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This volume of PPST is the first volume under my sole editorship. The editorial transition (from Diane E. Davis, the former editor) has been challenging but surprisingly seamless thanks to Dr. Davis' helpful hand and the capable team at Emerald Publishing. I am honored by this opportunity. I am also humbled. For years PPST flourished under the formidable skills and vision of Dr. Davis. While I am doubtful that I will be able to match her deft editorial skill and leadership, I am determined to maintain the journal's integrity and innovations while honoring its traditions. The complexities of sociopolitical structures, past and present, demand critical analysis. A proper understanding of power relations requires meticulous research and bold theorizing. My goal is to ensure that PPST continues to contribute to these tasks.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/09596119010143560. When citing the article, please cite: Diane Joy Davis, (1990), “Demographic Change: The Role of the Hospitality Manager”, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Manageme, Vol. 2 Iss: 2.

Diane Davis has written a fine piece that seeks to reorient our scholarly gaze onto the dynamics of middle-class formation in the developing world. She writes, “…our research objective is not merely to study the appearance of an emergent or new middle class in the developing world, but to understand the implications of an increasingly heterogenous middle class” with more acute occupational and spatial cleavages (p. 14). Building political coalitions between the two main groupings of the middle class – public sector employees and small- and medium-sized industrial producers – which in the past had produced “socially inclusive development policy” faces new complications as the global economy could pit old middle-class corporatist populism and new middle-class neoliberalism against each other (pp. 16–17). Davis argues this intraclass cleavage is further intensified as the state in many developing world countries opts for decentralization and I would add as party politics becomes significantly less representative (see, e.g., Mainwaring, Maria Bejerano, & Pizzaro, 2006). New middle-class politics becomes less and less about “class” and more about civil society, both in organizational and discursive terms (pp. 24–25, 29–30). With political discourse shifting away from national politics per se toward local, more NIMBYist proclivities (p. 18), activism becomes more intense though dispersed, focusing on “issues of urban sustainability and livability” and through distinct modes of political engagement (p. 30). What Davis concludes therefore is that “middle class heterogeneity, as reinforced by the unequal distribution of new and old middle classes in urban built environmental, politico-institutional, and consumption spaces, manifests itself in new forms of inequality, democratic politics, and the decline of class activism” (p. 33). Future research would certainly benefit from a close inspection of urban issues as the crux of middle-class politics in the contemporary developing world.

Questions about the role and composition of the middle class have been examined and debated in the academy and in the political sphere for more than 100 years. In analyses of the Indian middle class specifically, two questions, both addressed by Diane Davis, seem to excite the most attention. The first has to do with the definition of a middle class, a term that has its origins in a very different social formation as well as its potentially mediating function in democracy. The second and more recent question has to do with what is variously called the “new” or “emerging” middle classes – in short, the middle classes of a liberalizing India.