Making A Middle Class

Author : Jennifer Elrick
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781487527808

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Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism by Jennifer Elrick Pdf

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats’ perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals – in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms – influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats’ interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.

Author : Jean-Louis Rocca
Publisher : Springer
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781137393395

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The Making of the Chinese Middle Class by Jean-Louis Rocca Pdf

This book analyses the making of the Chinese middle class that started in the 1990s using a constructivist approach. With the development of the Chinese economy, a new group of middle wage earners appeared. Chinese social scientists and state institutions promoted the idea that China needs a middle class to achieve modernization. Middle class members are defined—and define themselves—as good consumers, educated people, politically engaged but reasonable citizens. As such, the making of the middle class is the result of three convergent phenomena: an attempt to define the middle class, a process of civilization, and the development of protest movements. The making of the Chinese middle class, Rocca argues, is a way to end the stalemate that modern Chinese society is facing, in particular the necessity to democratize without introducing an election system.

Author : A. Ricardo López
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2012-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822351290

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The Making of the Middle Class by A. Ricardo López Pdf

The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

Author : Jim Tankersley
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-11
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781541767843

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The Riches of This Land by Jim Tankersley Pdf

A vivid character-driven narrative, fused with important new economic and political reporting and research, that busts the myths about middle class decline and points the way to its revival. For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey to understand what the hell happened to the world's greatest middle-class success story -- the post-World-War-II boom that faded into decades of stagnation and frustration for American workers. In The Riches of This Land, Tankersley fuses the story of forgotten Americans-- struggling women and men who he met on his journey into the travails of the middle class-- with important new economic and political research, providing fresh understanding how to create a more widespread prosperity. He begins by unraveling the real mystery of the American economy since the 1970s - not where did the jobs go, but why haven't new and better ones been created to replace them. His analysis begins with the revelation that women and minorities played a far more crucial role in building the post-war middle class than today's politicians typically acknowledge, and policies that have done nothing to address the structural shifts of the American economy have enabled a privileged few to capture nearly all the benefits of America's growing prosperity. Meanwhile, the "angry white men of Ohio" have been sold by Trump and his ilk a theory of the economy that is dangerously backward, one that pits them against immigrants, minorities, and women who should be their allies. At the culmination of his journey, Tankersley lays out specific policy prescriptions and social undertakings that can begin moving the needle in the effort to make new and better jobs appear. By fostering an economy that opens new pathways for all workers to reach their full potential -- men and women, immigrant or native-born, regardless of race -- America can once again restore the upward flow of talent that can power growth and prosperity.

Author : Peter Earle
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 1989-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0520068262

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The Making of the English Middle Class by Peter Earle Pdf

This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.

Author : Peter Temin
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2018-03-09
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780262535298

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The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue by Peter Temin Pdf

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.

Author : Robert Wuthnow
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2020-08-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691210711

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American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability by Robert Wuthnow Pdf

How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.

Author : Marlon Barbehön,Marilena Geugjes,Michael Haus
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2020-03-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000059700

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Middle Class and Welfare State by Marlon Barbehön,Marilena Geugjes,Michael Haus Pdf

This book examines the relationship between the middle class and the welfare state. Taking an interpretive approach which understands the middle class as a socially constructed category, it combines discourse analysis, welfare state theory, and interpretive policy analysis in an innovative way to investigate how the middle class becomes a meaningful object of public debates and policymaking. Comparing Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the book reconstructs the prevalent images and meanings of the middle class from each country’s public debates and tracks how the middle classes with their various meanings and characteristics are entangled with the identification of societal problems, the articulation of political demands, and the construction of welfare policies. Ultimately, it shows how the formation and consolidation of different welfare regimes can be interpreted as specific ways of solving the puzzle of how to incorporate the middle class in the construction of a welfare state consensus. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative welfare state research, policy analysis, political sociology, political theory, and European and comparative politics.

Author : OECD
Publisher : OECD Publishing
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2019-05-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9789264150348

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Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class by OECD Pdf

Middle-class households feel left behind and have questioned the benefits of economic globalisation.

Author : Brian P. Owensby
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804743402

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Intimate Ironies by Brian P. Owensby Pdf

Focusing on the period between 1920 and 1950, the author looks beyond ideologies to reveal how middle-class men and women strained to wrest order from the ordeal of change.

Author : Jacob S. Hacker,Paul Pierson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781416588702

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Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob S. Hacker,Paul Pierson Pdf

Analyzes the growing divide between the incomes of the wealthy class and those of middle-income Americans, exonerating popular suspects to argue that the nation's political system promotes greed and under-representation.

Author : Willem Boterman,Wouter van Gent
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2022-11-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781137554932

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Making the Middle-class City by Willem Boterman,Wouter van Gent Pdf

​This book seeks to understand the urban transformation of Amsterdam over a 40-year period. In addition to charting social and economic changes associated with gentrification, it analyses the electoral dynamics and middle-class politics that have underpinned Amsterdam’s change to a middle-class city.

Author : Richard Reeves
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2018-05-08
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780815735496

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Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves Pdf

Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.

Author : Mark W. Robbins
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2017-05-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472130337

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Middle Class Union by Mark W. Robbins Pdf

Examines the birth of the American middle class as white-collar workers used their growing consumer identity to organize politically

Author : Paul Douglas Axelrod
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : College students
ISBN : OCLC:1011721586

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Making a Middle Class by Paul Douglas Axelrod Pdf