scholarly journals From the ‘What’ and ‘How’ to the ‘Where’: Class Distinction as a Matter of Place

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Koehrsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Cultural Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Boundary ◽  
Class Distinction

Research on the symbolic boundary work of upper- and middle-class actors has placed a greater emphasis on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of cultural consumption than on the ‘where’. However, the spaces where actors move are important: the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of marking distinction vary according to national class cultures and cultural fields. This article focuses on the ‘where’ arguing that interaction settings shape actors’ boundary work. Based upon research on Argentinean Pentecostalism, the study shows that middle-class Pentecostals switch between distinction-marking and ‘omnivorous’ performances of Pentecostalism depending on the social permeability of the spaces where they move. These insights suggest that the contextual conditions in which actors present themselves as ‘omnivores’ or ‘snobs’ deserve more attention.

scholarly journals Advertising Homeownership through Cultural Capitalism: Neoliberal Making of New Shanghai Middle-Class Dream

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Lei Ping
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cosmopolitan Citizenship ◽  
Market Promotion ◽  
Class Distinction

Private homeownership has increasingly become a kind of new obsession and a symbol of upward mobility among the emerging middle class in post-Mao Chinese society. This essay studies the neoliberal making of the new Shanghai middle-class dream by exploring how this dream is invented and imagined through the pursuit of cosmopolitan citizenship, socio-spatial class distinction, and tiered lifestyles. It analyzes and problematizes the enduring charm of Shanghai as a global “city of magic” continues to attract those who aspire to eventually own a piece of property and display cultural capital of this highly unaffordable neoliberal city. Through a series of distinct case studies of recent real estate advertisement, interior design philosophy, and signature furniture stores and architecture magazines whose storytelling aesthetics are middle-class-inspired and focused, the essay critiques the way in which private homeownership is engineered, advertised, and made as one of the key prerequisites for the new Shanghainese (xin Shanghairen) to become middle class in the past two decades. It argues that the making of the new Shanghai middle-class dream is problematically preconditioned by a type of state-market promotion and advertisement of private homeownership and urban citizenship that ultimately synchronizes with the state-capitalist, neoliberal making of a moderately prosperous (xiaokang) society where class distinctions have revived to dominate the social, cultural, and economic discourses of a bourgeois Shanghai in the age of global capitalism.

scholarly journals How to Negotiate Class Ambiguity: A Boundary Work Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 356-370
Author(s):  
Jens Koehrsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Class Distinction

AbstractResearch indicates that actors increasingly engage in practices that do not match their class background. This contribution explores how actors negotiate class ambiguity through boundary work. Studying Argentinean middle-class actors participating in Pentecostalism, the article draws attention to boundary conversion as a strategy to manage class ambiguity. Deviating from the middle class with their religious affiliation, the studied Pentecostals convert existing boundaries between the Argentinean middle class and Pentecostalism into internal boundaries within Pentecostalism, creating trenches between “highbrow” middle-class and “lowbrow” mass Pentecostalism. The boundary processes point to the ongoing relevance of class distinction even among those actors that freely engage in practices at odds with their class background. As such, the results underpin the need to study not only what type of dissonant practices actors perform, but equally what boundary strategies they employ to negotiate their class belonging.

Aspiring, Ambivalent, Assertive: Bulgarian Middle-Class Subjectivities and Boundary Work through Migration

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-528
Author(s):  
Polina Manolova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Personal Attributes ◽  
Class Membership ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Self Differentiation ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Middle Class People

This article investigates the subjectivities of a group of aspiring middle-class Bulgarians and their boundary work in the context of their migrations to the United Kingdom. Drawing on Lamont’s critique of Bourdieu’s theory on class formation and reproduction, it shows how people from underprivileged social backgrounds can lay claims to middleclassness by strategically drawing on cultural and moral markers of distinction revolving around the notions of “civilization,” “culturedness,” and the “West.” The adoption of such narratives and their enactment in the cultivation of personal attributes, however, fails to guarantee full-fledged middle-class membership for people who lack the necessary economic and social capital. Thus, boundary-building becomes the key mechanism for negotiating ambivalent middle-class subjectivities and rejecting objectively assigned positions in the social structure. The article traces the emergence of ideal-type models of middle-class belonging since 1989, their adoption by aspirational middle-class people, and the boundary work and self-differentiation by which they try to reassert their superior status both before during and after their migrations to the UK. It concludes that the observed everyday processes of group classification through the defining of and distancing from cultural, moral, and racial “others” reproduces class antagonisms that preclude a more critical understanding of the discontents of Bulgaria’s capitalist transition.

СОВРЕМЕННОЕ РОССИЙСКОЕ ОБЩЕСТВО КАК ПРОСТРАНСТВО КОНФЛИКТА

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
V. V. Gorshkova ◽  
A. A. Melnikova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Russian

The article considers the contradictions and conflicts that are characteristic of modern Russian society. The processes of social disintegration are analyzed and interpreted as a result of fundamental social and economic transformations. The problems of economic inequality are presented in the historical perspective in close connection with the previous stages of Russia's socioeconomic development. Significant polarization of the population is one of the most significant conflict factors in modern society, which leads to an increase in protest moods and may in the long term threaten social upheavals. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with the socio-economic situation does not lead to ideas of the unification and consolidation of society, but find expression in social conflicts. The emergence and development of social conflicts is influenced by a number of factors: economic, ethnic, religious. One of the most important characteristics of society is its social structure. After the collapse of the USSR, the previous social structure was abolished, and a new social reality was formed in Russia. When considering the stratification structure of society, most attention is paid to the middle class, which is considered the backbone of a stable society. The middle class in Russia is in the stage of formation, it is hardly possible to speak of a complete analogy with the middle class of Western society. The share of middle class in society can be estimated in different ways depending on the methodological approaches used by researchers. An important consequence of the transformation of the social structure was the problem of marginalization, since the dismantling of the old social structure and the slow formation of the new one put the social status and place in the division of labor system of many individuals into question. The sharp impoverishment of representatives of prestigious professions led to a reassessment of their situation, especially for the younger generation. When analyzing the origins of social conflicts in modern Russian society, it is necessary to consider the issue of the attitude of the broad masses of the population to power and national elites. It should be noted that power in Russia historically takes shape around specific leaders and does not have an institutional character. The most significant factor shaping the attitude towards the authorities and the elite in general in Russian society are the economic results of the market reforms that have taken place. Only a small part of the population believes that they won as a result of the changes that have taken place, the natural consequence of which is the population's distrust of the authorities and, in general, political institutions.

Who is Rational?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Emergence

Beginning around 1860, authors in the Egyptian capital portrayed Cairo’s changing cityscape and the recent emergence of local newspapers in terms of their impact on rationality (‘aql). In their descriptions, these contemporaries depicted rationality as an education of the heart that especially enabled men from the middle class to control their bodies and passions. The chapter shows that Cairo’s transformation was, however, not always associated with rising rationality by drawing on a different set of sources. Police and court records from the 1860s and 1870s demonstrate that contemporaries also described processes of urban change as a danger to the “honor” of lower-class women. Like the debates in Berlin, emotional practices in Cairo thus served as a way to address the social formation of the Egyptian capital during a time of dynamic transformation.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Some Dilemmas of Political Consumerism

2018 ◽  
pp. 720-740
Author(s):  
Sarah Webb ◽  
Anna Cristina Pertierra
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Environmentally Friendly ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Political Consumerism ◽  
Palawan Island ◽  
Class Distinction

In the Philippines, socioeconomic relations that result from deeply uneven market engagements have long made consumption a moral affair. Ecoconscious lifestyles and consumer practices remain largely the domain of elite and middle-class Filipinos, and as such, engagement with sustainable and environmentally friendly consumption may be seen not only as a marker of class distinction but also as a critique of urban and rural poor livelihood practices deemed to be environmentally detrimental. Focusing on a case study from Palawan Island, the chapter discusses some dilemmas that have arisen as the application of “eco” to tourism practices has become widespread and attractive to middle-class Filipinos with steadily growing spending power. The relevance of class to considering dilemmas of political consumerism is not unique to the Philippines, and these issues provide an opportunity to critically reflect on who benefits from political consumerism.

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

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