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The patience and work ethics of the middle-class families and the refined taste for leisure of upper-class families were the class-specific attitudes that were the key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape. This explains the rise of the middle class during the British Industrial Revolution.

'Mobility' is a key concept in understanding processes of globalization and class formation. In this article, I examine motorbike mobility in Ho Chi Minh City and its rote in reordering social stratification in urban Vietnam. In the years following trade liberalization, motorbikes emerged as exemplary syrnbols of purchasing power, displaying both monetized and motorized power. In response to the exponential increase in the number of motorbikes, Vietnamese state agencies inscribed streets with divisions to separate different classes of vehicles and regulate the flow of traffic. Motorbikes, I argue, elude attempts to regulate their movement precisely because they embody the very mobility promised by economic reforms. [Vietnam, traffic, commodity, circulation, public space, mobility]

The American middle class has much to be thankful for compared to other economies in the world. Food in different varieties is abundant. Clothes and gadgets are ordinary items whereas other less fortunate economies such as Ethiopia are plagued with war and famine., When my wife determined to buy a dog, it was clearly understood that all the responsibility for its care and feeding would be hers. Post-nuptial agreements being what they are, [...]

We explore certain aspects of the 'gentrification' process in the city of Paris and try to explain the growing fashion among upper-middle-class families for the centre of the capital. Based upon data from a survey and in-depth interviews of couples who had recently moved, we focus on their trade-offs and compromises and identify their residential choices, by comparing various aspects of the lifestyle of those who live in a Paris neighbourhood with the lifestyle of those who live in the near and the more distant suburbs. Living in the centre often means the subordination of housing to the choice of a location which expresses a strong attachment to urban values. Commuting time is also a determinant factor in the choice of housing location.

A woman writer relates a painful incident that happened during her childhood that made her aware of the difference between working and middle class and the snobbishness associated with the middle class. The incident was a visit to her gym teacher's house with her mother where she learnt about the 'polite' society and bourgeois values. She is ashamed of the passive way she submitted to authority and yearns to relive the experience so that she could have reacted in a different way.