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Social class is assumed to be a crucial determinant in consumer behavior. Most previous research has focused on purchase and consumption behavior across social class segments at the generic product class level. In contrast, this article reports an exploratory study on how brands from narrowly defined groups of products and services are perceived to appeal to different social classes.

Social class is assumed to be a crucial determinant in consumer behavior. Most previous research has focused on purchase and consumption behavior across social class segments at the generic product class level. In contrast, this article reports an exploratory study on how brands from narrowly defined groups of products and services are perceived to appeal to different social classes.

Explore how the degree of humanization affects user misconduct, and provide effective misconduct prevention measures for the wide application of artificial intelligence in the future.

Based on the “Uncanny Valley theory”, three experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between the degree of humanization of service machines and user misbehavior, and to analyze the mediating role of cognitive resistance and the moderating role of social class.

There is a U-shaped relationship between the degree of humanization of service machines and user misbehavior; Social class not only regulates the main effect of anthropomorphism on misbehavior, but also regulates the intermediary effect of anthropomorphism on cognitive resistance, thus affecting misbehavior.

The design of the service robot can be from the user’s point of view, combined with the user’s social class, match different user types, and provide the same preferences as the user’s humanoid service robot.

This study is an important reference value for enterprises and governments to provide intelligent services in public places. It can prevent the robot from being vandalized and also provide users with a comfortable human-computer interaction experience, expanding the positive effects of providing smart services by government and enterprises.

This study avoids and reduces users' misbehavior towards intelligent service robots, improves users' satisfaction in using service robots, and avoids service robots being damaged, resulting in waste of government, enterprise and social resources.

From the perspective of product factors to identify the inducing factors of improper behavior, from the perspective of social class of users to analyze the moderating effect of humanization degree and user improper behavior.

This chapter offers a broad view of ways organizations create and sustain social class distinction in the workplace and how these outcomes bolster broader perspectives about socioeconomic status and social class. One’s social class generally refers to earnings, education, or occupational status. In more complex terms, power dynamics create a dichotomy between owners of production forces and workers they employ; a social class structure of haves versus have-nots which organizes human relations. Chapter 9 draws from multiple research traditions to examine the wage labor system, combined with trends, myths and fallacies about social class, social identity intersectionalities, and specifically how social class is performed in organizations.

No matter how much people and their societies prefer to think of themselves as unrestricted and egalitarian, it seems that social class – perhaps more rigidly than any other social identity dimension – offers a ready reminder that social spaces and experiences at work, home, and elsewhere are clearly marked by social class. Key concepts explored include classism, class-free society illusions, and blue- and other color collar metaphors which connote power and privilege. To interrogate social identity research on social class in organizations, explored are subthemes of: socioeconomic status (SES) and the wage labor system in organizations; trends, myths, and fallacies about social class in the United States; intersectionalities of social class identity with age, ethnicity, gender, and physical/psychological ability; and “doing social class” at work.

Purpose: We review theory and research to suggest how research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) population health could more completely account for social class.

Approach: First, we review theory on social class, gender, and sexuality, especially pertaining to health. Next, we review research on social class among SGM populations. Then, we review 42 studies of SGM population health that accounted for one or more components of social class. Finally, we suggest future directions for investigating social class as a fundamental driver of SGM health.

Findings: Social class and SGM stigma are both theorized as “fundamental causes” of health, yet most studies of SGM health do not rigorously theorize social class. A few studies control socioeconomic characteristics as mediators of SGM health disparities, but that approach obscures class disparities within SGM populations. Only two of 42 studies we reviewed examined SGM population health at the intersections of social class, gender, and sexuality.

Research implications: Researchers interested in SGM population health would benefit from explicitly stating their chosen theory and operationalization of social class. Techniques such as splitting samples by social class and statistical interactions can help illuminate how social class and SGM status intertwine to influence health.

Originality: We synthesize theory and research on social class, sexuality, and gender pertaining to health. In doing so, we hope to help future research more thoroughly account for social class as a factor shaping the lives and health of SGM people.

This chapter is a Marxist Critical Realist inspired discussion of my interest in, and experiences of, being a working-class academic from Indian/African heritage. I begin my autoethnography by problematising the limits of defining social class from a gradational approach, which is the most common way to make sense of social class in academia and beyond. I argue that neoliberal capitalism organises people into workers and owners of production and without this acknowledgement, discussion of social class in the gradational approach is limited. I then go on to critique the de-centering of social class, for which I used Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a case study. My intention is to promote the explanatory power of approaching social class as as an organisational relationship, which assimilates racism, in the service of capitalism. Throughout the chapter, I provide examples of the way that I navigate this intellectual standpoint in the classroom, specifically through utilising the concepts of mystification and feasibility that I developed through my PhD that focussed on social class in Sweden. Without dismissing the value of the gradational approach of understanding social class in toto, and also the importance of personal identities (indeed I have focussed on my ethno-racial identity), my basic argument is that without the centralisation of social class, and crucially its articulation with neoliberal capitalism, social class becomes a descriptive category rather than explanatory, rendering the possibility of radical social change as severely diminished.

This chapter draws from a three-year ethnographic study focused on the educational and community interactions among working- and middle-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in a mid-western town in the United States. Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that “Chineseness” is a fluid, cultural practice manifested within the Chinese diaspora in particular ways that relate to globalization in late modernity, immigrants’ cultural background, their place in the social structure in their home society, and their new social class status in the context they enter. The study extends research focused on the complexities of social reproduction within larger global flows of Chinese immigrants. First, we describe how Chinese immigrants’ social status in their countries of origin in part shapes middle and working-class group’s access to cultural capital and positions in the social structure of their post-migration context. Second, we trace groups’ negotiation of their relational race and class positioning in the new context (Ong, 1999) that is often invisible in the processes of social reproduction. Third, we describe how both groups must negotiate national, community, and schooling conceptions of the model minority concept (Lee, 1996) that shapes Asian-American’s lived realities in the United States; yet the continuing salience of their immigrant experience, home culture, and access to cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2007) means that they enact the “model minority” concept differently. The findings suggest the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ accommodation of and resistance to normative ideologies and local structures that cumulatively contribute to social reproduction on the basis of class.

This chapter uses the pandemic crisis to explore the social processes that structure happiness and shape fantasies of living a happy life. Considered herein are issues of human potential, gendered and classed possibility and people's differing chances in cultivating a sense of satisfaction in ‘being happy’, despite living through COVID-19. Interviews with 40 Australian women living during lockdown restrictions with varying levels of social, cultural and economic capital are utilised to make sense of women's happiness. Vastly different avenues for achieving a happiness fantasy outside of drinking alcohol were possible for more privileged women than for those in middle and working classes. The classed differences in women's gendered roles in managing emotions (their own and other people's) and their chances to be happy are exemplified in how the changes to the structure of the day that resulted from COVID-19 restrictions did not devastate or cause stress (as we heard from working-class women) or need to be filtered or blocked out using alcohol in order to retain balanced emotions (as we heard from middle-class women) but rather provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of their happiness fantasy. We deduce that for those with less agency available to control their chances of living a happy life, prevailing COVID-19 discourse that places happiness within individual responsibility and focuses on personal resilience rather than tending to the conditions for flourishing, is problematic.

This chapter makes the assertion that social class is a verb, which is to say, an individual's class identifications are not fixed and ascribed at birth but must be understood as something that is practised and lived. In an era in which hyper mobility is the norm among a growing segment of the global population, social class identifications are increasingly fluid, context-dependent and could only be understood in relation to ‘other’ social class categories. By taking a discourse analytic approach to closely look at the episodes of my interactions with a range of interlocutors in my biographical trajectory across multiple contexts, this chapter provides accounts of the complexities of my class identifications as an academic in the UK higher education (HE) sector. Following Marxist scholarship in general, this linguistic autoethnography shows how class is not depicted as an attribute of people that is stationary in contemporary stratified societies. It argues that class must be understood as a social relation, as evolving in the social interactions with human subjects and the cumulative relationships that people engaged with, all arising out of the economic order in societies. Second, the interactional episodes highlighted in this chapter also shows how social class is interconnected with other identity inscriptions, such as gender, ethnicity, race and nationality. As such, this chapter shows how the nature of social class identifications in contemporary times are impacted by an individual's alignments with a range of social categories.

Corporate crime is prevalent and imposes enormous costs on society, yet our understanding of its antecedents remains poor, especially in relation to executive characteristics. In this study, we examine the influence of CEO childhood social class on corporate crime. Using a unique data set of CEOs at the largest US corporations, we consider CEO childhood background and develop the argument individuals raised in middle-class families have a greater disposition to commit wrongdoing within the corporations they lead. Specifically, growing up middle-class leaves a lasting status-anxiety imprint, which increases the tendency to engage in corporate crime to preserve or enhance social status. Furthermore, we show two status-anxiety-minimizing factors – Ivy League education and membership in a prominent golf club – weaken the effect of middle-class upbringing on corporate crime. Our findings suggest childhood social class has significant explanatory power for executive behavior and corporate outcomes.