Working-Class Masculinities at the Nexus of Work, Family and Intimacy in the Age of Neoliberalism: Or, Are the Times Really A-Changin’?

Author(s):  
Kirsty Whitman
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Edin ◽  
Timothy Nelson ◽  
Andrew Cherlin ◽  
Robert Francis

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 86-92
Author(s):  
V. Gavriliuk ◽  
T. Gavriliuk

The Object of the Study. The correlation of class and stratification approaches in Soviet and post-Soviet sociology.The Subject of the Study. New working class in Russian sociological discourse.The Purpose of the Study. The objectives are to substantiate the necessity of actualizing of the class approach in the study of modern Russian society social structure; identifying the signs of a new working class.The Main Provisions of the Article. In accordance with Marxist ideology, in Soviet sociology a working class was regarded as a protagonist of social change and a center of attraction for the forces of social change. The contemporary integration of workers into the capitalist system, the transition to the economy of the sixth order, the defeat of socialism, the global transition to a postindustrial society require to comprehend the «working question» from a new prospective. The authors actualize the problem of revealing the content and structure of the «new working class», traditional and actual methods of its theoretical conceptualization. The features of class and stratification approaches to the allocation of the working class in the structure of society have been studied. It has been shown that the excessive specification of criteria, non-critical declarative positioning of the middle class into the basis of the Russian society structure, led to a high degree of uncertainty in the model of the social structure of the Russian society of the early XXI century. The author's definition of the concept of a new working class has been given. Defining “the new working class of modern Russia”, we mean a group of employees in all spheres of material production and services whose content and nature of work are routinized and segmented; not participating in management and not having the property rights to the enterprise in which they work. Most of the times, these are workers without higher education. Power and control in the organization do not belong to them, their degree of freedom and authority in organizational structures are limited, they do not influence on the planning and control of labor


2020 ◽  
pp. 180-219
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford

This chapter connects Martineau’s contribution to shaping the Victorian press during its extraordinary rapid evolution during the 1840s to her work for Dickens at Household Words and shows that her agenda for the press developed earlier and was far more nuanced than has been previously recognized. Establishing herself in the elite intellectual quarterlies, simultaneously working with Charles Knight on the Penny Magazine and other projects aimed at mass-market working-class readers, and contributing to Thornton Leigh Hunt and G.G. Lewes’s progressive weekly The Leader in 1850-51, Martineau developed a remarkably flexible and constantly evolving journalistic presence that, in the 1850s and early 1860s, would allow her to become a consistent presence in both mass-market and elite press venues, to appear, simultaneously, in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly outlets.


2013 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 191-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Putnam

AbstractNew immigration restrictions in the United States and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s made legal entry dependent on specific kinship formalities. This article explores the impact of the new system through a study of British Caribbean migrants. Because family patterns and the place of church and state sanction within them varied greatly by class—here, as in many parts of the world—the result was a curtailment of mobility that affected elites very little, and working-class would-be migrants enormously. In order to elucidate de facto patterns of exclusion, the author concludes, historians of transnational labor must begin paying more attention to the work “family” does.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philip Boardman

The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests, Enderby Jackson, later wrote in his autobiography that other business dealings prevented him from further involvement in the series. Jackson had made full use of his talents and contacts to bring these remarkable working-class musical ensembles to the emergent national attraction that was the Crystal Palace. However, Jackson's manipulation of publicity and managerial style obstruct easy analysis of the contests. Moreover, Jackson later sought to protect his legacy by conjuring a smokescreen in his memoirs to obscure the real reasons for the failure of the Crystal Palace contests after 1863. The entrepreneurial environment is never a stable one, and it should not be presumed that the accolades accorded to the opening contest would translate into its continuance on an annual basis. However, the fact that the contests were attended by many thousands of visitors each year and Jackson's assertion that they were a financial success stand in stark contrast to what is implied by their sudden end. This article demonstrates how close examination of previously unconsidered letters, surviving documentation, and other sources cast doubt on whether the contest series was ever an extraordinary success.


2021 ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Manon Burz-Labrande

This article delves into the dismissal of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls as “wastes of print” (Oliphant 1858: 202) on the grounds of public concern for education, and relies on a close reading of an Edward Lloyd unstamped penny publication in order to reassess the relationship between education and the wider world of penny periodicals. The first part examines the upper classes’ attempts to establish an educational environment aimed at the working classes in the first part of the nineteenth century, among which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and proposes to reconsider the reasons for the relative failure of such initiatives in relation to popular penny publications. I then draw on Edward Jacobs’s analysis of ‘industrial literacy’ and urban street culture to analyse the rejection of such publications as Edward Lloyd’s, by disentangling the mechanisms to which contemporary critics consistently resort. Finally, in keeping with Louis James’s statement that “periodicals are cultural clocks by which we tell the times” (1982: 365), I explore the various pieces contained in a full 1846 number of Lloyd’s penny publication People’s Periodical and Family Library contemporary to the failure of the SDUK, in order to understand the potential dialogue in place with publications and criticism advocating ‘useful knowledge’. This article aims to prove that Lloyd’s penny publications were, in fact, an undeniable point of contact between the working classes and education.


Author(s):  
David Nasaw

The traditional high school education, by unfitting its graduates “for work with their hands,” encouraging them instead to look beyond the factory for their future employment, had become more of a problem than a solution. Still, despite its faults, it remained the only viable institutional solution to the “youth” and “worker” problems. To eject working-class youth from the institutions best situated to ease them through the perils of adolescence into the responsibilities of adulthood would serve no good purpose. The task confronting the business community and the critics of the high schools was a complex one: they wanted to bring as many “plain people” as possible into the high schools and keep them there through their teens, but in such a way that their expectations for life after graduation would not be inappropriately raised. Industrial schooling appeared to be the solution. Not only would such programs direct students towards realistic and realizable futures, but they would also attract many working class students who, the experts claimed, had been frightened away by the traditional secondary school curriculum. The masses, it was said, were not entering or remaining in the high schools because the high school curriculum had not been adjusted to their special needs. The muckrakers took great delight in calling attention to what they considered the failure of the high schools to move out of the dark ages. The secondary schools' exclusive emphasis on “culture,” it was argued, might have been appropriate to an earlier era, but was most definitely not appropriate to the modern age. “Our medieval high schools: shall we educate children for the 12th or the 20th century?” asked a Saturday Evening Post article somewhat ingenuously in 1912, the conclusion having already been reached that the schools were at least eight centuries behind the times. The critics of the public high schools, especially those from the business world, accepted without question the inability of the “masses” to proceed at the same academic rate as the “classes.” The working-class children were failing because they could not keep up with their middle-class counterparts and, in fact, were totally incapable of learning the same kinds of things.


1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1040
Author(s):  
T. Neal Garland ◽  
Deborah M. Merrill

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