Attitudes to Class in the ‘100 Families’ Study, 1985–1988

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Occupational Structure ◽  
Class Community

This chapter reuses interviews conducted in 1985–8 for Paul Thompson’s ‘100 Families’ study to examine interviewees’ thoughts about class in the middle of the Thatcher decade. It finds that ambivalence and ordinariness were key themes in the discussions of many. Many did not want to class themselves, for ‘class talk’ was associated with snobbishness, superior and inferior attitudes, and because many thought that changes in the occupational structure, housing, and lifestyles had created a large ‘ordinary’ group in the middle of society: not workless but also not privileged. Some interviewees confidently claimed a working-class identity; this was usually the case where individuals had trade union experiences and/or a close-knit, working-class community to draw on. Among younger generations, however, some said that, though older class markers had disappeared, new ones had grown up to take their place.

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Boyle Heights ◽  
Good For ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Deed Restrictions ◽  
Class Community

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

scholarly journals Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042098512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Folkes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Class Community

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

Roundtable discussion: Organising cleaners in the context of Covid-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-163
Author(s):  
Heather Wakefield ◽  
Helen O’Connor ◽  
Marjorie Mayo ◽  
Jonathan White
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Step Change ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
The Status ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Minority Ethnic

People working as cleaners represent a substantial part of the modern British working class. Low-paid, often part-time, disproportionately female and, more recently, from black and minority ethnic and migrant communities, this workforce has historically been seen as hard to organise. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has elevated the status of cleaning as a key part of maintaining public health. In this article, trade union organisers with experience of working with cleaners discuss the possibilities of the current conjuncture for effecting a step change in both unionisation and the reconstruction of public services.

Trade union strategy in fashion retail in Italy and the USA: Converging divergence between institutions and mobilization?

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Gasparri ◽  
Peter Ikeler ◽  
Giovanna Fullin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Contract Workers ◽  
Action Project ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Fashion Retail ◽  
Retail Workers ◽  
Effective Representation

We investigate trade union strategies in fashion retail, a sector with endemic low wages, precarity and a representation gap. Unions in Milan organized ‘zero-hours contract’ workers, while their counterparts in New York established an alternative channel of representation, the Retail Action Project. We argue, first, that the dynamics of both cases are counterintuitive, displaying institution-building in the USA and grassroots mobilization in Italy; second, union identity stands out as a key revitalizing factor, since only those unions with a broad working-class orientation could provide an effective representation for fashion retail workers.

Linking Moralisation and Class Identity: The Role of Ressentiment and Respectability in the Social Reaction to ‘Chavs’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
White Working Class

This paper aims to link two fields of research which have come to form separate lines of inquiry: the sociology of moralisation and studies on class identity. Expanding on recent papers by Young (2009 , 2011 ) and others, the paper argues that the concepts of ressentiment and respectability can be used to connect moralisation processes and the formation of class identities. This is explored through a case study of the social reaction in Britain to white working-class youths labelled ‘chavs’. It is demonstrated that chavs are constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have some elements of a moral panic. Moreover, moralisation is performative in constructing class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’ white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous. Moralising social reactions are here to an important extent triggered by feelings of ressentiment. This is a dialectical process where respectability and ressentiment are tied, not only to the social control of certain non-respectable working-class others, but also to the moral self-governance of the moralisers.

scholarly journals "COMPANY OF MUTUAL AID OF PRIVATE CUSTOMERS" OF GALICIA: ANALYSIS OF THE STATUTE AND ACTIVITY

2017 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
Ihor Berest
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Present State ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Mutual Assistance ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Significance

On the basis of trade union periodicals, the principle of historicism, scientific and objective approach, the article analyzes and shows the statute and activities of the trade union of private servants of Eastern Galicia. The present state and development of the historiography of the problems, the history of the trade union movement was investigated, it was proved that the main event in the trade union movement of the middle of the ХІХ century became social processes in Eastern Galicia, which created a new working-class movement on the material and moral protection of workers. The study of this problem has an important scientific significance, since it enables to show the work of the first professional union of private employees, to analyze their program document and to show the evolution of trade union movement until the adoption of the Constitution of 1867. Among the works devoted to this topic, unfortunately, there are no monographs or scientific researches by Ukrainian scholars, therefore, in the article we rely on the study of Polish scholars: Bali Stanislav, Kishchinsky Lucian, and trade union periodicals, where there is an attempt to present the history of trade union movement in a new course of events. Thus, we can conclude that the Society for the Mutual Assistance of Private Servants was formed, the founding of which was sought or projected by employees from 1846. And, despite for political blockages, or attacks by employers and many other reasons, the suspension of the creation of a basic document, however, achieved the goal of 1867 - the Society began its activities.

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