Special issue on Global Middle Classes
Professor Claire Maxwell recently edited a special issue on the Global Middle Classes. The special issue sheds light on a new group of globally mobile professionals. This global professional ‘class’ provides the expert knowledge and skills needed for the operation of multinational corporations, and consists of highly skilled professionals who circulate the globe – mostly between key global cities such as New York, London, Sydney, and Hong Kong, but also further afield in Stockholm, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, and so forth. In recent years, researchers have begun to examine this emergent social group, who are so central in sustaining and advancing processes of globalization.
The contributors to this special issue analyse these practices in various contexts in order to understand whether and how global professionals seek to transmit habits of international mobility and cosmopolitan orientations to their children and the practices they deploy to reproduce their privileged social position.