6. The dream machine

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Brian Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Coal Mine ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Food Markets ◽  
Central Image

‘The dream machine’ looks at the role of the 'machine' in the writing of Zola. Many of Zola’s novels are organized round a machine (like the distilling machine in L’Assommoir) or a great central image or entity that functions like a machine (the food markets in The Belly of Paris, the coal mine in Germinal). In The Ladies’ Paradise the ‘machine’ is the department store, inspired by the Bon Marché, Paris’s first such store. A symbol of capitalism, the Second Empire, and the modern city, it is emblematic of consumer culture and contemporary changes in gender attitudes and class relations, representing modernity and ‘progress’. Shopping became a new leisure activity, allowing middle-class women to venture into public spaces and enjoy the new culture of the commodity; but in the process they were themselves commodified. Octave Mouret, the store’s owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. But when he falls in love with his salesgirl Denise Baudu, he discovers that she resists commodification.

The Garrison and the Wider Society

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dominy
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Side ◽  
Settler Society

This chapter examines the reflection of the British military hierarchy in the class relations in settler society by comparing the “respectable” actions of soldiers taking their discharge and becoming settlers with the “rough” actions of drunkenness and desertion. It first considers the garrison's influence in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Natal before discussing the social side of the garrison that emphasized class differentiation. It then explores the reinforcement of the colonial “middling” class by the recruitment of respectable soldier-settlers and how the Christian converts of Edendale, the amaKholwa, provided the new reference points for a community attempting to define itself in terms of middle-class respectability. It also looks at the role of drunkenness in acts of indiscipline and low morale among British troops in the garrison at Fort Napier, along with the hunting ideology that fed into broader concepts of masculinity, aggression, and images of warriors. The chapter shows that garrison activities were integral to the wider social and cultural life of settler society in Natal.

The Ladies' Paradise

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Sexual Attitudes ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the spectacular development of the modern department store in late nineteenth century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century. Octave Mouret, the store’s owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified. This new translation of the eleventh book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola’s greatest novels of the modern city.

scholarly journals Making (Anti)Modern Childhood: Producing and Consuming Toys in Late Victorian Canada

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braden P. L. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Prior to the First World War much of Canada’s toy supply came from Germany. When the guns of August sounded in 1914, Canadian consumers found themselves in the midst of a shortage of mass produced toys, dubbed the ‘toy famine’ in the popular press. Two incompatible solutions ultimately arose to deal with this problem of consumer demand and industrial supply. Middle class women, drawing on their work over the preceding decades distributing and producing toys for philanthropic means and the discourse of the conditioned child, turned to craft production using the labour of returned soldiers to refurbish second hand playthings and produce new ones as artisans. Canadian manufacturers, with the support of the state, pursued a policy designed to industrialize toy production in Canada for competition at home and abroad. In some cases, one group openly resisted the efforts of the other. Ultimately, these two visions made possible a debate about modernity and the role of industrial technology in Canadian family life and consumer culture.

A ROLE OF PERSONAL SUBSIDIARY FARMS IN A PRODUCT SUPPLYING OF THE FOOD MARKETS

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
V. Zvolinsky ◽  
O. Zvolinskaya ◽  
N. Matveeva ◽  
A. Alexandrov
Keyword(s):  
Food Markets

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

Unresolved Questions of German Medicine and Medical History in the Past and Present

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Sociology Of Medicine ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Victim Status ◽  
The Third Reich

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

Austerity, Women and the Role of the State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Dabrowski
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The Uk

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, the author of this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state's legitimization of austerity and women's everyday experiences, the book reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, the book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity. Delivering a timely account of the misconceptions of policies, discourses and representations around austerity in the UK, the book illustrates the complex ways through which austerity is experienced by women in their everyday lives.

scholarly journals Is the quest to eat healthy a route to enhancing consumer’s food security?

2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Kerr ◽  
Jill E. Hobbs
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Food Supply ◽  
Food Markets ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Food Supply Chains ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Private Standards ◽  
Regulatory Failure

Abstract Background On an individual level, food security has multiple dimensions and consumers exhibit heterogeneity in the extent to which different attributes matter in their quest for enhanced food security. The aim of this paper is to explain how the quest for individual food security arises and its dynamic nature and its implications for how food security-enhancing attributes are defined and how they are signaled, and for the role of regulators and food supply chains in establishing credible signals. Results The paper finds that the quest for enhanced individual food security is a dynamic process that responds to the disequilibrium that change brings. The changing role of standards and grades as signals in food markets is discussed as a precursor to considering the implications for both market and non-market (regulatory) failure in determining the appropriate role for the public sector in regulating food safety and quality standards and labeling. The rise of private standards is examined, along with a consideration of how these standards differ in terms of scope and objective and their implications for international trade in increasingly globalized food supply chains. Conclusions Despite the growth of private standards, a clear role remains for mandatory public standards, yet challenges arise when these standards differ across countries.

scholarly journals Congenital heart disease: factor affecting it and role of RBSK in dealing with situation

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 4437
Author(s):  
Martina S. Balat ◽  
Saurabh Kumar Sahu
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Folic Acid ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Pregnancy Outcome ◽  
Congenital Heart ◽  
Adverse Pregnancy Outcome ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Adverse Pregnancy

Background: Congenital heart diseases (CHD) is the second leading cause of death in infancy and childhood. So the purpose of this study to know socio-demographic profile and the maternal risk factors affecting CHD, and the role of RBSK in screening with respect to CHD.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted during June to October 2016 in Ahmedabad city. Parents of 169 children with CHD who were beneficiaries of RBSK during the previous 3 months were interviewed.Results: The majority of children were in the age group of 0-3 years 49.7% (mean±SD= 4.26±4). Majority of families belonged to the lower middle class IV (41.4%). 44% of mothers had primary education. Mothers with age >30 yrs were 55.6%. Only 30.9% of mothers had taken folic acid during the periconceptional period. Mothers with previous adverse pregnancy outcome were 40.2%. Maternal stress and high blood pressure were present in 33.7% and 24.8% of the mothers respectively. 48% of children were diagnosed through Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK).Conclusions: Lower middle class, lower maternal education, advanced maternal age, low folic acid intake, previous adverse pregnancy outcome, maternal stress and high blood pressure were the leading risk factors for CHD. RBSK is playing important role in screening and diagnosing of patients.

scholarly journals Eligibility Criteria for the Upper Middle Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meilutė Taljūnaitė
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Class Model ◽  
Eligibility Criteria ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
Upper Middle Class

Each country has its own criteria for the upper middle class. On the other hand, it is clear that even the general principles that define the middle class in different countries differ markedly between them. The US and British criteria are often compared. The role of the family as an element of social stratification is important in the British upper middle class model. The article advocates the influence of family stratification on the formation of the upper (and not only) middle class in Lithuania. Not only does the upper middle class have self-employment, its income is above average and it has higher education, it also influences, identifies trends and fundamentally shapes public opinion (an aspect of its ‘social role’). The broad upper middle class is not so much a guarantor of the welfare state but of social stability in the country.

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