Middle-Income Groups in Kenya. Conflicting Realities Between Upward Mobility and Uncertainty

Abstract

For more than a decade scholars mostly from economy and development studies have described the rise of a newly emerging ‘middle class’ in the Global South including Africa. This has led to a ‘middle class narrative’ with the ‘middle class’ as the backbone of economic and democratic development. Especially with regard to the stability of the position of the people in the ‘middle’, empirical social science studies challenge the ‘middle class narrative’ and at their uncertainty and insecurity. This tension between upward mobility at the one hand uncertainty and instability at the other hand (the vulnerability-security nexus) and the options to cope with this challenge under the condition of limited provision of formal social security is the focus of this case study on Kenya. Instead of an analysis of inequality based on income, it is more helpful to start from the welfare mix and the role of social networks as main elements of provision of social security. Against this background, we identify different strategies of coping that go together with different sets of values and lifestyles, conceptualised as milieus, that are not determined by the socio-economic situation.

Do Western Sociological Concepts Apply Globally? Towards a Global Sociology

“…Moreover, income data are insufficient to define available financial means. Often considerable sums of money are given to poor relatives, for instance to enable their children to get a good education, or to help pay for medical treatment (Benda-Beckmann et al, 1988; Ferraro, 1971; Kroeker, 2020; Neubert, 2019a: chs 5, 6, 2019b; Steinwachs, 2006). In addition, occupational positions and business activities are very insecure, so that processes of repeated upward and downward mobility are common (Kroeker, 2020; Voigt, 2021).…”

Africa's Middle Classes

“…These explorations have on the one hand criticised the absence of a proper class analysis and are reminiscent of long-held theoretically diverse approaches, linked mainly (but not exclusively) to Karl Marx and Max Weber (see most systematically Southall, 2016: 1–22) while also more generally contextualising the term middle class (Therborn, 2020: 63–67). On the other hand, new undertakings stressed – not least with reference to Pierre Bourdieu – the need to include lifestyle, aspirations and sociocultural milieus to determine the individual belonging and positioning of something simply placed ‘in between’ (see especially Neubert and Stoll, 2015 and 2018; Neubert 2019a, 2019b and 2021), while Spronk (2012) draws attention to complementing aspects of sexual life among the Nairobi younger middle-class members. She has since then recorded some curiosity, ‘whether Neubert's proposition to replace class with milieu will be taken up’ (Spronk, 2020b: 217) and pointed to the challenges of how a proper class analysis is suitable and applicable to African realities – a matter which provoked a debate among several of the protagonists (cf.…”