Attitudes of the Indian Middle Class: A Theory of Planned Behavior Approach

The author conducts a pilot study to investigate whether the benefits of global marketing and the purported liberal policies of the Government of India have percolated to the Indian middle-class since the year 2014, when the present government came to power. The author collects data through online surveys from Indian citizens, and then conducts a qualitative analysis of the same to test six propositions based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Model and the Theory of Reasoned Action. The author finds moderate to strong support for five of his propositions and sets the stage for a more robust research study that the author is planning to conduct on this highly relevant topic. Keywords: globalization, consumer experience, marketing strategy, political marketing

The Rise and Fall of Popular Australian Lawn Bowls 1864–2021

Lawn bowls is one of the oldest formally established British sports in Australia. This paper provides an overview of the place of lawn bowls in Australian history and society from 1864 to 2021 through four eras: British nationalism (1864–1900); middle class sport (1900–1945); leading seniors sport (1945–1990); and decline (1990–2021). The four eras cover the span of Australian lawn bowls and are based on historical data from both primary and secondary sources tracing its rise and decline. The decline in lawn bowls has been a combination of both internal and external factors. This paper is not a purely chronological account of lawn bowls, but rather provides a framework to better understand the place and role of the sport in Australian culture and society. The origins of lawn bowls in Australia are directly linked to the cultural heritage that stemmed from British settlement. Lawn bowls provides a vehicle to develop insight and understanding into several past, current, and future social and cultural issues including seniors sport, sport participation rates, gender relations, nationalism, class structures, urbanisation, and the development of contemporary cities.

Them and Uz: Harrison and me

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

Middle-class Women and Domestic Work in India and the United States: Caste, Race and Patriarchy

This study compares middle-class women’s experience of domestic work in India and the United States(US), highlighting similarities in how domestic work is organised in its paid and unpaid forms across both sites. The focus on middle-class women’s experience as unpaid workers and employers of domestic workers provides an insight into how the social and economic values of domestic work are determined. Despite social and political differences, the political economies of India and the US and interlocking systems of oppression including patriarchy, neoliberalism, caste and race have produced similarities in the undervaluation of domestic work at both sites.

Manila

The focus of this article is on Metropolitan Manila (or simply Manila), a region spanning 619 square kilometers and comprising sixteen cities and one municipality: specifically, the cities of Caloocan, Las Piñas, Malabon, Manila, Mandaluyong, Marikina, Makati, Muntinlupa, Navotas, Quezon City, Parañaque, Pasay, Pasig, San Juan, Taguig, and Valenzuela, and the municipality of Pateros. Metro Manila was constituted by presidential decree in 1975, but its constituent cities are significantly older. It is the Philippines’ largest urban area, with a population of about thirteen million in 2015, as well as the country’s economic core, producing 37.5 percent of the national gross national product (GDP). Socially and spatially, however, it is not at all like the rest of the country, given its relative wealth and spectacular inequality—the latter owing less to the extent of inequality than to its spatial organization, a particularly intensive form of class segregation where upper- and middle-class residential and commercial enclaves abut the informal settlements of the urban poor as a general pattern. This landscape took shape as a result of four processes: rapid population growth beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, monumental city-building under the Marcos regime, democratization, and urban restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. These processes constituted what are perhaps the city’s two main social actors, the urban poor and middle class. These labels are more conventional than accurate. Most of the “urban poor” are not poor by official standards, and the term “middle class” is much too vague. These groups find definition relationally, particularly in space, as “squatters” (slum dwellers) and “villagers” (enclave residents). This division, while fundamentally spatial, elaborated around the divide between formal and informal housing, has become the most important social division in the city since the late 20th century. Hence this article considers each group in some depth. While Metro Manila’s importance to the Philippines is clear, lamentably it has been largely overlooked as a source of urban theory. Manila provides an example par excellence of “late urbanization.” Analytically, it belongs with a set of cities in Latin America and Southeast Asia having undergone rapid population growth in the mid-20th century, resulting in urban landscapes distinguished by precarious work and informal housing. Second, it represents a particularly vivid case of urban space and social relations being restructured by market forces. The commodification of land and labor has proceeded relatively unimpeded in Manila, and class dynamics have crystallized in space relatively uncomplicated by racial and ethnic, religious, and other lines of division. As a result, class contention is especially intense, and class segregation is extreme. We might see in this landscape one possible urban future.