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Social Distinctions (social + distinction)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences83%

Selected Abstracts

THE LOCAL EYE: FORMAL AND SOCIAL DISTINCTIONS IN LATE QUATTROCENTO NEAPOLITAN TOMBS

ART HISTORY, Issue 4 2008
TANJA MICHALSKY
The importation of foreign sculptors to Naples was a common phenomenon which both led to the amalgamation of divergent artistic forms of expression and also paved the way for innovative combinations which fulfilled the desire of the local nobility for hybrid, palimpsest-like tombs. This article examines the broader historical sensorium through which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Neapolitans drew distinctions between local traditions and imported innovations when choosing artists, types and decorative styles for their funerary monuments. It demonstrates that the Neapolitan nobility was able to assimilate new and imported representational styles because it was accustomed to distinguishing between different styles and forms. A network of visually related monuments and surviving contracts testify to the typological rigour of the visual frameworks and to the recognized potentiality inherent in reinterpretations of earlier formulae. [source]

Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
SRIRUPA PRASAD
It analyzes how the Bengali middle class, the bhadralok, attempted to construct a "doxa" of gastronomy in order to subsume a dominant position for itself and to classify hierarchically other classes and social groups. The aspirations of this class as the future guardians of an incipient nation were in reality a politics of self-identity, which was based on ideas of a cultural exclusivity. This politics of self-identity for the Bengali middle class were inextricably inter-woven with issues of modernity, nationalism, and colonialism. Through my analysis, I stress the importance of the "historical" or the "collective", particularly in the context of formation of the bhadralok, as a dominant class. [source]

WHAT ARE ,NATURAL INEQUALITIES'?

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 239 2010
Tim Lewens
The varying demands of justice are often thought to depend on a distinction between natural and social inequalities, but making this distinction has been little discussed, and it has been dismissed by philosophers of biology. It cannot be established by a simple causal criterion, nor by use of the analysis of variance, nor by distinguishing the innate from the acquired. Whether an inequality can be socially controlled provides the most plausible criterion, so ,natural' and ,social' are misleading labels for types of inequality. The analysis of these depends, besides, on how fine-grained the descriptions are; so it is implausible to think that the natural/social distinction, when drawn in terms of social control, is relevant to theories of justice. [source]

The Quest for Distinction: A Reappraisal of the Rural Labor Process in Kheda District (Gujarat), India,

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2000
Vinay Gidwani
Abstract: In this article I examine how the rural labor process is constitutive of social identity, particularly status, by harnessing empirical evidence from Kheda District, Gujarat, and other parts of India. Emphasis is on the labor practices of the dominant Lewa Patel caste, and only secondarily on the practices of other caste groups. My central claim is that the labor process is a primary arena in which the quest for social distinction occurs and that the primary source of distinction is the ability to withdraw family labor power from the commoditized labor circuit. In this paper I seek to deepen conventional understandings of the labor process within economic geography, agrarian studies, and mainstream economics. [source]

Motherhood as a Status Characteristic

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 4 2004
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
We present evidence that many of the disadvantaging effects that motherhood has on women's workplace outcomes derive from the devalued social status attached to the task of being a primary caregiver. Using expectation states theory, we argue that when motherhood becomes a salient descriptor of a worker it, like other devalued social distinctions including gender, downwardly biases the evaluations of the worker's job competence and suitability for positions of authority. We predict that the biases evoked by the motherhood role will be more strongly discriminatory than those produced by gender alone because the perceived conflicts between the cultural definitions of the good mother and the ideal worker make motherhood seem more directly relevant to workplace performance. [source]

Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics

LINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2009
Robin Dodsworth
Modeling socioeconomic class has been a persistent challenge in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. While early stratificational models formulated on the basis of socioeconomic indicators such as income, occupation, and area of residence revealed compelling patterns of linguistic variation, they were critiqued for their lack of explanatory power at the interactional level and for their marginalization of those without paid employment. Subsequent models have employed cross-disciplinary concepts such as the linguistic market, social networks, and communities of practice, prioritizing local social distinctions that are understood to reflect or even constitute abstract structural categories such as ,working class' or ,middle class'. It is argued that a full socioeconomic class paradigm for sociolinguistics would also theorize class at the aggregate level, and to this end, sociological class models may prove useful. Contemporary sociological class analysis at the level of social practice offers additional avenues for interfacing with sociology. [source]