scholarly journals Raising Successful Offspring by Chinese Middle-Class Parents

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang ◽  
Pak K. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Urban China ◽  
Professional Qualification ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Sociocultural Approach ◽  
Class Status

This article analyses the intergenerational mobility of the Chinese “new middle class” in Shanghai, China. Building on the Bourdieusian concept of social capital, it puts forward a sociocultural approach to explaining the reproduction of the middle class in contemporary urban China. It explores why cultural capital and marketable professional qualification are not enough for younger members of this class to secure their class status and upward mobility. It also discusses how and why the pre-reform socialist social institutions of danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) continue to play decisive roles in consolidating the middle class’ life status in post-reform China. This study finds that middle-class parents capitalise on their accrued and privileged guanxi (interpersonal relationship), built on the socialist social institutions, to help their children find good jobs to maintain their own upward intergenerational mobility.

scholarly journals LIVING IN UNCERTAINTY - PROSPERITY AND THE ANXIETIES OF NGO MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN IN THE CONTEXT OF MARKETISATION AND PRIVATISATION IN VIETNAM

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Binh Trinh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Market Values ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The University ◽  
Middle Strata

Studies of the new middle-class often write about the anxieties of falling behind with its members acquiring their middle-class status from uncertain and unpredictable market values. This type of anxiety is typical for members of the white-collar middle-class who often deal with pressures to maintain a conspicuous consumption level to remain in the middle strata. I argue that some of the anxieties associated with wealth experienced by the new middle class in Vietnam are also the result of a mode of governmentality that is used by the state to boost individual self-reliance and economic efficiency with the appeal of public contributions. Governmentality, in Foucault’s proposition, consists of technologies that allow the state to govern individuals from a distance with the vision of correct conduct. This mode of governance is done in Vietnam through the idea of “moral conduct”, by which the state guides the autonomous economic activities of individuals with the moral appeal of public contributions. This paper looks at the performance and experiences of Vietnamese female NGO professionals in the process of marketisation and privatisation in Vietnam. I show that their economic and professional performances demonstrate the morality of domestic responsibilities and public contributions, resembling the symbol of the virtuous woman in Vietnam’s Confucian and socialist tradition, a symbol which continues to be applauded by the state. The findings in this paper are drawn from my PhD research project at the University of Leeds, with data collected from a six-month fieldwork study conducted in Hanoi between 2016 and 2017.

scholarly journals Oriental Taste in Imperial Japan: The Exhibition and Sale of Asian Art and Artifacts by Japanese Department Stores from the 1920s through the Early 1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
Younjung Oh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Imperial State

From the 1920s to the early 1940s, Japanese department stores provided Japanese urban middle-class households with art and artifacts from China, Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The department stores not merely sold art and artifacts from Japan's Asian neighbors but also promoted the cultural confidence to appreciate and collect them. At the same time, aspiring middle-class customers satisfied their desire to emulate the historical elite's taste for Chinese and other Asian objects by shopping at the department stores. The aesthetic consumption of Asian art and artifacts formulated a privileged position for Japan in the imperial order and presented the new middle class with the cultural capital vital to the negotiation of its social status. This article examines the ways in which department stores marketed “tōyō shumi” (Oriental taste), which played a significant role in the formation of identity for both the imperial state and the new middle class in 1920s and 1930s Japan.

Culture and Educational Achievement

1981 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaynor Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Academic Success ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
School Achievement ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Class Status

Many studies have analyzed the links between academic achievement and social class. Few, however, have focused on the process by which culture as life-style, rather than knowledge, reinforces inequalities in the class and economic structure of society. Gaynor Cohen reports her findings from an ethnographic study of a middle-class housing estate in Great Britain and shows that families living there are in the process of moving from a working-class status to one termed the "new" middle class. Achieving their newly acquired status through the occupational mobility of men, women of the estate develop a collective estate culture and life-style conducive to the academic success of their children. Dr. Cohen concludes her analysis by relating microlevel changes in family lifestyle and school achievement to changes in the occupational structure of society.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Outsourcing the Self

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Romantic Relationships ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
First World ◽  
Class Youth ◽  
Call Center Workers

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.

An Intersectional Approach to the “Mobility Trap” That Ensnares Migrant Youth in China

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaorong Gu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Urban China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Migrant Youth ◽  
Political Economic

This essay explores the theory of intersectionality in the study of youths’ lives and social inequality in the Global South. It begins with an overview of the concept of intersectionality and its wide applications in social sciences, followed by a proposal for regrounding the concept in the political economic systems in particular contexts (without assuming the universality of capitalist social relations in Northern societies), rather than positional identities. These systems lay material foundations, shaping the multiple forms of deprivation and precarity in which Southern youth are embedded. A case study of rural migrant youths’ ‘mobility trap’ in urban China is used to illustrate how layers of social institutions and structures in the country’s transition to a mixed economy intersect to influence migrant youths’ aspirations and life chances. The essay concludes with ruminations on the theoretical and social implications of the political-economy-grounded intersectionality approach for youth studies.

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