scholarly journals Informal Volunteering, Inequality, and Illegitimacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 089976402110345
Author(s):  
Jon Dean
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Informal Volunteering ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Research And Policy

This article argues that informal volunteering (the unstructured giving of one’s time to help friends, neighbors, or community) has been ignored or understudied within research and policy. With data frequently showing higher rates of informal volunteering among women, people of color, working-class communities, and other often discriminated against groups and qualitative research demonstrating the value of informal volunteering within poorer communities, such positioning serves to reproduce dominant narratives around volunteering, reinforcing social inequalities. Using Bourdieusian critical theory from largely U.K.-based working-class feminist scholars, this article contributes to the nonprofit literature by showing how such a formulation adds to the legitimacy of middle-class cultures and delegitimizes working-class ones, especially at the current neoliberal conjuncture where volunteering experiences are encouraged to be used as a tool of distinction and employability. However, the article cautions against conceptualizing informal volunteering within existing formal volunteering frameworks, as doing so may further hollow out community life.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

Responsibility and the Big Society

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Bednarek
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Good Society ◽  
Big Society ◽  
Class Distinction ◽  
The Welfare State

This paper focuses on the interplay between Conservative thought as evinced by the current Conservative Party leadership and the idea of responsibility, which is a central concern in the Big Society programme. I show that responsibility holds different meanings based on attitudes to work and the welfare state and that the differentiation in meaning map onto a working class/middle class distinction. I then argue that the ‘good society’ as it emerges from the Big Society idea would be a more stratified one that accepts large degrees of inequality. Leaving the conceptual plane, I then provide support for my argument with findings from qualitative research into the lifeworld of young Conservatives.

scholarly journals Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 95S-113S ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Dean
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Widening Access ◽  
The United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

Social Class Differences in Complaining Strategies Used by Customers of Central Santosa Finance

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Insan Utama Sinuraya ◽  
Chairunnissa Chairunnissa
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Analysis Technique

This study deals with complaining strategies in different social class. The objectives of this study were to find out the types of complaining strategies used by customers as the complainers and the reasons of the customers used complaint strategies. To achieve the objectives, this study was conducted by applying qualitative research. It is a kind of multi-case study. The subjects of this study were the customers of Central Santosa Finance with different social class, namely working class and middle class. And the objects of this research were the utterances which contained complaining strategies uttered by the customers. The data were collected by using content analysis technique. The data were analyzed based on the theory of complaining strategies proposed by Trosborg (1995) and the interview was conducted to get the answer of the reasons why customers used complaint strategies. Based on the results of this study, the customers from working class dominantly used Explicit Blame and Modified Blame as their complaint strategies. While the customers from middle class tended to use Hints as their complaint strategy which meant that customers form working class were more direct in saying their complaints than customers from middle class. The reasons of they used complaint strategies were Situation and Problem.

“Finally Something for Us”: Black Girls Run! and Racialized Space-Making in Recreational Running

2020 ◽  
pp. 019372351989924 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Smith-Tran
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Racialized Space ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Life Story Interviews ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This study uses life story interviews to understand the utility of Black Girls Run!—a predominantly Black organization for women who engage in recreational distance running. Drawing from Neckerman, Carter, and Lee’s conceptual framework of the minority culture of mobility, the author suggests that Black Girls Run! serves the purpose of helping its members confront the challenges and repercussions associated with being a racial minority in a majority White space, particularly as they are experienced by middle-class Black women. The author focuses on how the organization (a) allows its members to run with others who look like them, (b) cultivates social connection and community, and (c) facilitates challenging health statistics and shifting dominant narratives about Black women. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the latent functions of recreational sporting organizations catered to middle-class people of color.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

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.

Gentrification and neighborhood melancholy. Collective sadness and ambivalence in Dortmund’s Hörde district

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
The Phoenix

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.

scholarly journals Informal Volunteering and Socialization Effects: Examining Modelling and Encouragement by Parents and Partner

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlou J. M. Ramaekers ◽  
Ellen Verbakel ◽  
Gerbert Kraaykamp
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Important Indicator ◽  
Parental Encouragement ◽  
Helping Behaviours ◽  
The Family ◽  
Socialization Processes ◽  
Informal Volunteering ◽  
Socializing Agents ◽  
The Impact

AbstractInformal volunteering is seen as an important indicator of social relations and community life. We therefore investigate the impact of various socialization practices on informal volunteering, being small helping behaviours outside of organizations for people outside the household. From theoretical notions on socialization, we hypothesize that experiencing extensive prosocial socialization practices promotes informal volunteering. We examine socialization processes of both modelling and encouragement and consider two socializing agents: parents and partners. We test our expectations employing the sixth wave of the Family Survey Dutch Population (N = 2464) that included unique measures on socialization as well as informal volunteering and holds important control variables. Our results indicated that parental modelling, partner modelling and partner encouragement were all positively related to informal volunteering, but that parental encouragement was not significantly related to informal volunteering. Our paper, thus, underscores that socialization practices are relevant in nurturing social relations and community life.

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