Please answer ONE of the following essay questions. The essay should be 5 pages double-spaced.
- Within debates over capitalism, one longstanding argument concerns the nature of social class. While in classic Marxist conceptualizations, class is defined by a person’s position within the economic relations of production (i.e. as capitalists who own the means of production or the proletariat who works for them), other scholars have broadened this focus. How do Sherry Ortner and Julie Bettie understand social class in ways that differ from this classic formulation? In their view, how do class differences relate to other kinds of differences such as race/ethnicity and gender? Why might it be important to explore class formation in places like schools that are outside of people’s work experiences? Explore these questions through a discussion of the different class experiences of working class and middle class white and Mexican-American girls that Julie Bettie worked with at a high school in Central California. What do you find useful - or potentially less useful—in this kind of social scientific research on social class? (Please offer close readings of the material by Ortner and Bettie. Please read the additional chapters by Bettie listed in the Readings section. You may also cite the movie “People Like Us” or other class readings if you find it helpful.)
- Sherry Ortner has argued that Americans tend to see in other classes those they aspire to become and those they wish to differentiate themselves from. In other words, class is always relational—we define ourselves through our relations with others. Karyn Lacy in her book on middle-and upper-middle-class African-Americans in the Washington D.C. suburbs refers to this process as “exclusionary” and “inclusionary” boundary work. In your essay, consider how the “Old Money,” wealthy, and middle-class Americans discussed by Nelson Aldrich and Lacy seek to create affinities with certain groups, while contrasting them with others. How does this “boundary work” happen through the values or cultural lifestyles that certain groups cultivate or through the ways they rear and educate their children, acquire and decorate homes, make purchases, or carry themselves and interact with others? How do they “perform” certain class positions, differentiating themselves from some groups, while aligning themselves with others? Towards what ends do they do so? And how does race come to be “co-constituted” with class in the process? In answering your question, you must closely analyze the readings by Aldrich and Lacy. You are also welcome to cite the movie “People Like Us” or other class readings.
- Some of the most significant labor market trends in recent decades include the expansion of low-wage labor and the shift towards more precarious or “contingent” forms of employment (whether sub-contracted work, contract labor, part-time work, temp work, on-demand jobs, or gig work). Write an essay that combines attention to WHY the theorists we read postulate these trends might be happening and the larger social ramifications of such trends along with an analysis of what such work means for people in their everyday lives, including both its benefits and drawbacks. If you’re focusing on low-wage labor, you will want to draw upon the readings about the meatpacking industry and fast-food workers. If you’re focusing on on-demand labor, you may use the chapters from Ghost Work by Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri. (Alternately you can use Chapters 2–3 in Uberland by Alex Rosenblat.) Include a discussion of your own views of such trends in the essay. Are you persuaded by theorists’ arguments about why this is happening? Why or why not? Do you see such trends in positive, negative, or mixed terms? Make sure you support your views with evidence.
