Sexual needs, control, and refusal: how "doing" class and gender influences sexual risk taking

The poor are disproportionately affected by unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We know relatively little, however, about the sexual processes behind these disparities. Despite studies of gender enactment's influence on sexual behaviors, few analyses examine the sexual "doing" of social class. We conducted sexual history interviews with 36 women and men, half middle class and half poor and working class. Most respondents reported that men have greater sexual appetites than women, but the middle class were more likely to cite social influences while the poor and working-class respondents primarily ascribed biological origins. The social construction of sexual controllability among the middle class contributed to perceptions that sex was a containable force. Poor and working-class women described men's sexual needs as physiologically irrepressible, which shaped sexual refusal. Our findings move beyond socioeconomic status (SES) as a "risk factor" and explore two examples of how gender and social class mediate people's sexual selves and health.     

The Decimation of America's Middle Class and Its Meaning for Social Work

The current deterioration of America's middle class will test the ability of the social work profession to take the concept of class seriously and sharpen our understanding of the maldistribution of wealth as a form of oppression. The effort requires identifying and discrediting prevailing ideologies in both the popular culture and our profession. The middle-class crisis provides the opportunity to devise innovative coalitions of working-class and middle-class Americans. Recent efforts may point the way for social workers to help catalyze such movements.     

Reconsidering Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class(es)

This paper focuses on the early goals, past educational experiences, familial support, and current career goals of a sample of 80 White middle-class and working-class parents in a medium-sized northeastern city in the United States. The research will help determine whether members of the working class have lived in or still live in worlds of pain. Middle-class parents overwhelmingly report having had high goals and aspirations in high school, positive experiences in school, and supportive parents and role models in their families. Moreover, they report being satisfied in their current occupational positions. The working-class parents present a more complex pattern: For each of the areas studied—early goals, schooling, familial support, and job satisfaction and future goals—some of the working-class respondents report better experiences than the others. A more inclusive sampling strategy proved useful in this study in documenting the varied life experiences and attitudes found among members of the working class. These findings provide support for and modification of Rubin's (1976, 1994) portraits of the working class.     

Middle classes,democratization, and class formation

Conclusions This analysis of the South Korean case demonstrates the importance of the historical context for understanding the political role of the middle classes. In late industrialization, as occurred in South Korea and other East Asian countries, the new middle class has emerged as a significant social class, before the capitalist class established its ideological hegemony and before industrial workers developed into an organized class. Neither of these two major classes was able to offer an ideological or organizational leadership to the middle classes. In this context, the middle class can act as more than merely a dependent variable. In South Korea, the minjung movement led by an intellectual segment of the middle class played a critical role in the formation of the working class, by providing an opposition ideology, new politicized languages, organizational networks, and other resources.The Korean experience also highlights the significant role of the state in class formation. The predominant role of the state in economic and social development puts it at the center of major social conflicts. Social tensions and conflicts that emerge in rapid industrialization are directly and indirectly related to the character of the state and the economic policies it implements. A high level of politicization among Korean middle-class members, not only among intellectuals but also among a large number of white-collar workers, is the product of the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun and their repressive control of civil society. Both the nature of Korean middle-class politics and its relationship with the working-class formation have been shaped by the nature of state politics.The role of the middle class in the South Korean democratization process has been complex and variable, in part because of its internal heterogeneity and in part because of shifting political conjunctures in the transition to democracy. It would not make much sense, therefore, to characterize the Korean middle class as progressive or conservative, because different segments of it were inserted into the shifting conjunctures of political transition differently. At the same time, it would be also unsatisfactory to characterize middle-class politics as simply inconsistent or incoherent, because there exists some definite pattern in their behaviors.This analysis suggests that political behaviors of different segments of the middle class can be explained in terms of their locations within the broad spectrum of middle-class positions between capital and labor and by the changing balance of power between the two major classes. This is to acknowledge the fact that capital-labor relations constitute the primary axis of conflict and that middle-class politics must be understood ultimately in terms of this principal mechanism of class struggle. This is, however, not to assume that middle-class politics is simply a terrain of struggle between the capitalist and the working classes, as many Marxist theorists do. To repeat, in certain historical contexts middle-class politics can have an independent effect on the formation of the two major classes and the outcomes of struggles between the two.     

Class and class conflict: An objective-subjective interactive approach

Class conflict is one of the biggest sources of social tension. But why do some individuals perceive more class conflict than others? In this article, we consider how subjective self-placement interacts with objective social class to shape people's perception of class conflict. We argue that the common finding that individuals often misidentify with the incorrect class can have implications on how they perceive class conflict in their society. Analyzing data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP 1999 and 2009), we find that while, overall, perception of class conflict is higher among the working class and lower among salariats, self-placing lower in the social structure can bring perceptions closer together. Specifically, we show that salariats who deflate their class identities to levels expected of the working class perceive levels of class conflict similar to the working class. This study is among the first to document the disparate effects of the interplay between objective and subjective class on perception of class conflict across countries and over time.     

Social class and social liberalism

The relationship between social class and politics has been a central concern of political sociologists over the years. Recently various scholars have contended that the last twenty years have witnessed the emergence of noneconomic or social issues (e.g., equal rights, personal freedom) and of a middle class liberalism, especially on these social issues. In fact, it was claimed that this privileged radicalism has led to an inversion of the traditional relationship between class and political ideology, as now it is the middle class which is more supportive than the working class of liberal positions on the important social issues of the day. In this paper we subject these claims to a rigorous empirical test using 1973–1982 NORC data. Our findings indicate that there is little support forclass differences in social liberalism, and that most of the apparent differences are due to education. Furthermore, affluence does not have a consistent effect on social liberalism. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analyses for the nature of class differences in American society.     

Assimilation versus multiculturalism: The views of urban Americans

Parents of children in public schools in a large American urban center, representing a number of different ethnic groups, were interviewed about their personal views and feelings toward cultural and racial diversity in America today. Three main issues were addressed: respondents' attitudes toward the maintenance of heritage cultures versus assimilation; their attitudes toward bilingualism; and their attitudes toward other groups in the community. The analyses revealed important differences in attitudes between ethnic minority groups and established white and black groups. Nonetheless, strong support was shown for the retention of heritage cultures, even among middle-class white and working-class black Americans. The working-class white American sample was distinctive in its rejection of multiculturalism and in its negative attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups. All groups supported the idea of bilingualism for their children, and certain groups thought that public schools had an important role to play in its promotion. Overall, the results delineate a series of factors that affect intragroup and intergroup harmony and the processes of adjustment that transpire within a social system when it has to cope with ethnic and racial diversity.     

Race,Class, and Support for the Welfare State*

Two competing approaches to the study of African Americans—the race and class perspectives—have dominated attempts to explain their views on contemporary issues. To examine the race versus class debate, this study uses African Americans' views on government spending for five social welfare concerns: (1) improving and protecting the nation's health, (2) solving the problems of big cities, (3) halting rising crime rates, (4) dealing with drug addiction, and (5) improving the nation's education system. Data from the 1972–1990 General Social Surveys are used to compare middle-class blacks with both working-class blacks and whites and middle-class whites in terms of their support for government spending for those five social welfare issues. Examining group means, we found no significant difference between the two black classes but a significant difference between the black middle class and the white middle class on support for government spending in all areas except halting the rising crime rates (where there were no significant differences among the four groups). Similarly, using logistic regression analysis we found that race continued to have a significant effect on support for spending even after controlling for class, year, age, gender, education, income, and occupational prestige. In respect to social welfare spending, the results indicate support for the race, as opposed to the class, perspective; that is, race is better than class for predicting African American attitudes on government spending.     

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract This article uses the myth of the many-headed Hydra, commonly employed by members of various ruling classes around the Atlantic to describe the class struggles that surrounded them, to illuminate the history of the working class in the eighteenth century. It concentrates on two groups of workers, wage laborers (especially sailors) and slaves, two zones of the Atlantic, Europe and North America, and four moments in the history of the Atlantic working class: 1747, when, in the Knowles Riot in Boston, sailors and slaves fought the King's press gangs and in so doing created one of the central ideas of the 'Age of Revolution' 1768, when, in the London port strike, sailors, Irish coal heavers, and others pioneered one of the central ideas and activities of the modern working-class movement, the strike; 1776, when, in the American Revolution, sailors and slaves helped to instigate and win the world's first colonial war for liberation; and 1780, when, in the Gordon Riots, the polyglot working class of London liberated the prisons amid the greatest municipal insurrection of the eighteenth century. It argues that fixed, static notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality among historians have obscured a vital world of cooperation and accomplishment within a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, international working class.     

The intersection of youth masculinities,decreasing homophobia and class: an ethnography

This article examines the emergence of progressive attitudes toward homosexuality among working‐class boys in a sixth form in the south of England to develop an intersectional analysis of class, youth masculinities and decreasing homophobia. Drawing on three months of ethnographic data collection, I find that working‐class male youth intellectualize pro‐gay attitudes and that homophobic language is almost entirely absent from the setting. I document the presence of homosocial tactility, as well as the valuing of friendship and emotional closeness. However, these behaviours are less pronounced than documented among middle‐class boys, and I use these findings to advance understanding of how class influences the development of inclusive attitudes and behaviours. Inclusive masculinity theory is used to understand these findings, refining the theory and extending it to a new demographic.     

Symbolic violence and the neighbourhood: the educational aspirations of 7-8 year old working-class girls

This article focuses on the experiences of 7-8 year old working-class girls in Belfast, Northern Ireland and their attitudes towards education. It shows how their emerging identities tend to emphasize relationships, marriage and motherhood at the expense of a concern with education and future careers. The article suggests that one important factor that can help explain this is the influence of the local neighbourhood. In drawing upon Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and habitus and Elias' notion of figuration, the article shows how the local neighbourhood represents the parameters of the girls' social worlds. It provides the context within which the girls tend to focus on social relations within their community and particularly on family relationships, marriage and children. It also provides the context within which the girls tend to develop strong interdependent relationships with their mothers that also tend to encourage and reinforce the girls' particular gendered identities. The article concludes by arguing that there is a need for more research on working-class girls and education to look beyond the school to incorporate, more fully, an understanding of the influence of the family and local neighbourhood on their attitudes towards education and their future career aspirations.     

Oh,Canada

SUMMARY

This article focuses on an exploratory study, documenting the experience of ten working class gay men in Toronto. Using qualitative methods in an effort to uncover clues about how the informants themselves perceive the experience, this article offers practice insight into the world of some working class gay men. Various themes such as the issue of appearance, the role of work, coming out to families, and attitudes and participation in the Toronto gay political/social scene are discussed.     

American Network for Intervention in Situations of Social Suffering (RAISSS): A Case Study of a Civil Society Organization Network

The civil society organizations networks in the Latin American region are increasingly participating in the public policy advocacy. There are many studies that address them, but they do it through more in qualitative methodological approaches but there are few analyzed from a social network analysis approach. We present a case study that analyzes the American Network for Intervention in Situations of Social Suffering (Red Americana de Intervención en Situaciones de Sufrimiento Social, RAISSS), a transnational network of civil society networks from 15 Latin American countries that work with the same meta-model, called ECO², to promote social inclusion and public policy advocacy.     

The re-making of the English working class?

Conclusion More than twenty-five years after its publication The Making of the English Working Class remains a landmark work in English history and the study of class formation. Thompson's formulation and application of agency and experience in understanding the process of class formation have altered the ways historians and social scientists approach the study of class. From its inception The Making has been a lightening rod for criticism, some of it piquant and politically charged. In the latest round of critique, Gareth Stedman Jones and Joan Wallach Scott have argued that Thompson seriously neglects the role of discourse in class formation, and in doing so has presented a partial and distorted picture. They each have offered analyses that find a central role for discourse in the process of class formation. Stedman Jones sees political radicalism as a guiding force of working-class collective action, while Scott finds a fundamental gendering of the ways in which the working class was organized through discourse.Both Stedman Jones and Scott are clearly correct in observing that discourse played an important role in this working-class history, yet their accounts are reductionist and highly skewed interpretations of a rich and complex history. By privileging discourse as a casual force in class formation they shunt experience and agency into minor roles, providing impoverished accounts of how the working class was indeed active in its own making.The alternative I have proposed is to focus on discourse as an intermediate process linking experience and agency, animated through social organization and collective action. The English working class of the early nineteenth century faced degradation of their labor and political oppression of rights they perceived as fundamental. In response to these trials they constructed expressions of their grievances and visions of solutions through the discourse streams available to them. Through the contextual use of various streams they articulated a consciousness of class. This process itself was part of the class struggle that was their making. In this sense, discourse framed the painting of the panorama, and perhaps added shading, hue, and perspective, but it did not create the picture. As Thompson, following Marx, has observed, it is people that do the making, even if it is not just as they please.     

The Distinction Between Social Distance and Stereotyping

An analysis of survey data from a large city in the Southwest shows that social distance and stereotyping are distinct components of prejudice in white attitudes toward both blacks and American Indians. Further, whites perceive more social distance between themselves and blacks than between themselves and Indians. There is evidence of a smaller difference in the levels of stereotyping of Indians and blacks by whites.     

Working-Class Studies: Ongoing and New Directions

This paper gives an account of working-class studies as it has developed in the USA and UK. It includes a comparative assessment of ways in which the working-class and class analysis appear within academe. This argues that the different role played by social classes in the post-war settlement and its subsequent breakdown can account for divergent fortunes of class analysis in response to similar developments. The paper unpacks some of the opportunities and threats to further development of working-class studies in the UK. It is argued that the field needs to be developed in a way that is reflexively self-critical and avoids reproducing middle-class experience as universal. However, it notes the challenge of opening up space for the working class within the academy, particularly given the problem of the institutional embodiment of class together with the rigid framework of higher education in the UK.     

Working‐class participation,middle‐class aspiration? Value,upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education

This paper interrogates the relationship between working‐class participation in higher education (HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working‐class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to ‘become middle class’. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different ‘forms of capital’, or symbolic ‘mastery’ (Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of ‘creditor’ to whom the working‐class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working‐class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working‐class culture as ‘deficient’ and working‐class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of ‘escape’ implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of ‘fugitivity’, to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor.     

青年婚恋观现状透析

当前,“80后”正值婚恋高峰期。在改革开放和多元时代下成长起来的“80后”在恋爱观、择偶观、性观念和婚姻观上有着自己独特鲜明的看法。他们直白朴素的恋爱观、多元务实的择偶观、热情与保守相交织的性观念以及“个人主义”的婚姻观,不仅直接影响着个体对未来婚姻、家庭的责任和义务的承担,而且还间接影响着整个社会的主流婚恋价值观趋势。对“80后”婚恋观现状及其原因的探讨,有利于“80后”树立起正确的婚恋观,实现婚姻家庭幸福;有利于社会稳定及和谐社会的构建：更有利于实现中华民族的伟大复兴。     

Class Reproduction by Four Year Olds

While scholars know that young children are active if inadvertent participants in social reproduction, little has been said about how young children engage in class reproduction. Through observing in a preschool classroom with a class diverse student body, I show that preschoolers are already class actors, performing class through their linguistic styles. Upper-middle-class children speak, interrupt, ask for help, and argue more often than working-class children. Upper-middle-class children’s classed linguistic style effectively silences working-class students, gives them less power, and allows them fewer opportunities to develop their language skills. The children’s linguistic class performances have immediate consequences and potential future implications for class reproduction.