scholarly journals LIVING IN UNCERTAINTY - PROSPERITY AND THE ANXIETIES OF NGO MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN IN THE CONTEXT OF MARKETISATION AND PRIVATISATION IN VIETNAM

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Binh Trinh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Market Values ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The University ◽  
Middle Strata

Studies of the new middle-class often write about the anxieties of falling behind with its members acquiring their middle-class status from uncertain and unpredictable market values. This type of anxiety is typical for members of the white-collar middle-class who often deal with pressures to maintain a conspicuous consumption level to remain in the middle strata. I argue that some of the anxieties associated with wealth experienced by the new middle class in Vietnam are also the result of a mode of governmentality that is used by the state to boost individual self-reliance and economic efficiency with the appeal of public contributions. Governmentality, in Foucault’s proposition, consists of technologies that allow the state to govern individuals from a distance with the vision of correct conduct. This mode of governance is done in Vietnam through the idea of “moral conduct”, by which the state guides the autonomous economic activities of individuals with the moral appeal of public contributions. This paper looks at the performance and experiences of Vietnamese female NGO professionals in the process of marketisation and privatisation in Vietnam. I show that their economic and professional performances demonstrate the morality of domestic responsibilities and public contributions, resembling the symbol of the virtuous woman in Vietnam’s Confucian and socialist tradition, a symbol which continues to be applauded by the state. The findings in this paper are drawn from my PhD research project at the University of Leeds, with data collected from a six-month fieldwork study conducted in Hanoi between 2016 and 2017.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 242-258
Author(s):  
Nana Okura Gagné
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Socioeconomic Change ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Individual Self

This chapter reviews the different meanings of the new middle class, which describe the historical and cultural configurations of postwar Japan and universalized notions of socioeconomic class used in social science. It reflects on the configurations, relations, and operationalizations of the slippage between discursive and ideological characteristics of “middleness” that have been elided under the term the new middle class in postwar Japan. It also offers new insights on the understanding of dominant ideology and dominant groups, including anthropological theorizations of power, ideology, and subjectivity in late capitalism. The chapter emphasizes on the issues of individual self-cultivation and concerns of families in practice in the midst of socioeconomic change. It explains how salarymen or any other social actors represent both the nexus and product of ongoing self-cultivation and socialization in the changing global economy.

Creating modern women: The kitchen in postcolonial Singapore, 1960–90

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-434
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The State ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Class Status

This article examines the modern kitchen as a technological artefact and a mechanism through which the postcolonial Singaporean state and agents of household consumerism such as advertisers, retailers, home economists, and social scientists constructed the image of a modern Singaporean woman. By revealing how the female consumer-cum-homemaker became a symbol of material success and middle-class status in Fordist Singapore, the article highlights two types of domestication: the subordination of women to the patriarchal imperatives of family and nation, and the transformation of hard successes in the economy into soft comforts in the kitchen. This article suggests that although the state had narrowed the gap between popular expectations for improved living standards and its ability to fulfil them, it also unwittingly enmeshed definitions of femininity, womanhood, and female citizenship in a series of contradictions and tensions that had implications for contemporary Singaporean society.

Disputing Limeño Historical and Cultural Heritage

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-305
Author(s):  
Gisela Cánepa-Koch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The State ◽  
Grassroots Organizations ◽  
Urban Workers ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
The City

In the 1970s many persons of andean origin migrated to Lima. Informally and through the mediation of emerging grassroots organizations, the nuevos limeños negotiated with the state for their right to residency in the city and to sanitation and other services. They struggled for recognition as citizens. Gradually an informal economy mainly based on Andean cultural practices of production gave way to entrepreneurship, which created a new middle class. In this way Andean migrants to Lima became urban workers and consumers and appropriated and transformed the city.

scholarly journals Raising Successful Offspring by Chinese Middle-Class Parents

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang ◽  
Pak K. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Urban China ◽  
Professional Qualification ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Sociocultural Approach ◽  
Class Status

This article analyses the intergenerational mobility of the Chinese “new middle class” in Shanghai, China. Building on the Bourdieusian concept of social capital, it puts forward a sociocultural approach to explaining the reproduction of the middle class in contemporary urban China. It explores why cultural capital and marketable professional qualification are not enough for younger members of this class to secure their class status and upward mobility. It also discusses how and why the pre-reform socialist social institutions of danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) continue to play decisive roles in consolidating the middle class’ life status in post-reform China. This study finds that middle-class parents capitalise on their accrued and privileged guanxi (interpersonal relationship), built on the socialist social institutions, to help their children find good jobs to maintain their own upward intergenerational mobility.

scholarly journals A New Middle Class on Old Academic Grounds: Law Students of the Cluj University in the 1930s

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Zoltán Pálffy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Educational Credentials ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
Statistical Survey ◽  
The University

Abstract One of the main tasks of universities of Central and Eastern Europe is that of forming loyal and reliable citizens ready to fill in the ranks of public service. Educational credentials make for social elevation into the ranks of this peculiarly state-dependent middle class. Law students make the relative majority of those engaged in higher learning in the region all through the first half of the 20th century. Where and when there is an acute need for a new middle class under a new state sovereignty, it is law studies that are notoriously perceived as meant to producing the bulk of it. The University of Cluj in the inter-war period is a case in point. The paper shall put forward a selection of data (from an ample statistical survey of elite formation via upper-level education in Central Europe) on this segment of the student population in the 1930s, setting it against a dramatically changed background (the general one and the local one, as traced in secondary sources): how do Romanians cope with the task of producing this new middle class on old grounds, and what are the unwanted side-effects of such state-related social emancipation mechanisms? And how non-Romanians behave in the new situation?

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