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The second chapter in Part II (‘Performances of Power’) turns to a performative arena that is both fundamental to pre-modern societies and yet often forgotten – and that is particularly instructive for cross-cultural comparison. Darian Marie Totten discusses the organization of agricultural labour, not from an economic standpoint but with regards to its innate capacity to govern quotidian experience, endorse ideas of equality and inequality, and structure society. A similar avenue of inquiry is prevalent in Ryan R. Abrecht’s contribution on neighborhood encounters and the rhythm of social life (Chapter 7). In Totten’s take, labour, performed on elite estates and overseen by a court that claims ultimate superiority in knowledge and organizational skill, lies at the heart of social hierarchy and imperial statecraft. Building off theories of performance, the chapter first unravels the basic nexus of social reproduction and discrete agricultural activities – the communication of knowledge, its cyclical application and transmission into a structured workflow, among others. Resonance with real life, inevitably so, shapes and defines different social strata that are discussed in the chapter’s main section: the imperial court and elite landowners, estate managers, free and unfree tenants, and/or slaves. For each of these, Totten displays an ingenious investigative sense that makes voices heard and explores agencies, privileged and underprivileged alike. The bulk of evidence for the comparative study of context in Han China and the Roman Empire is of a literary nature, the Book of Han the Book of Later Han, Monthly Ordinances of the Four Seasons and the agricultural writings of Cato, Columella, and Varro, which figure prominently throughout. At the same time, Totten draws on the visual language of coinage, mosaics, and murals that signalled a forceful message to their ancient audiences: that agricultural performance was critical to the creation of the social cohesion around them. In conclusion, the chapter places its findings into communications between imperial ideology and its translation into the local horizon. Han Chinese and Roman culture relied heavily on agrarian activity, both economically and performatively. While both established similar practices in the amassing of resources, the performance of agricultural labour, argues Totten, followed rather divergent trajectories, with profound ramifications for the experience of empire.
Smiths analysis of the relationship between division of labour and the wealth of nations interpreted as per capita income is illustrated, through their connection with productivity. The division of labour also explains the existence and characteristics of social stratification and alienation. The classical tripartition in social classes – capitalists, landlords and workers – is discussed, considering both its explanatory value and its limits. Division of labour evolves through time: Babbages laws, Taylorism, the production chain, mechanization. The international division of labour and international value chains are considered. Marxs communist utopia with the disappearance of compulsory labour is recalled and confronted with less unrealistic utopias concerning the command structure within the firm or Ernesto Rossis labour army.
Power is a broad and complex concept that cuts across all fields in humanities and social sciences. Written by a leading historian of economic thought, Power and Inequality presents a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary analysis of power as an economic and social issue. Its aim is not to formulate a new abstract theory of power but rather to illustrate the different ways in which power is used to exacerbate social and economic inequality. Issues such as division of labour and its evolution, different forms of capitalism up to the money-manager economy, the role of networks (from the family to mason lodges and the mafia), the state and the international arena, culture and the role of the masses are considered. The analysis of these elements, causing inequalities of various kinds, is a prerequisite for devising progressive policy strategies aiming at a reduction of inequalities through a strategy of reforms.
The sustainable funding of tertiary education is a subject of significant policy debate worldwide. In South Africa, the need to balance equitable access within a constrained fiscal environment has been a complex challenge. A legacy of racially segregated educational opportunities, together with student activism and protests, has shaped the political economy surrounding tertiary education funding. Policymakers continue to be faced with the challenge of funding students whose household income is too high to meet state financial aid eligibility, yet who struggle to afford tuition and accommodation expenses. In this context, exploring a policy instrument that differentiates students based on multidimensional socioeconomic need is critical. We motivate for a differentiated policy instrument that considers economic uncertainty of households as a dimension of socioeconomic need. A purpose of our paper is therefore to illustrate that income mobility can contribute to household vulnerability, and therefore to funding need. Household income mobility is estimated using a multivariate probit model that explicitly accounts for endogeneity of initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity, and non-random panel attrition. We operationalise this model as a relevant empirical tool for analysing and understanding the implementation, expansion, and targeting of social policy more generally.
To find answers for the worldwide proliferation of constitutions we need to look at root causes: the sources of constitutions. These are found and human nature. Men are social animals. During human evolution our brains have been wired to work together in communities up to a maximum of 150 members (the Dunbar number). Beyond that number it is difficult to cooperate: we can only do that if there are form of artificial trust and recognition available: and that is what constitutions do and provide. Abstract - imagined - concepts that help us jump the Dunbar threshold and cooperate in large scale groups, and overcome our brain limitations for large scale cooperation
Chapter 10 examines the public health literature and research on well-being that suggests that being Black and middle class in America does not equate to overall positive health outcomes, due largely to prolonged exposure to racism. Chapter 10 investigates how being Black, middle class, and SALA impacts the health and well-being of the Love Jones Cohort and what coping mechanisms they employ to deal with the challenges they face. Chapter 10 reports that some Cohort members experience situational depression, situational anxiety, or situational loneliness usually stemming from feelings of stress, overwork, and frustration at their financial situations and/or jobs. Moreover, a good number of Cohort members report that their families – despite occasional negative feelings of obligation and responsibility toward them – serve as sources of support, guidance, and love. Many also emphasize the importance of close friendships and augmented families in maintaining well-being and providing a coping mechanism during times of high stress and anxiety.
In this chapter, Kearns traces the novel politics and communities developing in the neighboring Vasilikos and Maroni river valleys, to the east of the town of Amathus. Their commonly described position as a marginal hinterland provides an opportunity to explore rural dynamics at multiple registers. Survey data and rescue excavations form an evidentiary dataset with which to interrogate the generative ties between clusters of settlements and Amathus that produced unruliness across variable and interconnected scales. One critical theme is continuity and impermanence, and the differentiated patterns of access, appropriation, and management taken up by groups returning to sites of prehistoric and protohistoric occupation. Another is social stratification, which entails the development of local autonomous figures, potential community leaders, or members with elevated status. These actors advanced special relationships with Amathusian authorities and local groups through the construction of gathering places such as cemeteries and shrines. The chapter situates these dynamics in habitation, non-quotidian activity, and land use within a framework of a small near-shore world entangling rural sites with maritime economies.
Over two thousand years ago, Oaxaca, Mexico, was the site of one of the New World's earliest episodes of primary state formation and urbanism, and today it is one of the world's archaeologically best-studied regions. This volume, which thoroughly revises and updates the first edition, provides a highly readable yet comprehensive path to acquaint readers with one of the earliest and best-known examples of Native American state formation and its consequences as seen from the perspectives of urbanism, technology, demography, commerce, households, and religion and ritual. Written by prominent archaeological researchers who have devoted decades to Oaxacan research and to the development of suitable social theory, the book places ancient Oaxaca within the context of the history of ideas that have addressed the causes and consequences of social evolutionary change. It also critically evaluates the potential applicability of more recent thinking about state building grounded in collective action and related theories.
This chapter is an enquiry into whether we can predict whether a particular instance of variation at the syntactic level may reflect social stratification or not (Labov 1966, 1972, 1994). Therefore, a range of syntactic variables in Dutch has been examined that may reveal social correlations in the spontaneous speech of 67 speakers who were born, grew up, and still live in one particular locality. Most of the syntactic variables consist of variants associated with the local dialect and (codified) standard Dutch. The syntactic variables examined differ in frequency of occurrence, synonymy/functional equivalence, abstract properties, and presumably noticeability. The fact that the social stratification of various syntactic variables can be investigated by following the same speakers within one speech style, i.e. the sociolinguistic interview,L12 offers a unique opportunity to carefully discriminate the effects of similar socio-demographic factors on different types of syntactic variables. The overall result is that social stratification of syntactic variation can be predicted where syntax maps onto discourse. The outcome is dependent on the extent of duration of language contact situations, and interactions in which particular linguistic variables have become socially meaningful depending on the individual and the wider societal, political and ideological context.
Family systems shape social institutions, yet they are rarely considered in histories of economic development. In this article, we show that a suite of social conventions—such as age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence against women—are overrepresented in polygamous societies as compared to monogamous societies. This dichotomy can be explained on the grounds that polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females. We argue that this suite, which we call gamos and which we quantify by two different methods, has demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development.
Friendships between members of different ethnoracial groups can help to reduce prejudice and ease tensions across ethnoracial groups. A large body of literature has explored possible determinants for the formation of these friendships. One unexplored factor is the role of an individual’s skin color in influencing their opportunities to befriend members of other ethnoracial groups. This study seeks to answer two questions: For ethnoracial minorities, how is an individual’s skin color associated with the likelihood that they will engage in a cross-ethnoracial friendship? Does the role of skin color depend on the ethnoracial combination of the two groups that befriend one another? Using waves 1, 2, and 3 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and a series of multinomial logit models, the results suggest that the role of skin color is a function of the relative levels of social status of the two ethnoracial groups that befriend one another. I argue that lighter-skinned members of lower status ethnoracial groups have a greater likelihood of having close friendships with members of higher status ethnoracial groups. There is also limited evidence that darker-skinned members of a higher status group, specifically Asians, have a greater likelihood of having close friends from a lower status group.
Chapter 5 moves beyond regional accents to the importance of speech sound patterns for speakers’ presentations of their affiliations and for listeners’ interpretations of others.The chapter considers what sociophonetics offers the understanding of language and the social world and outlines some of the fundamental ways that the major social categories of social class, gender, ethnicity and age impact phonetic variation and change.Taking each of these topics in turn, the chapter unpacks how sociolinguistic studies of socially driven variation have established a foundation that underpins contemporary sociophonetic research and then transitions to survey sociophonetic research that investigates the influence of these four social factors on speech production.The chapter then turns to the role of these factors in speech processing, providing an overview of how factors such as class, gender and ethnicity have been shown to affect how listeners process variation in speech.The chapter closes with a discussion of how such research has contributed greatly to our understanding of how social factors correlate with linguistic factors.
Various factors determine the use of media in later life. Nevertheless, spatial inequalities among older media users have been accorded little attention in academic research. This study aimed to explore differences in variety (number) and intensity (duration) of both traditional and new media use among older adults residing in various types of localities. Data were obtained from the second wave of the ACT (Ageing + Communication + Technology) cross-national survey, comprising 7,927 internet users aged 60 and over from seven countries. The statistical analyses used in the study were chi-square and analysis of variance tests, and linear regression as a multivariate technique. The results indicated that spatial differences concern variety of media use to a greater extent than its intensity, especially with regard to use of traditional media via new devices. Overall, residents of large cities exhibited greater variety and intensity of media use than did their counterparts from smaller localities, especially rural ones. These findings supported the social stratification hypothesis – according to which individuals from more-privileged social backgrounds have better media literacy, use media to a greater extent and benefit from its use more than people from disadvantaged groups. The findings should be considered by practitioners and policy makers.
This chapter begins with a review of the early literature on William Labov’s 1972 concept of the linguistic lame, its influence on the study of African American English, and its role in shaping linguistic perceptions of middle-class speakers. The chapter then proceeds with a summary of the small, but growing, body of research on the use of AAE by middle-class speakers, including studies of social stratification, intraspeaker variation, performative language practices, and attitudes and perceptions. The chapter ends with an overview of the topics covered in subsequent chapters of the book.
Paul’s letters were written to communities of Christ-followers of the first century. This essay outlines some of the overarching features that shaped the Roman world in which Paul’s communities lived.
Rapid industrialization and urbanization leads at first to secular rates of social mobility. Who benefits and how this occurs. The slow change to circular mobility and the blockages to social ascent are examined.
Social stratification is an important mechanism of human organization that helps to explain health differences between demographic groups commonly associated with socioeconomic gradients. Individuals, or group of individuals, with similar health profiles may have had different stratification experiences. This is particularly true as social stratification is a significant non-measurable source of systematic unobservable differences in both SES indicators and health statuses of disadvantage. The goal of the present study was to expand the bulk of research that has traditionally treated socioeconomic and demographic characteristics as independent, additive influences on health by examining data from the United States. It is hypothesized that variation in an index of multi-system physiological dysregulation – allostatic load – is associated with social differentiation factors, sorting individuals with similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics into mutually exclusive econo-demographic classes. The data were from the Longitudinal and Biomarker samples of the national Study of Midlife Development in the US (MIDUS) conducted in 1995 and 2004/2006. Latent class analyses and regression analyses revealed that physiological dysregulation linked to socioeconomic variation among black people, females and older adults are associated with forces of stratification that confound socioeconomic and demographic indicators. In the United States, racial stratification of health is intrinsically related to the degree to which black people in general, and black females in particular, as a group, share an isolated status in society. Findings present evidence that disparities in health emerge from group-differentiation processes to the degree that individuals are distinctly exposed to the ecological, political, social, economic and historical contexts in which social stratification is ingrained. Given that health policies and programmes emanate from said legal and political environments, interventions should target the structural conditions that expose different subgroups to different stress risks in the first place.
This article examines the transformations to urban social stratification in Angola during the last decades. The analysis is centered on the indicators of social difference throughout these years: the racial criteria of the colonial times; the political precedence in the first years after independence; and the multi-criteria of the postwar period. Based on research conducted before and after the end of the civil war in 2002, the article explores the construction and reconfiguration of urban society today, providing evidence of increased social mobility—despite the poverty and deeper inequalities—and of the importance of economic and residential criteria.
The German twin family study ‘TwinLife’ was designed to enhance our understanding of the development of social inequalities over the life course. The interdisciplinary project investigates mechanisms of social inequalities across the lifespan by taking into account psychological as well as social mechanisms, and their genetic origin as well as the interaction and covariation between these factors. Main characteristics of the study are: (1) a multidimensional perspective on social inequalities, (2) the assessment of developmental trajectories in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in a longitudinal design by using (3) a combination of a multi-cohort cross-sequential and an extended twin family design, while (4) capturing a large variation of behavioral and environmental factors in a representative sample of about 4,000 German twin families. In the present article, we first introduce the theoretical and empirical background of the TwinLife study, and second, describe the design, content, and implementation of TwinLife. Since the data will be made available as scientific use file, we also illustrate research possibilities provided by this project to the scientific community.