The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of naturalistic portraits, genre scenes and landscapes that circulated through a newly open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. Their closely observed details of everyday life offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances that distinguished members of social classes, from the nobility to the urban poor. The dazzling array of paintings gathered here - from artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Gerrit Dou, as well as Rembrandt and Vermeer - illuminated by essays by leading specialists, invite us to explore a vibrant early modern society and its reflection in a golden age of brilliant painting.

Drawing on the first systematic study of cultural capital in contemporary Britain, Culture, Class, Distinction examines the role played by culture in the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity. Its findings promise a major revaluation of the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the relationships between class and culture.

The past decades have witnessed a surge of sociological interest in the body. From the focal point of aesthetic investment, political regulation and moral anxiety, to a means of redefining traditional conceptions of agency and identity, the body has been cast in a wide variety of sociological roles. However, there is one topic that proves conspicuously absent from this burgeoning literature on the body, namely its role in the everyday (re)production of class-boundaries. Distinctions in the Flesh aims to fill that void by showing that the way individuals perceive, use and manage their bodies is fundamentally intertwined with their social position and trajectory. Drawing on a wide array of survey-data – from food-preferences to sporting-practices and from weight-concern to tastes in clothing – this book shows how bodies not only function as key markers of class-differences, but also help to naturalize and legitimize such differences. Along the way, it scrutinizes popular notions like the ‘obesity epidemic’, questions the role of ‘the media’ in shaping the way people judge their bodies and sheds doubt on sociological narratives that cast the body as a malleable object that is increasingly open to individual control and reflexive management. This book will be of interest to scholars of class, lifestyle and identity, but also to social epidemiologists, health professionals and anyone interested in the way that social inequalities become, quite literally, inscribed in the body.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

This book offers both a philosophical and sociological model for understanding the constitution of identity in general, and black social identity in particular, without reverting to either a social or racial deterministic view of identity construction. Using a variant of structuration theory (phenomenological structuralism) this work, against contemporary postmodern and post-structural theories, seeks to offer a dialectical understanding of the constitution of black American and British life within the class division and social relations of production of the global capitalist world-system, while accounting for black social agency.

In The Theory Of The Leisure Class, His First And Best-Known Work, Thorstein Veblen Challenges Some Of Man S Most Cherished Standards Of Behavior And With Devastating Wit And Satire Exposes The Hollowness Of Many Of Our Canons Of Taste, Education, Dress And Culture. Veblen Uses The Leisure Class As His Example Because It Is This Class That Sets The Standards Followed By Every Level Of Society.The Sign Of Membership In The Leisure Class Is Exemption From Industrial Toil And The Mark Of Success Is Lavish Expenditure Conspicuous Consumption Is The Famous Term He Invented To Describe Spending Which Satisfies No Real Need But Is A Mark Of Prestige.The Process Veblen Criticized Continues Today The Same Worship Of An Empty Scale Of Values, The Same Urge To Prove Oneself Better Than One S Neighbor By The Conspicuous Accumulation Of Useless Objects And By Time And Money-Wasting Activities.

Drawing together theoretical ideas from across the social sciences, Classifying Fashion, Fashioning Class examines how the fashion-class association has developed and, using the experiences of middle-and-working class British women, demonstrates how this relationship operates today. Though increasingly academics argue that contemporary class distinctions are made through cultural practices and tastes, few have fully explored just how individual’s fashion choices mobilise class and are used in class evaluations. Yet, an individual’s everyday dress is perhaps the most immediate marker of taste, and thus an important means of class distinction. This is particularly true for women, as their performances of respectability, femininity and motherhood are embodied by fashion and shaped by class. In unpacking this fashion-class relationship, the book explores how fashion is used by British women to talk about class. It offers important insights into the ways fashion mobilises class differences in understandings of dressing up, performance and public space. It considers how class identity shapes women’s attitudes concerning fashion trends and classic styles, and it draws attention to the pivotal role mothers play in cultivating these class distinctions. The book will be of interest to students in sociology, fashion studies, cultural studies, human geography and consumer behaviour.