Working-class girls in a welfare state: Finnishness, social class and gender in Aki Kaurismäki's Workers' Trilogy (1986-1990)

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANNA KIVIMÄKI
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
And Gender

Life stories: biography and creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
University Expansion ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the engine of the pioneers' success and discusses their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. It begins by analyzing how the pioneers' were influenced by the communities where they grew up. Looking at the pioneers' families as a whole, even though this generation for which unprecedented university expansion brought rare opportunities for upward mobility, the chapter examines the pioneers' working-class families and old Oxbridge intellectual aristocracy. It notes that some of the key factors which brought them opportunities were due to national social changes and international events. The chapter also looks at how the older generation generally benefitted from Second World War experiences that took them out of their social-class cocoon. The chapter then discusses the pioneers who chose to explore other cultures rather than to research their own communities. It emphasizes social class injustice, racism, and gender injustice.

scholarly journals How does parental time relate to social class in a Nordic welfare state?

2021 ◽  
pp. 000169932110520
Author(s):  
Anne Lise Ellingsæter ◽  
Ragni Hege Kitterød ◽  
Marianne Nordli Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Parental Time ◽  
Childcare Time ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
The Relationship

Time intensive parenting has spread in Western countries. This study contributes to the literature on parental time use, aiming to deepen our understanding of the relationship between parental childcare time and social class. Based on time-diary data (2010–2011) from Norway, and a concept of social class that links parents’ amount and composition of economic and cultural capital, we examine the time spent by parents on childcare activities. The analysis shows that class and gender intersect: intensive motherhood, as measured by time spent on active childcare, including developmental childcare activities thought to stimulate children's skills, is practised by all mothers. A small group of mothers in the economic upper-middle class fraction spend even more time on childcare than the other mothers. The time fathers spend on active childcare is less than mothers’, and intra-class divisions are notable. Not only lower-middle class fathers, but also cultural/balanced upper-middle class fathers spend the most time on intensive fathering. Economic upper-middle and working-class fathers spend the least time on childcare. This new insight into class patterns in parents’ childcare time challenges the widespread notion of different cultural childcare logics in the middle class, compared to the working class.

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’.

Class and gender as a laughing matter? The case of Roseanne

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Senzani
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Critical Humor

AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in challenging hegemonic discourses on social class and gender, as they are reproduced in the popular sitcom format. Mindful of sitcoms' entrenched role in the audience's commodification process, the study explores whether a form of critical humor on social class and gender can emerge in the TV palimpsest. For this purpose, the study will look specifically at the sitcom Roseanne and at the public persona of Roseanne Barr. The study adopts a “multiperspectival approach” that considers all three elements of production, text and reception. First, Roseanne will be historically contextualized to understand the contradictions with which working-class representations are fraught. Secondly, a textual analysis will be performed to assess the extent to which class and gender are used as sources of humor and for which functions; finally, metatexts and viewers' responses will be analyzed considering the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to the sitcom. The case study of Roseanne will show that, in spite of obvious containment strategies—often through the secondary plotline and the metatexts, the sitcom provided its audience with critical humor to challenge hegemonic representations of class and gender.

New Social Classes, 1895–1949

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua H. Howard
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

The ability of foreign enterprises to establish factories in China after the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 accelerated industrialization and as a consequence proletarianization, by which numerous workers without resources entered a class relationship by selling their labor power to survive. It was, however, during the economic boom years of World War I and its aftermath and during the New Culture Movement with the introduction of socialism that new urban social forces—the bourgeoisie and working class—emerged and radical intellectuals applied the concept of social class to their analysis of society and revolution. The increasingly politicized and often-militant quality of the labor movement between 1919 and 1927 led Jean Chesneaux (Chesneaux 1968, cited under Class Formation and the Labor Movement) to argue, in Marxist terms, that a class-conscious proletariat under the ideological guidance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had arisen in reaction to the forces of imperialist oppression and exploitation. Although most social historians of the republican era concur that social classes in their objective form had emerged by the 1920s, they disagree on whether workers constituted a subjective “class for itself.” Scholars influenced by the new labor history school, with its emphasis on community and culture, find the complexity of the social composition and social dynamics of the working class to have obstructed the process of class formation. Despite positing workers’ own historical agency, these scholars underscore how segmented labor markets, workers’ particularistic ties and strong sense of regional identity, and gender divisions impeded class consciousness. Consequently, questions over workers’ politics and the nature of the labor movement have become controversial. Elizabeth J. Perry (Perry 1993, cited under Class Formation and the Labor Movement) interprets labor divisions based on skill, provenance, and gender as encouraging rather than debilitating labor activism. Other studies emphasize how anti-imperialism fueled the 1920s labor movement, with class taking a subservient role to nationalism. In a related issue, the relationship between workers and the CCP has sparked debate. Whereas Chesneaux emphasized that a class-conscious proletariat served as the social basis for the Communist revolution, others have challenged the CCP’s ideological supremacy and leadership over the labor movement and have focused on contradictions between Communists (largely drawn from the intelligentsia) and workers. Although these studies focus on Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton from 1919 to 1927, scholarship on Chongqing’s class formation during the 1940s analyzes both objective and subjective features of social class and contributes to an ongoing debate about the origins of the post-1949 work unit (danwei单位) system.

scholarly journals Social Class, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19 Mortality Among Working Age Adults in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth B Pathak ◽  
Janelle M Menard ◽  
Rebecca B Garcia ◽  
Jason L Salemi
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
Working Age ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Importance: Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality have been documented. Social class is a likely explanation of mortality disparities across and within racial/ethnic groups. This is the first U.S. study of social class and COVID-19 mortality in working age adults. Objectives: To determine the joint effects of social class, race/ethnicity, and gender on the burden of COVID-19 mortality. A secondary objective was to determine whether differences in opportunities for remote work were correlated with COVID-19 death rates for sociodemographic groups. Design: Annual mortality study which used a special government tabulation of 2020 COVID-19 related deaths stratified by decedent social class (educational attainment) and race/ethnicity. Setting: United States in 2020. Participants: COVID-19 decedents aged 25 to 64 years old (n=69,001). Exposures: Social class (working class, some college, college graduate), race/ethnicity (Hispanic, Black, Asian, Indigenous, multiracial, and non-Hispanic white), and gender (women, men). Detailed census data on occupations held by adults in 2020 in each of the 36 sociodemographic groups studied were used to quantify the possibility of remote work for each group. Main Outcomes and Measures: Age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates for 36 sociodemographic groups defined by social class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Disparities were quantified by relative risks and 95% confidence intervals. College graduates were the (low risk) referent group for all relative risk calculations. Results: A higher proportion of Hispanics, Blacks, and Indigenous people were working class in 2020. COVID-19 mortality was five times higher in the working class vs. college graduates (72.2 vs. 14.6 deaths per 100,000, RR=4.94, 95% CI 4.82-5.05). The joint detriments of lower socioeconomic position, Hispanic ethnicity, and male gender resulted in a COVID-19 death rate which was over 27 times higher (178.0 vs. 6.5 deaths/100,000, RR=27.4, 95%CI 25.9-28.9) for working class Hispanic men vs. college graduate white women. In regression modeling, percent employed in never remote jobs explained 72% of the variance in COVID-19 death rates. Conclusions and Relevance: SARS-CoV-2 infection control efforts should prioritize the working class (i.e. those with no college education), particularly those employed in never remote jobs with inflexible and unsafe working conditions (i.e. blue collar, service, and retail sales workers).

scholarly journals Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042098512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Folkes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Class Community

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document