"I Wish I Were a Plumber!": Transnational Class Re-Constructions Across Migrant Experiences Among Hong Kong's Professionals and Managers.

This study examines processes of class construction within a transnational community of professionals and managers who are emigrants, returnees, and non-migrants. Building on Bourdieu's class analysis and literature on transnational migration, we examine how class statuses are supported by moral claims based on varying transnational mobility strategies. We draw our results from qualitative interviews with 45 Hong Kong respondents in Hong Kong and Canada. We find that despite Hong Kong emigrants' loss of economic capital due to de-professionalization, their cultural and symbolic claims frame an alternative set of norms about their life successes. Returnees claim to have the best of both worlds having amassed economic capital, while making social distinctions from stayers in terms of their globalized cosmopolitan imaginaries. Stayers appear envious of emigrants' and returnees' flexibility and seek to accumulate economic capital for future retirement migration or to send their children abroad. Respondents' moralizing discourses reveal a social field defining within class distinctions apart from hyper concerns of upward mobility through material gains. Nuanced class distinctions articulate values around freedom of space, time, and expression not readily accessible to residents remaining in Hong Kong.

Moral discourses and pharmaceuticalised governance in households.

This article extends our understanding of the everyday practices of pharmaceuticalisation through an examination of moral concerns over medication practices in the household. Moral concerns of responsibility and discipline in relation to pharmaceutical consumption have been identified, such as passive or active medication practices, and adherence to orthodox or unorthodox accounts. This paper further delineates dimensions of the moral evaluations of pharmaceuticals. In 2010 and 2011 data were collected from 55 households across New Zealand and data collection techniques, such as photo- and diary-elicitation interviews, allowed the participants to develop and articulate reflective stories of the moral meaning of pharmaceuticals. Four repertoires were identified: a disordering society repertoire where pharmaceuticals evoke a society in an unnatural state; a disordering self repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify a moral failing of the individual; a disordering substances repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify a threat to one's physical or mental equilibrium; a re-ordering substances repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify the restoration of function. The research demonstrated that the dichotomies of orthodox/unorthodox and compliance/resistance do not adequately capture how medications are used and understood in everyday practice. Attitudes change according to why pharmaceuticals are taken and who is taking them, their impacts on social relationships, and different views on the social or natural production of disease, the power of the pharmaceutical industry, and the role of health experts. Pharmaceuticals are tied to our identity, what we want to show of ourselves, and what sort of world we see ourselves living in. The ordering and disordering understandings of pharmaceuticals intersect with forms of pharmaceuticalised governance, where conduct is governed through pharmaceutical routines, and where self-responsibility entails following the prescription of other agents. Pharmaceuticals symbolise forms of governance with different sets of roles and responsibilities.