Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“You Never Know” Work And Precarity In Las Vegas Before And During Covid-19, Richard Reeves, Morgan Welch, Hannah Van Drie

Policy Briefs and Reports

In this brief we examine work and work-based policies in Las Vegas, Nevada – a theme that emerged strongly from focus group data collected in the fall of 2019. The middle-class Americans we talked with were concerned about upward mobility, the changing landscape of work as a result of automation and skills training, scheduling uncertainty, and employee benefits like time off and paid leave. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated these pre-existing issues for many workers. Much of the policy agenda in the last year has been understandably reactionary, as policymakers addressed immediate issues such as unemployment insurance, keeping workers …

Race, Class And Attitudes Towards Use Of Force By Police, Christopher Everett Robertson

Sociology & Anthropology Theses

Another unarmed victim of police violence. Another acquitted officer. In recent years, this tragic course of events has repeated itself on multiple occasions in courtrooms, living rooms and social media spaces throughout the nation. Each new, widely-publicized fatal police encounter has added to an ongoing and contentious national debate around policing and minority rights. This intractable debate, which has been argued along racial lines, seems to be at an indefinite impasse. But what if this debate persists because we have not accounted for the role that both race and class play in shaping views towards use of force? Therefore, this …

Elite And Ethical: The Defensive Distinctions Of Middle-Class Bicycling In Bangalore, India, Manisha Anantharaman

School of Liberal Arts Faculty Works

This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions,which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling among Bangalore’s middle classes. With their environmental discourses and signage, middle-class cyclists make claims to being ethical actors and ecological citizens concerned about global environments. Their high-end bicycles and special gear enable them to maintain their social status in personal and professional circles, despite adopting …

Bridging The Gap Between Unmet Legal Needs And An Oversupply Of Lawyers: Creating Neighborhood Law Offices - The Philadelphia Experiment, Jules Lobel, Matthew Chapman

Articles

In the United States there is, simultaneously, an abundance of unemployed lawyers and a significant unmet need for legal care among middle-class households. This unfortunate paradox is protected by ideological, cultural, and practical paradigms both inside the legal community and out. These paradigms include the legal chase for prestige, the consumer’s inability to recognize a legal need, and the growing mountain of debt new lawyers enter the profession with. This article will discuss a very successful National Lawyers Guild experiment from 1930s-era Philadelphia that addressed a similar situation, in a time with similar paradigms, by emphasizing community-connected lawyering. That is, …

Stew Of Discontent:“Middle Class” Americans' Economic Populism In The 1990s And Beyond, Jonathan Martin

Jonathan Martin

This article highlights the hidden subtlety of ordinary Americans' economic populist sentiment, a longstanding and politically pivotal form of popular resentment concerning class inequalities. Based on my research in the late 1990s, I describe how economic populist attitudes in the United States can be much more complex than suggested in the relevant literature. I use data from interviews with a small number of “ordinary middle class” Americans to illustrate little known nuances in these attitudes and to highlight how such subtleties are overlooked in prevailing characterizations of public opinion. I suggest that the oversight is the result of the fragmentary …

Middle-Class Crisis In The Colonization Transition: Comparing Catalysts And Consequences In Taiwan, 1988-2008, Jui-Chang Jao

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

The Taiwanese middle class has experienced two waves of crisis over the past three decades in the context of a colonization transition involving globalization and democratization as primary catalysts. On the economic front, Taiwan’s economy has become increasingly integrated into the Chinese market, resulting approximately one million of the Taiwanese middle class relocating to China. Moreover, neoliberal economic reforms have led to a downsized state sector of the Taiwanese economy. These economic changes affect the growth and stability of the Taiwanese middle class. Meanwhile, on the political front, an ongoing democratic consolidation and decolonization efforts have brought about significant political …

The Disappearing Middle Class: Implications For Politics And Public Policy, Trevor Richard Beltz

CMC Senior Theses

What does it mean to be middle class? The majority of Americans define themselves as members of the middle class, regardless of their wealth. The number of Americans that affiliate with the middle class alludes to the idea that it cannot be defined simply by level of income, number of assets, type of job, etc. The middle class is a lifestyle as much as it is a group of similarly minded people, just as it is a social construct as much as it is an economic construct. Yet as the masses fall away from the elite, and changes continue to …

Secrets And Hiding Places: The Worth Of Women In Nicholas Nickleby, Elizabeth Redmond

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In early Victorian England, married women were denied the legal right to own property, and social convention remanded them to ostracism if they chose to remain single. Likewise, jobs that were available to women failed to pay a living wage, so women were placed under tremendous economic and social pressure to marry. In Charles Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby, he depicts how marriage becomes manipulated within the working and middle classes as a means to acquire wealth. Dickens also compares the repression of women to the abuse suffered by school children in the Yorkshire schools, which had a reputation for neglecting …

Downsizing America In The Twentieth Century: A Sociological And Theoretical Analysis Of The Shrinking Middle Class, Terreea Lynne Adams

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Downsizing is the process by which a firm decreases its number of employees, even during times of a strong economy, with the stated purpose of generating greater efficiency, productivity and of course, profit. The downsizing trend in the United States during the past three decades has resulted in an enormous shift in the structure of our society. Various theorists, sociologists and economists employ differing ways of looking at this downsizing trend and its effects on the largest segment of the population; that is, the middle class.

lndications of a healthy economy are low levels of unemployment and poverty-. Downsizing involves …

Stranger In Our Midst: The Working Class Woman, Yvonne Van Der Klip Stam

IUSTITIA

Although some of the concrete goals of women's liberation such as adequate available day care for children are important to women of both the blue collar and middle classes, the philosophy expressed by the movement is not calculated to attract the working class woman. Two incomes may be increasingly necessary to the middle class family, and an increasing number of middle class women are now supporting their children alone, but the movement speaks of freeing women fiom child care to pursue a career, an idea which does not speak to a blue collar woman concerned with getting a job to …

Middle And Working-Class Fathers' Occupational Expectations And Aspirations For Their Daughters, William H. Bieck

Student Work

Sociological research in the areas of occupational preference and mobility, together with related work in the sociology of education has been concerned almost entirely with males. An all but exclusive preoccupation with the male worker is somewhat surprising considering the fact that census data reveal, an increasing proportion of women in paid employment during the last sixty years.¹ An examination of labor statistics by Bossi,² disclosed that between 1950 and I960, women accounted for 65 per cent of the increase in the labor force. By 1965, according to Davis³, approximately one paid worker in three was …