The article offers a distinctive account of how the nouveaux riches serve as an anchor for a range of upper- middle- class ambivalences and anxieties associated with transformations of capitalism and shifting global hierarchies. Reflecting the long- term association of middle- class symbolic boundaries with notions of refinement and respectability, it examines how the discourse of civility shapes how the nouveaux riches are represented to the upper middle class, identifying a number of recurrent media frames and narrative tropes related to vulgarity, civility, and order. The author argues that these representations play a central role in the reproduction of the Western professional middle class, and in the cultural constitution of a global middle class — professional, affluent, urban, and affiliated by an aesthetic regime of civility that transcends national borders. The findings underline the significance of representations of the new super- rich as devices through which the media accomplish the global circulation of an upper- middle- class repertoire of cultural capital, which is used both to police shifting class boundaries and to establish a legitimate preserve for univorous snobbishness.
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March 1, 2019
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Research Article|
March 01 2019
MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS of the NOUVEAUX RICHES and the CULTURAL CONSTITUTION of the GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS
Jennifer Smith Maguire
Jennifer Smith Maguire
Jennifer Smith Maguire is professor in the Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focuses on processes of cultural production and consumption in the construction of markets, tastes, and value.
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Cultural Politics (2019) 15 (1): 29–47.
Citation
Jennifer Smith Maguire; MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS of the NOUVEAUX RICHES and the CULTURAL CONSTITUTION of the GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS. Cultural Politics 1 March 2019; 15 (1): 29–47. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-7289472
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