WORKING CLASS
Sociologyindex, Books on Working Class, Sociology Books 2012,
Working class in Marxian sense refers to those who work for a living, employed for wages, especially in manual or industrial work; the proletariat. Working class is a term used generally to refer to those who are employed in lower tier jobs as measured by education, skill and compensation.
In Britain, working class generally includes skilled and unskilled manual workers (perhaps synonymous with blue-collar workers) and sometimes lower levels of white-collar workers.
Working classes are mainly found in urban areas in industrialized economies and are contrasted with the upper class and middle class with reference to education, occupation, culture, and income.
Working class is similar in meaning to lower class unless it is used in a more Marxian sense.
Working class can also mean of, or pertaining to working class, as when we talk about working class mentality.
Working-Class Women in London Local Politics, 1894–1914
KIM YOONOK STENBERG, Montgomery College
In the class-bound society of late Victorian and Edwardian England, those few women who
dared to enter into the rough and tumble world of local politics were often middle-class
ladies who had leisure, confidence, and connections. Were there any working class women
party activists? The answer is ‘yes’. Then what was the profile of a typical
working-class party woman? First, she came not from destitute situations but from the
labour aristocracy. Or some women activists might be even properly considered belonging to
the lower echelon of the middle class. Second, working-class party women were likely to be
married, unlike their middle-class counterparts, most of whom were spinsters. Third, many
working-class or lower-middle-class women party activists were married to local
politicians and notables, whose presence eased their political entry. Fourth,
working-class political women were concentrated in a few specific working-class districts,
such as Poplar, Southwark, and Woolwich in the case of London. Finally, it was the Labour
movement that provided the most hospitable environment for working-class women's political
mobilization. In Woolwich, women played a significant part in building and sustaining the
local Labour Party and enjoyed something approaching equal partnership. -
tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/9/3/323
|
The Neighborhood Politics of Class in a
Working-Class Suburb of Los Angeles, 1920-1940
Becky M. Nicolaides, University of California-San Diego
In interwar Los Angeles, the politics of the neighborhood took on immense importance in
the lives of white, working-class families. A close study of South Gate, a blue-collar
suburb in southern Los Angeles, reveals that home ownership became central to the
political identity of local residents. In these years, the peculiar nature of
working-class suburbia lent a highly class-sensitive spin to that identity; working-class
homeowners were fiercely concerned with protecting the modest economic security that home
ownership gave them, particularly in the precarious years before the welfare state. South
Gate’s native-born, white residents embraced the tenets of "plain folk
Americanism," which valued self-help, hard work, and individualism. Accordingly, they
drew on sweat equity to build their own homes and grow food on their property, as a means
of achieving some independence from cash wages. When local merchants sought to raise
taxes, to finance their broader goal of developing the suburb’s infrastructure as a
means of stimulating local business, working-class families mobilized politically to
resist. Local politics became a series of battles between South Gate’s merchants and
working-class residents, focused on taxation and development. These struggles reveal how
workers ascribed their own class-based meanings to home ownership, and how they asserted
their class interests in the arena of neighborhood politics. -
juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/3/428
A Divided Working Class? Planning and Career Perception in the Service
and Working Classes
Yaojun Li, University of Manchester, UK
Frank Bechhofer, University of Edinburgh, UK
Robert Stewart, MVA Scotland, UK
David McCrone, University of Edinburgh, UK D.McCrone@ed.ac.uk
Michael Anderson, Lynn Jamieson, University of Edinburgh, UK
The contrast between the service class and the working class is central to much class
analysis. This structural distinction, based on differences in the employment
relationship, is analytically powerful, has validity, and is not in question here. The
working class, however, is not homogeneous in all respects. This paper focuses on a
sizeable group within the working class who perceive themselves as having (or having had)
a career. As well as having this perception, they exhibit a forward-looking perspective,
both in the world of employment and with regard to more general planning. They demonstrate
degrees of planning, in work and non-work areas, strikingly comparable to service class
respondents, and significantly greater than working class respondents without career
perceptions. They believe that they can achieve their plans and indeed some have done so
successfully. This exercise of forethought is materially aided by this group's possession
of rather greater resources of various kinds than the rest of the working class. But this
is by no means the whole story. The findings suggest strongly that a willingness to
exercise or not to exercise forethought sharply distinguishes two groups within the
working class, and may indicate a significant and hitherto unreported cleavage worthy of
further investigation. - wes.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/617
America's
New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age
The
Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford World's Classics)
A
Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century
(Revolutionary Studies)