Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent shifts in the college and job markets have made American middle-class parents anxious about their children’s futures. Research shows that these parents practice strategic behaviors that give their children academic advantages over working class children. However, research has not yet explored how parents strategize to gain competitive advantages over other families within the middle class. In this research, I identify two different strategies middle-class parents use to help their children succeed, using in-depth interviews with 36 mothers and fathers in 18 families. Drawing on theories of class and competition, this research will contribute to knowledge about how the middle class maintains its privilege despite heightened competition. These findings will also augment understandings of the gender and power dimensions behind family practices. Finally, this study will add to knowledge about how individuals negotiate between their religious values and economic concerns.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Many writings emphasize repressive aspects of authoritarian regimes and resistance against them from society. Paying attention to long-standing stability of the Park Chung Hee regime (1961-1979), this paper attempts to investigate one way in which repressive regimes generate political legitimacy and examines class politics as a ruling strategy of the regime and its reactions. In the 1960s, both working class and middle class were the beneficiaries of a rapid economic developmental project and pseudo-hegemony was formed corresponding to the expansion of the total economic scale. However, the social base for popular support attenuated in the 1970s as income disparity deepened and political repression grew severe. At times when anti-regime worker mobilization intensified, the urban middle class opted for the status quo aligning themselves with state ideology. In short, working class exclusion and middle class inclusion constituted the central mechanism for the generation of regime legitimacy and the necessary political coalition between the working and middle classes for wide opposition and democratization was blocked.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Structured activities have become an increasingly important part of children’s lives and educational experiences. Using in-depth interviews, sociodemographic surveys, and document analysis at two schools in a large Northeastern city, we investigate social class differences in activity enrollment, types of activities in which children participate, and reasons why parents enroll their children in structured activities. Although we find greater participation in activities among middle- versus working-class children, particularly in activities that are not organizationally tied to schools, we find widespread participation among working-class children. Sports, cultural, and academic activities are the most prevalent activities among both groups, yet we also find class differences in enrollment by type of activity, differences that may have later educational consequences. Some of the reasons why working-class parents enroll their children in extracurricular activities are different from those of their middle-class counterparts—their desire to keep children safe by enrolling them in activities that keep children out of their neighborhood, the preparation of children for future opportunities, and the acquisition of skills that can help children transition into adulthood. These and other findings suggests that existing explanations for class differences in structured activity participation may not adequately capture the experiences and values of working-class families.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: As the process of market transition in Eastern and Central Europe continues, the proportion of people who report that they favor the socialist system has grown. The article examines the sources of this post-communist nostalgia among middle class, middle aged Poles, the social group which is commonly thought to have been the chief beneficiary of the process of market-transition. While positive attitudes towards socialism are reported by vast majorities of respondents in all opinion surveys, nostalgic attitudes are frequently scorned by the media and in the public discourse and therefore are subject to self-censorship. The present article examines the mechanism of social suppression of nostalgia. We argue that the main source of nostalgic attitudes is the merging of economic and social status that has occurred in the course of transformation. Under socialism, many occupations enjoyed extraordinary social prestige, despite low salaries. The ongoing fusion of social and economic status gives those less financially successful a feeling of being deprived of both social position and of economic well-being. This hypothesis is verified through a series of interviews and through the analysis of alternative explanations of nostalgia, for example, theories claiming that post-socialist societies have been affected by collective amnesia. We argue that post-communist nostalgia has substantive reasons and is likely to transform itself into a more militant opposition to the principles underlying the transition to market-based economy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The middle class theory of class developed through a secularization of the pietist idea of a calling, and in the 19th century became explicitly set over against the concept of the industrial working class. Unlike the industrial working class, the middle class concept of work was related to god's will and thereby disconnected from an identity based on one's place within the industrial political economy. The middle class drew on beliefs about the value of education, and a social stratification based on levels of stylistics, to articulate its beliefs about the spiritual value of professional class work. While this protected the middle class from some of the consequences of labor, it also left the middle class without a vocabulary for describing their place in the economy in secular terms, and without a secular means to resist declining fortunes. For example, it is inconceivable to a person pursuing a calling that some day there might be no job for them, no place for them to practice what god has "called" them to do.