Beauty and Quality for All

2019 ◽  
pp. 453-474
Author(s):  
María A. Cabrera Arús
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Socialist

This article focuses on sartorial visions put forth by institutions and representatives of the Cuban regime throughout the 1960s to the 1980s, in particular the visions of modernity produced by and circulated through the institutions of fashion and clothing production of the Cuban state. It presents these visions as oriented to put forth a figured world of power aimed at persuading individuals to participate in the construction of the communist future by catering to the aspirational dreams of the middle class. The article concludes that such an imaginary helped in the short term to consolidate and legitimize the Cuban state socialist regime, allowing the new socialist middle classes to reinvent themselves as consumers, while participating in the construction of socialism. Yet, at the same time, for many people these visions were mostly a mirage, as fashionable clothes were not for sale.

Submerging or Clinging On Again? József Antall, Father and Son, in Hungary after 1956

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÁNOS M. RAINE
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Hungarian Society ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Father And Son

The aim of this case study of the two Antalls, father and son (the latter became the first Hungarian prime minister after the free elections in 1990) is to present and analyse the period that coincided with the post-1956 development of the Kádár system. Its apparent success, efficiency and partial, surrogate, legitimacy has often been explained by the so-called ‘compromise’ of the Kádárist leadership with Hungarian society after 1956, particularly the ‘old intelligentsia’ or ‘old middle classes’. In fact, while there was an obvious continuity in institutions and ideology between the classic Stalinist regime and that of Kádár, the societal and political practice of the system gradually changed. The Antalls were representative of the inter-war upper middle class (the father) and the participants in the 1956 revolution (the son). Discrimination according to their social background, prevalent in the early 1950s, diminished at the turn of the 1960s, so that someone descended from the former Christian middle class, like the younger József Antall, could be recruited into the intelligentsia.

The Rise and Fall of Kenyan Entrepreneurs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maike Voigt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Special Regard ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Life Courses ◽  
Empirical Material

This book analyses middle-class enterprises in Kenya with special regard to their founders’ social mobility. Using concrete events, individual biographies and in-depth empirical material, Maike Voigt demonstrates how the interplay of personal and familial characteristics with larger political and economic trends determines individual social mobility. Methodologically innovative, ethnographically sound and with analytical clarity, this study highlights the short-term changes, insecurity and opportunities inherent in entrepreneurs’ life courses. It is a thought-provoking contribution to empirical and conceptual debates on social mobility, entrepreneurship and the rise and fall of the middle classes in contemporary African societies and beyond.

scholarly journals The Western Middle Classes under Stress: Welfare State Retrenchments, Globalization, and Declining Returns to Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 85-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Луи Шовель
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Returns To Education ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Wage Earner ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S

Citation: Chauvel L. (2020) The Western Middle Classes under Stress: Welfare State Retrenchments, Globalization, and Declining Returns to Education. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 4,pp. 85–111. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-4-85-111 Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Gustav Schmoller before him, the multipolarity of the middle classes between higher and lower, and between cultural and economic capitalsis well acknowledged. This old vision is useful to understand the “middle classes adrift” of the last 20 years in France and Continental Europe. The expansion of the “new wage earner middle class” of the 1960s to 1990s is now an old dream of the welfare state expansion of Western societies, and the European social structure now faces a trend of  repatrimonialization”, meaning a U-turn towards a decline in the value of mid-qualified work and an expansion of the return to the inheritance of family assets. This paper addresses three main points. First, a new description of repatrimonialization is useful in the specific European context of middle-class societies. We need a redefinition of the system of middle classes (plural) in the context of the construction and decline of strong welfare states. Second, there are three ruptures in the social trends of the ‘wage earner society’ of the 1960s to 1990s. In this period, economic growth, social homogenization and social protection were major contextual elements of the expansion of ‘the new middle class,’ based on educationalmeritocracy, the valorization of credentialed skills, and the expansion of the average wage compared to housing and capital assets (‘depatrimonialization’). After the 1990s, the rupture and reversal of these trends, with ‘stagnation’, ‘new inequalities’ and ‘social uncertainty’ as new trends, generated a backlash in the “middle class society”. Third, I analyze the demographic and social consequences of these new trends in terms of the shrinking of the middle classes in a context where the inheritance of assets and resources changed the previous equilibrium. Finally, I highlight the importance of addressing the problem of social stability when large strata of the middle class have less interest in the maintenance of the social order.

Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm: A Case-Control Study of Democratic Protest Coalitions in Russia

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRYN ROSENFELD
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Population Data ◽  
Case Control ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
State Sector ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Selective Incentives

A large literature expects rising middle classes to promote democracy. However, few studies provide direct evidence on this group in nondemocratic settings. This article focuses on politically important differentiation within the middle classes, arguing that middle-class growth in state-dependent sectors weakens potential coalitions in support of democratization. I test this argument using surveys conducted at mass demonstrations in Russia and detailed population data. I also present a new approach to studying protest based on case-control methods from epidemiology. The results reveal that state-sector professionals were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud, even after controlling for ideology. If this group had participated at the same rate as middle-class professionals from the private sector, I estimate that another 90,000 protesters would have taken to the streets. I trace these patterns of participation to the interaction of individual resources and selective incentives. These findings have implications for authoritarian stability and democratic transitions.

Modernity and cultural citizenship in the Netherlands Indies: An illustrated hypothesis

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Schulte Nordholt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Netherlands Indies

Conventional historiography presumes a linear development from urbanisation, the rise of indigenous middle classes and the spread of modernity towards nationalism as the logical outcome of this process. This article aims to disconnect modernity from nationalism by focusing on the role of cultural citizens in the late colonial period for whom modernity was a desirable lifestyle. The extent to which their desires and the interests of the colonial regime coincided is illustrated by a variety of advertisements and school posters, which invited members of the indigenous urban middle class to become cultural citizens of the colony.

scholarly journals ‘Below English Line’: An ethnographic exploration of class and the English language in post-liberalization India

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 576-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAZANA JAYADEVA
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
English Language ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
And Performance ◽  
English Training

AbstractAnthropological studies of India's post-liberalization middle classes have tended to focus mainly on the role of consumption behaviour in the constitution of this class group. Building on these studies, and taking class as an object of ethnographic enquiry, I argue that, over the last 20 years, class dynamics in the country have been significantly altered by the unprecedentedly important and complex role that the English language has come to play in the production and reproduction of class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork—conducted at commercial spoken-English training centres, schools, and corporate organizations in Bangalore—I analyse the processes by which this change in class dynamics has occurred, and how it is experienced on the ground. I demonstrate how, apart from being a valuable type of class cultural capital in its own right, proficiency in English has come to play a key role in the acquisition and performance of other important forms of capital associated with middle-class identity. As a result, being able to demonstrate proficiency in English has come to be experienced as a critical element in claiming and maintaining a space in the middle class, regardless of the other types of class cultural capital a person possesses.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Costruire per il ceto medio a Milano. Note sulla filiera imprenditoriale

TERRITORIO ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 88-94
Author(s):  
Luca Gaeta
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Property Market ◽  
High Concentration ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Construction Companies ◽  
Land Owners ◽  
The Social ◽  
City Construction ◽  
The City

The precise boundaries of the supply chain for the production of housing for the middle classes in Milan during the boom years are not clearly defined. And yet its activity is of crucial importance to an understanding of the social and tangible forms of the middle class city. Construction companies constituted the key link in relations between land owners, clients, architects and end users of the asset that is a home. This paper offers a provisional picture which documents the firms most active in the sector, the prevailing operating practices and two businessmen who were interviewed. The conclusions identify two lines for further research into the middle class city: the role of non-professional mediators in the property market and the high concentration of up-market new housing construction within the ‘cerchia dei bastioni' (inner part of the city).

Cosmopolitan Consumption

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Utsa Ray
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Hybrid Culture ◽  
Culinary Culture ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Alternative Modernity

This chapter demonstrates that, while scholars have long focused on the economic origins of the middle class, it is crucial to understand the ways in which it fashioned itself. Although the universe of the Indian middle class revolved around contesting colonial categories, the chapter shows that the project of self-fashioning of the Indian middle class was not an instance of alternative modernity, nor did the locality of the middle class in colonial India result in producing some sort of indigenism. This middle class borrowed, adapted, and appropriated the pleasures of modernity and tweaked and subverted it to suit their project of self-fashioning. An area in which such cosmopolitan domesticity can be observed was the culinary culture of colonial Bengal, which utilized both vernacular ingredients and British modes of cooking in order to establish a Bengali bourgeois cuisine. This process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and in the patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform, and it developed certain social practices, including imagining the act of cooking as a classic feminine practice and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. It was often this hybrid culture that marked the colonial middle classes.

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