The UK is an unequal society. Societies like these raise significant ethical questions for those who live in them. One is how they should respond to such inequality, and in particular, to its effects on those who are worst-off. In this article, I’ll approach this question by focusing on the obligations of a particular group of those who are best-off. I’ll defend the idea of morally objectionable class-based advantage, which I’ll call ‘class privilege’, argue that class (...) privilege can be non-culpable, and put forward an account of the obligations those with class privilege have. My main claim will be that those with class privilege have obligations to ‘offset’ their privilege, in something like the same way high emitters have obligations to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. (shrink)

This collection of groundbreaking studies breaks with the tradition of gauging inequality by looking 'down' at at-risk or poverty-disadvantaged schools and shifts the gaze of inquiry 'up' toward the experiences of privilege in educational environments characterized by wealth and the abundance of material resources.

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-protective epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups (...) experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-protecting epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups (...) experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

This essay argues that a failure to think and talk critically and candidly about White privilege and White poverty is a key threat to the United States of America's precarious democracy. Whiteness frames one of America's most pressing collective challenges—the poor state of the nation's health, which lags behind other wealthy nations and is marred by deep and entrenched class‐ and race‐based inequities. The broadscale remedies experts recommend demand what is in short supply: trust in evidence, experts, government, (...) and one another. The authors’ prescription is threefold, beginning with a call for intersectional health studies and reports that avoid one‐dimensional misrepresentations of widespread health problems as simply Black or White problems. Second, there is the need for a “critical consciousness” about race and class. Lastly, the essay calls for widescale opportunities for Americans to engage in cross‐racial and cross‐class democratic conversations about their struggles and aspirations in search of common ground. (shrink)

This essay serves as both a response and embellishment of Marilyn Frye's now classic essay " Oppression." It is meant to pick up where this essay left off and to make connections between oppression, as Frye defines it, and the privileges that result from institutional structures. This essay tries to clarify one meaning of privilege that is lost in philosophical discussions of injustice. I develop a distinction between unearned privileges and earned advantages. Clarifying the meaning of privilege as (...) unearned structural advantage makes visible the role white privilege plays in maintaining complex systems of domination such as racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism. Using a critical reading of both Frye and Young's accounts of oppression as a springboard, I develop a definition of privilege as a particular class of unearned advantages. -/- I distinguish my account of privilege from standard legal and philosophical definitions of privilege. The general distinction I make between privileges and advantages rests on three interrelated claims: that benefits granted by privilege are always unearned and conferred systemically to members of dominant social groups; that privileges granted to members of dominant groups solely on the basis of their membership in these groups is never justifiable; and, that privileges have an unconditional value that can be explained not only in terms of immunities, but also in terms of additional benefits. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski's (1936) semantic account of the logical properties (logical consequence, logical truth and logical consistency) makes essential appeal to a distinction between logical and non-logical terms. John Etchemendy (1990) has recently argued that Tarski's account is inadequate for quite a number of different reasons. Among them is a brief argument which purports to show that Tarski's reliance on the distinction between logical and non-logical terms is in principle mistaken. According to Etchemendy, there are very simple (even first order) languages (...) for which no such distinction can be made. This is a surprising result, and an important one, if true. Since Tarski's account does indeed depend on such a distinction, Etchemendy's argument, if correct, would rule out definitively the received view on logical truth (as well as logical consequence and logical consistency). But his argument is not correct, and it is the job of this paper to show that. (shrink)

(2010). A Review of “Making Sense of Race, Class, and Gender: Commonsense, Power, and Privilege in the United States”. Educational Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 139-144.

A common early narrative that arose as people struggled to cope with their new lives under COVID-19 centered on a platitude about the pandemic being “the great leveler.” But the pretense that we are equally vulnerable—or that we’re “alone together” across lines of race, gender, and class—was a comforting lie. Chronicling the timeline of media talking points seen over the past few months, I argue that social privilege continues to structure the narratives many people use to process life (...) under the pandemic, even while material conditions are much worse for those not in charge of these narratives. At the same time, however, I argue that the pandemic might be setting the stage for genuinely new collective responses to social inequalities, including the long-overdue uprisings inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

This article presents a theoretical framework that views interpersonal power as interdependent with broader structures of gender and class inequalities. In contrast to oversimplified, gender-neutral or gender-static approaches, this approach illuminates the ways that structures of inequality are expressed in ideological hegemonies, which enhance, legitimate, and mystify the interpersonal power of privileged men relative to lower-status men and women in general. The discussion centers on how the relational construction of ascendant and subordinated masculinities provide men with different modes of (...) interpersonal power that, when exercised, construct and reaffirm interclass male dominance. Examples of how the construction of femininity can undermine women's interpersonal power and implications for other forms of masculinities and femininities are discussed. Examples are drawn from an analysis of conjugal power in the accounts of remarried individuals' first and second marriages to illustrate the main points of this perspective. (shrink)

Relative to gender, race, and class, age relations are undertheorized. Yet age, like gender, is routinely accomplished in daily life. Grandmothers and adult daughters simultaneously do age and gender as they support one another in managing paid work and domestic responsibilities. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with 90 single mothers and 30 grandmothers in Russia, I explore intergenerational negotiations for support. Both single mothers and grandmothers are held accountable for doing gendered age, but labor and marriage markets tip (...) the balance in favor of single mothers. Single mothers re-create youth privilege, finding their lives simpler with a babushka. Some grandmothers embrace newer discourses of femininity, challenging assumptions about age and family status that oblige them to perform care work. But most grandmothers do whatever they can to help daughters, feeling more dependent than ever on them because of the uncertainties of capitalism and the state’s retrenchment. I contribute to theories of age and gender intersectionality by making visible both single mothers’ youth privilege and grandmothers’ unpaid, often devalued, care work. (shrink)

Lukács is widely recognized as being the first critical theorist to have explicitly developed the idea of a “standpoint theory”. According to such a theory, members of oppressed groups enjoy an epistemic privilege regarding the nature of their oppression. However, there is no agreement regarding what precise argument Lukács offers for his claims regarding the alleged epistemic privilege of the working class. Additionally, it remains unclear whether later feminist standpoint theories share any continuity with Lukács’s argument. In (...) this analysis, I identify four arguments for the epistemic privilege of oppressed groups that could be attributed to Lukács. I argue that, although Lukács does not consistently endorse any specific argument, the most promising interpretation suggests that epistemic privilege arises from a contradiction between the norms that guide the self-understanding of such groups and the effects of the social practices they are socially obligated to engage in. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to (...) be neglected by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

Serious concerns about pervasive, persistent, and unjustified social inequalities have prompted a small—but growing—number of academic commentators to raise some hard and troubling questions for those who would like to legalize physician-assisted suicide. In various ways, these commentators have asked: In light of existing social inequalities—inequalities that operate, for example, along sometimes intersecting lines of race, class, age, sex, and disability—how persuasive are autonomy-based arguments in favor of legalization of assisted suicide when those arguments depend on a conception of (...) autonomy that either presupposes social equality or does not expressly account for its absence? How compelling are arguments that we ought to legalize assisted suicide out of feelings of mercy for the sick and dying, when such affective expressions may actually be the socially acceptable manifestation of private ambivalence that includes merciless discrimination? (shrink)

Serious concerns about pervasive, persistent, and unjustified social inequalities have prompted a small—but growing—number of academic commentators to raise some hard and troubling questions for those who would like to legalize physician-assisted suicide. In various ways, these commentators have asked: In light of existing social inequalities—inequalities that operate, for example, along sometimes intersecting lines of race, class, age, sex, and disability—how persuasive are autonomy-based arguments in favor of legalization of assisted suicide when those arguments depend on a conception of (...) autonomy that either presupposes social equality or does not expressly account for its absence? How compelling are arguments that we ought to legalize assisted suicide out of feelings of mercy for the sick and dying, when such affective expressions may actually be the socially acceptable manifestation of private ambivalence that includes merciless discrimination? (shrink)

How do elite universities in the United States and United Kingdom work to meaningfully address decades of deeply embedded institutional racism and classism? They don’t.Continuing their work of expo...

In the past few decades, a multi-billion-dollar “therapeutic boarding school” industry has emerged for America’s troubled upper-class youth. This article examines the therapeutic models prominent in these programs and the ways they conflict with dominant notions of masculinity. Using in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork inside a Western therapeutic boarding school, I show how privileged young men navigate this masculinity dilemma by constructing hybrid masculinities that incorporate qualities associated with femininities and subordinate masculinities. However, these qualities are incorporated strategically and (...) in ways that reproduce and obscure privileges associated with students’ positions as young, upper-class, white men. Using hybrid masculine styles that include humility, commitment to service, and open emotional expression, students re-assert dominant positions as leaders and as “better” men in contrast to various others. (shrink)

By exploring how gender norms and material interests vary between women in different classes, this article highlights interactions between class and gender that mitigate against the mobilization of political support for activist family policies in the United States. Ironically, while educated women in professional and managerial jobs are ideologically most favorable toward the dual earner/dual carer model, it is not in their economic interest for the state to make it happen. Scandinavian-style interventions would impose costs on relatively privileged women (...) in their role as child care consumers. There is also reason to believe that these interventions would indirectly undermine their labor market attainments. (shrink)

We articulate a holistic understanding of hope, going beyond the common conceptualization of hope in terms of positive affect and cognition by considering what hope means for the underprivileged. In the recognition that hope is always situated in a particular place, we explore the perspective of the privileged and the underprivileged, clarifying how spatial contexts shape their goals for the future and their agency toward attaining these goals. Where some people experience precarity due to their disability, race, gender, sexuality, and (...) social class, others enjoy enhanced agency due to their privilege. In our analysis, this loss of agency does not mean the underprivileged are hopeless; instead, it suggests that hope can incorporate negative affect and cognition. In our view, a spatial understanding acknowledges the power of hope in discouraging situations, and it points to practical measures through which hope can be cultivated by marginalized communities. (shrink)

This article aims to claim ‘body size’ as an increasingly important axis of signification. It draws on research from various disciplines to present an exploratory overview of the different ways in which body size categorizations – being fat or slender – intersect with other axes, such as gender, race, sexuality, social class and age. The article argues that an intersectional perspective on body size adds to our understanding of the layeredness and complexity of power differentials, normativities and identity formations (...) that co-produce inequalities. Furthermore, it attempts to show how processes of exclusion and marginalization based on body size categorizations are similar to racist, ableist and misogynist logics and practices. Hereby the article intends to demonstrate the vast impact of body size categorizations, specifically but not exclusively on the lives of those who occupy the marked position in relation to this axis: the ‘fat’. It argues that an intersectional perspective helps us to see body size discrimination more clearly and can help disrupt dominant discourses about the body in order to create a truly ‘healthy’ environment in which bodies of all sizes, shapes, colours and abilities can be celebrated. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long been concerned with privileged women’s activism and engagement with feminist politics and how acts of resistance from privileged subjects might best be understood. In the current moment, we are seeing a reinvigoration of interest in feminist activism particularly from young women, but not necessarily focusing on young women who are positioned as privileged. Simultaneously, there is attention in the sociology of elite schooling to the question of social justice politics in privileged spaces. In this article, we (...) contribute to both of these scholarly conversations by reporting on the feminist activism of three young women attending an elite school in Australia. We argue that these young women’s activism/feminist politics need to be understood as a complex entanglement of resistance and reproduction with regard to gender, race and class, and that drawing on recent theorisations influenced by post-humanism in feminist educational research produces fresh insights into researching gender/race/class reproduction by young women in elite educational settings. (shrink)

As researchers, we cannot be outside society and thus activities such as "science," or "objectivity" are striated with procedures for minimizing or celebrating the presence of the researcher in the research product. Our recognition of the situated character of scientific knowledge is the context in which questions about the researchers relation to the group she studies have arisen. The paper begins with a review of the Insider/Outsider debate which circles around the researcher''s relation to those she studies. Where the researcher (...) enters the research site as an Insider - someone whose biography (gender, race, class, sexual orientation and so on) gives her a lived familiarity with the group being researched - that tacit knowledge informs her research producing a different knowledge than that available to the Outsider - a researcher who does not have an intimate knowledge of the group being researched prior to their entry into the group. This paper describes the research issues that arise and the various strategies researchers have used to manage them. The argument then shifts to query the social boundaries implicit in the construction of research Insiders and Outsiders. Reflecting on research that explored mothering for schooling, the article shows that researchers are rarely Insiders or Outsiders. Rather, research is constructed in a relationship with many Others. The interaction of individual biography and social location shape the research relation in complex ways which undercut the common-sense translation of historical familiarity into epistemological privilege. (shrink)

The present qualitative study analyzes how cultural capital, gender, class, and family involvement impact Chinese female students’ aspirations of studying in the United Kingdom. We investigated how these factors facilitate or limit female students’ choice of study destination, as well as choices of subject and program. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. A total of 25 young Chinese female students from different subject areas took part in the semi-structured interviews. Out of those, (...) five students are undergraduates, 11 are taught master’s students, and the other nine students are doctoral candidates. Most of the undergraduates and postgraduates are from middle-class families, while some of the Ph.D. students are from working-class families. The results of the content analysis were examined in light of gender and cultural capital theory. It was found that although there exist differences within the middle-class families regarding the possession of cultural capital, many female students from middle-class families obtained high levels of cultural capital, and these students usually internalized the idea of pursuing a place in the United Kingdom’s tertiary education system as a way of enhancing women’s competency in future job markets. Furthermore, compared with working-class students, many respondents’ choice of subject and program was highly gendered, as their families expect them to live a feminine life by choosing “appropriate” feminine subjects. Therefore, despite having the privilege to study abroad, female middle-class students’ educational choices are still constrained by gender and class. (shrink)

The family poses problems for liberal understandings of social justice, because of the ways in which it bestows unearned privileges. This is particularly stark when we consider inter-generational inequality, or ‘class fate’ – the ways in which inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next, with the family unit ostensibly a key conduit. There is a recognized tension between the assumption that families should as far as possible be autonomous spheres of decision-making, and the assumption that we should (...) as far as possible equalize the life chances of all children, regardless of background. In this article I address this tension by way of recent liberal egalitarian literature, and consideration of the different dimensions of class fate. I argue, firstly, that the tension may not be of the a priori nature which liberals have tended to identify – and secondly, that as well as distributive and recognition-based aspects, the notion of contributive justice provides a particularly illuminating way of analyzing what is wrong about class fate, and the role of the family in promoting it. (shrink)

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organization of parenting, domestic and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neoliberal contexts. This article examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek medical schools in the aftermath of the Greek recession. (...) The analysis presented in this article is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on a neoliberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse, Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organized their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealized discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non-traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions. (shrink)

In what directions is the Australian `new' middle class developing as we move towards the `Asia-Pacific century'? This paper reviews the basic structural features of the group during most of the 20th century, and suggests that a number of the arrangements which had delivered high status, material privileges and security to the group are becoming increasingly problematic. It examines evidence of the growing importance of Asian opportunities to the Australian middle class, and indications of responses to these. Interpreted (...) in the context of contemporary accounts of transformations in identity formation processes, this evidence may signal the emergence of a significant new stratum within the Australian middle class. The paper concludes with some speculations about the significance of such a development. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the continued potency of veillance theories to traverse beyond the taxonomies of surveillance inside liberal democracies. It provides a commentary on the ability of sousveillance to destabilise and disrupt suer/violence by shifting its focus from the centre to the periphery, where Big Data surveillance is tantamount to sur/violence. In these peripheral political spaces, surveillance is not framed by concerns over privacy, democracy and civil society; rather, it is a matter of life and death, a technique of (...) both biopolitical and thanatopolitical power. I argue that the universalist, and universalizing, debates over surveillance cannot be mapped through the anxieties of privileged middle classes as they would neither transcend nor make possible alternative ways of tackling the intersection of surveillance and violence so long as they are couched in the liberal concerns for democracy. I call this phenomenon “liberal luxury,” whereby debates over surveillance have over-emphasised liberal proclivities at the expense of disengaging those peripheral populations most severely affected by sur/violence. (shrink)

In this piece, the author examined the impact of ideology, experience, and privilege on pre-service Social Studies teacher disposition. Findings suggest that participants conceptually understood injustice and began to critique social antagonisms like whiteness and class. However, they continued reinforcing raced and classed ideologies in their interactions with those outside their group. When faced with the cognitive dissonance between stated ideology and their privileged position, the more liberal participants re-narrativize their political stances to adopt more critical ideological worldviews (...) while maintaining their privileged identities. More conservative participants disassociated themselves from more extreme aspects of U.S. conservative political ideology. Both groups maintained the ideologies that provided justification for social hierarchy. Upbringing/identity, understandings of power/hierarchy, emic cultural understandings, and a desire to live one’s ideology, or not, beyond the classroom, informed participant decition making. (shrink)

From providing on-demand access to vast catalogues of recorded music at little or no cost to the use of Big Data to personalise the experience of consuming music, music streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, have the potential to disrupt the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the reproduction of class privilege in ways not previously encountered. The influential sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrated that cultural taste – what and how (...) people consume cultural goods, such as music, food and fashion – is shaped by class background and in doing so serves to mark and reproduce class differences in everyday life. In this commentary, I consider how sociologists might address the important but challenging question of if and how are music streaming platforms shaping the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the cultural reproduction of class privilege. I discuss some ways in which music streaming platforms may be shaping how class identities are performed through how people consume music, drawing attention to consumption practices that have the potential to both involve and resist the use of music streaming platforms in the pursuit of social distinction. (shrink)

Drawing on ethical principles of fairness and integrative social contracts theory, moral obligations of fair dealing exist between the firm and all shareholders. This study investigates empirically whether privileged investors of publicly traded firms engage in legal, but morally questionable, trading that at the expense of non-privileged institutional or atomistic investors. In this context, we define privilege as the access to material, nonpublic earnings surprise information. Our results show that the opportunity for procedural unfairness increases with the presence of (...) privileged investors. However, this procedural unfairness does not appear to lead to distributive unfairness even though the level of abnormal trading also increases with the presence of privileged investors. That is, our findings suggest that other shareholders are in fact better off from an outcome perspective given that the abnormal stock price returns upon the announcement of an earnings surprise are either more positive or less negative when the firm has a high proportion of privileged investors. We extract the important implications of our study for future research on the fairness of capital markets and information asymmetry amongst classes of investors, as well as for public policy. (shrink)

The position I defend in this paper is that both prisoners and ex-prisoners, at least within present U.S. society, experience a form of oppression that can be distinguished from that inflicted upon other structurally disadvantaged groups. As a result of these U.S. conditions, I also argue that those who have not been or are not currently incarcerated may possess some unearned advantages, similar to but also different from other forms of privilege, such as those based upon race, class, (...) gender, sexuality, and ability. In the first section, I investigate three definitions of oppression to articulate my thesis of prisoner oppression, using the work of Marilyn Frye, Kenneth Clatterbaugh, and Ann E. Cudd. In the second section, I respond to three objections against my thesis. I conclude in the third section with some thoughts on how the preceding arguments should affect the dominant discourse regarding prison reform and abolition. (shrink)

This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of ‘white’ (...) migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a ‘flexible’ resource. (shrink)

This review analyzes the book Rental Society: In the Shadow of Labor, Capital, and Democracy. The book’s authors consider factors and conditions for the transition from a social state and a society of mass labor to a rental type of society. The main reasons for this transformation are the depletion of resources on a global scale and the replacement of humans by machines, which entails the growth of social groups living off various forms of rent (benefits, unconditional basic income, additional (...) payments, etc.). Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people are involved in the production of wealth. Under these conditions, the only active political subject becomes a non-democratic and non-egalitarian state, which distributes rents to various social groups. Simultaneously with the transformation of economic, political, and social structures, the content of moral consciousness also changes during the transition from a labor society to a rent society. There is a transition from labor morality to rent-parasitic morality, which, in view of the objective conditions for the existence of the rent majority, is internalized and gradually becomes a new moral norm. Two possible scenarios for the further development of the rental society are discussed. The positive scenario is a formation of a new type of economy due to the development of science, personality, new socialization forms. Negative scenario is associated with the deepening and globalization of rent processes, leading to “neoliberal feudalism,” to a society without mass labor and economic growth but with a hierarchy of class-rent groups, between which the state distributes rents and privileges using non-economic methods. In addition, the article shows significant shortcomings of the reviewed research: inconsistent understanding of the concept of rent, overly broad understanding of the subjects of rental processes, unjustified extrapolation of rent relations to the whole history of mankind (so called rent presentism). (shrink)

Gerhard Lenski's classical work on stratification, "Power and Privilege", was an effort to reconcile and to synthesize different approaches to inequality incorporated into the grand theories of the day. It anticipated a variety of developments in the theoretical and empirical understanding of inequalities. These include recognition of the multiplicity of inequalities; emphasis on race, class, gender, and other sources and systems of domination and subordination; and the intersection of these factors in complex patterns to create different standpoints and (...) life consequences. The result was ground-breaking work that underscored the multidimensionality of stratification systems, the variability of their influences, and the notion that their intersection in itself has implications beyond the sum of component parts. In these ways his work foreshadowed the possibilities of finding common ground between modern and postmodern perspectives, to make Lenski the last grand theorist of modernity and a forerunner of postmodern theories of inequality. (shrink)

Intimacy, shared experiences and evening out the power relations between researcher and the participants play an important role in feminist methodology. However, as highlighted in previous research on studying ‘up’, such methods might not be appropriate when studying privileged groups. Therefore, studying privileged women challenges fundamental assumptions in feminist methodology. When researching privileged women, the assumption that the researcher is almost always in a superior position within the research process becomes more complicated. The article seeks to contribute to the feminist (...) methodological literature on how to study privileged groups by exploring how class, gender and whiteness are produced in three fieldwork situations with women who hold privileges in a postcolonial and capitalist landscape. Drawing on interviews and participant observations with white Swedish migrant women, the article argues that researchers need to turn the problems, fears and feelings of being uncomfortable into important data, in order to study privileged groups of women. (shrink)

We examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1920 and 2000 in their probability of having had sex with same-sex partners in the last year and since age 18. Using data from the 1988–2018 General Social Surveys, we explore how trends differ by gender, race, and class background. We find steep increases across birth cohorts in the proportion of women who have had sex with both men and women since age 18, whereas increases for men are less steep. We (...) suggest that the trends reflect an increasingly accepting social climate, and that women’s steeper trend is rooted in a long-term asymmetry in gender change, in which nonconformity to gender norms is more acceptable for women than men. We also find evidence that, among men, the increase in having had sex with both men and women was steeper for black than for white men, and for men of lower socioeconomic status; we speculate that the rise of mass incarceration among less privileged men may have influenced this trend. (shrink)

We explore the meaning and implications of Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power and integrate it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Corporate leaders active within the field of power hold prominent roles in numerous organizations, constituting an ‘elite of elites’, whose networks integrate powerful participants from different fields. As ‘bridging actors’, they form coalitions to determine institutional settlements and societal resource flows. We ask how some corporate actors (...) become hyper-agents, those actors who ‘make things happen’, while others remain ‘ordinary’ members of the elite. Three hypotheses are developed and tested using extensive data on the French business elite. Social class emerges as persistently important, challenging the myth of meritocratic inclusion. Our primary contribution to Bourdieusian scholarship lies in our analysis of hyper-agents, revealing the debts these dominants owe to elite schools and privileged classes. (shrink)

The author uses census data to assess the consequences of two alternative theoretical formulations of care work for understanding the intersections of gender, race, and economic inequalities in paid care. The nurturance conceptualization focuses on care as relationship while the reproductive labor framework includes both relational and nonrelational jobs that maintain and reproduce the labor force. An empirical application of both models to the labor market shows that placing increasing theoretical emphasis on nurturant care privileges the experiences of white women (...) and excludes large numbers of very-low-wage workers from consideration. (shrink)

What lies behind the amalgam of liberalism, elitism, anti-capitalism, and fascistic elements in today’s street politics? This essay analyzes this mixture in light of the shifting class locations of middle strata. Intensified business dominance has not only proletarianized some middle strata but has led to a dry life for even the privileged ones. Middle classes are now taking to the streets to reclaim their specialness. Their exact agendas might not be identical throughout the globe, but a kindred spirit of (...) creativity and aestheticized occupation unites disparate geographies of revolt. Liberal and radical analyses of the wave of revolt miss its most significant characteristics, which only a re-theorization of the new petty bourgeoisie can capture. The essay outlines a research agenda that would explore the multiple dimensions of middle-class formation, as well as the post-capitalist trajectories that might result from further politicization. (shrink)

Phenomenological psychology has typically avoided the "importation" of such concepts as social class from sociology.Within the epoche, such terminology is bracketed on the grounds that it brings with it excess theoretical baggage and threatens the return to experience in itself. Yet, in uncovering the lifeworld of university students who—in what in Britain is still predominantly a preserve of the privileged—come from relatively economically disadvantaged homes, "class" or some cognate concept is found to be necessary to capture the range (...) of modes of alienation and disjunction experienced. Following Casey's discussion of the way in which Bourdieu's notion of habitus relates to Merleau-Ponty's description of the interpenetration of the natural and the cultural in the lived body, social class is shown to bring together students' accounts of their multi-faceted sense that "University is not for the likes of us"—encompassing issues of identity, sociality, and spatio-temporal dislocation. (shrink)

Women’s education has been central to discourses that have sought to modernize developing and Muslim societies. Based on ethnographic data collected from women teachers from rural and low-income communities of Pakistan, the article shows how being a parhi likhi woman implies acquiring a privileged subject position making claims to middle-class and Islamic morality, and engaging in specific struggles within, rather than against, the institutions of family, community, and Islam. This focus on the lived experiences of educated Muslim women complicates (...) the prevalent narrative of modernity that presents women’s education and gender empowerment as an expression of individual women’s choice and free will against the oppressive frameworks of family, community, and Islam. (shrink)

While Max Weber is commonly treated as a social theorist or a theorist of social stratification, relatively little attention has been paid to the theory of the social that is developed in his work. In view of this, this article turns to Weber’s most explicit theorization of the social: the section of Economy and Society entitled ‘Class, Status, Party’. In this work, Weber treats class as a non-social form, in contrast to status groups and parties, which are seen (...) to emerge through communal or associative modes of socialization. Given this, it is argued that it is a mistake to reduce ‘Class, Status, Party’ to an argument about social stratification. Rather, this work is a general theorization of the social in relation to the spheres of economics and politics. Read in this way, Weber’s work is presented as a possible resource for rejuvenating social theory that goes beyond study of class or ‘societal’ structures, and which privileges analysis of social relationships (including those that go beyond nation-state boundaries) in the competition for social and political power. (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)