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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Socializing Messages In Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways To Social Mobility And Reproduction, Kristen Lucas
Socializing Messages In Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways To Social Mobility And Reproduction, Kristen Lucas
Kristen Lucas
This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n=41) and their children (n=25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messages take several paths (direct, indirect, ambient, and omission). Further, the content of messages communicated along these paths often is contradictory. That is, sons and daughters receive messages that both encourage and discourage social mobility. Ultimately, these individuals must negotiate the meanings of family-based anticipatory socialization communicated to them through a mix of messages.
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
Kristen Lucas
In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial …