Embourgeoisement among Blue-collar Workers?*

This paper examines the notion that blue-collar workers have been converting from working-class to middle-class orientations as a consequence of gains in income and education over the past few decades. Cross-sectional analysis of survey data for white workers and spouses reveals that a considerable manual-nonmanual subjective class schism persists when remaining differences in income and education are taken into account. The gap is maintained both by an adherence to working-class identification among blue-collar workers at all socioeconomic levels and by a weaker tendency for these workers, compared with white-collar workers, to use income and educational status as criteria for self-placement in the class system. Longitudinal analysis further indicates that embourgeoisement among blue-collar workers has been slight and suggests that the manual-nonmanual gap in class orientations is widening.     

ON THE FAULT LINE: RACE,CLASS AND THE US PATRIOT MOVEMENT

This paper analyses the identity politics of the US Patriot Movement and how it addresses the anxieties its primary constituency–working-class whites–have with globalization. White workers find themselves straddling an identity fault under globalization. By virtue of their class, they suffer exploitation within a capitalist system. By virtue of their race, they find themselves the beneficiaries of racial privileges. To analyse how a patriot politic addresses this dual positionality, a poststructuralist identity theory is employed, focusing on a subset of this literature known as whiteness studies. It is argued that discourses of patriotism keep patriots from addressing the economic basis of many of their grievances while buttressing notions of cultural/racial superiority through ‘safe’ nationalistic coding. The Patriot Movement in Central Kentucky is examined as a case study–in particular, its deployment of a patriot politic around two issues: calls to legalize industrial hemp and efforts to stop the designation of a biosphere reserve in the state. This paper's conclusions are situated within a current debate in whiteness studies between those calling for the abolition of whiteness and those calling for its reconstruction. The paper contends that disidentification is not a viable option without alternative categories to replace it. The willingness of Kentucky patriots to galvanize around a patriot politics despite realizing goals through it indicates that working-class whites are anxious for political categories of action in the new global era. Given that working-class whites are mobilizing around categories that code their race-based anxieties, however, reconstruction paradigms must also consider the reconstruction of categories–such as ‘patriot’–that currently work to divide workers along racial lines.     

The practice of ‘Othering’ in reaffirming white working-class boys’ conceptions of normative identities

This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London.     

ASSERTING THE POLITICAL SELF: Community Activism Among Black Women Who Relocate to the Rural South

In this article, I address the collective process of politicization in a group of urban working-class black women who have departed from large cities in the northeast United States and resettled in small towns and scattered, isolated rural communities in the Southeast. The study examines how newcomes became politically involved in their new environment and particularly, how social constraints and opportunities embedded within local political culture influenced their experiences of becoming activists. I employ a critical feminist approach in which an understanding of political agency is grounded in culturally and geographically specific social relations. I argue that activist politics of returnees are framed and formed by unequal gender, race, and class relations resonant in the political culture of the rural South. Localized social conventions define and normalize allowable political roles, discourses, and actions for working-class black women. As newcomers and outsiders, women activists and their actions become politicized in the process of encountering, questioning, and ultimately, subverting these conventions. As the women returnees engaged local political culture, their practices were interpreted as a violation of established paternalist norms of community activism by both white power holders and local working-class black women. This transgression influenced the formation of their identities as political agents and may potentially disrupt the power relations in the surrounding community as well. The study's findings demonstrate the importance of situating race, class, and gender relations in the analysis of activist politics in general and among black working-class women in particular. The study is based on participant observation and interviews with working-class black women activists in three counties in southeastern North Carolina.     

Reproducing the Home in Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

This paper examines a central concern in the texts of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) and Sons and Lovers (1913)—the figure of the home and the mother within it. Situating the author's preoccupation with the domestic interior alongside contemporary social concerns about the houses of the working-classes and the nature of the familial relations that went on within them, I argue that the ways of seeing into the house in these texts are intimately related to the place of the embodied author. Tressell and Lawrence's habitation of the class structure—their lived relation to the places of class—determines their reproduction of the working-class home and accounts for the different ways in which it is used in each of the novels, as symbol of the body politic and site of psychological longings respectively.     

Rural gentrification and the processes of class colonisation

The term rural gentrification is examined and contrasted with contemporary debates over urban gentrification. A common root, in the displacement of a working-class populace by middle-class incomers, is identified and also criticised. Attention is drawn to debates current within urban studies concerning the definition of gentrification as a process of capital investment or as a means to purchase particular lifestyles, the role of reproductive work and service provision, and the possibility of diverse types of gentrifiers and processes of gentrification. The paper investigates, through a substantive study of households in four villages in Gower, whether some of these arguments can illuminate understandings of rural gentrification. Claims that gentrification is necessarily associated with home owners acting as capitalist developers or with an emergent service class are questioned and the possibility of ‘marginal gentrifiers’ is raised. It is also suggested that asymmetries in class positions of householders may be constitutive of rural gentrification. Finally it is argued that comparative work should be undertaken to draw out both the commonalities and differences between rural and urban gentrification and also within gentrification in various rural localities.     

Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.     

Girls’ friendships as habitus in an elite,middle-class secondary school in Ireland

This study examines gendered and classed friendships in a predominantly middle-class, girls' secondary school in the southern region of the Republic of Ireland. Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus, interactively, with Gidden's (1984) concept of practical consciousness, and Gambetta's (1987) intentional rational choice informed the conceptual framework for the study. Narrative sources yielded data about girls' friendships and peer interactions inside and outside of school. The social class and habitus of each of the girls mediated their friendship formation and friendship choice. Data sources highlight that the middle-class girls' friendships were situated in fluid and multiple cliques; given their hegemonic positionality within the school. Contrastingly, working-class girls' friendships were situated in a contained and single clique, often evidenced by their resistance to the institutional habitus. The ways in which these peer friendships operated as powerful shapers of the girls' actions and identities is discussed. This paper provides examples of the nuanced ways that girls' friendships are developed and maintained based on conformity or resistance to the school norms and expectations of academic success. Importantly, findings evidence the differentiated and instrumental use of friendships among the middle-class and working-class girls in a competitive, elite school setting.     

FROM JUKE BOX BOYS TO BOBBY SOX BRIGADE

Through its analysis of the complex discursive struggle over Times Square's – and later America's – ‘bobby sox brigade’, this article reintroduces young women into historical and theoretical accounts of youth culture. In doing so it challenges subculture and moral panic theories for their over-emphasis on working-class masculinity and their inability to account for the complexity and localized specificity – both historical and geographic – that such case studies command. The bobby soxer and the conflicting debates she engendered must be understood as a product of wartime contingency and in relation to the contested discourses within and between different localized contexts and media forms; the bobby soxer was simultaneously positioned as the key problem of wartime and promise of the post-war prosperity ahead. This article ultimately proposes a theoretical framework focusing on localized and contested terrains of discourse, appropriate to (sub)cultural activity in times of war and other disruptions.     

Working-Class Authoritarianism und Die Wahl Rechtspopulistischer Parteien

May the often stated over-representation of workers in the electorates of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe be explained by the so-called “working-class authoritarianism”-thesis by S.M. Lipset? Following this thesis, there are specific socialisation and deprivation experiences in the social situation of the working-class, favouring the development of authoritarian traits and making class-members more susceptible to authoritarian parties. On the basis of the European Social Survey of 2002 the thesis is tested empirically by using the Goldthorpe class scheme and two measures of authoritarianism. It is shown that workers are more inclined to vote for right-wing populist parties and have higher levels of authoritarianism. Furthermore, persons with high levels of authoritarianism are more likely to vote for such parties. The authors conclude that disproportionately high shares of votes for right-wing populist parties from the working-class are, indeed, mediated by authoritarianism. In addition to this, class affiliation has an independent effect on voting behaviour. Finally, it is found that authoritarianism has an even stronger impact on the vote for right-wing populist parties in the service class and the class of routine non-manual workers, though being less frequent there.     

Social capital and social exclusion in England and Wales (1972-1999)

Recent research on social capital has explored trends in membership in voluntary organizations. However, there is currently little robust evidence on such trends in the UK since the 1970s, nor is there any analysis of whether participation bridges social divisions or accentuates them. This paper explores trends in participation in England and Wales since 1972 using data from the Social Mobility Inquiry of 1972 and the British Household Panel Survey of 1992 and 1999. We are concerned with social exclusion mechanisms in social capital generation in Britain over the three decades. Using binomial and multinomial models to 'unpack' the effects of socio-cultural factors on civic participation and on different types of associational membership, we test the thesis of across-the-board decline in social capital by Putnam (2000) and that of rising levels of middle-class social capital versus consistent low levels of working-class social capital by Hall (1999). The results show significant socio-cultural-gender differences, a relative stability of middle-class participation, and a rapid decline in the working-class access to social capital. We challenge the established accounts of both theses.     

MILK BARS,STARBUCKS AND THE USES OF LITERACY

The starting point for this article is the passage on ‘The Juke-Box Boys’ in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. This passage is often cited as evidence of Hoggart's residual, Leavisite suspicion of mass culture and his nostalgia for more ‘authentic’ working-class culture. This article moves beyond this critique by discussing Hoggart's account in relation to the broader historical shifts signalled by the development of milk and coffee bars in postwar Britain, and their more recent replacement by corporate fast-food and coffee chains. It argues that Hoggart's critique was not simply a knee-jerk fear of the new; it fed into more widespread anxieties which long predate the media invention of the ‘teenager’ or the emergence of organized youth subcultures. These anxieties were not simply about mass culture and Americanization, but also about cultural literacy, class, the relationship between the public and private sphere, and the losses and gains of rising affluence – concerns that have been increasingly submerged in post-Thatcherite political culture.     

World Music,nation and postcolonialism

Recent scholarship on representational politics in popular music tends to dwell on the macropolitical entailments of contradictory desires acted out through the consumerization of culture within the globalized circuitry of supranational capitalism. This article takes a micropolitical look at what salsa means for working-class Puerto Ricans in the colonial diaspora, positing salsa as a musical culture that fuels, and is fuelled by, the organic intelligence of its practitioners. Comparatively analysing the performative content and contexts of two albums produced at the symbolic juncture of the Quincentennial (1992) – Willie Colón's Hecho in Puerto Rico and Ruben Blades' Amor y Control – and sharing an auto-ethnographical account of experiences with salsa music in the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, this article explores the cultural politics obtained between mainstream appropriations of Latin musical cultures and salsa within the working-class communities who created it. Thus shifting the critical lens from above to below, the most salient concerns become the ethical dimensions of subaltern (kin)aesthetics and knowledges, which can be charted alongside the overt rejection of consumerist assimilation, the conscious racialization of cultural agency and other articulations of liberatory desire.     

DIFFERENT CLASSES,DIFFERENT FATHERS?

This paper discusses how social class and different economic conditions influence men's parenting. The paper is based on a qualitative study of 30 Swedish couples who live together with their biological children. The study shows that, despite the generosity of the Swedish welfare state and family subsidies, both internal and external economic conditions affect the way men construct their fatherhood. This was shown most clearly in the couples’ discussions around parental leave where parents under economic pressure often distributed the leave in a gender-traditional way. It was also apparent how traditional class patterns and structures still have a strong influence on today's parenthood. Fathers in working-class households often saw fatherhood as creating meaning in their lives and saw the process of becoming a parent as an explicit aspiration to establish something ‘natural’, well known and predictable. Fathers in middle-class households, on the other hand, considered fatherhood as something new, a reflexive project or an opportunity to develop their identity and to get to know new sides of themselves. In practice, these different ways of creating meaning in fatherhood are illustrated by the finding that working-class fathers tend to take up fewer parental leave days and uphold more traditional patterns of family life than fathers in middle-class households.     

Class, authenticity and the transition to higher education for mature students

The stated UK Government policy on Higher Education is to attract increasing numbers of non‐traditional applicants to Higher Education. Mature students are positioned as key within this policy initiative. However, the statistics suggest that recent policy changes have made it more rather than less difficult for non‐traditional students to attend university. This paper explores some of the sociological and psychological processes which make working‐class transitions to higher education problematic by focusing on the narratives of 23 mature students attending an inner London Further Education college. It is argued that class, although mediated by gender and ethnicity, always counts in the transition process. Also, within the working‐classes there are different class fractions with differing priorities in relation to risk, challenge and fitting in. These solidarist and individualist fractions within the working‐classes result in differing priorities, attitudes and actions in relation to the higher education choice process.     

Childbirth Within the Risk Society

Despite the fact that the speciality of obstetrics is considered to be a high risk area, indeed it is estimated that in the UK, maternity services account for massive 60% of all the NHS litigation claims burden; scholarly activity in childbirth performance as part of the risk society is relatively underdeveloped when compared to other areas of health. It is the extent of the influence of risk upon the maternity services that makes this underdevelopment especially striking. In an effort to present childbirth as a worthwhile site for empirical investigation and theoretical discussion, this paper attempts to review the sociology of childbirth and to consolidate some of the multidisciplinary contributions made to date on childbirth within the risk society.     

The construction of South Texas masculinity: masculine space,the pico de gallo and the barbeque grill

I contend that masculinity formation in South Texas is linked to objects that have been deemed as ‘manly’. This study is significant because it examines a group in the US population that, according to census predictions, account for a large percentage of the fastest growing and largest Latino group in the United States. This autoethnography research examines how pico de gallo – a type of salsa – and the barbeque grill assist working-class Mexican American males in constructing a masculine identity known as macho. The data are based on observing 30 social events in the Rio Grande Valley. The findings reveal a pursuit for an apex status of macho through these objects and the cultural transmission of gender roles to the next generation of males. This study concludes by offering suggestions in examining how masculinity, for men of colour, might be linked to marginalisation practices within a social structure.     

The 'family wage' as a class-rational strategy

This paper re-examines the debate about the class rationality of the working-class demand for a family wage and argues that this issue cannot be resolved without considering the feasibility of alternative strategies. Existing accounts are criticized for their unrealistic treatment of these alternatives and the constraints upon them and particularly for their neglect of the influence of the policies of employers and the state upon working-class strategies. The argument is supported by discussion of the economic and political context of the family wage demand in Britain up to the First World War and concludes that the strategy was more rational than many writers have suggested.     

‘That black boy’s different class!’: a historical sociology of the black middle-classes,boundary-work and local football in the British East-Midlands c.1970−2010

ABSTRACT

Seldom has leisure as a cultural activity been used to examine the boundary-work and lived realities of black middle-class men in the UK. Drawing on ethnographic data taken from a three-year study of one East-Midlands based African-Caribbean founded football club c.1970-2010, the article addresses these points. It widens existing knowledge on the British black middle-classes in three ways. (1) It indicates that the emergence of the black middle-classes in Leicester is discontinuous, and connected to wider social policies designed to improve the effectiveness of front-line services and pacify urban black youth in the 1980s. (2) Using Lacy’s black Lower and Upper middle-class (BLMC and BUMC) schemata, the paper sketches-out the boundary-work which exist between the club’s black working-class and BLMC and BUMC members, and between the BLMC and BUMC men within the club. (3) That sport possesses its own class-dimensions which further divided black men in Leicester during this period.     

Transitions to motherhood: young women’s desire for respectability,responsibility and moral worth

ABSTRACT

In the UK, teenage motherhood is depicted in the media and government policy as highly negative and problematic. Pregnant and mothering young women are constructed as socially excluded members of society who belong to an assumed underclass who lack responsibility and respectability. This article draws on the views and perspectives of pregnant and mothering young women in the east of England to examine how positive and successful subjects are defined and understood. It is illustrated how this group of working-class young women negotiated and resisted their positioning as ‘unfit’ mothers and ‘bad’ citizens. Central to their narratives was a desire to reassert themselves as respectable and responsible individuals through engaging in education and employment in order to achieve financial independence. It is argued that this notion of respectability provides a limited and limiting understanding of inclusion and moral worth for working-class young women.