Gendered parenting and returns from children in contemporary India: A study of IIT students and their parents

2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212199002
Author(s):  
Ravinder Kaur
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Educational Training ◽  
Entrance Exam ◽  
Concerted Cultivation ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Value Of Children ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Parental Strategies ◽  
Family Strategies

This article seeks to understand the modern-day value of children to middle class Indian parents. It examines parental strategies aimed at raising successful children by providing them with the best education possible. These strategies, involving ‘concerted cultivation’ and gendered ‘educational labour’, are analysed in relation to schooling and preparation for a highly competitive national entrance exam, for admission to an elite engineering college in the country. Describing and analysing the classed and gendered nature of these strategies, the article explores the shifting nature of returns that middle class parents expect from their grown children. As the article shows, gendered burdens and class location of parents are crucial in shaping the value of children. Mothers across class contribute disproportionately to children’s educational training and highly educated mothers are withdrawn from the labour market to immerse themselves in educational labour. Ironically, educated mothers’ own educational inputs remain invisible even to themselves, resulting from an acceptance of culturally constructed norms around the gendered division of labour. Family strategies are oriented towards aspirations of upward social mobility, a return that parents seek to derive from educationally and professionally successful children.

scholarly journals Skilled Migrants in the Swedish Labour Market: An Analysis of Employment, Income and Occupational Status

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 3428
Author(s):  
Nahikari Irastorza ◽  
Pieter Bevelander
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Occupational Status ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Skilled Immigrants ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Highly Skilled Migrants ◽  
Highly Skilled ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
Employment Rates

In a globalised world with an increasing division of labour, the competition for highly skilled individuals—regardless of their origin—is growing, as is the value of such individuals for national economies. Yet the majority of studies analysing the economic integration of immigrants shows that those who are highly skilled also have substantial hurdles to overcome: their employment rates and salaries are lower and they face a higher education-to-occupation mismatch compared to highly skilled natives. This paper contributes to the paucity of studies on the employment patterns of highly skilled immigrants to Sweden by providing an overview of the socio-demographic characteristics, labour-market participation and occupational mobility of highly educated migrants in Sweden. Based on a statistical analysis of register data, we compare their employment rates, salaries and occupational skill level and mobility to those of immigrants with lower education and with natives. The descriptive analysis of the data shows that, while highly skilled immigrants perform better than those with a lower educational level, they never catch up with their native counterparts. Our regression analyses confirm these patterns for highly skilled migrants. Furthermore, we find that reasons for migration matter for highly skilled migrants’ employment outcomes, with labour migrants having better employment rates, income and qualification-matched employment than family reunion migrants and refugees.

scholarly journals Disabling Fields, Enabling Capital: Mothers with Disabilities and the Concerted Cultivation Habitus

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Frederick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Extracurricular Activities ◽  
Parenting Style ◽  
Concerted Cultivation ◽  
Accessibility Barriers ◽  
Class Habitus ◽  
Mothers Experiences

This article examines the experiences of mothers with disabilities who engage in concerted cultivation, a parenting style commonly practiced in middle-class communities. The author explores these mothers' experiences in the "fields" of their children's schools and organized extracurricular activities. Findings illuminate how ruptures in these mothers' middle - class habitus occur as they confront accessibility barriers and social exclusion while engaging in concerted cultivation. These mothers are found to simultaneously deploy class-based resources to overcome these barriers. This analysis lays bare the ways in which the concerted cultivation habitus presumes a nondisabled identity.

Protestantism and the Latin American Middle Class

1971 ◽  
Vol os-18 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
Charles F. Denton
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Reform ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
The Church ◽  
Positive Force

The author feels that the development of a middle class in Latin America has been fostered by the effects of Protestant evangelism among the lower classes, which has spurred upward social mobility. But instead of becoming a positive force for social and economic reform, this middle class has become as reactionary as the small traditional upper class. This, together with the inability of most Protestant pastors to minister effectively to middle class persons and intellectuals, is a serious problem for the church in Latin America.

India’s Middle Class

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Entrepreneurship ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Ordinary Folk ◽  
Social Entities

The category “middle class” can refer to quite different social entities. In the United States, it is often used as a synonym for “ordinary folk.” In the United Kingdom it references an elite with economic and social privileges. In India, “the middle class” acquired its own valence through a history that encompasses colonialism, nationalism, and desire for upward social mobility. At one level the Indian middle class was evidently derivative. Indians who wished to emulate the achievements and standing of the British middle class adopted the category, “middle class” as a self-descriptor. Yet the Indian middle class was hardly a modular replica of a metropolitan “original.” The context of colonialism, indigenous hierarchies, and various local histories shaped the nature of the Indian middle class as much as any colonial model. Composed of people—often salaried professionals—who were reasonably well off but not among India’s richest, being middle class in colonial India was less a direct product of social and economic standing and more the result of endeavors of cultural and political entrepreneurship. These efforts gave the middle class its shape and its aspirations to cultural and political hegemony. The same history, in turn, shaped a variety of discourses about the nature of society, politics, culture, and morality in both colonial and post-independent India. Contradictions were inherent in the constitution of the middle class in colonial India, and continue to be apparent today. These contradictions become even more evident as newer, formerly subaltern social groups, seek to participate in a world created through middle class imaginations of society, culture, politics and economics.

Educational Status Hierarchies, After-School Activities, and Parenting Logics: Lessons from Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Aurini ◽  
Rod Missaghian ◽  
Roger Pizarro Milian
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
Educational Status ◽  
After School ◽  
Concerted Cultivation ◽  
National Differences ◽  
American Research ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Stratification System

This article draws from American research on ‘‘concerted cultivation’’ to compare the parenting logics of 41 upper-middle-class parents in Toronto, Canada. We consider not only how parents structure their children’s after-school time (what parents do) but also how the broader ecology of schooling informs their parenting logics (how they rationalize their actions). We find that parenting practices mirror American research. Upper-middle-class families enroll their children in multiple lessons and cultivate their children’s skills. However, unlike their American counterparts, Canadian parenting logics are not explicitly stratification oriented, guided by a desire to access elite universities. Canada’s relatively flat stratification system of higher education, where prestige differences between universities are minimal, prompts the emergence of a more expressive parenting ethos. Our findings draw attention to the macrofoundations of social behavior by articulating the connection between parenting logics and educational status hierarchies. We conclude by considering the implications of cross-national differences to theories of parenting and social stratification.

Middle-Class Voices, c.1969–1979

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Distinction ◽  
Middle Class People

This chapter uses three different source bases to examine middle-class attitudes towards class and social change in the 1970s: interviews from Paul Thompson’s Edwardians oral history project, the journalistic study Voices from the Middle Class, by Jane Deverson and Katharine Lindsay, and the diaries of an upwardly mobile man, deposited with Mass Observation. It argues that some older middle-class people in the 1970s still thought of class as something given by birth and breeding, and still felt comfortable voicing class prejudices. However, even among older generations, some recognized that such attitudes were no longer widely acceptable. Younger generations of the middle classes were far more heterogeneous, and many younger middle-class people rejected class distinction and tradition. Social change, particularly the expansion of upward social mobility in the post-war decades, meant the middle classes were more heterogeneous and less bound by a common culture.

Class in the Millennium Memory Bank, 1998–2000

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Memory Bank ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Middle Group ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sociological Studies

This chapter examines discourses of class in interviews for the Millennium Memory Bank, at the end of the 1990s. It finds similar themes to those traced in earlier chapters: ordinariness, authenticity, and ambivalence were prominent in interviewees’ testimonies—working-class, middle-class, and even upper-class. Many thought the idea of ‘classlessness’, as espoused by John Major, was attractive; none thought he had achieved this goal, but many did think class divides had declined in the post-war period, and that an ‘ordinary’ middle group was now the largest in society. This chapter also examines narratives of upward social mobility in the 1990s, suggesting that the range of important sociological studies of the ‘hidden injuries’ and cultural facets of class that appeared in that decade were shaped by the experiences of upwardly mobile men and women who knew about the dislocations of moving class because they themselves had done it.

Multicultural citizenship for the highly skilled? Naturalization, human capital, and the boundaries of belonging in Canada’s middle-class nation-building

Ethnicities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146879682096578
Author(s):  
Elke Winter
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Application Process ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
The Family ◽  
Multicultural Citizenship ◽  
Immigrant Selection ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Taking Canada as a widely envied and imitated example of liberal, “difference-blind” economic immigration, in this paper, I examine the permeability, constraints, and symbolic meaning of the different requirements of the naturalization process from the perspective of those who have undergone the process. Based on interviews with recently naturalized Canadians, my study reveals that the three steps of the application process – filing the application, studying the citizenship guide and sitting the test, attending the citizenship ceremony and swearing the citizenship oath – constitute mostly blurred boundaries for skilled and highly educated immigrants, with occasional bright boundaries related to management flaws, classed naturalization, and cultural biases. Specifically, immigrants endowed with valued forms of human capital are naturalizing fast and easily even if they are members of racial, ethnic or religious minorities. This underscores the strength of multiculturalism as national identity and ethos of societal integration. However, the attainment of citizenship in the multicultural nation does not come quasi-automatically as a right for everyone after years of lawful residency. Rather, it is granted as an earned privilege only to those who demonstrate the successful mastery of the skills and mindset of middle-class professionals. Since naturalization now operates along the same econocentric logic that governs immigrant selection through the points system, individuals admitted through non-economic streams, such as refugees and immigrants in the family class are increasingly struggling with the naturalization process. This raises questions about the implicit biases and new fault lines of seemingly difference-blind middle-class nation-building through immigration.

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