Women's Occupations and the Social Order in Nineteenth Century Britain

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Bottero ◽  
Kenneth Prandy

This paper examines the hierarchy amongst female occupations in Britain in the nineteenth century, using information on marriage and family patterns to generate a measure of distance within a social space. This social interaction approach to stratification uses the patterning of close relationships, in this case between women and men, to build up a picture of the social ordering within which such relationships take place. The method presented here starts, not with the assumption of a set of broad social groups that may interact to a greater or lesser extent, but from the opposite direction, from the patterns of social interaction among detailed occupational groupings. Instead of reading off social hierarchy from the labour market, we use relations of social closeness and similarity (here marriage) to build a picture of the occupational ordering from patterns of relative social distance. Such an approach is possible because of the way in which social relations are constrained by (and constrain) hierarchy.

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Prandy ◽  
W. Bottero

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Alzaga

Cristina Alzaga: Indoor Prostitution: The Parlour as a Social Space This article presents a sociological hermeneutic analysis of the lived everyday working world of Danish indoor prostitutes. It draws upon observations and interviews, as well as documentary and experiential data, produced during a six-month period of ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen massage parlour, where the author served as “telephone lady“. The article uncovers the social order (nomos) of this life world, its social relations and shared interpretations as well as organizational traits and practical-corporeal terms. It also discusses the variety and multidimensionality of the relations between prostitutes and clients. The article seeks to uncover the meanings of the distinct experiential dynamics and work experiences that take form within this particular working universe, and examines their contradictory relations to the dominant views and accounts of prostitution in the outside world, including the views pre¬sented by mainstream research on prostitution.


Author(s):  
Dennis Eversberg

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people’s positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people’s perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-407
Author(s):  
Mladen Lazić ◽  
Jelena Pešić

AbstractBased on research data from 2003, 2012, and 2018, the authors examine the extent to which capitalist social relations in Serbia have determined liberal value orientations. The change of the social order in Serbia after 1990 brought about a radical change of the basis upon which values are constituted. To interpret the relationship between structural and value changes, the authors employ the theory of normative-value dissonance. Special attention in the analysis is paid to the interpretation of value changes based on the distinction between intra- and inter-systemic normative-value dissonance. In the first part of their study, the authors examine changes in the acceptance of liberal values over the period of consolidation of capitalism in Serbia, while in the second part they focus on the 2018 data and specific predictors of political and economic liberalism.


1992 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 298-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben A. Nelson ◽  
J. Andrew Darling ◽  
David A. Kice

Epiclassic occupants of the site of La Quemada left the disarticulated remains of 11-14 humans in an apparently sacred structure outside the monumental core of the site. Several lines of evidence are reviewed to generate propositions about the ritual meanings and functions of the bones. A comparative analysis reveals the complexity of mortuary practices in northern and western Mexico, and permits the suggestion that these particular remains were those of revered ancestors or community members. The sacred structure is seen as a charnel house, in which the more ancient tradition of ancestor worship expressed in shaft tombs was essentially perpetuated above ground. Hostile social relations are clearly suggested, however, by other categories of bone deposits. Recognition of the rich variability of mortuary displays leads to questions about their role in the maintenance of the social order.


Purpose of the study: To investigate the sociological dimension of social space structuring under the influence of territorial movements in the era of globalization based on the example of modern Russia. As the methodology for the study, the synthesis of E. Giddens’ theory was structured, its provisions on the topography of social space in the geographical plane. The paradigm of structuralist constructivism of P. Bourdieu was used as well, in which it was relevant for us to analyze habitus as a socio-geographical environment for the formation of institutional strategies of agents of social relationship. Factors that contribute to and hinder the adaptation of personality in the new social environment, were examined based on works by O. Toffler, U. Beck, V.I. Chuprov and Yu.A. Zubok. To determine the mechanism of the genesis and functioning of meanings in the new communicative environment, the authors relied on N. Luman's approach to self-identification and self-conference. In the process of analyzing the nature of trust in the institutional order in the context of globalization, the authors used works by A.V. Ivanov and S.A. Danilova who analyze the mechanisms of formation. The empirical basis for the article was a sociological study conducted on the basis of the Sociological Center of Kutafin Moscow State Law University.The article reveals the features of personality identification in a dynamic environment of interethnic and cross-cultural interactions, structured under the influence of territorial factors. The degree of conformity of the scale, the nature and depth of self-identification in various territorial planes of the social space are determined by the example of modern Russian society. Factors of social integration in the process of the formation of territorial identity both at the institutional level and in everyday life when constructing informal social ties are disclosed. The restrictions of social identification in the regions of Russia are found that prevent the formation of civic identity and responsibility for the reproduction of the social order. The values that determine social integration in cross-cultural interaction are revealed. The results of the study make a significant contribution to the development of methods for determining the causes of the genesis of separatist sentiments and the conditions for designing constructive social participation in various regions. The article is relevant for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as lecturers, involved in the problems of the sociological study of globalization, social space and group identity. The work uses an integral methodology for measuring social processes from the perspective of the subject of action, constructing strategies in the new social environment, and from the perspective of a system that ensures the reproduction of the institutional order.


Author(s):  
Jens Ambrasat ◽  
Christian von Scheve

Ever since Georg Simmel’s seminal works, social relations have been a central building block of sociological theory. In relational sociology, social identities are an essential concept and supposed to emerge in close interaction with other identities, discourses and objects. To assess this kind of relationality, existing research capitalises on patterns of meaning making that are constitutive for identities. These patterns are often understood as forms of declarative knowledge and are reconstructed, using qualitative methods, from denotative meanings as they surface: for example, in stories and narratives. We argue that this approach to some extent privileges explicit and conceptual knowledge over tacit and non-conceptual forms of knowledge. We suggest that affect is a concept that can adequately account for such implicit and bodily meanings, even when measured on the level of linguistic concepts. We draw on affect control theory (ACT) and related methods to investigate the affective meanings of concepts (lexemes) denoting identities in a large survey. We demonstrate that even though these meanings are widely shared across respondents, they nevertheless show systematic variation reflecting respondents’ positions within the social space and the typical interaction experiences associated with their identities. In line with ACT, we show, first, that the affective relations between exemplary identities mirror their prototypical, culturally circumscribed and institutionalised relations (for example, between role identities). Second, we show that there are systematic differences in these affective relations across gender, occupational status and regional culture, which we interpret as reflecting respondents’ subjective positioning and experience vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality.


Author(s):  
Joanna Innes

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.


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