Kari Elle Brown

Bio: Kari Elle Brown is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social class & Socioeconomic status. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 4 publications receiving 58 citations.

Credentialism and Career Aspirations: How Urban Chinese Youth Chose High School and College Majors

Abstract: This article explores how graduates of a junior high school in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, chose their high school and college major subject of study and the extent to which their majors fit with their work trajectories. We found that most interviewees considered the likelihood of a major and degree leading to better job opportunities more important than how the major fit with their personal interests. However, the unpredictability of the market economy in China made it difficult to anticipate which majors would lead to more lucrative jobs, and many eventually found work that did not match their majors.

How flexible gender identities give young women advantages in China’s new economy

Abstract: In this article, we examine how a cohort of urban youth born under China’s one-child policy have developed flexible gender identities through their childrearing aspirations and educational and occu...

“Poorer children study better”: How Urban Chinese young adults perceive relationships between wealth and academic achievement

Abstract: This article examines how Chinese citizens perceived the relationship between wealth and achievement among their former middle school classmates. It draws on a survey of 503 respondents in their late twenties and early thirties (who have been followed since 1999, when they were eighth or ninth graders in Dalian City, China) and on interviews with 60 of them. Most believed their former classmates from “poorer” families “studied better” than those from “wealthier” families. Interviewees elaborated that wealthier classmates were more likely than poorer classmates to lack motivation, have poor study habits, and be distracted by material pursuits. Interviewees also suggested that parental involvement was a key factor in shaping achievement, with more involved and educated “poorer” parents’ children doing better than children of “wealthier” business-owner parents who were too busy to get involved in their children’s education. Among these young adults, associations between wealth and achievement differ from tho...

Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood

Abstract: MacLeod, Jay. 2009 (3rd ed). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Boulder. CO: Westview Press In Ain't No Making' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1987) Jay MacLeod expertly shows education's role in the process of social reproduction, or how class inequality passes from one generation to the next. On the jacket cover of the third edition, preeminent sociologists-like William J. Wilson-comment enthusiastically about the updates on subjects' socio-economic status 20+ years after the initial study. They underscore the "classic" status of ANMI in scholarship on structural inequality and social reproduction. For readers unfamiliar with the book, I briefly describe the author's initial study and the contributions from data collected for the second edition. Following this, I discuss the added longitudinal data obtained for the third edition, its important new insights, and the usefulness of this book for courses in several core areas of sociology. In 1982 Jay MacLeod conducted participant observation of two groups of male youth, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both lived in a housing project called Clarendon Heights, but the two groups differed in important respects. The Hallways Hangers are predominantly white youth who, at that point in their young lives, openly resisted the American achievement ideology advanced by schools. They were dropouts and underachievers, saw few opportunities for themselves in the economy and other structures of society, and subsequently had no aspirations for a better life. In contrast the Brothers, predominantly black youth, demonstrated their belief in America as a land of opportunity by adopting its cultural norms, institutional rules, and by applying themselves in school (albeit with mixed results). They had strong faith that education would give them the needed human capital to succeed in middle-class jobs. When asked about racism, most believed that collective discrimination was a thing of the past. Any future challenges they faced from prejudicial people could be overcome with focus, hard work, and commitment. By dismissing racism and classism, both groups failed to recognize any structural basis for inequality. MacLeod also shows how the process of social reproduction works in practice. Social structure, he explains, becomes embedded in the "habitus" (Bourdieu) of the lower classes and shapes the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers. Habitus refers to "subjects' dispositions, which reflect a class-based experience and a corresponding social grammar of taste, knowledge, and behavior." Using habitus as a theoretical framework, MacLeod stresses, helps to transcend the dualism that characterizes scholarship on social reproduction. It is not solely one-structure-or the other-agency. Both are responsible for class inequality and its reproduction. (Although MacLeod does concede that structure is primary.) The second edition is based on data collected on the men's lives nine years later, and the comparative racial dimension of this study yields another important insight into the process of social reproduction. The majority of Hallway Hangers and Brothers have jobs in the secondary labor market, with low wages, skill requirements, and irregular work. …

Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

Abstract: Other Modernities: tendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 330 pp. Lisa Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives. Drawing on factory floor discussions, interviews, and personal conversations, Rofel focuses on the constitution of gendered identities as a means of probing aspects of modernity inflected with power. The result is a theoretically sophisticated yet broadly accessible account which combines an analysis of narrative based on cultural and historical specificities, and on the politics of representation, with a reflexive interrogation of western representations of Chinese women and China, beginning with views formerly held by Rofel herself. Rofel begins by problematizing modernity as something imagined, a discourse that the west subscribes to as opposed to an essence or a state of being. She challenges western assumptions of modernity as a monolithic category-sort of an endpoint in a teleological tale in which the United States and Europe are exemplary models. Non-western constructions of modernity are neither simply part of a universal phenomenon (that is, essentially the same beast as western modernity), nor can they be explained as an entirely different animal, a phenomenon unique to its cultural or local context. Rofel criticizes the former view as omitting culture and the latter as omitting power. Her alternative framing pluralizes modernity and then anchors "modernities" in particular historical moments. For Rofel, modernity is a process that when scrutinized reveals how local and global configurations of power have been "knit together." Divergent constructions of modernity shape the gendered identities of the three cohorts who are the subjects of this book. These cohorts are comprised of women who came of age roughly during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution, and the postMao era. The women in the oldest cohort construct identity in terms of their work performance and portray themselves as having been liberated by the revolution which enabled them to work. Prior to the revolution the cultural arena was characterized by a gendered distinction between "inside" and "outside." China scholars have long identified "inside" activities with femaleness and the family, and "outside" activities with maleness and the public domain. Due to this spatial designation working class women employed as factory laborers were suspected of having questionable morality, not on account of their actions but because of the "outside" location of their labor. Rofel points out that it was largely working women, formerly tainted by the inside/outside distinction, who found the new socialist state's framings a meaningful medium for crafting new gender identities through "labor" and for representing pasts that were once culturally problematic. This form of agency was shaped by Chinese Marxist discourse, which held that "work" meant activities in the public domain outside of the home. However, she argues that this framing resulted in an erasure of other forms of agency. For urban entrepreneurial families the "inside" was actually a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with male kin and engaged in labor. Thus, after the revolution women who had worked in household silk weaving workshops during the pre-revolutionary era were denied histories as workers, while women who had labored in factories could re-cast themselves as incipient feminists and revolutionaries. Rofel argues that these erasures and forms of agency were given credence by Marxist and international feminist binaries that erroneously identified women who were confined to "inside" activities with feudalism/tradition and those engaged in "outside" activities with productive labor/liberation. She accuses such binaries of replacing history with teleology and of assuming "women workers" could constitute a homogeneous subject as opposed to several situated positionalities differentially shaped by power. …

The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change [Book Review]

Abstract: Review(s) of: The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, by McRobbie, Angela, Sage, London, 2009, ISBN 9 7807 6197 0620, vi + 184 pp., A$49.95, Distributor: Footprint Books.