Unexpected Destinations

This chapter argues that an upbringing of religious restraint constrains college choices, especially for professional-class kids. It does so by recalibrating their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to rarely consider a selective college despite their excellent grades in high school. As a result, religiously restrained teens—and especially those from the professional class who have the resources to make it to college—tend to undermatch in the college selection process. This is evident among men and is especially prevalent among women. Girls who grow up with religious restraint have a self-concept centered around family, service, and God. They do not aspire toward prestigious careers, which makes a degree from a selective college less valuable. Unlike less affluent teens who want to improve their class position by gaining a college degree, religiously restrained teens are content maintaining their class position by attending college close to home and reproducing traditional gender norms.

God’s Guardrails

This chapter explains why religious restraint operates differently based on teens’ social class background. It argues that what religion offers isn’t equally helpful to everyone. Working- and middle-class teens benefit from religious restraint because religion gives these kids access to social capital, which middle- and especially working-class kids can’t access elsewhere. Since boys are especially prone to getting caught up in risky behaviors that derail them from academic success, the social capital of religious communities creates crucial “godly” guardrails that help them stay on the path to college. The benefits of godly guardrails are not distributed evenly, because not everyone’s road to college looks the same. Professional-class kids don’t benefit from godly guardrails as much because they already have access to social capital through other social institutions.

A Domino Effect

Education during the early years of life lays the groundwork for educational trajectories over the course of life. A college degree has a profound effect on Americans over the life course, including how much they earn and how long they live. This chapter argues that religious restraint has a domino effect. Teenagers raised with religious restraint earn better grades in high school, and their higher grade point averages help them go on to complete more years of college than nonabiders. Abiders from working-class and middle-class families see the biggest educational attainment bump. However, abiders from poor families and from the professional class do not see a strong educational attainment bump.

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Social Mobility, Health and Wellbeing in Poland

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on individuals’ health and wellbeing outcomes. However, studies on the effects of social mobility on health, using high-quality panel survey data, have almost exclusively been conducted in Western welfare democracies. To account for this gap, and using empirical data from one of the largest and most eventful post-communist countries, Poland, in this study we investigate how individuals’ origin and destination socio-economic position and social mobility are linked to self-rated health and reported psychological wellbeing. We use the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) data to construct self-rated health and psychological wellbeing measures, origin, destination and occupational class mobility variables, and account for an extensive set of sociodemographic determinants of health. We employ diagonal reference models to distinguish social mobility effects from origin and destination effects, and account for possible health selection mechanisms. Our results suggest that there is an occupational class gradient in health in Poland and that both parental and own occupational class matter for individual health outcomes. We also find a positive reported psychological wellbeing effect for upward social mobility from the working to the professional class.

Historical redlining and contemporary racial disparities in neighborhood life expectancy

While evidence suggests a durable association between redlining and population health, we lack an empirical account of how this historical act of racialized violence produced contemporary inequities. In this paper, we use a mediation framework to evaluate how redlining grades influenced later life expectancy and the degree to which contemporary racialized disparities in life expectancy between Black working-class neighborhoods and white professional-class neighborhoods can be explained by past HOLC mapping. Life expectancy gaps between differently graded tracts are driven by urban renewal, economic isolation, and property valuation that developed within these areas in subsequent decades. Still, only a small fraction of the total disparity between contemporary Black and white neighborhoods is predicted by HOLC grades. We discuss the role of these maps in analyses of structural racism, positioning them as only one feature of the larger public-private project of conflating race with financial risk. Policy implications include targeting resources to formerly redlined neighborhoods, but also dismantling broader racist logics of capital accumulation codified in more abstracted political economies of place.

Problems of Online Learning during Covid-19 Pandemic in Speaking For Professional Context Class

Indonesia's Government has made policy in the education sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Previously teaching and learning process especially in the higher institution is held face to face, and it switches to fully online learning. This situation forces the lecturer and students to adopt online learning and effected to their learning experiences. This current study is aimed at analyzing the students’ difficulties during online learning in speaking for professional context subject during COVID-19 situation. This research was held using a descriptive qualitative method approach. The data was obtained from an online questionnaire and interview conducted to 45 students of the second semester of the English Department who joining speaking for professional context class at Universitas Pendidikan Mandalika in Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The findings of the research revealed various problems for students as indicated in the current research. A total of 5 problems arose during online learning in the Speaking for Professional class. The arisen problem was: The first problem was related to Youtube video as the source of learning materials. The second problem was dealing with the students’ difficulties in elaborating the materials given by the lecturer during an online class. The third problem was related to the students’ procedure in doing the project or assignment given by the lecturer. The fourth problem was dealing with Students’ limitations in accessing ZOOM Meetings. The Students’ learning equipment and supporting facilities also contributed as the fifth arisen problems of the students while having online learning during COVID-19 pandemic situations. The findings provide information for further development and improvement in online teaching and learning procedures. Further research on the strategy of how the students face the challenge and adapt are encouraged.

Az átalakuló terroir – Egy természetföldrajzi fogalom társadalomföldrajzi átértékelése

As a winemaking concept, terroir has had a “lightning career” in recent decades. Initially used by a narrow professional class, the term has now become more popular. It is unavoidable for the wine economy, the market and consumers. The fundamental study of terroir has been carried out primarily within the framework of physical geography, and only in the last two decades has social geography and other social sciences played a growing role in this research. The expansion of the wine market, the emergence of foreign terroir wines, and the European Union’s regulation of protection of origin, which is also based on terroir, have made the concept more well-known in Hungary as well. At the same time, the Hungarian perception, and even the vast majority of domestic terroir studies, still follow the physical geographical approach. I consider it very important that the latest social science studies also have a place in terroir research in Hungary, because these are absolutely necessary for understanding and applying the concept in Hungarian conditions. The present study attempts to begin to fill this gap.

Examining the Differential Impact of Recessions and Recovery across Race and Gender for Working- versus Professional-Class Workers

We investigate how wages and occupation sorting vary by race, gender, and class during recessions. We performed repeated Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions of the Black-White wage gap from 1988 to 2020. Black professional-class workers’ wages are more unstable and take a more substantial hit during recessions. Black workers see a lower return to their labor market characteristics during recessions, and this is pronounced for the professional class. Using an occupational crowding methodology, we find that Black women are overrepresented in essential work and roles with high physical proximity to others and receive the lowest wages. White men are crowded out of riskier work but, within these categories, dominate higher-paying roles. Black workers earn less in professional riskier work than in working-class roles, while the reverse is true for White workers. We find that class status does not protect Black workers to the same extent as White workers, especially during recessions.

Throwing one’s voice and speaking for others: Performative vocality and transcription in the Assemblées of the long nineteenth century

This article examines the role of the voice in practices of representation in nineteenth-century parliament. It asks how textual representations of vocal practices of political representation can be mobilized for the histories of politics and representation, and how such an enquiry can complicate our understanding of representation as a multifarious practice organized around speech. The article takes a particular case as its point of departure: that of the different Assemblées of nineteenth-century France, its vocal performances and the many practices of transcription, reporting and comment, such as those produced by an increasingly professional class of stenographers, journalists and satirists. Tracing the various ways in which representatives ventriloquized others, and were ventriloquized by different audiences and commentators, it draws attention to the acoustic aspects of parliamentary speech, and of the concept of representation itself. We focus on the representative quality of political vocality itself and also consider the practice of representing political speeches on paper (e.g. as transcripts or by journalists). Finally, and most importantly, we reflect on how the use of such representations could make the MP’s voice present even where his body was not. Thinking about the French case in a wide transnational context, we argue that including extra-linguistic aspects of speech in our analyses of oratory might draw attention to the embodied practices that served to make, imagine or sometimes disrupt beliefs about national belonging – thus delving into understandings of trustworthiness and political effectiveness beyond the particular national framework. Consequently, thinking about speech with and as sound allows us to think beyond the nation or national institutions when examining the practice of modern politics, its development and the continued importance of ventriloquial imaginations and materialities in political speech.