Imagining the Middle Class

Imagining the Middle Class PDF Author: Dror Wahrman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521477109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why and how did the British people come to see themselves as living in a society centred around a middle class? The answer provided by Professor Wahrman challenges most prevalent historical narratives: the key to understanding changes in conceptualisations of society, the author argues, lies not in underlying transformations of social structure - in this case industrialisation, which supposedly created and empowered the middle class - but rather in changing political configurations. Firmly grounded in a close reading of an extensive array of sources, and supported by comparative perspectives on France and America, the book offers a nuanced model for the interplay between social reality, politics, and the languages of class.

Imagining the Middle Class

Imagining the Middle Class PDF Author: Dror Wahrman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521477109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why and how did the British people come to see themselves as living in a society centred around a middle class? The answer provided by Professor Wahrman challenges most prevalent historical narratives: the key to understanding changes in conceptualisations of society, the author argues, lies not in underlying transformations of social structure - in this case industrialisation, which supposedly created and empowered the middle class - but rather in changing political configurations. Firmly grounded in a close reading of an extensive array of sources, and supported by comparative perspectives on France and America, the book offers a nuanced model for the interplay between social reality, politics, and the languages of class.

Imagining Consumers

Imagining Consumers PDF Author: Regina Lee Blaszczyk
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801861932
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tells the story of American consumer society from the perspective of mass-market manufacturers and retailers. Case studies illuminate the actions of decision-makers in key firms, including the Homer Laughlin China Company, the Kohler Company and Corning Glass works.

Imagining the Middle East

Imagining the Middle East PDF Author: Thierry Hentsch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781895431131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, Imagining the Middle East examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how they have been used as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions.

Negotiating Opportunities

Negotiating Opportunities PDF Author: Jessica McCrory Calarco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019063443X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

Money, Morals, & Manners

Money, Morals, & Manners PDF Author: Michèle Lamont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922596
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class—the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else. Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation. "A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come."—David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology "A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come."—R. Granfield, Choice "This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft."—Lewis Coser, Boston College

Imagining the Middle Class

Imagining the Middle Class PDF Author: Dror Wahrman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Class

Class PDF Author: Paul Fussell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671792253
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

Imagining the Medieval Afterlife

Imagining the Medieval Afterlife PDF Author: Richard Matthew Pollard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110717791X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
A comprehensive, innovative study of how medieval people envisioned heaven, hell, and purgatory - images and imaginings that endure today.

The Anxiety of Ascent

The Anxiety of Ascent PDF Author: Scott Doidge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351267140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
This intriguing book re-evaluates a narrative of cultural decline that developed in the wake of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Weber, and a group of influential sociologists that followed, Western modernity is marked by growing disenchantment with the beliefs and values that had previously given a sense of structure and meaning to life. Despite its unparalleled material achievements, the modern West in this reading is suffering from a crisis of meaning and is no longer able to provide authoritative answers to the only really important question: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ This book examines two influential responses to this question: the German bourgeois ideal of the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century American celebration of the middle class. In each period, the exploration is guided by a close reading of a contemporary and retrospective text. For Germany, Gustav Freytag’s novel Debt and Credit (1855) is read against Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), and, for the US, the domestic comedy Father Knows Best (1954–1960) is read against the cable television drama Mad Men (2007–2015). The Anxiety of Ascent casts Weber’s narrative in a more optimistic light, pointing towards the redemptive possibilities contained within everyday life. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and cultural studies scholars interested in cultural sociology, social theory, morality, meaning and the culture of middle-class life.

Imagining the Future

Imagining the Future PDF Author: Chilla Bulbeck
Publisher: University of Adelaide Press
ISBN: 1922064351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
Do young Australians understand and live equality and difference differently from older generations? Is Australia the gender equal society that many claim it to be? How do we understand and explain growing economic inequality when our dominant ideologies are individualism and neoliberalism? What are or should be the limits of tolerance in our negotiation of cultural difference? Imagining the Future explores our contemporary complex equality narrative through the desires and dreams of 1000 young Australians and 230 of their parents from diverse backgrounds across Australia. This extraordinary data set affords analysis of the impact of gender, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, Aboriginality and sexuality on young peoples imagined life stories, or essays written about their future. An intergenerational comparison assesses how different young people really are from older generations. The book offers a compelling and subtle engagement with the sometimes deeply moving, sometimes hilarious voices of young people to deliver insight into the challenges and complexity of gender and other social relations in early 21st Australian society. Young people yearn for and believe in equal opportunities, but their imagined life stories indicate massive inequalities in the personal resources that will allow them to achieve their goals. They claim to live in a world of gender equality, even as they continue to cherish performances of gender difference. The gulf between young mens and young womens imagined intimate lives together suggest that many are bound for conflict. They (and indeed their parents) do not understand the world in terms of class relations, but proclaim that everyone is the same, even as they are aware of fine distinctions in economic resources and cultural capital. Alongside proclaimed acceptance of cultural diversity, the advantages experienced by virtue of being white challenges many young Australians. In an increasingly individualistic world, some young people perform in intimate citizenship, or personal engagements based on shared experiences. Like their parents, few understand obligations towards unmet others, which form the basis of national solidarity.