7. The Social Crisis of the Middle Class, 1918-1933

1977 ◽  
pp. 123-149
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
The Social

СОВРЕМЕННОЕ РОССИЙСКОЕ ОБЩЕСТВО КАК ПРОСТРАНСТВО КОНФЛИКТА

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
V. V. Gorshkova ◽  
A. A. Melnikova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Russian

The article considers the contradictions and conflicts that are characteristic of modern Russian society. The processes of social disintegration are analyzed and interpreted as a result of fundamental social and economic transformations. The problems of economic inequality are presented in the historical perspective in close connection with the previous stages of Russia's socioeconomic development. Significant polarization of the population is one of the most significant conflict factors in modern society, which leads to an increase in protest moods and may in the long term threaten social upheavals. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with the socio-economic situation does not lead to ideas of the unification and consolidation of society, but find expression in social conflicts. The emergence and development of social conflicts is influenced by a number of factors: economic, ethnic, religious. One of the most important characteristics of society is its social structure. After the collapse of the USSR, the previous social structure was abolished, and a new social reality was formed in Russia. When considering the stratification structure of society, most attention is paid to the middle class, which is considered the backbone of a stable society. The middle class in Russia is in the stage of formation, it is hardly possible to speak of a complete analogy with the middle class of Western society. The share of middle class in society can be estimated in different ways depending on the methodological approaches used by researchers. An important consequence of the transformation of the social structure was the problem of marginalization, since the dismantling of the old social structure and the slow formation of the new one put the social status and place in the division of labor system of many individuals into question. The sharp impoverishment of representatives of prestigious professions led to a reassessment of their situation, especially for the younger generation. When analyzing the origins of social conflicts in modern Russian society, it is necessary to consider the issue of the attitude of the broad masses of the population to power and national elites. It should be noted that power in Russia historically takes shape around specific leaders and does not have an institutional character. The most significant factor shaping the attitude towards the authorities and the elite in general in Russian society are the economic results of the market reforms that have taken place. Only a small part of the population believes that they won as a result of the changes that have taken place, the natural consequence of which is the population's distrust of the authorities and, in general, political institutions.

Who is Rational?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Emergence

Beginning around 1860, authors in the Egyptian capital portrayed Cairo’s changing cityscape and the recent emergence of local newspapers in terms of their impact on rationality (‘aql). In their descriptions, these contemporaries depicted rationality as an education of the heart that especially enabled men from the middle class to control their bodies and passions. The chapter shows that Cairo’s transformation was, however, not always associated with rising rationality by drawing on a different set of sources. Police and court records from the 1860s and 1870s demonstrate that contemporaries also described processes of urban change as a danger to the “honor” of lower-class women. Like the debates in Berlin, emotional practices in Cairo thus served as a way to address the social formation of the Egyptian capital during a time of dynamic transformation.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?

1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
New Class ◽  
Green Parties ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Green Politics ◽  
Material Values

The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the ‘new childhood’ argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.

Koranlektüre-Kurse für „Intellektuelle“ in Dakar, Senegal: religiöse Erwachsenenbildung in frankophonen Mittelschichtsmilieus

Sociologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-179
Author(s):  
Nadine Sieveking
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
Effective Time ◽  
Secular Education ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Seit 2015 werden in Dakar Koranlektürekurse von einer Organisation angeboten, die verspricht, mittels einfacher und effizienter Methoden die Fähigkeiten zum eigenständigen Lesen des Korans innerhalb von drei Monaten zu vermitteln. Diese kostenpflichtigen Kurse sind auf eine spezielle Zielgruppe in frankophonen urbanen Bildungsmilieus zugeschnitten, die als „Intellektuelle“ bezeichnet wird. Der Artikel untersucht den Erfolg der Kurse und die soziale Positionierung der Beteiligten, die sich aus arabophonen (Lehrende) und frankophonen (Lernende) Bildungsgruppen rekrutieren. Letzteren wurde nach der Unabhängigkeit ein exklusiver Status als nationale Bildungselite zugeschrieben, der durch anhaltende Islamisierungsprozesse ‚von unten‘ zunehmend in Frage gestellt wird. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Kurse dazu beitragen, die symbolischen Grenzen zwischen francisants und arabisants abzubauen und den frankophonen Teilnehmenden helfen, einen sozialen Status aufrecht zu erhalten, der respektable Modernität verkörpert. Eine wichtige Rolle für den Erfolg der Kurse spielen außerdem das effektive Zeitmanagement, die pädagogischen Methoden sowie die bürokratischen, räumlichen und materiellen Organisationsstrukturen, die dem Habitus der in säkularen, modernen Bildungssystemen sozialisierten Zielgruppe entsprechen. Qur’an Reading Courses for “Intellectuals” in Dakar, Senegal: Religious Adult Education in Francophone Middle Class Milieus Since 2015, a certain type of Quran reading course has been offered in Dakar. With their simple but efficient methods, these courses promise attendees the ability to read the Quran within three months. They are subject to fees and target a specific social group, identified as “intellectuals” and located within francophone educated urban milieus. The article examines the success of these courses and the social positioning of its participants, who are drawn from Arabic-speaking (teachers) and francophone (students) educated groups. Since Senegal’s independence, the latter have been ascribed an exclusive status as the national educated elite – a status that is increasingly questioned in ongoing Islamization processes ‘from below’. The analysis shows that the courses contribute to a weakening of the symbolic boundaries between francisants and arabisants and help the participants to reinforce a social status that embodies notions of respectable modernity. The specific method and pedagogy of the courses also play an important role in their success, as do their effective time management, their bureaucratic structures, and their spatial and material conditions, since these all correspond to the habitus of the target group whose members have been socialized within modern secular education systems.

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