylums in Scotland. By examining the impact of the war on asylum structures, economies and patient health, this study will explore exactly which patients were valued in these difficult years. In so doing, this paper will also reveal how the lives of institutionalized ex-servicemen and the civilian insane inside district asylums were not quite as distinct as political and social groups would have liked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of “individualization” plays a central role in both classic and modern sociology. In modern sociology writers such as Beck, Giddens, and Bauman made the concept of individualization a key one in their theories of “late”, “reflexive”, and “liquid modernity”. However, the emphasis which the sociology of individualization puts on “liberation”, choice and social change is challenged by the sociology of stratification and power (Bourdieu, Dean, and others) with its greater emphasis on class, power and social reproduction. This paper seeks to “overcome” this schism between social change and social reproduction in the form of an attempt to think the differentiated (stratified) forms of individualization in reflexive modernity. The assumption is that there is a differentiation in reflexive modern people’s ability to deal with the requirements of individualization, depending on their possession of economic, social and cultural capital. This is argued by means of a theoretical “reconstruction” of the insights and deficiencies of the sociology of individualization, and demonstrated—with a focus on young people—by a number of empirical examples. In conclusion, the paper discusses the possibility of a theoretical integration of the fundamental insights of both the sociology of individualization and the sociology of stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reappraises the meaning of space and place in contemporary class analysis. We explore how class is reshaped and mediated by neoliberal urban restructuring, of which the processes of gentrification and territorial stigmatization form critical parts. We focus on the contemporary interrelation of class and urban restructuring in the post-crash city by looking at the local lived experiences of the 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Glasgow's East End. This high-profile regeneration effort in a deprived working-class neighbourhood reveals much about the functions of neoliberal financial capitalism, austerity and contemporary class formation. We show that gentrification and territorial stigmatization work in tandem within urban regeneration policy interventions as a punitive strategy for managing poor populations. This involves land value and (de)valuing of people and creates new localized class inequalities and insecurities. Our research highlights that in the face of national level cuts and commodification, residents' local relations and support become essential social, economic and political resources. Yet, paradoxically, at the very same time, their local attachment to place is devalued, stigmatized and is at its most precarious. This exposes the coercive elements of the neoliberal class project; a distinct urban class inequality of our time and therefore, we suggest, a critical direction in class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type of research question yields several benefits. First, gap-closing estimands place categories like race in a causal framework without making them play the role of the treatment (which is philosophically fraught for non-manipulable variables). Second, gap-closing estimands empower researchers to study disparities using new statistical and machine learning estimators designed for causal effects. Third, gap-closing estimands can directly inform policy: if we sampled from the population and actually changed treatment assignments, how much could we close gaps in outcomes? I provide open-source software (the R package gapclosing) to support these methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on original archive material from the Tyne and Wear Archives, this article examines the sociological significance of the Metro Centre shopping mall, built in Gateshead in North East England in 1986, at the time the biggest in Europe. It explores how the Metro Centre marked a call to accept the new and 'prevailing ideals' of consumption and represented a key moment for the reformulation of selfhoods as consumer identity practices. Adopting Walter Benjamin's notion of the 'hollow mould' of modernity, the article positions the Metro Centre as an embodiment and material form of wider social, political and economic shifts. Its geographical location at the epicentre of British de-industrialisation is highly significant and marks a key moment where citizens and consumer selfhoods were fused. The shifting discourses around consumerism that occurred during this time, against the backdrop of the increasingly populist ideology of Thatcherism, set the foundations for the emergence of a new neoliberal consumer citizen, who was promised choice, personal growth and wellbeing via consumerism. I will show how new neoliberal ideals of aspiration and meritocracy became interwoven into a new language of consumption that was heavily promoted by the Metro Centre. In fact, the Metro Centre was pivotal in promoting new forms of social exclusion and new articulations of global capitalist production. The article concludes by proposing that the Metro Centre came to embody new neoliberal notions of social 'worth', value and inclusion entwined with engagement in new processes and practices of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political and organisational routes opened up on the contemporary left following the financial crisis have seen a revival of class composition analysis as a means of comprehending a broad array of social and economic phenomena both within and beyond the workplace. Contextualising contemporary class composition analysis as a long-standing component of autonomist Marxism, this article argues that its application amid the left's electoral turn exposes to scrutiny deeper-running weaknesses. The article first presents a history of class composition analysis through operaismo into postoperaismo. The second part of the article discusses four interconnected new directions in class composition analysis: Hardt and Negri's Assembly ; the analysis of social composition offered by the Notes from Below collective; Keir Milburn's analysis of 'generation left'; and, finally, the uptake of some of these ideas among commentators on the left of the British Labour Party like Paul Mason. The article then discusses the theoretical and strategic implications of these contributions through the prism of critiques of class composition analysis put forward by other theorists in the autonomist Marxist tradition. Noting the possible limitations confronting the application of class composition analysis to contemporary challenges faced by the post-crisis left, the penultimate section considers Labour Process Theory as a theoretical alternative implicit in recent critiques of contemporary class composition analysis, arguing that while Labour Process Theory's analysis of the 'politics of production' captures the contingency of the connection between the workplace and formal politics, it leaves unresolved the lack of a distinctive theory of the latter on the contemporary left. The final section reconnects the discussion to the legacy of operaismo by exploring Mario Tronti's recently translated work on the 'autonomy of the political' as a more substantial articulation of the specificity of politics against the backdrop of class conflict at the point of production. The conclusion relates this back to recent strategic issues in the Labour Party and broader labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a series of ethnographic encounters collected while hanging around at a seafood stand in east London, the following article aims to explore the relationship between individual expressions of distaste and the production of class, ethnic and generational forms of distinction. Starting with the visceral expressions of distaste directed towards a seafood stand, the following paragraphs draw on a combination of historical and ethnographic data rendered through a matrix of anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the role of everyday ambient experiences and the stratifying processes that cut across the lives of the city's inhabitants. Arguing against purely biological explanations of disgust, the paper explores how social histories and cultural experience inflect gut responses to the sensoria that suffuse urban environments. Moving the focus beyond the social construction of urban sensibilities, the paper goes on to develop an account of culturally inflected forms of distaste, shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the significance of class to English national identity. It takes one systematic exposition of the argument that Englishness has been traditionally and intimately bound up with class: George Schopflin’s essay Englishness: citizenship, ethnicity and class, published in 2000. Schopflin thought that Englishness was distinctive in European terms by its class rather than its ethnic character and that this provided people with a very secure and very stable identity, though he did observe a more ethnicised form of identity emerging at the beginning of the new millennium. This is a strong definition of Englishness as class and the paper reassesses its claims in terms of recent research on identity. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the role of class but suggests that the modus vivendi of English class relations still distinguishes its identity within Europe and the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses upon the St Anns neighbourhood in Nottingham, a community first studied by Ken Coates and Bill Silburn in the 1960s which noted the great upheavals of the physical and social changes generated by the slum clearance programme of 10,000 back-to-back terraced houses, and the consequent building of the concrete council estate that is now St Anns. This paper draws upon both the physical and the social changes within the neighbourhood, and highlights what has remained constant despite the massive upheavals to working-class life over the last 40 years. This paper looks at the concept of belonging to a neighbourhood which has been stigmatized, finding value and an identity within the estate, and residents describing themselves as simultaneously and interchangeably as being from and simply being St Anns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers reflections on the author's working experience as an industrial sociologist from the 1960s. It seeks to contextualise this in more general considerations of the part played by industrial sociology in the development of sociology in the UK. This is evidenced in thematic concerns, the importance of historical perspectives as well as the use of case studies and the development of ethnographic work. It discusses the role which industrial sociology has played in bringing issues of power, authority, control and class into sharp focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising unemployment among educated young men is a key feature of neoliberal economic change. This paper reviews recent research on the strategies of educated unemployed young men in the global south to stress the importance of class, politics and environmental transformation for an understanding of contemporary youth geographies. Transnational reflection on the lives of educated unemployed young men provides an example of how human geographers might combine political economic analysis with recent theorizations of subjectivity formation and fluid identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the impact of structural changes in sports organizations on the nature of fan cultures have been an important part of the sociology of sport in recent years, and such studies have come to rely on the concepts of class, commodification, and consumption. This paper suggests that although such concepts are indeed important, their contentiousness and complexity are not always acknowledged, and that the concepts may therefore acquire an overgeneralized and taken-for-granted set of meanings. The paper uses examples from studies of football fan cultures in Britain to highlight some of the potential problems with this, before going on to outline some additional and alternative approaches to these terms, and to make suggestions as to how these might be incorporated into future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]