The working class in the social structure of society: assessing the prestige of the profession

Author(s):  
Alina V. Makhiyanova ◽  
Aidar F. Sagetdinov
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed

This chapter explores the intricacies of the first discernible class structure that conformed to normative standards of socioeconomic status in Chicago's history. Black Chicago developed a very small but distinguishable upper class, large segments within the broad middle classes, enormous laboring classes including industrial and service sector workers, and an underclass. The members of the upper class owned and managed businesses, chose housing commensurate with their status, consumed their disposable income with conspicuous delight, engaged in civic activities, and socially acted as a group apart from other segments of their racial cohort to which they traditionally held their primary social allegiance. The middle class focused on occupation, wealth production, educational attainment, cultural interests, and character. The working-class, however, formed the bulk of black Chicago's citizenry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-506
Author(s):  
Lindsey Stewart

Abstract This article examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of the early psychiatric idea of monomania in her novel Mary Barton (1848). Digital searches show a steep rise in the textual use of the word so that by the mid-1830s it might be described as popularly familiar, albeit still invested with the esotericism and prestige of medical vocabulary. The furore in the press circulating around monomaniacal assassins would not have escaped Gaskell’s notice as she began the novel, which was written intermittently between the years 1844 and 1847 and set in c. 1834 to 1840. John Barton, and his sister-in-law, fallen woman Esther, are gripped by obsessive, avenging missions fostered by the pathogenic environments they inhabit. Their trajectories are similar: the loss of a child, a recourse to opiates and alcohol to manage misery and hunger, and an expulsion from the normalizing world of domesticity. The narrative describes both as monomaniacs. I argue that these monomanias are equivalent to a tormenting class consciousness wherein their over-abundant imaginations refuse to accept their lot. A challenge to the notion that the working class were morally at fault, monomania is presented as a condition caused by an environment that can only foster despair. The text does not simply pathologize the characters, but presents the social structure itself as pathological. Gaskell uses a gothic formulation of the disease as ‘haunting’ and ‘incessant’. It is a novelistic version which is both proto-sensational in the projects its sufferers pursue (murder and detection) whilst also signifying a nervous collapse brought about by material deprivation. Gaskell’s monomaniacs come closest to replicating the aetiologies of their ‘real’ counterparts in County Asylums.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadzli Bin Baharom Adzahar

Abstract Applying Bourdieu’s theoretical framework on the correspondence between mental structures and social structures, this paper examines the persistence of educational underachievement among working class Malay youths in Singapore. Accordingly, my first objective is to document the social structure, namely a largely working class neighbourhood where these Malay youths have grown up. My second aim is to analyse how everyday cultural practices and interactions among peers in the neighbourhood significantly reinforced these youths’ levelled aspirations. I maintain that by believing in ‘taking the gravel road’, which is symbolically rough, uneven and uncertain, these youths justified the irrelevance of doing well in school. Succinctly, this essay demonstrates the close correspondence between the perceptions of the odds of success and the educational underperformance of the Malay youths. Hence, this paper would be of interest to scholars in the Malay Peninsula, as well as experts concerned with the intertwining of education with class and ethnicity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 90-97
Author(s):  
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Ladeedah is an audio novella that takes place in a Black utopic space after “the improvised revolution.” Ladeedah is a tone-deaf, rhythm-lacking Black girl in a world where everyone dances and sings at all times. What is Ladeedah's destiny as a quiet, clumsy genius in a society where movement and sound are the basis of the social structure and the definition of freedom? This excerpt from Ladeedah focuses on Ladeedah's attempts to understand the meaning of revolution from her own perspectives—at home, at school, and in her own mind and body.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 678-700
Author(s):  
V Christides

Based on two important hagiographical works written in Greek, the Martyrdom of St. Arethas and his companions and the Acts of St. Gregentius, the aim of this paper is to continue my preliminary study of the countries around the Red Sea in pre-Islamic times, especially in the sixth century A.D. The most valuable information in the Martyrdom concerns the hazardous voyage of the Ethiopian army from the main port of Adulis across the Red Sea to South Arabia (ca 525 A.D.). This work illuminates aspects of that expedition which do not appear in such detail in any other source. In addition, it describes the ports of the Red Sea in the sixth century, i.e., Klysma, Bereniki, Adulis, etc., corroborating the finds of archaeology and epigraphy. Concerning the controversial Acts of St. Gregentius, the present author has tried to discuss only some vital information reflecting the social structure of South Arabia during its Ethiopian occupation until the Persian conquest of it (ca 525 A.D. – ca 570 A.D.), and attempted to trace the origin of just one law (the treatment of animals) among those supposedly imposed on the Himyarites by the so-called archbishop Gregentius.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 788-832
Author(s):  
Lukas M. Muntingh

Egyptian domination under the 18th and 19th Dynasties deeply influenced political and social life in Syria and Palestine. The correspondence between Egypt and her vassals in Syria and Palestine in the Amarna age, first half of the fourteenth century B.C., preserved for us in the Amarna letters, written in cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in 1887, offer several terms that can shed light on the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. In the social stratification of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian rule according to the Amarna letters, three classes are discernible:1) government officials and military personnel, 2) free people, and 3) half-free people and slaves. In this study, I shall limit myself to the first, the upper class. This article deals with terminology for government officials.


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