This research examines variation in the relationships between college expectations, planfulness, and intense adolescent work by socioeconomic factors using data from Add Health (n = 8,836). Results show that higher college expectations are related to higher odds of intense school-year work among lower social class youth, but lower odds of intense work among youth from higher social class backgrounds. Moreover, planful adolescents are more likely to work intensely during the school year among youth from disadvantaged neighborhoods, but less likely to work intensely among those from advantaged neighborhoods. Results also show less variability in these relationships when considering summer work.

This qualitative study was designed to produce a theoretical model to illustrate disadvantaged clients' social class-related experiences in therapy. Clients' perceptions of therapist behaviors that positively and negatively influenced the quality of their therapy were also explored. Individual interviews were conducted with 18 adult clients (13 females, 5 males; age range: 18 to 64 years) at urban and rural community agencies primarily serving individuals who are considered economically disadvantaged. Participant-clients' disadvantaged status was based on their income below the cutoff for Medicaid eligibility in the state of Illinois and need for reduced fees or reliance on Medicaid coverage to pay for therapy services. Participants reported diverse ethnic backgrounds, including European American (n = 8), Hispanic American (n = 5), African American (n = 3), Jewish American (n = 1), and biracial (European and Native American; n = 1). Most participants reported a yearly household income less than $10,000 (n = 11), and that they were either unemployed or not in the labor force due to disability (n = 16). They reported varied religious/spiritual affiliations, educational levels, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Charmaz, 2000) was utilized to collect and analyze the data. The emergent theory, categories, and direct quotes from the participants are presented in order to illustrate clients' social class-related experiences in therapy. Results are consistent with existing empirical and theoretical literature on social class and therapy, and identify ways that disadvantaged social class affects individuals' therapy experiences. Implications for clinicians working with this population and public policies are discussed.

No description available.

This thesis explores the dynamics of economic relations and distributive outcomes according to displaced steelworkers' own accountings of deindustrialization and job loss. Whereas class analyses tend to investigate consciousness according to “true” versus “false” preferences and “post-class” scholars assert that “post-materialism” is replacing “materialist” social concerns, the author abandons these dualisms to demonstrate that workers use cultural codes of “purity” and “pollution” to represent and evaluate individuals, interests, and relations. The findings buttress the continuing relevance of social class for explaining social identity, consciousness, and antagonism.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

No description available.

No / Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candidly about their childhood backgrounds, their school experiences, and what happened to them after leaving compulsory education. They also reveal their experiences of university, both as students and academics from their early careers to the present day. This book will be of interest to an international audience that includes new and aspiring academics who come from a working-class background themselves. The multifaceted findings will also be relevant to established academics and students of sociology, education studies and social class.

Habilitation - Universität, Passau, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [571]-689) and index.

Habilitation - Universität, Passau, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [571]-689) and index.

The Jack Wills brand and the name Jack Wills has become synonymous with an elite group identity in British society, namely the 18-24 demographic of the ‘upper-middle classes’. This group – wealthy, privately educated and attending a Russell Group university – are the subject of this thesis, specifically those involved in the co-ordination and lifestyle events of the Jack Wills brand. This study tracks and distils the identity and sociality of this social group through the prism of the Jack Wills brand’s corporate activity, a role that I outline to be central to the group’s social networking and cohesion through convivial pursuits and lifestyle events. This, I show, creates an elite core group who become the face of the brand; their life being the life-style element that the corporation sells to their consumers. Central to this thesis is the distinction between this elite, core-group of persons that become the basis of Jack Wills advertised lifestyle and those who purchase the product at market. The distinction I make is between a gift and commodity economy where, on the one hand, gifts develop intricate friendships and lasting social ties amongst a small few as an elite segment of the group and commodities, on the other hand, develop a residual role and make those purchasing the clothes an aspirational group. The name of the corporation comes to stand for the name of the group. And this name contains a contradiction; that of the gift and the commodity as the aspired and the aspirational persons, respectively. This contradiction is explored and dubbed ‘the dialectic of gentry’. Tracing this contradiction at the heart of the brand and the gentry group Jack Wills’s target, the thesis traces the value of the brand through ethnographic investigation: What type of economic object is a brand? Arguing it is what anthropologists call ‘inalienable wealth/valuables’, I claim the social group’s elite identity arises through the gifts and patronage the Jack Wills brand supplies them as they withhold these valuables from wider circulation and, therein, the value of the brand is manifested and given its elite stature. Bolstered by ethnographic material I attempt to demonstrate that the Jack Wills brand embodies the aspirational core of elite British identity and aids in the reformation of this elite group in the face of globalising pressures and new forms of sociality mediated by branded goods.