This essay reconstructs the critical notion of class. Firstly, it turns its attention to the methodological distinctiveness of critical theory and clarifies the key importance of Marx's critique of fetishized capitalist social forms in his sociological method. Secondly, it criticizes the sociological reconstructions of Marx's work that are unable to integrate his concept of class with his treatment of capitalist social objectivity. Thirdly, it shifts its focus to a contemporary interpretation of the critical concept of class in Bonefeld's work. Bonefeld derives the process of social constitution from Marx's theorization of primitive accumulation, which has left its imprint on capitalist conceptuality as such. On this basis, Bonefeld introduces a distinction between the affirmative and the critical concept of class. Finally, this essay, once again, stresses the interconnectedness and inseparability of the concepts of class and class struggle in critical theory and ponders their usage in the sociology of culture.
This text focuses on meanings of class as formulated by mothers in regard to the early care and education facilities that are attended by their children. We approach class from feminist perspectives that enrich analyses by considering the cultural dimensions. Inspired by the approach of Christina Scharff, we combine ethnomethodology with discursive psychology to analyse ways that actors ‘do difference’. The article draws on semi-structured interviews with mothers and explores ways of ‘doing difference’ in two facilities: an exclusive private kindergarten and a kindergarten in a disadvantaged neighbourhood. This comparison enables us to see how ‘middle class’ operates as a normative category and how its meanings are modified by race and ethnicity.
This article focuses on a key episode in the Czech political-economic history of the 1990s, the abandonment of 'Czech capitalism', and the switch towards the competition state and an economic model based on foreign investment. The account of the U-turn in the policy approach to foreign investors identifies domestic actors that have had a crucial role in organising political support for the competition state. These actors, which the author calls the 'comprador' service sector, have an important role in mediating the structural power of transnational investors and translating it into other forms of power within the state. These actors also had a major role in shaping the U-turn in policy in the Czech Republic.
Despite class being one of the main characteristics of society, the study of class seems to be noticeably disappearing from social sciences. The following text is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to the class in general and the author deliberately focuses on authors whose contribution to the class theory has not been fully appreciated and also on those who represent the cultural turn in the study of class. This choice represents an alternative to the dominant stratification theory and research based solely on the connection between class and occupation. She suggests multidimensional conceptual frames of class that take into account also the categories of lifestyle and inequalities created alongside the axes of gender, ethnicity and age. In the second part of the text the author focuses on the working class. The process of definition and specification of this broad and diverse category is also the object of my interest. She is interested in the existence of the working class under the conditions of the post-industrial society in post-communist countries. Against the background of the rich tradition of international research my goal is to highlight the conceptual and methodological changes of the understanding of the working class. The author argues for the importance of research on working class and she foreshadows the possible research heading in this diverse and rich field.
The paper analyses the biographies of women at the intersection of class and gender in the Czech Republic. With the transition towards a market-based economy and a decrease in the symbolic capital of workers in the blue-collar and service fields, and in the context of a familiarise social policy and a labour market that discourages a combination of paid employment and care responsibilities, women with low education find themselves in the secondary labour market and exposed to gender discrimination. We illustrate how an intersectional approach (Brah – Phoenix 2004) can be used in sociology to analyse the ways in which class, gender and other social categories, such as care responsibility, interact and mutually constitute each other in the lives of women.
The theoretical basis of this article is Max Weber´s distinction between class and status as related but different forms of social stratification. Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe proved that this distinction is conceptually cogent and empirically important in the study of today´s modern societies. We follow their approach in our attempt to identify a status order in present-day Slovak society. We analysed the occupational structure of spouses (partners in marriages): empirical results show that there is one dimension of this structure that can be interpreted as reflecting a hierarchy of status. The status order we identify is different to income, education and socioeconomic status. An analysis of the relationship between the status hierarchy and the class structure has shown that while some classes show a rather high degree of status homogeneity, in other classes status stratification is quite extensive. Similarly to the findings of Chan and Goldthorpe, our results also show that the Weber´s distinction between status and class remains valid and empirically beneficial.
In this article we analyse data from the International Social Survey Programme, module Social Networks and Social Resources 2017 to identify the relationship between social capital and social classes in Slovakia. According to the work of Florian Pichler and Claire Wallace, we are focusing on different dimensions of social capital (they distinguished formal and informal capital, with their extensity and intensity). Using the method of ordinal regression analysis we found out, that social class is an important element in understanding social capital in Slovak society. Upper classes have higher levels of social capital (both formal and informal capital) than middle classes and lower classes, although informal capital was not as clearly stratified by class.
In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a “female” occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled.
This article focuses on the intersection of gender, class and racial/ethnic inequalities. The intersection theory draws on the feminist critique of traditional class theory and on the challenge to feminism posed by ethnic women. The article develops thinking about various configurations of the intersection of inequalities and addresses mainly the case of marginalized women. However, the argument goes that the intersection of gender, class and racial/ethnic inequalities is not just a matter for disadvantaged groups because it has an impact on all groups in various relations. Class, gender and race/ethnicity should be understood as interlocked systems of both disadvantage and privilege. The intersection of inequalities is an approach intertwined with the development of social movements (women's, labour and civil rights movements) in the USA and Western Europe. The article looks at why the intersection theory elaborated in the West mainly in the 1990s has not been reflected in Czech gender studies. Is it possible to connect the study of gender in a post-communist East European country with the predominantly American intersection theory?
This paper explores the influence of social context, class, and ideology on attitudes toward immigrants in the US. Using the conceptual frames of heterophobia and resource competition, we hypothesize that between 1996 and 2014 attitudes toward immigrants would become increasingly negative because of changes in the social context, in particular the growth in the number and diversity of immigrants. We also hypothesize that people in more precarious labor market positions, without a college education, and with a conservative religious ideology will have more negative attitudes toward immigrants. Using the General Social Survey at three points in time (1996, 2004, and 2014), we find mixed support for our hypotheses. Attitudes toward immigrants became more positive in the overall sample, but more negative for religious fundamentalists. Religious ideology and education were better predictors of attitudes toward immigrants than employment status and self-identified class. In general, the data show more support for the heterophobia explanation for negative attitudes than the resource competition explanation.
The study focuses on the social structural approach of the reforms in Eastern- and Middle-European countries based on the material of an international conference held in Kiev. In the fist part,the author briefs on a lecture held on the Polish middle class, after which she outlines the role of elites, classes and civil society in the changes in more details. Supporting David Lane's approach of explaining the Regime-change based on classes, we define the terms of administrative, capital and global political classes and identiy their status in the Post-Soviet society. in the second part, the developments during the past twenty years in Ukraine since its independence will be examined. This period has a double character: we see West-European democratic ideas and institutes implemented in traditional soviet mentality and practice. Based on empiric research results, we analyse the successful initiatives of the country striving for independency and the double - new democratical and old Soviet-type - characteristic institute system built on the above-meationed dichotomy. We pay special attention to the Orange Revolution, considered as the most important reform by public opinion, in reality being only a swing towards building democracy. In the third part, we leave the macro-social analytical frames behind and describe the Ukraine Parliament from inside. This lecture describes the structure of the Verkhovna Rada between 2002 and 2006. The author's impression of an ambiguously complex party society becomes transparent as a result of applying the social relationship network analysis. Based on examining the structure of the legislative body, she outlines the development of relationships and dynamics among the political and other groups during the four (!) significant structural reforms during the period concerned.
This article uses data from a representative survey on the applications of information and communication technologies to investigate the use of the mobile phone as a cultural object by different groups of respondents/consumers. Setting out from the premise that the symbolic and artefactual nature of new media, their ‘thingness’, should be a central part of any investigation of their social and cultural signifi cance, the article focuses on the meaning of the mobile phone as a cultural object and commodity sign for various groups of users/consumers. It also concentrates on the social structuring of mobile phone use by young people and addresses the relationship between class and the practices and meanings of mobile phone use in the context of young people’s consumption of other media and cultural technologies. It addresses one of the central questions in the sociology of culture—how are consumption tastes and practices related to class—and examines it through the case of mobile phone use. The study suggests that the general ‘technosensibility’ of young people, which seems a universal generational phenomenon, when interpreted in the context of the consumption of other ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and cultural consumption in general, is differentiated according to class and cultural capital. The article concludes that class distinctions produce a digital divide that results in two distinct populations of young users: the interacting and the interacted users.
In this article we use survey data to test three arguments on the relationship between social stratification and the way of life (including cultural consumption): „homology“, „individualisation“ and „omnivore – univore“ arguments. The conclusion of our analysis is the relationship of social stratification and the way of life (including cultural consumption) in Slovak society is currently best characterized by the class homology argument. Thus, it can be said that members of basic social classes as well as people with different socio-economic status live by separate, different ways of life, which also include different ways of their cultural consumption. It can reasonably be assumed that the different ways of life of members of social classes and status groups not only share their specific characteristics but also contribute to the definition of their social position (including the definition of symbolic boundaries between them) and their interrelations in the system of class and status order of the Slovak society.
W artykule podejmuję kwestię stereotypu z perspektywy antropologicznej jako narzędzia danej kultury w naznaczaniu rzeczywistości społecznej, będącego jednocześnie – co nie do końca zostaje uznane przez bardziej socjologiczne teorie stereotypu – wysoce plastycznym, kontekstualnym i zależnym od indywidualnych decyzji aktorów w danym polu władzy. Korzystając z inspirującej teorii stereotypu Zygmunta Benedyktowicza, w celu doprecyzowania wielorakich funkcji stereotypów, przyglądam się w artykule stereotypowi migranta polskiego w Wielkiej Brytanii. Stereotyp Polaków jako zaradnych, obrotnych i ciężko pracujących indywidualistów idzie w parze ze znaczeniowo podobnym, ale o skrajnie odmiennym zabarwieniu etycznym stereotypie Polaków jako nie potrafiących się zorganizować egoistów mających jedynie swój interes na względzie. Aby zrozumieć sens i społeczną funkcję tego stereotypu należy jednak – jak podkreśla Benedyktowicz – patrzeć nie na zawartość stereotypu i kogo on dotyczy, ale przede wszystkim na tego kto go wytwarza.
EN
In this article I look at stereotypes from an anthropological perspective which differs slightly from a sociological one in recognizing its plasticity, context of use and its dependence on social actors’ reproduction in a given field of power. Using an inspiring and refreshingtheory of stereotypes by Zygmunt Benedyktowicz, in order to decode their various meanings and functions I look at stereotypes around Polish migrants in Great Britain. Two similar in meaning but opposite in ethical valuation stereotypes operate there – one that sees Polish migrants and individualistic, opportunity driven, hardworking economic actors, another that treats them as egoistic, unable to organize and inward looking. In order to understand the meanings and functions of these we need to – as Benedyktowicz reminds us – look not at the content and the addressee of the stereotype but who actually produces them.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.