People like Us: Social Class in America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Debating the Reality of Social Classes
This paper first surveys a significant set of issues that are intertwined in asking whether social classes are real. It distinguishes two different notions of class: class as organized social entities and class as types of individuals based on individual characteristics. There is good evidence for some classes as social entities—ruling classes and underclasses in some societies—but other classes in contemporary society are sometimes best thought of in terms of types, not social entities. Implications are drawn for pluralist accounts of social classification and the individualism-holism dispute.
Current Directions in …, 2011
Social class reflects more than the material conditions of people's lives. Objective resources (e.g., income) shape cultural practices and behaviors that signal social class.
2011
I have selected these three articles for their important contribution to contemporary debates around social class, and, in particular, their development of conceptions of class that encompass understandings of how class is lived and experienced on an individual as well as collective level. Neither the cultural nor the embodied experiences of being classed were satisfactorily addressed in the conventional approaches to class theory that dominated the last half of the twentieth century.
A Road Map for an Emerging Psychology of Social Class
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2012
Though the scientific study of social class is over a century old, theories regarding how social class shapes psychological experience are in their infancy. In this review, we provide a road map for the empirical study of an emerging psychology of social class. Specifically, we outline key measurement issues in the study of social class -including the importance of both objective indicators and subjective perceptions of social class -as well as theoretical insights into the role of the social class context in influencing behavior. We then summarize why a psychology of social class is likely to be a fruitful area of research and propose that social class environments guide psychological experience because they shape fundamental aspects of the self and patterns of relating to others. Finally, we differentiate social class from other rank-relevant states (e.g., power) and social categories (e.g., race ⁄ ethnicity), while also outlining potential avenues of future research.
Theorizations of social class represent the first attempt in European social theory to systematically account for how the social location of human agents shapes their conditions of possibility in society (now supplemented by a variety of other concepts including race and gender). It took shape in German and French sociological theory in the nineteenth century (associated with Marx, Weber and Durkheim), from which it diffused into the Anglophone social sciences, and eventually (after 1945) into geography. An analysis of geographical applications of class, and geographical theories of class, thus cannot be understood without some attention to its genealogy in social theory. We thus begin the chapter with a brief overview of sociological theories of class, highlighting the (shifting) spatial ontologies embedded in these theories. We then consider how class became influential in human geography; initially as an imported concept for making sense of sociospatial relations, before geographers turned to consider how spatiality should be incorporated into theories of class. We will show that the genealogy of class in Anglophone geography does not replicate that in sociology: Rather, it reflects the shifting theoretical fashions in different fields of human geography, and in different regions of the Anglophone world. (We pay particular attention, here, to North America and Britain.)
Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 2004
Because social class and classism remain elusive constructs in psychology, this 2-part article first lays the foundation for the Social Class Worldview Model and then the Modern Classisrn Theory. A case example is used for illustration. The authors also provide counseling applications and recommendations for future research. Debido a que la clase social y el clasisrno continuan siendo unos conceptos evasivos en la psicologia, este articulo de 2 partes establece una fundacion para el Modelo de Cosrnovision de Clase Social y la Teoria Moderna del Clasismo. Se utiliza un caso de ejemplo para su ilustracion. Los autores tambien proporcionan aplicaciones para la consejeria y recomendaciones para investigaciones futuras. at do we mean when we describe a person as middle-or workingclass? How do we make sense of people making longer commutes w so they can own larger houses (Armas, 2001; U.S. Census Bureau, 2001a)? How does classism play a role in student teasing (Duggan, Waxman, & Snyder, 2001)? Why do some people seem unworried and still continue to live seemingly unencumbered even during economic slowdowns (Harden, 2001; Kilborn, 2001a; Wakin, 2001), and why would a wealthy student decide to live a bohemian and impoverished lifestyle (Brooks, 2000)? These questions suggest that social class can have multiple meanings in people's lives and that social class may be conceptualized differently, depending on experience and intrapsychic and contextual factors. The questions regarding social class also reveal the need for an integrated framework that contextualizes, integrates, and explains social class and classist functioning, but why is it so important to understand social class?