The purpose of this study was to understand how White students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds (operationalized as students who are both low income and of the first generation in their family to attend college) experience and navigate social class during college. This was a qualitative research study employing a phenomenological research methodology. A critical theoretical lens was used to illuminate systemic issues of power and privilege related to social class present in the experiences of these participants. This study was guided by the following research question: How do White, low SES students experience and navigate social class during college? Participants in this study had many similar experiences to one another related to their social class. However, there also existed a variety of individual differences in how students understood and experienced their social class during college. Overall, participants expressed a limited awareness of their social class growing up, but all became keenly aware of it during college. In particular, during college, students became aware of how their own social class differed from the dominant middle class to upper class social class represented on campus. Participants minimized the salience of social class as an aspect of their identity with many of them expressing that they did not want their social class to define them. While participants largely did not feel as if social class was an important aspect of their identity, it became clear through their stories that this aspect of their identity influenced how they viewed themselves, the world around them, and their higher SES peers in college. For example, participants readily acknowledged the frustration and resentment that set them apart from their college peers. The students who participated in this study exhibited ethics of hard work, self-sufficiency, and financial responsibility. These values and attitudes also were evident in students' practices and behaviors (e.g., their judicious spending habits, their long hours working for pay). It also became clear that the long hours most participants in this study worked in order to afford college meant missing out on opportunities for involvement in activities outside of the classroom. Finally, participants' experiences interacting with their high SES peers played a pivotal role in their awareness of their social class during college. Participants were often frustrated by the attitudes, values, and behaviors of their higher SES peers, and for some, these social class differences led to social isolation. Overall, these findings illuminate a variety of issues and areas for concern, directly related to social class, experienced by low-income, first-generation college students in higher education.

An understanding of the nature and role of the parlements is essential to effective study of the French old régime, and of the origins of the Revolution. Much light can be thrown on this question by the study of the magistrates of these courts, their interests, and the conditions under which they passed their lives. The results of such enquiries have the added use of illustrating aspects of aristocratic life not directly connected with the parlements. The study of parlementaires, therefore, has relevance to political, institutional, social, economic, and intellectual history. Too often, studies have been too narrowly tied to their political or social and economic aspects, with no attempts other than the crudest to link them, and the result has tended to produce an unbalanced picture. In this thesis an attempt has been nade to bind together all the aspects of the lives of one group of parlementaires, to relate then one to another, and to to present a total view which will make the ways of parlementaires more understandable.

The aim of this thesis is to examine compulsory schools' material conditions in relation to students' learning opportunities and schools staffs’ opportunities to educate. The thesis consists of four published peer-reviewed articles. The empirical data was collected through extensive fieldwork during 2010-2011 in three Swedish schools (ages 14-15), characterized by different social demographics. The material is primarily classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and policy documents. Analysis in the thesis draws mainly on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, but also on contemporary developments institutional habitus by Diane Reay and positional capital by Jacques Lévy. Also, materiality as an educational concept is used to reflect and discuss schools’ prerequisites as institutions of education. The first article investigates how school practice emerges for pupils and the importance it has on their perceptions of their own lives in the school, it also considers and discusses the utility of the theoretical tool school habitus. The study was furthermore a critical examination of the reproductive and/or social levelling effects that school practice could have on pupils. The second article explores and compares the schools' access to ICT and classroom teaching. The third article examines the role of the family and its importance for school staff and pupils in the daily operations of the school. In addition, it scrutinizes how socioeconomic conditions affect the middle- and working-class schools' abilities to navigate in relation to families. The fourth article examines material conditions in all three schools with a focus on pupils and school staffs’ perceptions and actions in school practices, and how materiality shapes schools' institutional habitus. The analysis displays that schools’ materiality has major significance for the forms of institutional habitus and which ideals and values about education are developed in the different schools. It also displays that schools’ material conditions are closely interwoven with pupils’ educational backgrounds and the socioeconomic structure of the local neighbourhood. Schools’ material preconditions affect the pedagogical work of the teachers in classrooms and principals’ acting space to follow and implement the schools’ missions according to steering documents. Viewed as preworld, the local area and resources in the schools shape pupils’ sense of worthiness and thus their visions of a possible future in regard to educational and- workinglife carriers. The thesis discusses and concludes that the title The Subtle Inequality illustrate a process where phenomenon such as school choice, teacher shortage or schools’ abilities to compete are taken for granted. They are seen as “natural” and given, thus they hide the existing, objective material preconditions as the sources that shape differences in the educational system. To overcome these differences, the thesis reflects on the need to give all schools in Sweden equal material starting points.

A number of arguments appeared in the late-nineteenth-century United States about “correctness” in language, arguments for and against enforcing a standard of correctness and arguments about what should count as correct in language. Insofar as knowledge about and facility with “correct” linguistic usage could affect one’s standing in the social structure, such knowledge and facility functioned as a form of capital—linguistic capital. This dissertation considers treatments of linguistic capital in a variety of contexts, including verbal criticism, linguistics, composition pedagogy, and novels. The subject of Chapter 1 is verbal criticism, popular writings that quibble over the “correct” meanings of words. Verbal critics’ goals and conclusions, however, were often full of contradictions. My first chapter offers an explanation for these contradictions based on their resonance within late-nineteenth-century capitalism’s social structure. Chapter 2 centers around William Dwight Whitney‘s efforts to establish what he called the “science of language” in America. Whitney’s potentially progressive principles sometimes appear conservative, capable of rationalizing a laissez-faire politics with regard to language and class—a politics this chapter considers in relation to Whitney’s attempt to craft an ethos for the discipline of linguistics. My third chapter examines the dominant composition pedagogy of this period, current-traditional rhetoric, at a time when universities increasingly admitted middle-class students. Chapter 3 considers what types of cultural capital current-traditional pedagogy assumed its students possessed and what effects its assumptions imply. Chapter 4 focuses on William Dean Howells, whose realist novels represented the language of various characters as precisely as possible in an effort to encourage readers to accept speakers of non-prestige dialects. This chapter explores the possibilities and the limits of Howells’s efforts, and what those possibilities and limits imply for any progressive language policy. The Conclusion analyzes the most famous attempt by a professional organization to adopt such a progressive language policy, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Deliberation over this policy deeply divided teachers in the language arts. My conclusion considers why both sides may be right—and wrong—to think their preferred means can achieve what turns out to be an agreed-upon end. / text

This study follows students from two Swedish elite upper secondary schools with different profiles when they participate in a parliamentarian role-play game. The game lacks a teacher authority and is not a graded activity, putting the students in a position where they must negotiate what constitutes winning and losing. The game is used as an ethnographic site to investigate what it means to be a ‘successful’ elite school student and how it is embodied. The aim is to explore concrete processes of habitus formation, extending the knowledge regarding elite socialization in the Swedish case. The findings suggest that the game puts notions of what it means to be a ‘successful’ student to its head, giving rise to conflicts between students from the two differently profiled schools. The conflicts articulate differences between schools within the elite school category with regard to student formation. Further, the game singles out a few students and make them feel entitled to become leaders. The study shows that the intersection of students’ school affiliation, gender and social class background is important in order to understand whether they feel entitled or not, as well to understand their more encompassing experiences in this elite school game.

This thesis is about social class and economic inequality, using the Goldthorpe class schema. It tests theories claiming that social class is increasingly irrelevant to inequality and people's life-chances with data on incomes and material living standards from the British Household Panel Survey. It covers the period over which the survey ran, i.e. 1991-2008. During this time many prominent social theories dismissed class analyses while others sought to retain the class concept but dismissed its economic foundations, seeking to ground it in culture instead. Economic inequality has not figured highly on the agenda of class analysts, at least not those working with the Goldthorpe class schema. There is a substantial body of work on mobility, voting behaviour, income poverty and material deprivation, but inequality in a broader sense has for the most part been neglected. This thesis is a step towards rectifying this situation. Thus it provides new information about within-career social mobility as well as income inequality within and between classes, on whether income mobility reduces class inequalities over time, and cast light on class inequalities in material living standards. The findings suggest that class is far from irrelevant to economic inequality. Class differences in incomes are persistent, between class inequalities contribute more to inequality overall than within-class inequalities, and while income mobility does reduce class inequalities over time it is not to the extent that supports the hypothesis that class is irrelevant to people's economic fortunes.

This research study explores how future educational and occupational aspirations are constructed by young Sikh adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten young Sikh adults, both their parents, and their teachers at one school in West London to investigate how future aspirations are constructed, which resources are employed, and why certain resources are used over others. In some previous research on aspirations and future choices, Sikhs have either been ignored or, instead, subsumed under the umbrella category of 'Asian' and this study seeks to address this. Furthermore, the study seeks to shed light on how British-Sikh identities are constructed and intersected by social class, caste and gender. This is important to explore since it can have an impact upon how young adults are structured by educational policy. A 'syncretic' social constructionist framework which predominantly draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's notions of habitus, capital and field, along with the cultural identity theories of Avtar Brah and Stuart Hall, is employed to investigate the construction of identities and aspirations. In addition, the study contains ethnographical elements as it is conducted on my 'own' Sikh group and at my former secondary school. Consequently, I brought a set of assumptions to the research which, rather than disregard, I acknowledge since they highlight how I come to form certain interpretations of phenomena over others.

In accordance with structural theory and distributive justice theory, this study investigates if Americans' personal encounters with the opportunity structure and their existing reward conditions will influence their perceptions toward distribution outcomes in the U.S. I argue that higher-status individuals possessing various "attributes of structural privilege" will exhibit less support for regulating income inequality in society than lower-status individuals. Upward mobility should also be negatively related to support for restoring greater equality in allocation outcomes. However, the effect of mobility on justice perceptions should vary by class status, since class has been known to be a reliable predictor of these attitudes. The study employed a sample of 438 American adults from the GSS 2000 dataset, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was applied in the analyses of the data. Two of the three above hypotheses received partial confirmation, that is, there were class, race, and gender differences in distributive justice perceptions. Class also interacted significantly with occupational mobility in altering distributive justice perceptions.

To investigate whether there is unequal treatment for ethnic minorities in the sharing economy this paper conducts a field experiment on Airbnb in Sweden. The key findings report that inquiries from guests with Arabic-sounding names are 17 percentage points less likely to receive a booking invitation compared to guests with Swedish-sounding names. The discrimination is robust across host and listing characteristics. Furthermore, the results show that being associated with a lower social class decreases the probability of receiving a booking invitation for guests with Arabic-sounding names but not for guests with Swedish-sounding names, suggesting that the signal of social class is stronger for guests with Arabic-sounding names.

Esta pesquisa é inspirada na grande ampliação da classe C ocorrida no passado recente de nosso país. A inclusão de milhões de brasileiros em ambientes e atividades antes exclusivas das classes mais abastadas, como o estudo em instituições de ensino superior e ocupações profissionais de natureza mais intelectual do que braçal, é algo extremamente positivo para o País. Porém, ela parece ter gerado efeitos colaterais inesperados: indivíduos apresentando sofrimentos psíquicos que os impedem de prosseguir sua vida durante ou após trajetórias de ascensão social. Este estudo pretende compreender como a ascensão social, que muitas vezes se apresenta como um movimento familiar e multigeracional, pode afetar psiquicamente os indivíduos que vivem esse processo. Para isso, são apresentados três fatos clínicos a partir dos quais procura-se estabelecer ligações entre os sintomas observados e conceitos psicanalíticos que possam elucidá-los, em articulação com reflexões de Souza (2018) acerca do cenário sociocultural em que se deu esse movimento de ascensão social. O primeiro conceito é o de enquadre (Bleger, 1977) que, expandido à noção de metaenquadre (Kaës, 2007/2011), explica o fato de os sintomas de sofrimento se apresentarem de forma obscura, quase imperceptível. Em seguida, há uma reflexão sobre a saída do lugar de origem através do conceito de contrato narcísico (Aulagnier, 1975/2001 e Kaës, 2007/2011), para posteriormente se pensar o lugar de (não) chegada e o desejo de reconhecimento (Hegel, 1807/1988, Benjamin,1988 e Safatle, 2017) / This research is inspired by the large growth of the social class C, which occurred in the recent past of our country. The inclusion of millions of Brazilians into environments and activities which had been, up to a few years ago, exclusive to the wealthier social classes, such as undergraduate education and professional occupations of intellectual nature, rather than those of physical labour, is something extremely positive for the country. Nevertheless, this seems to have generated unexpected side effects: individuals showing psychic sufferings during or after their social ascension trajectories, which prevent them from reaching the objectives they had set for themselves. This study intends to comprehend how social ascension, often being a multigenerational move in the family, can psychically affect the individuals who undertake it. To accomplish that I introduce three clinical facts from which I try to establish liaisons between the observed symptoms and three psychoanalytic concepts to elucidate them. This is done in articulation with Souzas (2018) thoughts on the sociocultural scene where the social ascension takes place. The first concept is frame (Bleger, 1977) which, when expanded into the notion of metaframe (Kaës, 2007/2011), explains the fact that the suffering symptoms present themselves in an obscure, almost imperceptible manner. Following that, there is a reflection on leaving the origin and the inevitable split from several aspects of this birth time-space for that I resort to the concept narcissistic contract (Auglanier, 1975/2001; Kaës, 2007/2011), to then think of the (non-)arrival place and the longing for recognition (Hegel, 1807/1988; Benjamin, 1988; Safatle, 2017)