HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS IDENTIFICATION IN TAIWAN?

Data from a 1992 survey (N = 2,377) of the population of Taiwan show that class identification is rooted in the objective stratification system: the higher one's education, occupational status, power, and income, the more likely one is to identify with the middle or upper classes rather than the working or lower classes. Class interest theory predicts that the higher a person's objective position and subjective class identification, the more likely s/he is to hold a conservative ideology concerning class issues (e.g., do large firms have too much power? Should employees protest against their employer's personnel practices, and go on strike?). Multiple regression analysis provides only partial confirmation for class interest theory. The finding that the most educated and those in professional and technical occupations are the least conservative on class issues is interpreted as supporting a “new class” form of class interest theory. While the Taiwan respondents are not generally conservative on these class issues, their class identification appears to have little to do with whether they are conservative or nonconservative, either before or after objective position in the stratification system is held constant.     

The middle classes in rural England 1971–1991

This paper examines the issue of whether the English countryside has been ‘captured’ by the service classes. It examines this issue with regard to three questions: the role of the service classes in deciding dominant rural images; their role in controlling change processes in the countryside; and their share of the rural population. For the first two, doubts are raised about the importance that is being attached to middle class ‘capture’ ideas. The demographic takeover of the countryside is examined empirically, using census data on individuals from the Longitudinal Study. This shows that notions of a demographic dominance by the service classes are exaggerated and largely apply to SE England. Extending class membership to include those who have ever been in a class indicates that there is a comparatively slight tendency for migration into rural areas to be associated with downward social mobility amongst service class members. Inward movement was more closely allied to longer term service class membership. In gender terms rural areas were not distinguished from other zones in the same region in terms of the likelihood that female in-migrants would stay in full-time employment or leave the paid workforce.     

Polarization in Mothers' Employment

Using secondary analysis of large, nationally representative government data sets, we explore the interaction of occupational class and the age of youngest child in mothers' labour force participation. We show that levels of full-time working vary markedly in each occupational class and by age of youngest child. Within part-time working, the principal form of labour force participation for mothers, there are marked class differences in eligibility for ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ employment rights, as well as in the ‘quality’ of part-time working. We suggest that the impact on mothers' employment of the age of the youngest child is mediated by mothers' occupational class and conclude that there is growing evidence of polarities in the employment experience of mothers in different occupational classes.     

The nature of working in the United States: an occupational therapy perspective

Although working is considered by occupational therapy practitioners to be an important life role, there is very little information about the nature of working in the occupational therapy literature. This article reviews the construct of working in three ways: 1) The history of working and how it has shaped the modern beliefs about working; 2) The nature of working; and 3) The health promoting attributes of working. The paper will also discuss research done on how working is viewed by individuals with disabilities and will touch on some of the implications of the cultural bias in the workplace toward workers with disabilities. Through this increased knowledge of the nature of working, occupational therapy practitioners and other vocational rehabilitation professionals will be better equipped to break down the subtle cultural barriers, and help individuals with disabilities to participate in working.     

Social origin,field of study and graduates’ career progression: does social inequality vary across fields?

Research on stratification and mobility has consistently shown that in the UK there is a direct impact of social origin on occupational destination net of educational attainment even for degree‐holders. However, only a few studies applied a longitudinal and dynamic perspective on how intergenerational mobility shapes graduates’ working careers. Using multilevel growth curve modelling and data from the 1970 British cohort study (BCS70), we contribute to this research by looking at the emergence of social inequalities during the first ten years since labour market entry. We further distinguish between graduates of different fields of study as we expect social disparities to develop differently due to differences in initial occupational placement and upward mobility processes. We find that parental class does not affect occupational prestige over and above prior achievement. Separate analyses by the field of study show that initial differences in occupational prestige and career progression do not differ between graduates from different classes of origin in STEM fields, and arts and humanities. It is only in the social sciences that working‐class graduates start with lower occupational prestige but soon catch up with their peers from higher classes. Overall, our results indicate no direct effect of social origin on occupational attainment for degree‐holders once we broaden our focus to a dynamic life course perspective.     

Occupational Level and the Love of Money

Abstract

As an alternative to the embourgeoisement hypothesis, Goldethorpe, et al., have advanced the notion that the modern working class is privatized in social relations and money-oriented in culture. The present paper addresses itself to this latter point of money-orientedness. Presenting data from a 1973 national survey, the findings support the idea that semi-skilled and unskilled workers place a greater emphasis on money than do other occupational levels. Differences in emphasis on the importance of money are not explained when income is used as a covariate. A part of these differences is explained by education. When both education and income are controlled, differences between occupational levels vanish except for the difference between the semiskilled/unskilled and all other levels. The findings tend to support Form's hypothesis of the ‘internal stratification of the working class” with increasing industrialization.     

MEASURING AND ANALYZING CLASS INEQUALITY WITH THE GINI INDEX INFORMED BY MODEL-BASED CLUSTERING

The most widely used measure for studying social, economic, and health inequality is the Gini index/ratio. Whereas other measures of inequality possess certain useful characteristics, such as the straightforward decomposability of the generalized entropy measures, the Gini index has remained the most popular, at least in part due to its ease of interpretation. However, the Gini index has a limitation in measuring inequality. It is less sensitive to how the population is stratified than how individual values differ. The twin purposes of this paper are to explain the limitation and to propose a model-based method—latent class/clustering analysis for understanding and measuring inequality. The latent cluster approach has the major advantage of being able to identify potential "classes" of individuals who share similar levels of income or one or more other attributes and to assess the fit of the model-based classes to the empirical data, based on different cluster distributional assumptions and the number of latent classes. This paper distinguishes class inequality from individual inequality, the type that is better captured by the Gini. Once the classes are estimated, the membership of estimated classes obtained from the best fitting model facilitates the decomposition of the Gini index into individual and class inequality. Class inequality is then measured by two relative stratification indices based on either the relative size of the Gini between-class components or the relative number of stratified individuals. Therefore, the Gini index is extended and assisted by model-based clustering to measure class inequality, thereby realizing its great potential for studying inequality. Income data from France and Hungary are used to illustrate the application of the method.     

Women and class – a problematic relationship?

The relationship between gender and class is important and controversial within sociology and has significant theoretical and political dimensions. But how do women experience class?Is it a meaningful dimension of everyday life The experiential aspects of class were explored with two hundred women, A third of them perceived social class m terms perceived of income. Others perceived it in terms of occupation their parents. their partner's or their own type of housing or the need to work to earn a living These different perceptions relate to women's own occupational class and educational background more closely than they relate to the occupational class of their partners. Women occupied full-time as housewives did not appear to differ from those m full or part-time paid employment m terms of their perceptions of class, nor did they experience their situation as marginal to the class structure of society. Although women's class does count there arc problems with assigning individual women to classes solely on the basis of their current position in the occupational hierarchy.     

“People in Stockholm are smarter than countryside folks” – Reproducing urban and rural imaginaries in film and life

This article explores the celebrated film The Hunters (Swedish title: Jägarna) within the context of the discourse of Internal Orientalism. By juxtaposing a contemporary Swedish film with historical accounts and contemporary news media, I demonstrate how the film reworks and (re)produces representations of the rural North (Norrland), constructing stereotypes enmeshed with familiar and global genre-specific stereotypes of a traditional and intransigent population positioned in rural areas and a modern and progressive population in urban areas. This paper shows how the representation in popular culture becomes enmeshed with the representation in news media and politics and how this helps obscure geography, gender, ethnicity and class by way of positioning representations of the middle class in urban spaces and white male working class in rural spaces, and by way of constructing class as a choice of lifestyle or culture.     

Gender,class and rurality: Australian case studies

The interrelationship between gender and class in rural spaces has received little attention. While rural scholars have focused on the implications for class from processes of gentrification and agricultural and rural restructuring, these analyses have remained largely ungendered. Similarly, feminist rural studies have rarely explored subjectivity as gendered and classed. This paper contributes to rural theories of class and gender by drawing on the work of contemporary feminist class theorists to explore class as gendered and inscribed through personal memory, community narrative and through everyday values and interactions associated with work, leisure and family. To explore intersections of gender, class and rurality, the article draws on data from interviews from two separate Australian studies of farming families. Narratives highlighted the ambiguity of class, the gendered and classed nature of voluntary organisations in rural spaces, and moral values and signifiers associated with what it is to be a ‘good’ farmer and a ‘good’ community member. The data indicate how values of moral worth are gendered and classed and inscribed on farming women and men. This qualitative examination of gender and class in rural spaces draws attention to class as being more than a ranking on an occupational scale, property ownership or degrees of engagement in consumption. Rather, it reveals class as emotionally inscribed in ways that are gendered, economic and moral, and represented through symbolic signifiers and cultural narratives.     

Occupational Sex Composition and Marriage: The Romantic Cost of Gender-Atypical Jobs

The author considers the mechanisms by which occupational sex composition (the proportion of women and men in an occupation) might be associated with romantic transitions in the United States. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to 2014, the author estimates the odds of marriage during a period of 35 years as a function of occupational and personal characteristics. Men's odds of marriage are decreased by working in predominately female occupations (75%–100% female) when compared with working in predominately male occupations (0%–25% female) or integrated (26%–74% female) occupations. Also, working in a predominately female occupation increases the odds that men have never married by ages 30 and 40. Women's odds of marriage are unrelated to occupational sex composition. Although the author focuses on marriage, the results are robust to including cohabitation as a competing risk. The author uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health 1994 to 2008 to replicate these findings in a more recent cohort with additional control variables. The romantic penalty for men's occupational gender atypicality demonstrates the continued devaluation of female activities and attributes and the resulting rigidity of expectations for men's gendered behavior, which may reinforce occupational segregation.     

CROSS-CLASS PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL CLASS

This article explores how members of the American middle and working classes perceive themselves and each other's lives. The data offer an opportunity to address the relevance of social class as a concept for understanding American society while at the same time helping to clarify the debate over the question of whether the working class is integrated into American society or angry, alienated, and resistant to mainstream goals and institutions. The data reported here suggest that the attitudes held by many members of the middle class, which members of the working class perceive during social interaction, have an impact on the self-confidence of working-class individuals, causing some of them to experience self-doubt, pain, and hidden injuries. Social class as defined by education, occupational prestige, and income still matters in the United States. The American working class may not be class conscious in the classic Marxian sense of the concept - a class for itself - but it does have a deep understanding of the inequalities between "us" and "them". The respondents in this study do not yet know they live in a postmodern world. The attitudes and actions of members of the middle class toward working-class culture help (re) create the American working class.     

农村青年婚姻市场层级化的社会学分析

当前农村青年婚姻市场上,以"家庭地理位置"和"家庭经济条件"为分层标准,农村男青年被划分为不同的层级。不同层级的男青年在婚姻市场上有着不同的处境:较高层级的男青年拥有较大的择偶主动权,中层的男青年也基本能够进入婚姻,较低层级的男青年择偶困难,成为大龄未婚男青年的风险较大。因此,形成不同层级的原因是性别比失衡使得农民经济上的分化在婚姻市场上凸显出来,市场经济冲击下的农民择偶观念理性化,打工潮加剧了农村婚龄人口性别比的失衡。     

Social Classes in Contemporary Sweden*

Survey data from Gavle, Sweden, are examined to determine whether the three Swedish occupational groups reflect actual social classes. Analyses reveal that (a) occupational status is heavily influenced by educational attainment; (b) education and amount and source of income all differ significantly among the three social groups; (c) upward generational occupational mobility is largely restricted to the top two groups; (d) Sweden is generally perceived as having three social classes; (e) most persons in all three groups identify with Group II; and (f) Swedes in all social groups desire to increase economic and social equality. The argument is made that Sweden may indeed contain a three class structure based primarily on occupation, but many Swedes view this class structure largely in economic terms. Recent marked rises in income across all social classes in Sweden have therefore left most people relatively satisfied with their society.     

Changing class complexions on and in the British countryside

This paper explores the class complexion of the English and Welsh countryside utilising the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (or NS-SEC), as well as reflecting on the value of this classification given claims as to the ‘death of class’ as a meaningful subject of analysis. The paper situates analysis using the NS-SEC in a paradoxical context, whereby its very use appears, on the one hand, to demonstrate successful incorporation of academic constructions of class into the agencies of governmental social statistical production, while, on the other hand, academic discourses, including some within rural studies, appear to have undermined its very rationale. The paper argues that the classification lends support to claims that rural studies have used an overly aggregative concept of the middle class that obscures the spatial distribution of classes in the British countryside, although interpretation of the classification also needs to consider a range of broader criticisms of class analysis. The paper concludes by suggesting that the paradox surrounding the classification and rural class analysis more generally might be viewed through Latour's, [1999. Pandora's hope. Harvard University Press, London] concept of knowledge as a ‘circulatory system.’     

'It's like saying "coloured" ': understanding and analysing the urban working classes

This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term ‘working class’, and consider what forms ‘working class‐ness’ takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We emphasise the heterogeneity of the working class(es), the differences in attitude and experiences based on place, gender, occupational status, education, age and family membership. Then we consider our respondents in relation to their strategies and exercise of agency, their engagement with the labour market, and their embedded‐ness in social networks. We conclude that one way of understanding the lives of urban working class families is to consider the extent to which they ‘manage or struggle to cope’, a focus which emphasises process, activity and the differential degrees of agency which the respondents are able to exercise.     

From ‘sustainable rural communities’ to ‘social sustainability': giving voice to diversity in Mangakahia Valley, New Zealand

Despite widespread interest in the notion of sustainability, little progress has been made towards an understanding of its social dimensions. Nonetheless, the concept of ‘sustainable rural communities’ is embedded in popular, policy and academic discourses, where the needs of ‘rural communities’ are usually equated with those of farm families. Our ethnographic research in Northland, New Zealand illustrates the diverse interests to be found within ‘rural communities'. Interviews and participant observation were undertaken between August 1995 and July 1996 in the Mangakahia Valley. The increasing divergence in the ethnic, class and occupational makeup of the population has brought with it complexities in terms of what can be said to contribute to ‘sustainable rural communities'. We suggest that ‘sustainable rural communities’ be treated as a folk category, and instead, social science discourse should resort to the broader concept of social sustainability, which will have a locally defined content, not a universal definition, but will include elements of livelihood, social participation, justice and equity.     

Women and the rural idyll

The existence of a ‘rural idyll’ has been widely accepted by social scientists working within the rural field. Yet the term itself has received relatively little critical attention. In particular, the variable characteristics and impacts of the rural idyll amongst different groups within the rural population has been largely overlooked. The cultural turn in rural geography and the emphasis which has recently been placed on identifying and studying the rural ‘other’ provides an important opportunity for the notion of a rural idyll to be unpacked from the perspective of different rural dwellers. This paper investigates the role of the rural idyll in maintaining rural gender relations. It examines women's attitudes towards and experiences of two key elements of the rural idyll; the family and the community. Drawing on material from interviews with women in rural Avon in the south west of England, the paper shows how women's identity as ‘rural women’ is closely tied in to their images and understanding of rural society. It is argued, in particular, that the opportunities available and acceptable to women are built on very strong assumptions and expectations about motherhood and belonging within a rural community. Some of the more practical implications of these expectations are explored in the context of women's involvement in the community and in the labour market.     

Wer wurde als homosexuell verfolgt?

This paper investigates the impact of the social structure on the persecution of homosexuals in Austria during the Nazi regime and the following democratic Republic. So far local studies for the German case have come to the conclusion that the middle class has been victim to the same, or event to a greater extent, of state-supported homophobia as the lower social class. An analysis of court files confirms this finding partly but reveals the working class as the mainly affected social group in the Austrian case. Social status, however, did only have a marginal influence on the length of imprisonment. The fact that different occupational groups were overrepresented among the sentenced homosexuals in the two considered periods of time (1938?C1944; 1945?C1955) points to systematic patterns of repression. As historical data is sparse we can only formulate hypotheses on why certain persons were more likely to be sentenced for being homosexual than others.     

The Implication of Wife's Occupational Attainment for Husband's Class Identification*

Drawing upon research indicating that the subjective class identifications of working wives are to a considerable extent the result of their own occupational attainments, this study seeks to determine if husbands of working wives also derive perceptions of status from their wives' occupational attainments. Regression analysis is conducted on a subset of husbands of working wives in three General Social Surveys gathered from 1973 to 1975. A husband's level of subjective class identification is unaffected by the occupational achievements of his working wife. If husbands and wives derive perceptions of status from different sources, then they may not perceive themselves as sharing the same level of status in society.