Journal ArticleDOI
Raising the ‘Meritocracy’ Parenting and the Individualization of Social Class
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TLDR
The authors demonstrate how the association of disadvantage with a particular form of subjectivity is operationalized and institutionalized through a contemporary focus on childrearing practices, and show how such an approach fails to recognize the socially and materially grounded nature of child-rearing.Abstract:
Theories of ‘individualization’ and ‘risk’ have shifted attention away from the material and structural roots of inequality and sanctioned a psychologized view of class distinctions in terms of personal qualities. This article will demonstrate how the association of disadvantage with a particular form of subjectivity is operationalized and institutionalized through a contemporary focus on childrearing practices. Discourses of ‘social exclusion’ construct working-class families as lacking in personal skills and moral responsibility, destined to transfer disadvantage to their children in a ‘cycle of deprivation’.This view underpins the current UK policy focus on parenting, characterized by state efforts to regulate and control the way children are brought up. Drawing on qualitative research with parents across a wide range of social backgrounds, this article will show how such an approach fails to recognize the socially and materially grounded nature of childrearing.read more
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New labour, new language?
TL;DR: All competent politicians know how to coin weasel words, but none is as good at it as Tony Blair and “new Labour,” according to Norman Fairclough in this penetrating disquisition, refreshingly free of sociolinguistic jargon and bolstered by linguistic evidence and analysis.
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Regulating the Abject: The TV Make-Over as Site of Neoliberal Reinvention Toward Bourgeois Femininity
Jessica Ringrose,Walkerdine +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how the feminine has become a new site of limitless possibility and endless consumption, the fulcrum of intensifying processes of neo-liberal reinvention of continuously making over the self into successful, post-feminist bourgeois subjects.
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Beck, individualization and the death of class: a critique.
TL;DR: The intention is not to conservatively deny that social change is occurring nor to advocate any particular model of class, but only to illustrate the aporias of Beck's position with the aim of vindicating the enterprise of class analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Becoming Middle Class: How Working-class University Students Draw and Transgress Moral Class Boundaries
TL;DR: In this paper, the expectations and experiences of a group of Canadian working-class, first-generation university students were analyzed and the structural disadvantages in terms of economic, soci...
References
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Book
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
Ulrich Beck,Mark Ritter +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, Scott Lash and Brian Wynne describe living on the VOLCANO of CIVILIZATION -the Contours of the RISK SOCIETY and the Politics of Knowledge in the Risk Society.
Journal ArticleDOI
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
TL;DR: In this paper, the self: ontological security and existential anxiety are discussed, as well as the trajectory of the self, risk, and security in high modernity, and the emergence of life politics.
Book
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
TL;DR: In the context of a post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project as mentioned in this paper, which is not a term which has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within plurality of possible options, and is 'adopted' rather than 'handed down'.
Book
The logic of practice
TL;DR: In this article, the Imaginary Anthropology of Subjectivism is described as an "imaginary anthropology of subjectivism" and the social uses of kinship are discussed. And the work of time is discussed.
Book
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
TL;DR: Powers of Freedom as mentioned in this paper is an approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways and argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources.