“Taking the Gravel Road”: Educational Aspirations of Working Class Malay Youths

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadzli Bin Baharom Adzahar
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Educational Aspirations ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Malay Peninsula ◽  
Close Correspondence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gravel Road

Abstract Applying Bourdieu’s theoretical framework on the correspondence between mental structures and social structures, this paper examines the persistence of educational underachievement among working class Malay youths in Singapore. Accordingly, my first objective is to document the social structure, namely a largely working class neighbourhood where these Malay youths have grown up. My second aim is to analyse how everyday cultural practices and interactions among peers in the neighbourhood significantly reinforced these youths’ levelled aspirations. I maintain that by believing in ‘taking the gravel road’, which is symbolically rough, uneven and uncertain, these youths justified the irrelevance of doing well in school. Succinctly, this essay demonstrates the close correspondence between the perceptions of the odds of success and the educational underperformance of the Malay youths. Hence, this paper would be of interest to scholars in the Malay Peninsula, as well as experts concerned with the intertwining of education with class and ethnicity.

scholarly journals Changing the Pattern: Reclaiming History, Constructing Herstory in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Ana Sentov
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Immigrant Status ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
The Social ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Church

This paper will examine how Grace Marks, the female protagonist/narrator of Alias Grace (1996), reclaims her history, which is comprised of many different, often contradictory stories of her life and the crime for which she is imprisoned. These stories reflect the dominant discourse of a conservative male-dominated society, in which Grace is an outsider, due to her gender, class, age, and immigrant status. The law, the medical profession, the church, and the media all see Grace as a disruptive element: a woman who committed or assisted in a murder, a lunatic and/or a member of the working class who dared disturb the social order. Grace is revealed not as a passive victim, an object to be acted upon, but as an agent capable of reclaiming history and constructing herstory, challenging and defying the expectations of dominant social structures. The paper will show that Alias Grace, as a novel giving voice to the marginalized and the silenced, stands as a compelling work that examines and provides insights into the position of women and its changes over the course of history, provoking a discourse that remains relevant today

Disidentification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Social

Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.

Profit as Social Rent: Embeddedness and Stratification in Markets

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sascha Muennich
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Rent Extraction ◽  
Free Competition ◽  
The Social

This article shows how research on the social structure of markets may contribute to the analysis the growing income inequality in contemporary capitalist economies. The author proposes a theoretical link between embeddedness and social stratification by discussing the role of institutions and networks in markets for the distribution of economic profits between firms. The author claims that we must understand profit and free competition as opposites, as economic theory does. In the main part of the article the author illustrates six typical mechanisms of rent extraction from networks or formal and symbolic rules that embed markets. They emerge from material as well as symbolical access to and influence on the orientation of other market actors. Social structures in markets lead to unequal chances for rent extraction, even if actors produce them for coordination rather than for accumulation purposes. This is how market sociology and theory of capitalism can be linked more closely.

Feminist Challenges to the Social Structure and Sex Roles

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen R. Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Sex Roles ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Feminine Identity ◽  
Voluntary Childlessness ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Complex Relationships

A social-psychological and historical context for understanding contemporary sex roles, fertility, parenting, and the family is provided by reviewing origins and objectives of the Women's Movement. Feminist efforts to change social structures affecting women's choice of roles and fertility require continued attention. Increased voluntary childlessness seriously challenges the concept of motherhood as central to adult feminine identity and legitimization of choice in whether or not to become a parent provides a new context for studying women, sex roles, fertility, and their complex relationships to the social structure. Continued challenges to premises, methodologies, and conclusions of such research are urged.

“The Whirl of Life” The Social Structure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social

This chapter explores the intricacies of the first discernible class structure that conformed to normative standards of socioeconomic status in Chicago's history. Black Chicago developed a very small but distinguishable upper class, large segments within the broad middle classes, enormous laboring classes including industrial and service sector workers, and an underclass. The members of the upper class owned and managed businesses, chose housing commensurate with their status, consumed their disposable income with conspicuous delight, engaged in civic activities, and socially acted as a group apart from other segments of their racial cohort to which they traditionally held their primary social allegiance. The middle class focused on occupation, wealth production, educational attainment, cultural interests, and character. The working-class, however, formed the bulk of black Chicago's citizenry.

COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY AND COMPLETION OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES

1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Mower White
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Balance Principle ◽  
The Social

Seventy-two Ss, of whom half were cognitively complex and half cognitively simple, made predictions about unknown relations in four-person social structures. Structures differed in the number of relations given. For those with two or three relations given, predictions of cognitively complex and cognitively simple Ss did not differ, all Ss making balanced predictions. For those with four or five relations given, cognitively complex Ss, to a greater extent than cognitively simple Ss, made balanced predictions. Cognitively simple Ss tended to make predictions based on consideration of fewer relations in the social structure. It is suggested that this result supports the contention that cognitively simple Ss become “overloaded” by smaller amounts of information than do cognitively complex Ss, and that such an explanation has relevance to the interpretation of the balance principle as a conceptual rule.

‘A New and Fierce Disorder’s Raging’: Monomania in Mary Barton (1848)

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-506
Author(s):  
Lindsey Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Material Deprivation ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Steep Rise ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Medical Vocabulary

Abstract This article examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of the early psychiatric idea of monomania in her novel Mary Barton (1848). Digital searches show a steep rise in the textual use of the word so that by the mid-1830s it might be described as popularly familiar, albeit still invested with the esotericism and prestige of medical vocabulary. The furore in the press circulating around monomaniacal assassins would not have escaped Gaskell’s notice as she began the novel, which was written intermittently between the years 1844 and 1847 and set in c. 1834 to 1840. John Barton, and his sister-in-law, fallen woman Esther, are gripped by obsessive, avenging missions fostered by the pathogenic environments they inhabit. Their trajectories are similar: the loss of a child, a recourse to opiates and alcohol to manage misery and hunger, and an expulsion from the normalizing world of domesticity. The narrative describes both as monomaniacs. I argue that these monomanias are equivalent to a tormenting class consciousness wherein their over-abundant imaginations refuse to accept their lot. A challenge to the notion that the working class were morally at fault, monomania is presented as a condition caused by an environment that can only foster despair. The text does not simply pathologize the characters, but presents the social structure itself as pathological. Gaskell uses a gothic formulation of the disease as ‘haunting’ and ‘incessant’. It is a novelistic version which is both proto-sensational in the projects its sufferers pursue (murder and detection) whilst also signifying a nervous collapse brought about by material deprivation. Gaskell’s monomaniacs come closest to replicating the aetiologies of their ‘real’ counterparts in County Asylums.

scholarly journals Afterword

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 430-436
Author(s):  
Hedda Reindl-Kiel
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social

Abstract The paper questions the function of the anti-Ottoman approach that, until recently, prevailed in Southeastern European historiography. This mindset and its concomitant attitudes were steps in nation building. A short comparison of the Ottoman social system with the social structures of countries in the region that did not come under direct Ottoman rule shows only minor differences. Thus, the adoption of Ottoman cultural practices including material culture was not a difficult choice. At the same time, we see individuals and whole groups whose lifestyles were oriented toward the West. Changing eating habits serve as an illustration for this phenomenon.

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