Class and Social Structure in Hungarian Sociology

Gagyi, Ágnes; Éber, Márk Áron

doi:10.1177/0888325415599203

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…Moreover, class analysis also declined in Hungary and eastern europe, in general, because of ideological reasons; apart from the middle class, the existence of other classes did not fit well into the discourse of the construction of the new capitalist systems. 29 However, the relevance of the topic, not only for the academic community but also in terms of public opinion, is clear.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the Post-communist Class Structure: Findings from a New Multidimensional Hungarian Class Survey

Albert

Dávid

Kmetty

et al. 2017

East European Politics and Societies

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In this article, we define a schema for the class structure of Hungary, in which we consider a case for an Eastern-European capitalist system emerging from post-communist societies. Our schema is based on the findings of the Hungarian Class Survey, 2014. Using six measures of Bourdieusian economic, cultural, and social capital and applying the methodology of latent class analysis (LCa), we have constructed a model of eight LCa-based classes: upper class, cultural middle class, affluent middle class, young urban consumers, network-embedded rural workers, young drifters, middle-aged deprived, and the precariat. Hungarian society seems to be quite hierarchical but is also fragmented within the upper and lower strata. Status inconsistency in terms of possessing economic, cultural, and social capital is strongly present even for the middle XXX10.1177/0888325417739954East European Politics and SocietiesAlbert et al. / Mapping the Post-communist Class Structure research-article2017 2 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures classes. There is a clear divide in our class model between the upper four and the lower four classes, in terms of vertical and nonvertical aspects of social stratification. We also compare our new multidimensional class typology to the traditional occupation-based one and demonstrate its added value for class analysis in Hungary.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the Post-communist Class Structure: Findings from a New Multidimensional Hungarian Class Survey

Albert

Dávid

Kmetty

et al. 2017

East European Politics and Societies

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show abstract

“…In their famous samizdat publication, Konrád and Szelényi (1979) argued that the intelligentsia was on the road to consolidating itself as the new ruling class. While this perspective has since been contested, the affective and ideological ties between the socialist intelligentsia and the emergent post-socialist middle classes are undeniable (Eber & Gagyi, 2015;Szelényi, 2013).…”

Section: Class Cultural Practices and Reproductive Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating the post-socialist middle-class mother: Global hierarchies and local distinctions

Cheresheva

2022

Intersections

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This paper discusses the ways class distinctions are upheld through the performance of culturally valued childcare practices in a post-socialist capital: Sofia. It is based on 19 in-depth interviews, concerned with the mundane everyday lives of first-time middle-class mothers on maternity leave. I use feminist critical discourse analysis to trace the ways classed power shapes the meaning my interviewees attach to their experiences of motherhood. Feminist academic literature on motherhood, generally originating in the global west, has long demonstrated how the labour-intensive, financially demanding and time-consuming practices of middle-class mothers historically inform the very idea of ‘good’ motherhood. Seeing the child as a project in need of managing, via an amalgam of diligent provision of organic home-cooked food options, skilful manoeuvring around pre-school selection and an endless supply of extracurricular activities, has been exposed as middle-class privilege and thoroughly critiqued. These practices are implicitly opposed to the more intuitive parenting styles of the working classes. However, automatically linking specific childcare rituals with a certain class standing is also a symptom of the global inequalities in knowledge production, which tend to naturalise western realities as universal truths. My research shows that class distinction, rather than being produced by the exact practices parents engage in, is the outcome of processes of symbolic and material exclusion through which one imagines oneself as superior. The mothering styles of the socially privileged correlate with the norms enforced by childcare experts and state institutions around the world, but these styles are essentially ‘glocal’ designs. ‘Good’ middle-class mothers in post-socialist Europe anxiously manage their classed performance of motherhood with an awareness of their inferior position in the global class ladder. As such, Bulgarian ‘glocally-appropriate’ parenting merges two symbolic strategies in order to secure a relative and fragile economic privilege: mothers’ preferred childcare styles deploy an array of technologies of exclusion of the socially marginalised poor as well as those perceived as nouveau riche; and they represent an attempt at imagining oneself and her children as ‘civilised’ and valuable Europeans, with a focus on rejecting the country’s socialist past.

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“…In his debate with orthodox Marxism, Polanyi was also too quick to eschew class theory. This deficiency of Polanyi’s theory was mirrored in the majority of the literature on post-socialist democratisation, which neglected the aspect of class and rejected class analysis (Gagyi and Éber, 2015; Ost, 2015). Remedying this gap, the article combines Polanyi’s ideas with recent insights from cultural political economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013) and relational class theory (Kalb, 2015).…”

Section: The Cultural Political Economy Of Neo-nationalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left Behind in the Hungarian Rustbelt: The Cultural Political Economy of Working-Class Neo-Nationalism

Scheiring

2020

Sociology

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Nationalism is back with a renewed force. Hungary is a virulent example of the new nationalist ascendancy. As the country was a former liberal star pupil, Hungary’s neo-nationalist turn has been puzzling researchers for years. This study goes beyond the entrenched polarisations in the literature by highlighting the dynamic interplay between culture, structure and identity. It proposes to conceptualise Hungary’s neo-nationalist turn as a Polanyian countermovement against commodification, globalisation and deindustrialisation. The article presents the results of a thematic analysis of 82 interviews with workers in four towns in Hungary’s rustbelt and highlights how the multiscalar lived experience of commodifying reforms violated an implicit social contract and changed workers’ narrative identities. In the absence of a class-based shared narrative and lacking a viable political tool to control their fate, working-class neo-nationalism emerged as a new narrative identity to express workers’ anger and outrage.

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Class and Social Structure in Hungarian Sociology

Cited by 10 publications

References 6 publications

Mapping the Post-communist Class Structure: Findings from a New Multidimensional Hungarian Class Survey

Mapping the Post-communist Class Structure: Findings from a New Multidimensional Hungarian Class Survey

Creating the post-socialist middle-class mother: Global hierarchies and local distinctions

Left Behind in the Hungarian Rustbelt: The Cultural Political Economy of Working-Class Neo-Nationalism

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