Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence that social class identity has on the emerging professional identities of novice teachers. The study argues that schooling in the UK is classed in terms of its history, outcomes and processes, and as a result, situates teaching as a form of ‘class work’. Given the strong arguments for situating teaching in this way, this thesis seeks to increase our understanding about the way class actually works in relation to teachers’ identities and the impact this has on their work as teachers. This study was qualitative and longitudinal in nature and used semi-structured interviews as the main method of data collection. A group of eleven novice teachers were followed over a two year period as they both learnt to become teachers on a postgraduate initial teacher education programme and then one year later after most had started teaching in secondary schools. The thesis begins by examining the complexities of the heightened, emotive and fiercely debated issue of class and draws strongly on understandings that locate class in contemporary Britain as being about culture as well as social structures. It recognises that whilst the emerging professional identities of teachers are heavily shaped by life experiences prior to becoming a teacher, new and varied teaching experiences have the capacity to impact on the way teachers see themselves and their understandings of their work in schools. Using data rich stories of six of the novice teachers to exemplify the wider sample, this thesis illustrates the ways in which classed identity shapes novice teachers’ early understandings of schooling and becoming a teacher. It demonstrates that class really does matter for novice teachers but that it plays out in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. In particular, the thesis draws on the notion of social class boundaries and the way in which teaching often involves the crossing of these. The crossing of class boundaries is identified as being a central feature of the novice teacher experience. It is argued that class boundary crossing creates tensions for novice teachers not least because their own class identities are called into question and troubled by this process. One feature of this process is that many novice teachers recognise teaching as ‘class work’ and additionally understand that the cultural capital they bring to this context may not be equally valued in all educational settings. This can result in a class identity acting in restrictive and constraining ways. Whilst some novice teachers are bound by their class identities, others are able to play strategically with their class minimising the disadvantages of a perceived lack of appropriate cultural capital. This study suggests that the ability to know how and when to strategise is itself classed, a coping mechanism employed by middle rather than working class novice teachers. The study concludes by examining the implications of these findings for novice teachers and their preparation for work in schools. It argues that the classed identities of teachers need to be explicitly examined in a supportive and reflexive manner within initial teacher education.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to lay the groundwork for the eventual combination of micro and macro levels of class analysis into a unified theory. The first steps of this process require the creation of a micro level theory of class identity formation, a slight reconceptualization of the class map upon which the macro level theory is based, and an elaboration of the partial macro level theory provided by Wright (1997). At the micro level, I find the factors which contribute to class identity formation depend on which class identities are being distinguished. This result echoes the findings of Centers [1949] 1961, but moves beyond his analysis by quantifying the contribution of each of the factors to the predicted probability of selecting a class identity. At the macro level, I find that including partial ownership in Wright's class map uncovers important hidden variation among Wright's non-owning class locations. Separating partial owners from non-owners illustrates an important source of division in class consciousness not possible using Wright's class map. Finally, I further elaborate Wright's partial theory of class consciousness by demonstrating that McPherson's concept of socio-structural space can be usefully applied to the class structure, which provides a set of hypotheses to explain how class formation affects class consciousness. The solidarity hypothesis is supported, suggesting class based homogeneous friendship relations strengthen class consciousness in the polar class locations. Increasing class based social distance between friends, decreases the strength of an individual's class consciousness. While just the first steps, these advancements in theory and empirical results help further the cause of creating a unified theory of class by strengthening our understanding of both the micro and macro levels of class analysis. With these improvements in place, further work at both levels of analysis can continue the process of integrating the two levels of analysis.

This dissertation explores the impact of the permanent chautauqua movement in American culture, especially in the period from 1874 to 1935. It argues that chautauquas served as sites for the production of middle-class culture and the renegotiation of relationships among class, gender, race, and religion. Permanent chautauquas were popular vacation resorts throughout the United States, beginning with the founding of the Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly in upstate New York and increasing in number to about two hundred in 1900. They were associations of cottages offering community programs that were educational, religious, and entertaining. This dissertation examines the programs that the chautauquas planned, arguing that they espoused a burgeoning form of culture, one that supported a perceived morality and middle-class values like dedication to family, temperance, education, patriotism, piety, and fighting against temptation to sin. Particular emphasis is placed on how performance at permanent chautauquas led to new expectations of gender, class, race, and religion. Women had opportunities for leadership, were able to blur lines between public and private spheres, and could act out different expectations of their gender while on the grounds. While most chautauquans were middle class, attending a chautauqua meant that one's class was not important and all could enjoy a middle-class vacation. While the line between whites and non-whites remained stable, non-whites were granted performance opportunities at chautauquas that they might not have had; other non-whites participated as members of the work force that allowed white chautauquans the leisure they expected. Because chautauquas were Protestant communities, religion underlaid all activities on the grounds, redefining expectations of how religion and entertainment could be combined. Taken together, these renegotiations of identity at chautauquas impacted a broader American culture. This dissertation examines the performances at chautauqua, in particular the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and their Recognition Day graduation ceremony; historical pageantry; professional performers who visited as part of the circuit chautauquas; and early film exhibition. It places them in a broader American performance context and argues that permanent chautauquas played a role in their development and popularity. It draws upon archival records from the chautauquas to outline the kinds of programming presented. Additionally, the research is supported by anecdotal evidence from a series of oral history interviews conducted with individuals who recall their childhoods at permanent chautauquas.

In recent years, the concept of emotion has increasingly been seen as a vital political factor shaping human subjectivity, that is, the process by which one becomes a subject. Emotion is an important component in the neoliberal economy within which well-being is seen to be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and by assuming the interests of workers and companies are commensurate. I approach the job-search process and (un/under)employment as focal spheres in which to examine the everyday production and upkeep of emotional management to produce an employable self. Specifically, I draw on thirteen months of fieldwork at five career development workshops in Arizona to argue that the career advice industry is urging job seeking college educated Americans to use emotional management techniques to become employable in a neoliberal economy. Increasingly precarious employment for college-educated Americans prepares the ground for job seekers to pursue help from career experts. These experts guide job seekers to do emotion work to change their thinking and behavior so that they can be employable professionals ready for the work force. This attempt to repackage and recreate a new employable self is couched in discovering one's "authentic self" discourse, bringing out existing skills, and figuring out what one enjoys doing. Career experts re-frame unemployment and underemployment as a training opportunity for job seekers to become productive people. During these workshops, experts explicitly attempt to blur the boundaries between work and non-work, as well as between social good and profit, which is consistent with the neoliberal economy where the individual is seen as a product or company to be marketed. Therefore, in a neoliberal context, achieving individual well-being involves active incorporation of the personal sphere into the business domain. In addition, a look at the class identities of college educated participants reveals that emotion, particularly a sense of economic security, is also shaping how job-seeking Americans describe their middle-class identity. I illustrate that in the face of decreasing economic opportunities and a tight labor market, very few participants have a negative view of what "middle class" means to them, nor do they describe their class status with an occupation oriented criteria. The majority of participants' descriptions of "middle class" included consumption items, while almost half of them indicated the importance of economic safety, security and the lack of anxiety for basic economic needs. Following and extending on the concept of ontological security, which refers to the constancy of social and material environments, I demonstrate that despite their precarious employment status, participants still believe in the American Dream and they articulate middle-class identity through their ability to continue consuming, even in a more modified form, which allows them to retain a sense of security. This indicates the centralization of safety and security discourses in defining an American middle-class identity.

Submitted by Adriana Alves Rodrigues (aalves@espm.br) on 2018-10-04T19:10:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 ppgcom - maria beatriz portelinha.pdf: 1579910 bytes, checksum: f9e9693605864fac4e3b48ab0d8a1adb (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Alves Rodrigues (aalves@espm.br) on 2018-10-04T19:11:06Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 ppgcom - maria beatriz portelinha.pdf: 1579910 bytes, checksum: f9e9693605864fac4e3b48ab0d8a1adb (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Debora Cristina Bonfim Aquarone (deborabonfim@espm.br) on 2018-10-04T19:11:45Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 ppgcom - maria beatriz portelinha.pdf: 1579910 bytes, checksum: f9e9693605864fac4e3b48ab0d8a1adb (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-10-04T19:11:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ppgcom - maria beatriz portelinha.pdf: 1579910 bytes, checksum: f9e9693605864fac4e3b48ab0d8a1adb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-03-23 / The subject of this thesis is the meaning attributions to popular classes’ everyday food consumption. The consumption, as a social and cultural phenomenon, allows us to investigate society’s ways of life and the meaning attributions given by its members to everyday life. As food consumption, specifically, the meanings are constantly built and materialized into practices, whether due the physical needs or the desire of doing so. By associating food consumption to social classes, specific eating manners become noticeable within each social group having its own eating habitus, revealing traces of their social dynamic. The meanings attributed to consumption are built by the collective, in a way that the culture and socialization manners affect the individual’s ways of thinking, felling and acting, affecting also their lifestyle and their identity formation. The consumption preferences and taste, influenced by the habitus and the individual’s lifestyle, are objects of negotiation between individual’s perceptions and collective knowledge, as a negotiation between individual and society. From that, our aim in this study is to think the relations between food consumptions and the meanings built in its practices, investigating its relation with identity construction in a media society. We base our study in theories of authors who articulate the consumption to social relations as Bourdieu, Barros and Rocha, García Canclini, Martín-Barbero, Slater, Landowski, Barbosa and Fischler, to verify the meaning attributions about food consumption and how they are related to the everyday life of popular classes. By means of in-depth interviews with decision makers from families of those classes we investigated the eating consumption and media practices of those individuals, verifying how it relates to their lifestyles. Synthetically, we noticed that the eating consumption practices are related to the demands of their everyday practices and their cultural and social identities. The association between feeding and social class reveled different manners of food preparation, behavior, purchasing strategies and food preferences, with social condition stablishing itself as a category that guides their actions. / O tema desta pesquisa é atribuição de sentidos ao consumo cotidiano de alimentos pelas classes populares. O consumo, como um fenômeno social e cultural, permite-nos investigar os modos de vida de uma sociedade e os sentidos por ela atribuídos ao seu cotidiano. No consumo de alimentos, mais especificamente, os sentidos são constantemente construídos e materializados em práticas, seja pela necessidade fisiológica desse consumo ou pelo desejo de realizá-lo. Ao associar o consumo de alimentos a diferentes classes sociais, modos específicos de alimentação se tornam visíveis com cada grupo social possuindo um habitus alimentar próprio e revelando traços de sua dinâmica social. Os significados atribuídos ao consumo são construídos na coletividade, de modo que a cultura e os modos de socialização influenciam nos modos de pensar, sentir e agir dos indivíduos, influenciando em seu estilo de vida e na constituição de suas identidades. As preferências de consumo e o gosto, influenciados pelo habitus e pelo estilo de vida dos indivíduos, são objetos da negociação entre as percepções individuais e os saberes coletivos, sendo uma negociação entre o indivíduo e a sociedade. A partir disso, o objetivo do estudo é pensar as relações entre o consumo de alimentos e os sentidos construídos em suas práticas, investigando sua relação com o processo de construção identitária de indivíduos em meio a uma sociedade midiática. Apoiamo-nos nas teorias de autores que articulam o consumo às relações sociais, como Bourdieu, Barros e Rocha, García Canclini, Martín-Barbero, Slater, Landowski, Barbosa e Fischler, para verificar as atribuições de sentido no consumo de alimentos e como estes se relacionam ao cotidiano das classes populares. Por meio de entrevistas em profundidade com decisoras de compra de famílias dessas classes, investigamos as práticas de consumo alimentares e midiáticas desses indivíduos, verificando como estas se relacionam a seus modos de vida. Sinteticamente, verificamos que as práticas de consumo alimentares de nossas entrevistadas estão relacionadas às demandas práticas cotidianas e a suas identidades culturais e sociais. A alimentação associada a classe social revelou diferentes modos de preparo, comportamento, estratégias de compra e preferência por alimentos específicos, com a condição social estabelecendo-se como uma categoria que orienta suas ações.

The main objective of this dissertation is to study the subjective class identification and the importance of this identification for social attitudes and leisure habits. Class identification is a significant, yet often neglected, area of research in the study of social class and stratification. The aim of this thesis has been to explore in what way the Swedish citizens perceive their own place in the structure of stratification. This thesis is based on three Swedish surveys, collected between 1993 and 2000. The results show that a vast majority of the citizens think that Sweden is still a class society and can place themselves in this structure. The most important sources for this identification are the objective class position and the class position of the father during childhood and adolescence. Identification with the working class is to a higher extent connected with a view that the differences in living conditions are too high, that the differences in the possibility to advance in the Swedish society are unequal and that the gap in income should decrease. This standpoint is nearly as common for people who identify with the working class irrespective of a socialistic or non- socialistic position. The results also show that class identification is related to the level of participation in different leisure activities. Identification with the middle class is connected with a higher degree of participation in a variety of activities, especially in highbrow culture such as theatre and opera. In the conclusion it is discussed that the relevance of class identification in the future is highly dependent on how class in the political and ideological sphere is formulated and attached with different attitudes, and if class is expressed as a positive source in the construction of the social identity.

With the postmodern prevalence of shopping as both a recreational and subsistence activity, social class identity is increasingly constituted around access to the landscape of consumption. U.S. middle-class identity is normalized in commercial spaces and the exclusion of the lower-class from these spaces perpetuates wider social disparities. For socially aware members of the middle-class, distinction may be achieved by selectively shopping throughout the metropolitan area with the goal of influencing corporate practices. Yet this distinction is not without cost as middle-class shoppers are prime targets of identity marketing schemes and of the neoliberal regime’s construction of consent. Through 15 self-proclaimed middle-class shoppers’ reported use of Atlanta’s postmodern landscape of consumption, this study focuses on performances of middle-classness and representations of commercialized spaces with the goal of furthering the anthropological understanding of class identity and urban space as heterogeneous.

Recently there has been considerable interest in Cornish ethnicity reflected both by a rise in the numbers in Cornwall who identify as Cornish and by academic research. Cornish studies have constructed a regional narrative embracing Celticity and an economy based on primary industries, particularly mining, from which has evolved a distinctive culture. This study adopting an ethnographic approach, extends Cornish studies by considering a number of elements which have not previously been addressed. These include investigating how identity may be played out in a particular place to see whether there may be differences in how ethnicity is performed within Cornwall, looking at how it may be practiced collectively in the context of civil society and examining the relationship between ethnicity and place identity. Three settings within Penzance have been selected to represent some of the issues prevalent in twenty first century Cornwall. They include a study of festivals celebrating ethnicity and place identity, an investigation of how kinship and ethnicity are the basis for social cohesion on a social housing estate and an analysis of a dispute over harbour re-development reflecting tensions between regeneration and conservation. Investigating the civil society associated with each of these settings has identified a number of discourses which influence place images, are the focus for debate and reflect different ways in which ethnicity is articulated and performed. Influences on Cornish identity have been exposed which have not been previously explored by Cornish Studies including the relationship between civil society and the state, the importance of place mythology and the impact of inward migration. The study concludes that collective identities, ethnicity and place images are constantly in flux driven by discourses debated within the micro-politics of civil society and that the overarching narratives of Cornishness contain tensions and cleavages which help explain the fractured nature of much of public life in Cornwall.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:23:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 2767761 bytes, checksum: ac58e327217b02dcec74da9dc1676d4f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This study aims to present an approach of how the new unionism contributed to the change in the political culture of the leaders in commerce unionism João Pessoa, between 1986 and 1993. Historical context in which the authentic unionism emerged provided significant changes in the relationship between capital and work from the disruption to the ancient practice of making unionism during the military dictatorship. We believe that this movement was primarily responsible for the change in behavior of the new union leaders that category of workers where there was a prevailing culture of harmony between antagonistic classes. This new unionism will bring out a union opposition to fight what became known as pelegas practices. From an analysis of the political practices of the "old unionism" and change the political culture in commerce unionism João Pessoa. Understand how political culture not only the practices and attitudes of social agents, but these agents have relationships with symbolic elements, whether the acceptance or rejection and certain power projects in the political structure. As theoretical foundation, we will use the concepts of political culture and class identity in order to understand the behavior of union leaders Category shopkeeper. The sources used were built on research papers, oral reports, official documents and works of Brazilian historiography. / Este estudo tem por finalidade fazer uma abordagem de como o novo sindicalismo contribuiu para a mudança de cultura política das lideranças do sindicalismo comerciário de João Pessoa, entre 1986 e 1993. O contexto histórico em que surgiu o sindicalismo autêntico proporcionou mudanças significativas nas relações entre capital e trabalho a partir das rupturas com as antigas práticas de se fazer sindicalismo durante a ditadura militar. Acreditamos que este movimento foi o principal responsável pela mudança de comportamento dos novos dirigentes sindicais daquela categoria de trabalhadores onde predominava uma cultura de harmonia entre as classes antagônicas. Esse novo sindicalismo vai fazer emergir uma oposição sindical no combate ao que ficou conhecido como práticas pelegas. A partir de uma análise entre as práticas políticas do chamado velho sindicalismo e, mudança de cultura política no sindicalismo comerciário de João Pessoa. Entendemos como cultura política não só as práticas e atitudes dos agentes sociais, mas as relações que esses agentes têm com os elementos simbólicos, sejam pela aceitação e ou pela rejeição a determinados projetos de poder na estrutura política. Como fundamentação teórica, utilizaremos os conceitos de cultura política e identidade de classe visando entender o comportamento dos dirigentes sindicais da categoria comerciária. As fontes utilizadas foram construídas em pesquisa em jornais, relatos orais, documentos oficiais e obras da historiografia brasileira.