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The monograph argues that American racism has two colours (white and black), not one; and that each racism dresses itself not in one clothing, but in four: (1) “Minimal” negative, when one race considers another race inferior to itself in degree, but not in nature; (2) “Maximal” negative, when one race regards another as inherently inferior; (3) “Minimal” positive, when one race elevates another race to a superior status in degree, but not in nature; and (4) “Maximal” positive, when one race believes that the other race is genetically superior. The monograph maintains that the needs of capitalism created black slavery; that black slavery produced white racism as a justification for black slavery; and that black racism is a backlash of white racism. The monograph concludes that the abolition of black slavery and the civil rights movement destroyed the social and political ground for white and black racism, while the modern development of capitalism is demolishing their economic and intellectual ground.

Despite the theoretical shortcomings of recent historical work on social processes, the historical discipline has a role to play in the theorization of social dynamics. As the work of the late sociologist Charles Tilly (2008, p. 9) has emphasized, the larger-scale theoretical type of social-process analysis may benefit from a more small-scale historical awareness of “the influence of particular times and places.” In Tilly's view, the sociological accounts of social processes that lack the sense of temporal transitions which characterizes historical analysis will “rarely identify the component mechanisms, much less their combinations and sequences.” By contrast, a historical approach to the “big structures, large processes, huge comparisons” (see Tilly, 1984) of social processes may put forward an analytical program that “couples a search for mechanisms of very general scope with arguments that […] lend themselves to ‘local theory,’ in which the explanatory mechanisms and processes operate quite broadly but combine locally as a function of initial conditions and adjacent processes to produce distinctive trajectories and outcomes.” These local elements of history may aggregate together into a more general pattern of theory: “Mechanisms compound into processes: combinations and sequences of mechanisms that produce some specified outcome at a larger scale than any single mechanism.” The temporal dimension of a historical analysis has a capacity to theorize social processes by telling a story of beginnings that carry forward into points of culmination.

Sociologists studying the rise of postmodernism have generally concentrated on either macro-level structures of economy or micro-level subjectivities of individuals. Few have specified how meso-level actions within concrete institutions have produced both these macro- and micro-changes. Bourdieu's concept of field provides a meso-level concept that allows sociologists to explain the transition to a postmodern society by changes in the composition and competition of producers and consumers struggling for advantage in the economy and culture. The chapter focuses on architecture, revealing that the rise of a postmodern aesthetic was the result of internal changes of this field and their complex interrelation with the external changes of an economy in transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.

As Comaroff and Comaroff argue, in their discussion of the intersection of ethnographical research and historical perspectives, social change is a dynamic process in which existing social and political tensions, local and global, are played out, with an uncertain outcome. Change is often about how competing groups come to power (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992). Consumer researchers have already applied this perspective on class, consumption, and change in places as widespread as Niger and the US, but not to Eastern Europe.

This paper focuses on patterns of film consumption within cultural consumption more broadly to assess trends in consumerism such as eclectic consumption, individualised consumption and omnivorous/univorous consumption and whether economic background and status feature in shaping cultural consumption. We focus on film because it is widely consumed, online and offline, and has many genres that vary in terms of perceived artistic and entertainment value. In broad terms, film is differentiated between mainstream commercially driven film such as Hollywood blockbusters, middlebrow “feel good” movies and independent arthouse and foreign language film. Our empirical statistical analysis shows that film consumers watch a wide range of genres. However, films deemed to hold artistic value such as arthouse and foreign language feature as part of broad and wide-ranging pattern of consumption of film that attracts its own dedicated consumers. Though we found that social and economic factors remain predictors of cultural consumption the overall picture is more complex than a simple direct correspondence and perceptions of other cultural forms also play a role. Those likely to consume arthouse and foreign language film consume other film genres and other cultural forms genres and those who “prefer” arthouse and foreign language film have slightly more constrained socio-economic characteristics. Overall, we find that economic and cultural factors such income, education, and wider consumption of culture are significant in patterns of film consumption.

John Andrews Fitch spent a year studying labor conditions in the steel industry around Pittsburgh during 1907 and 1908. The results of his research became The Steel Workers, one of six volumes in the Pittsburgh Survey, a groundbreaking 1910 analysis of conditions faced by working people in a modern industrial city. Introducing his discussion of common employment practices in the steel industry, Fitch declared, “A repressive regime…has served since the destruction of unionism, to keep the employers in the saddle.” He traced the origins of management’s arbitrary power to the Homestead lockout of 1892, when Carnegie Steel destroyed the last stronghold of organized labor in the mills of western Pennsylvania. During his stay in Pittsburgh, Fitch saw the results of fifteen years of management domination. “The steel worker,” he wrote, “sees on every side evidence of an irresistible power, baffling and intangible. It fixes the conditions of his employment; it tells him what wages he may expect to receive and where and when he must work. If he protests, he is either ignored or rebuked. If he talks it over with his fellow workmen, he is likely to be discharged” (Fitch, 1989, pp. 206, 232–233).

Purpose – Recent research on the gender culture and femininity of adolescent girls found that girls construct their gender identity in various ways that are intertwined with race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. However, these existing studies focused on either general schoolgirls (see Ali, S. (2003). To be a girl: Culture and class in schools. Gender and Education, 15(3), 269–283; Bettie (2003); Weiler, J. D. (2000). Codes and contradictions: Race, gender identity and schooling. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Renold, E. (2005). Girls, boys and junior sexualities: Exploring children's gender and sexual relations in the primary school. London: Routledge) or delinquent girls in a gang (see Miller, J. (1998). Gender and victimization risk among young women in gangs. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35, 429–453; Miller (2001); Joe-Laidler & Hunt (2001); Schalet, A., Hunt, G., & Joe-Laidler, K. (2003). Respectability and autonomy: The articulation and meaning of sexuality among the girls in the gang. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32, 108–143; Messerschmidt (1995); Messerschmidt, J. W. (1997). Crime as structured action: Gender, race, class, and crime in the making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), and only a few studies paid attention to girls who showed overt oppositional behaviors at school.

Methods – The research uses qualitative methods and explores the gender identity of two adolescent girls in a junior high school in Taiwan, who are regarded as problem or “bad” girls by the school faculty.

Results – The two girls both manifested “ladette” culture (Jackson, 2006). On the one hand, they showed masculine behaviors such as fighting, troublemaking, disobeying school regulations, and using drugs and alcohol. On the other hand, they deliberately emphasized their femininity and sexual maturity in the way they dressed, talked, and behaved.

This chapter shows how the community college plays a unique role in producing American citizens with “global competence,” one of the main aims of institutions of higher education under the banner of its internationalization. While much discussion on how to achieve that aim has centered on study-abroad programs and curriculum changes targeting American-born students, this chapter focuses on the community college's contribution to producing “globally competent” American citizens through extensive classes in English as a Second Language (ESL) for immigrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 2001 to 2002 in ESL classes at a community college in the northeastern United States, this chapter examines three ways a community college's ESL classes foster such “global competence” in immigrants of various backgrounds: (1) by grooming them to be “American educated subjects” by disciplining them and teaching them “common sense” knowledge of American life, (2) by providing them with a space to develop a supportive community that goes beyond their ethnic networks, and (3) by nurturing students’ self-esteem in their new home. This chapter highlights the worldwide importance of the type of higher education, such as a community college, that serves the needs of local communities, including internationalized and underserved local communities – that of immigrants. It also points out the imbalance in the discussion of “global competence,” which focuses mainly on study abroad, and opens up a field of enquiry about “global competence” from another angle.

Our attitudes, values and tastes are shaped by our position in social space. At least, that was the argument Pierre Bourdieu set out in his seminal work, La Distinction. The purpose of this paper is to consider Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction and his argument that working-class families exhibit cultural attitudes and tastes for social necessity.

Attitudinal data relating to social necessity are taken from a national social survey of the British population. The results provide a rich source of data for exploring classed attitudes towards necessity in contemporary Britain.

Bourdieu's original claims for working-class “choice of the necessary” and working-class “taste for necessity” are based on his observations grounded in social survey evidence drawn from 1960s French society. Analysis of contemporary British social survey and attitudinal data also reveals sharp contours and differences in attitudes and tastes according to class fractions. These are evident in classed tastes and preferences for food, clothes, the home and social life.

Within the Bourdieusian theoretical framework, we understand that the tastes of necessity are preferences that arise as adaptations to deprivation of necessary goods and services. La Distinction and Bourdieu's approach to unmasking inequalities and structures in social space continue to be relevant in contemporary Britain. More generally, study findings add to the growing evidence that casts some doubt on current arguments concerning “individualisation”, claiming that social class has ceased to be significant in modern societies.

This paper sheds fresh light on the empirical validity and continuing theoretical relevance of Bourdieu's work examining the role of social necessity in shaping working-class culture. Bourdieu argues that the real principle of our preferences is taste and for working-class families, this is a virtue made of necessity.