This thesis considers how informational imperfections may give rise to advantages for those born to relatively rich parents. The first chapter focuses on the separation of some societies into different classes. Within the model, classes provide greater advantages to those from privileged backgrounds and, even in the absence of legal barriers preventing the lower classes from accessing skilled jobs, the skilled amongst them are still de facto denied access to high paying jobs through statistical discrimination. This chapter shows that there can be a net benefit from class discrimination, versus a classless state, when it creates information relating to the abilities of the upper class. This theme is expanded on in chapter two where a signalling model more explicitly describes the statistical discrimination suffered by some members of society. The advantage conferred on those from privileged backgrounds generates income dispersion, which in turn reinforces the advantages of the rich. If this feedback is strong enough, the model may exhibit multiplicity of steady states. This multiplicity of steady states is backward looking: the income dispersion today depends on the extent to which firms use the information available to them, which in turn depends on the income dispersion in the previous generation. The model of chapter two also demonstrates why societies with more "meritocratic" institutions may exhibit less intergenerational income mobility: the income dispersion that meritocracy creates increases the value of a privileged upbringing. The final chapter adds parental investment to the model. In doing so it brings the model more squarely in line with the statistical discrimination literature, although the model does not exhibit a multiplicity of equilibria. There is a unique optimal investment rule for parents. Exogenous shocks to meritocracy are again examined. Meritocracy increases income variance and hence, from behind the veil of ignorance, creates greater uncertainty over the income an individual will receive. The model describes how a risk averse person might prefer to be born into an economy where they expect to be poorer but avoid this increased uncertainty, and so despite raising incomes, meritocracy may make agents, on average, more unhappy.

This dissertation examines the production and consumption of nature in middle-class American holidays. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it follows the creation of new symbols and practices associated with Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In each of these holidays, members of the middle class used nature to narrate their new identity as Americans belonging less to local, regional, or ethnic communities and more to the nuclear family and the nation. In Thanksgiving, the turkey became an important symbol in the antebellum era, the same period in which the Easter rabbit was born, the Fourth of July picnic became popular, and the Christmas tree rose to prominence. These trends resulted from the middle-class desire to make the home an idealized private life complete with its own rituals and symbols that separated it from the public life of the street. While the middle class retreated into its imagined private sphere, it did so while simultaneously claiming that their families represented the core building blocks of the nation. By conflating family and nation, the middle class generated a large demand for the physical goods that made such symbolic meaning manifest--in particular, Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Reproducing these plants and animals, however, created agroecological problems, including crop diseases. While middle-class family holidays reinforce the scales of popular culture and mass agriculture, they do so only tenuously.

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This thesis examines the fiction of Neil Bartlett, Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst, considering how they write missing voices of sexuality, gender and class back into history through re-imagining the city space. It examines the ways in which traditional, linear narratives and the notion of objectivity in historical discourse are challenged when history is presented through fiction.Waters, Bartlett and Hollinghurst are writing the past from the perspective of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, both employing and subverting traditional narrative genres. They all depict London as a symbolic, liminal space which allows for the voices of marginalized groups to flourish. Their London is a physical but also an imagined city, both grand and squalid, where the official boundaries between public and private space are often blurred.Through depicting their protagonists mapping their own ways around London, the authors all disrupt and destabilize traditional accounts of past events and city dwellers, foregrounding the imagination in the re-telling of history‘s excluded stories.

The thesis is about a village which has become a part of the industrial city of Bangalore, the ways in which this change in circumstances is taken into account in social relations and moral judgments and tbe relation between Hindu religion and morality. From this local study I draw tentative conclusions about social relations and movements of ideas in Indian industrial society. In chapter 1 (Introduction) I describe the conditions of my fifteen months' fieldwork. I criticize the view that economic and technical changes cause moral or social changes directly and predictably, that the effect of industrialization and urbanization must be to alter 'folk' or 'traditional' society in the direction of a single ideal type of 'urban' or 'industrial' society and that this must involve great social strain and breakdown of norms. Social change means changes in moral values and ideologies. Changes in economic and other circumstances do not determine ideologies, but are taken into account as reasons for altering social categories and making new kinds of value judgments. It is at this level of ideologies and values, rather than of 'ideal types' constructed out of external similarities, that it is useful to make comparisons between societies. Indian ideologies are expressed particularly in religious terms and the key to understanding social change in India lies in the changing relations between religion and morality. Chapter 2 (History and description) traces the village's history from its foundation around 1800 to its incorporation into Bangalore (pop. 1.2m) in the 1950s, and describes the present appearance of the village and housing conditions within it. The leading peasant families sold their land for building or built on it themselves, and became building contractors or wholesale merchants. Their sons were educated in English, and tended to become factory workers or clerks. Half the village's population of 6700 belong to families of recent immigrants. More than half the village's workers are in positions requiring some skill or responsibility. Bangalore consists largely of a network of such urban villages which are not submerged but become more conscious of their identity as the neighbourhood gains moral significance at the expense of communities of birth. Chapter 3 (Groups within the village) describes the vestiges of traditional relations between castes and the surviving village offices. These things, like village cults and festivals, acquire a new value as the reality of rural life recedes and the village's recent past is idealized in the myth of a co-operating community, associated with peasant virtues. Immigrants as well as old families are attached to the village, as a unit in which relations are moral rather than economic, and particularly as an arena in which claims to respect or status can be defended. The villagers are divided into old families and immigrants, by language (half speak Tamil the rest mainly Teluga or Kannada), by religion (four fifths are Hindus, the rest Giristians apart from a few Muslims), by caste by 'family', which varies in meaning according to the situation, by economic class, by economic relations of creditor and debtor, or of employer and employee in the case of the minority who work for other villagers by education by age, by sex by occupation, by party and faction, by voluntary associations.,by close neighbourhood and by friendship. Wherever possible I give statistics, based on a sample survey of every tenth household. In chapter 4 (Caste and family) I discuss caste ideology, the religious justification of hierarchy, the place of endogamy and occupation, and the relation between castes and 'subcastes'. I describe the main castes of the village, most of which belong to the 'middle' block of castes and are social equals, the situations in which caste counts, and the way in which endogamous groups divide, unite, overlap and change their names. The closed endogamous group tends to be replaced by overlapping marriage circles, which the household may redefine for itself within limits. Ideal relations within the family may be inferred from simple rules about who is entitled to respect, but the content of this respect, and the criteria for giving it, are changing in the direction of equality and autonomy. Chapters 5 and 6 (Religion) describe cults of the whole village, cults of other groups and personal religion. I distinguish three aspects of Hinduism: brahmanism, associated with prestige and auspiciousness, and with the values of dharma (order), permanence, hierarchy, purity and ritual, the religion of groups, for the protection and welfare of closed communities, and the religion of choice, associated with moksha or liberation, renunciation, devotion, the direct relation of the soul to God, and, particularly in the modern form of this kind of religion with conscience, responsibility and service. Brahmanism and group religion are complementary. The thinking that characterizes then is thoroughly hierarchical: men are arranged in a hierarchy of birth and function, the legitimate ends of life in a hierarchy of value. Each item in the hierarchy is justified Dy its association with those above it. Just as castes derive status from their relation to Brahmans, the interest (artha) of groups is justified by and subordinate to the eternal order (dharma) of the whole, and group religion is justified by and subordinate to brahmanism. The religion of choice tends to make universal not hierarchical distinctions, and to regard worshippers as equals. Each of these aspects is particularly associated with one of the three main temples in the village: the ore brahmanical temple, the temple of the village's patron goddess, and a Math or religious institution built over the grave of a Guru. The Math is a centre not only of devotional religion, but of social and moral innovation: its younger devotees organized a night school for village children, and have been prominent in other enterprises associated with the ideology of 'social service'. They transformed universalistic ethical beliefs which were latent and unstressed into the common assumptions of a generation influenced by the reforming enthusiasm, moral fervour and equalitarianism of the Independence movement. In chapter 7 (Respect) I consider the use and meaning of 'respect' and words connected with it ('big man' andc). Respect is a fundamental social value and the form in which economic and other relations on larger scales are projected on to the village's scale of values. It has two main components 'prestige', a given, de facto quality related to birth, wealth and influence, and 'honour', a moral, de jure quality depending on the autonomous moral judgments of others. In modern conditions the second component tends to gain importance at the expense of the first, and the conversion of wealth or power into status conies to depend now on complying with universalistic norms. Forms of organization for common action are compromises between two types: the traditional pancaayat or council, where decisions are taken by consensus and 'big men' respected for their 'prestige' take the initiative, and the modern association, where decisions are voted on and men respected for their personal moral qualities take the initiative. I describe a municipal election, and the two ways in which candidates build up support by acting through dyadic links of 'respect' and by a direct appeal to voters or supporters through ideological arguments. Chapter 8 (Values) I relate values and social relations in the village to the two types which Piaget calls heteronomy aud autonomy. Heteronomy is associated with constraint, hierarchy and unilateral respect, autonomy with aspiration, equality and mutual respect. They correspond to Bergson's closed and open types of morality, religion and society.

This thesis examines the trajectories of class politics in post-apartheid South Africa. It investigates whether we can witness South African politics entering into a post-nationalist era characterised by the increasing salience of class struggles rooted in the country's glaring socioeconomic inequalities. In particular, the thesis explores the political role of the organised working class with a focus on the Tripartite Alliance between the African Natinal Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Alliance politics has traditionally been studied with a focus on policy analysis and elite-level exchanges played out in the public domain (Bassett 2005; Buhlungu 2005; Lodge 1999; Webster 2001), or with a focus on workers' political attitudes that uses statistical survey data (Buhlungu et al 2006a; Pillay 2006). The unique contribution made by the thesis is that it offers a detailed ethnographic focus into class politics 'from below', with a focus on the political attitudes and activism of members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), South Africa's largest and most politically influential trade union. The thesis explores how rank and file members of NUM have adapted to the radically altered social, political and institutional environment heralded by the transition to democracy in 1994. In particular, it analyses how and why union members are engaging in their trade union in changing ways, and what implications this has for those who advocate the trade unions becoming the driving force behind a radical class-based, post-nationalist political agenda (Bond 2000; 2010; Habib and Taylor 1999; 2001). The thesis also explores workers' relationships with the post-apartheid state and their experience of economic transformation under the ANC government. The case study evidence offers an important insight into how workers understand post-liberation politics and how they construct their political identities in relation to both their class and also the nationalist movement. In doing so, the thesis does not attempt to offer normative prescriptions as to what COSATU 'should' (or 'should not') do. Instead, it challenges mechanical, deterministic analyses of the relationship between class and nationalist politics, particularly those that stress that underlying class divisions in South African society will inevitably, in some form or another, produce a new class-based politics that will not only challenge, but potentially supersede, nationalist politics.