Search results

This chapter offers a few stylized observations about the middle class and its role in the fall of communist regimes in East Central Europe. I claim that successive East European modernization projects during the 20th century (intrawar, communist, and postcommunist) were essentially middle-class “revolutions from above.” They occurred in a backward region among late modernizers keenly aware of their peripheral position and were based on and carried out by the state. Both a product of the state and dependent on it, the middle class was the main actor and supporter of these modernization efforts. I also argue that the Solidarity movement in 1980/81 and the 1989 collapse of communism were the last successful middle-class revolutions. Hopes for another political rebellion against postcommunist authoritarianism may be misplaced, since the transformational potential of the East European middle class, produced by the peculiarities of communist rule, has been exhausted. Fast progressing modernization, segmentation, and fragmentation of identity of the postcommunist middle class brought about by the economic, cultural, and political integration with the West undercut its mobilizational potential and its role as an agent of political transformations. The East European middle-class revolution against communist rule can offer four basic lessons. First, the middle class is a cultural and historical not economic phenomenon. Second, it is extremely rare for the middle class to become a collective actor, the class for itself. Third, the main competitors of middle-class identity are nationalism, ethnicity and religion. Finally, postmodernity with its fluidity, uncertainty, fractured identities, fragmented lifestyles, consumption patterns, and status configuration does not provide facilitating conditions for middle-class solidarity and mobilization, making it politically feeble.

The recent increase in economic inequalities in many countries heightened the debates about policy preferences on income distribution. Attitudes toward inequality vary greatly across countries and numerous explanations are offered to clarify the factors leading to support for redistribution. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between subjective social class and redistributive demands by jointly considering the individual and national factors. The author argues that subjective measures of social positions can be highly explanatory for preferences about redistribution policies.

The author uses data from 48 countries gathered by World Values Survey and empirically tests the impact of self-positioning into classes by multilevel ordered logit model. Several model specifications and estimation strategies have been employed to obtain consistent estimates and to check for the robustness of the results.

The findings show that, in addition to objective factors, subjective class status is highly explanatory for redistributive preferences across countries. The author also exhibits that there is interaction between self-ranking of social status and national context. The author’s estimations from the multilevel models verify that subjective social class has greater explanatory power in more equal societies. This is in contrast to the previous studies that establish a positive link between inequality and redistribution.

The paper contributes to the literature by introducing subjective social class as a determinant. Self-ranked positions can be very relieving about policy preferences given the information these categorizations encompass about individuals’ perceptions about their and others’ place in the society.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study, conducted in Thailand, which examined the working class and middle class consumers’ evaluation and purchase intentions of high equity versus low equity Thai fashion labels of sophisticated and standard apparel, outsourced for production to three Asian countries of varying manufacturing competence. Design/methodology/approach – Data from a field survey was analysed through a 2×2×3 factorial design and the influence of a particular factor over the others in specific scenarios was observed. Findings – Consumers from both social classes are inclined to be partial to a specific quality dimension of their national brands made abroad. When considering purchase of reputed brands of standard products, working class consumers are particularly concerned about the item's country‐of‐origin (COO). On the other hand, middle class consumers’ apprehensions of multi‐featured products’ COO run across both high and low equity brands. Research limitations/implications – Common methods bias may have occurred in this study as a result of respondents in the self‐report survey wanting to avoid cognitive dissonance, trying to correlate their responses with their answers to previous questions. Practical implications – Consumers belonging to a particular social segment in the brands’ home country can be encouraged to buy their national brands produced abroad on the promise that these products will deliver their favoured quality features. Originality/value – The research results are presented in the form of a consumer typology based on the dimensions of perceived quality, and explain the effect of the interaction of country's competence, brand equity and product purchase involvement on middle class and working class consumers’ evaluation and purchase intention of brands outsourced for production abroad.

This paper focusses on how the educated and less-educated middle class react differently to income increases, against an intertwined literature backdrop of Engel's law, quality of life, aspirational and conspicuous consumption. The paper seeks to answer two main questions: Is there evidence of the middle class, particularly the educated, trying to emulate the upper class by shifting towards aspirational consumption? Is there any distinct expenditure behaviour amongst the middle class?

Combining the Malaysian 2016 Household Expenditure Survey (HES) and the 2016 Consumer Price Indices datasets, quantile estimations are applied on the merged dataset of 14,326 households.

There is evidence of the educated middle class emulating the upper class in terms of food share, home furnishing and starchy produce expenditure behaviour. The less-educated middle class exhibits a predilection for home furnishing expenditures when income increases, whilst the educated shows signs of dissociating themselves from such material acquisitions. The paper concludes that the middle class is collectively an aspirational class, but with diverging paths towards upward social mobility between the educated and less-educated households.

Aspirational consumption of the middle class has not been given detailed empirical treatment at the household micro-level in the literature, especially for upper-middle income countries like Malaysia. The paper starts off by detecting an anomaly in the Engel's food share coefficients, where the middle class sees unexpected larger declines in food share than those of the upper class. This is the paper's departure point from the literature.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

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.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

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.