Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today's soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

This volume focuses on developing a theory of culture that reveals how ideas create and legitimize social inequality, using empirical case studies ranging from automobile design to architecture to compare and critique two of the most influential theories of culture in contemporary sociology. It questions to what extent our culture reflects class inequality, and to what extent our culture masks those inequalities through the sameness of unified mass culture.

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.

This book examines class and its representation in Victorian literature, focusing on the emergence of the lower middle class and middle-class responses to it. Arlene Young analyses portraits of white-collar workers, both men and women, who laboured under disparaging misperceptions of their values, abilities, and cultural significance, and shows how these misperceptions were both formulated and resisted. The analysis includes canonical texts like Dickens's Little Dorrit and Gissing's The Odd Women as well as less well-known works by Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Amy Levy, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and May Sinclair.

First published in 1980, this book argues that subcultures are formed in defence of collectively experienced problems that arise from defects and contradictions in social structures. Mike Brake looks at the development of post-war youth culture in a sociological context and considers the class base of youth subcultures, showing that they generate a form of collective identity from which an individual identity can be achieved, outside that ascribed by class, education or occupation. Black youth and young females are two groups given special attention here since Brake notes they are prone to particular problems resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in much youth culture.

A fresh take on social class from the experts behind the BBC's 'Great British Class Survey'. Why does social class matter more than ever in Britain today? How has the meaning of class changed? What does this mean for social mobility and inequality? In this book Mike Savage and the team of sociologists responsible for the Great British Class Survey look beyond the labels to explore how and why our society is changing and what this means for the people who find themselves in the margins as well as in the centre. Their new conceptualization of class is based on the distribution of three kinds of capital - economic (inequalities in income and wealth), social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive) - and provides incontrovertible evidence that class is as powerful and relevant today as it's ever been.