scholarly journals A voice for the voiceless: Improving provenance practice for working-class books

2020 ◽  
pp. 096100062090916
Author(s):  
Lauren Alex O’Hagan
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Provenance Information ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Fair Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Three Stages

In recent years, libraries have become increasingly aware of the need to present a more diverse representation of society in their collections. While some efforts have been made to improve gender, race and sexuality representation, little attention has been paid to the working classes. The purpose of this research is to encourage a debate about the social class make-up of institutional collections and how fair representation and lack of diversity can be addressed. The research entails three stages: (1) Interviews with the 36 members of Research Libraries UK to investigate current challenges that prevent them from recording provenance information for working-class books; (2) The inclusive and fair cataloguing of the Janet Powney Collection – a working-class prize book collection in Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives; and (3) The organisation of impact and engagement events to promote the Janet Powney Collection. The study highlights that, while librarians face many challenges in terms of time, money and resources, as well as differences in guidelines and practices, the correct recording of provenance is essential in recovering the voices of working-class individuals, giving them agency as autonomous writers, and developing new narratives of working-class life and culture that challenge myths perpetuated by those in higher positions of power.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

Contraception and the Working Classes: The Social Ideology of the English Birth Control Movement in its Early Years

1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus McLaren
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
History Of

A host of social movements which had as their goal the improvement of the living conditions of the working classes emerged in England in the 1820s and 1830s. Owenism and Chartism come first to mind, but historians have recently acknowledged the social significance of a number of less well-known groups that proclaimed the benefits of temperance or mechanics' institutes or phrenology or infidel missions. The birth control movement in its early years has as yet received little attention from the historians of the English working classes. A possible reason is that the opposition of the 'pauper press' to the movement has led later observers to adopt the view that it was simply a middle-class Malthusian crusade which set out to convince the poor that the only escape from poverty lay in individual self-help. In what follows I shall sketch out the general lines of argument advanced by the advocates of birth control and their antagonists in the working-class movement. The purpose of the paper is not to provide yet another history of the first neo-Malthusians, but to use the arguments their activities elicited to gain a better understanding of nineteenth-century working-class culture.

Cognitive Consistency and Class Identification: Study of Social Perception

1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-330
Author(s):  
H. Wayne Hogan ◽  
C. Boyd Loadholt
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Semantic Differential ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Cognitive Consistency ◽  
Evaluation Scores ◽  
Class Identification ◽  
Psychological Concepts

Using the Semantic Differential, 46 undergraduates evaluated as theoretically expected 12 social-psychological concepts as they themselves felt about each concept and as they thought hypothesized members of four social-class categories would evaluate them. The evaluation scores of the generally working-class Ss were much more similar to those projected onto the middle and upper classes than those attributed to the lower and working classes.

scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

scholarly journals What CLASS are you in? A study of social class, school choice and identity

2011 ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Kevin Cahill
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Equal Educational Opportunities

My PhD investigates schools and communities as places constructed by ideas of social class, school choice, identity and comparisons between people as worthy and unworthy, deserving and undeserving. This thesis contributes to the social justice genre of social science research where equal educational opportunities are seen as an essential ingredient in a just society. I explore the tension between what may be termed here, for the purposes of clarity, the middle-class and the working-class in the context of an Irish urban second level school with DEIS status. DEIS stands for Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools and it is the designation given to schools where a significant proportion of students are from working-class backgrounds. One adult participant in this study informed me that “social class didn’t exist in Ireland, that it was an English thing”. You may make your own mind up but not before you ask some important questions:

scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

Negotiating Mobility: Royal Dockyard Workers as Railway Excursion Agents and Social Entrepreneurs, 1880–1918

2021 ◽  
pp. 002252662110434
Author(s):  
Melanie Bassett
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Entrepreneur ◽  
Social Entrepreneurs ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Working People

From their creation in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain railway excursions provided working people with the means to expand their horizons and create new opportunities for identity- and money-making. This article explores the role of the social entrepreneur and their affect on social mobility. It also re-evaluates working-class leisure in the south of England and challenges the notion that the working-classes were not proactive in establishing their own unique commercial leisure cultures. Using a case study of two dockyard excursion enterprises, which were operated as sideline ventures by skilled artisans of the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK, the article will demonstrate how local working-class access to travel and cultural experiences were broadened and transformed through their initiatives and analyse the role and influence of these men on their co-workers and in wider society.

Social Class Identification and Class Interest in Taiwan

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-41
Author(s):  
Robert Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Interest Theory ◽  
Weak Support ◽  
Class Interest ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Identification ◽  
Stratification System

AbstractAre social classes perceived as a meaningful source of identity in Taiwan? I explore this issue with data from a 1992 survey (N = 2,377) of the population of Taiwan. Respondents were asked, "If people in our society are divided into upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, working and lower classes, which class do you think you belong to?" Ninety-eight per cent placed themselves in one or the other of these six classes. The modal responses were "middle class" (41%) and "working class" (29%). Two tests are made of whether these responses are meaningful and consequential. First, I show that subjective class identification is rooted in respondent's position in the objective stratification system, i.e., the higher one's education, occupation, power and income, the higher the social class with which one identifies. The second test is the extent to which, controlling for one's objective position in the stratification system, subjective class identification has significant net effects on attitudes toward class issues (e.g, whether big enterprises have too much economic and political power). Class interest theory predicts that Taiwanese who identify with the "middle" or higher classes have a more conservative ideology concerning class conflict, while those who think of themselves as "working class" or lower are more likely to believe there is class conflict, to favor collective action by employees against their employer, and to think big enterprises have too much power. Multiple regression analysis provides at best weak support for class interest theory. Subjective class identification has a significant net effect on attitudes toward only two of eight class issues. While the Taiwan respondents are not generally conservative on these class issues, class identification appears to have little to do with whether one is conservative or nonconservative. A serendipitous finding concerns education, which more than any other variable had significant net effects on attitudes toward class issues. It is Taiwan's most educated who are the least conservative on class issues. This finding has parallels with what some observers of Europe and the United States have called the New Class. The paper concludes with a discussion of the reasons why class identification is only weakly consequential for class-relevant beliefs in Taiwan.

scholarly journals Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education

Sociology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1140-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vik Loveday
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
And Gender

Based on empirical research with participants from working-class backgrounds studying and working in higher education in England, this article examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which have the potential to generate shame. Through an examination of the ‘affective practice’ of judgement, the article explores the contingencies that precipitate shame and the embodiment of deficiency. The article links the classed and gendered dimensions of shame with valuation, arguing that the fundamental relationality of social class and gender is not only generative of shame, but that shame helps in turn to structure both working-class experience and a view of the working classes as ‘deficient’.

Reflections on the Role of Social Narratives in Working-Class Formation: Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Steinmetz ◽  
◽  
◽  
◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Collective Narratives ◽  
Social Narratives ◽  
Collective Levels ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the role of social narratives in working-class formation. The primary goal of this exercise is to generate concepts for the comparative analysis of working-class identities and practices. My thesis is that more successful cases of working-class formation involve the elaboration of coherent narratives about individual and collective history, stories that are coordinated with one another and that are organized around the category of social class. In such narratives, events are selected for inclusion due to their relevance to social class, or they are excluded or deemphasized because of their irrelevance to class, and events are interpreted, emplotted, and evaluated in a way that emphasizes class rather than other possible constructs. By contrast, working-class formation is less pronounced where individual and collective narratives are based on alternative, nonclass forms of identity, such as nationality, gender, ethnicity, and race. Working-class formation is also weaker where individual narratives are asynchronous, where the individual and collective levels are not coordinated with one another, or where identities fail to attain narrative coherence.

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