Conclusion: Social Policy and the Black Professional Middle Class

2013 ◽  
pp. 167-178
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class

Visiting Earlswood: The Asylum Travelogue and the Shaping of ‘Idiocy’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Primary Documents

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after.

scholarly journals Disciplinary Social Policy and the Failing Promise of the New Middle Classes: The Troubled Families Programme

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Nunn ◽  
Daniela Tepe-Belfrage
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Life Styles ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Societal Responsibility

This article looks at the promise of the ‘New Middle Class’ (NMC) inherent in the neoliberal ideological ideal of individualising societal responsibility for well-being and success. The article points to how this promise enables a discourse and practice of welfare reform and a disciplining of life styles particularly targeting the very poor in society. Women and some ethnic minorities are particularly prone to poverty and then therefore also discipline. The article then provides a case study of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and shows how the programme and the way it is constructed and managed partly undermines the provision of the material needs to alleviate people from poverty and re-produces discourses of poor lifestyle and parenting choices as sources of poverty, thereby undermining the ‘middle-class’ promise.

scholarly journals Precariate in Pandemic Conditions: New Trends, Traditional Content, Some European Practices

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Vladimir A. Shamakhov ◽  
Nikolay M. Mezhevich
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
European Regulatory

The evolution of the social structure of society in developed countries shows that the socalled middle class, whose existence is considered the main guarantee of stable social, economic, political development, is under threat. The epidemic and pandemic did not create fundamentally new risks, but significantly exacerbated traditional ones. In fact, the epidemic acted as a catalyst and accelerated negative, but fairly wellknown processes. World experience of social policy, European regulatory practices “efficiency vs equality” is of great importance to Russia.

Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard M. Wach
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Factory Production ◽  
Diffusion Of Knowledge ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Popular Knowledge ◽  
Historical Question

God bless my soul, sir … I am all out of patience with the march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burnt down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge. [Thomas Love Peacock—Crotchet Castle (1831)]The diffusion of knowledge preoccupied middle-class elites in early industrial England. While factory production promised a future of material abundance, an unsettled and menacing social environment threatened this vision of endless progress. Education constituted a cornerstone of the liberal creed embraced by the industrial middle class, and diffusing knowledge offered the hope of raising up the “lower orders” to social responsibility and respectability. A properly arranged distribution of knowledge held out hope for an ordered and orderly social existence.But the diffusion of knowledge meant more than simply uplifting the working class. Its significance extends beyond the problematic historical question of “social control.” An utterly new society was rising in the industrializing urban agglomerations of provincial England. An expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals claimed this world as its own. They pursued political power on both local and national stages and fought for reform in economic and social policy. A strongly felt sense of stewardship prompted the industrial middle class to devote great resources and energies to shaping the new urban environment.

Reviewed Work: Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? by Nita Rudra (2008)

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Muhammad Indrawan Jatmika
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Domestic Institutions ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Race To The Bottom ◽  
Global Pressure ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Welfare Distribution

Nita Rudra’s analysis in her book entitled Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in the Developing Countries challenges the argument of most globalization sceptics who argue that the bottom poor are the particular group who suffer the most from the globalization phenomenon.  Rudra’s main argument is that the domestic institutions will be the intermediate between global pressure and domestic social policy. As the aftermath, it is not the bottom poor of the citizens who hurts the most from the impact of the RTBs. It is precisely the middle class that hurts the most, because basically various kinds of policies such as government’s welfare distribution are controlled and determined by certain domestic institutions, whose access is controlled by the middle class and certain political groups, have been more oriented towards the interests of the middle class rather than than the interests of the bottom poor itself.

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