Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century.Neil J. Smelser

1993 ◽  
Vol 98 (5) ◽  
pp. 1231-1233
Author(s):  
David Levine
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Dunick

<p>The New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP) was the first radical socialist party in this country. The decade in which it existed was a time of rapid social change. The NZSP began in 1901 as a reaction against the Liberal Party which dominated New Zealand politics at the time. In its first five years the party had two main branches in Wellington and Christchurch, but it grew rapidly after 1907 with the expansion of industrial unionism. The NZSP was overshadowed by the Federation of Labour and never developed a coherent national organisation. As the working class began to organise nationally to challenge the Massey Government, the NZSP failed to adapt to the new political situation and dissolved in 1913.  The party began as a group of marginal outsiders, but as society changed and class became an important political factor, the NZSP played an important role in spreading new ideas and educating a generation of socialists. When the NZSP ended in 1913 the ideas it had promoted were widely accepted among New Zealand’s organised working class.</p>


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


2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 1177-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Crean

This article explores affective formations of class consciousness. Through autoethnography and conversations and discussion sessions with working class women, the article contributes to a sociology of social class that recognises how people come to know their class positioning in spaces outside of waged relations. The article argues that affective relations and affective inequalities inform women’s experiences and consciousness of inequality generated by the class system. Their consciousness of the class system is narrated through their care relational identities, discontent with affective inequalities generated by the class system and their attitudes and actions for social change. This implies an affective formation of class consciousness referred to as care consciousness. Care consciousness takes seriously what is refused legitimacy at a sociological and political level yet articulated privately by the women as they discuss experiences of the class system.


Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

This chapter examines how ideas about class, community, and individualism figured in the modernization of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the development, under Kinnock and Blair, of a new imagined constituency for Labour—a ‘new working class’ or, as Blair put it, ‘new middle class’. The sources of this vision lay partly in academic theorizing, but also in the backgrounds of key modernizers, and in new polling and focus group techniques for researching social attitudes. Modernizers understood the new majoritarian constituency in society as united by aspirations, and reoriented socialism to emphasize the use of community action—through the state—to secure a wide distribution of opportunity and security throughout society, in order to enable individuals to achieve those aspirations. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of these beliefs on policy relating to poverty, inequality, trade unionism, and community.


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