Chapter 10 – Class ceilings: A new approach to social mobility............................................24
Chapter 11 – Conclusion.......................................................................................................27
Epilogue: 10 ways to break the class ceiling.........................................................................30
Achievement Inequality and the Institutional Structure of Educational Systems: A
Comparative Perspective......................................................................................................33
The Forms of Capital.............................................................................................................39
The Contradictions of Inheritance..........................................................................................40
French Students and Their Relation to Culture.....................................................................41
Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students: Scaling Up Individualized
Tutorials................................................................................................................................ 43
School alienation – Theoretical approaches and educational research.................................47
Survival of the Nurtured.........................................................................................................51
Credentials, Signals, and Screens: Explaining the Relationship Between Schooling Job
Assignment........................................................................................................................... 58
From school to work – A Comparative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational
Destinations.......................................................................................................................... 67
Occupational Closure and Wage Inequality in Germany and the United Kingdom................72
The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis.....................78
Vocational Education and Employment over the Life Cycle...................................................79
Lecture 1 – From origin to education across countries..........................................................81
Lecture 2 – Social reproduction in education.........................................................................83
Lecture 3 – Inequality reducing educational programmes.....................................................85
Lecture 4 – School-to-work-transitions..................................................................................90
Lecture 5 – Access to the labour market...............................................................................94
Lecture 6 – Changing labour markets..................................................................................100
The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged
Friedman & Laurison
Inleiding
In Western cultures, the idea of "meritocratic" achievement has
long been glorified. As Max Weber argued as early as 1915,
'The fortunate man is rarely satisfied with being fortunate. Moreover, he needs to know that
he is entitled to his fortune. He wants to be convinced that he "deserves" it, and above all,
that he deserves it compared to others ... happiness, therefore, wants to be legitimate
happiness.'
In this book, however, we challenge the belief that success in elite professions is simply a
matter of "legitimate fortune". Instead, we show that not only do those who earn the most,
and reach the top, disproportionately come from privileged backgrounds, but that their
success cannot be explained by "merit" alone. Instead, we uncover a number of hidden
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,mechanisms that propel them forward, keeping people from less privileged backgrounds
ahead of them.
In this introductory chapter, we outline the main arguments put forward in this book. But first
we need to outline the political and sociological context of our research - where do the
questions underlying this project come from, and why do they matter?
The (premature) death of class
In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous politicians and academics lined up to proclaim 'the end of
class'. Classes were seen as a sign of inherited social divisions and had no place in today's
world. As Tony Blair famously said in 1999, "The class struggle is over. But the struggle for
real equality has only just begun. Ulrich Beck and others like Anthony Giddens announced
the emergence of a new postmodern world order based on 'individualisation'. Central to this
was the thesis that widespread social change had freed us from "historically prescribed
social forms and obligations" such as class, and had instead catapulted us into a more
individually oriented era in which we must "produce, stage and cobble together" our own
biographies. One of the key assumptions that fuelled the 'end of class' narrative was that we
were experiencing a transformative era of social mobility. By extension, there was also a
surge in the number of people from working-class backgrounds experiencing upward mobility
into management and the liberal professions.
John Goldthorpe showed that while there was certainly an increase in the absolute
number of people with upward mobility, the relative chances, or probabilities, of someone
born into a working-class family to advance into the liberal professions (before someone from
a privileged background) remained consistently low throughout the 20th century.
Nevertheless, shifts in absolute mobility were very important for perceptions of openness.
Many saw or knew others who had experienced upward mobility, and this fuelled the sense
that the old mechanisms of class reproduction were gradually unravelling. This post-war
expansion of 'space at the top' also coincided with a period of declining, and historically low,
income inequality.
But gradually both the increase in absolute mobility and
income equality tapered off. Much of the apparent success was based on the one-off
rewards made possible by deregulation and the sale of state assets, rather than the
sustained productivity growth that secured the longer-term benefits of the post-war decades.
Meanwhile, it was those at the bottom of the social hierarchy who suffered most from cuts in
public spending.
Social mobility and the politics of inequality
Against the backdrop of rising inequality and the growing civil unrest it has created, social
mobility has become the main rhetorical tool with which politicians stage their response. But
the reality is that there have been no major changes in overall mobility rates, however they
are measured. So why is the rhetoric of social mobility so often used in discussions about
inequality? Well, a large part of the reason is that the topic of social mobility is directly related
to the broader principle of equity. If some people are more likely than others to get the most
valued jobs, regardless of whether they are the most skilled or the hardest working, most
people will agree that this is unfair.
For a long time, the dominant political view has been that economic inequality need
not necessarily be a problem, as long as there is equality of opportunity. If people from
different backgrounds have equal access to the most attractive jobs and the highest
incomes, any resulting inequality in outcomes is acceptable and possibly even desirable
(since higher rewards should motivate the most skilled people to seek the most attractive
jobs). In this view, then, social mobility is an important means of justifying inequality,
providing inequality with what Goldthorpe has called "meritocratic legitimacy". However, there
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,are also many politicians - mainly on the left, but also some on the right - who increasingly
put forward the argument that no matter how equitably people have access to jobs, there is
no reason that one person earns millions while others live on ten thousand or less.
Fair access to the top
It is perhaps not surprising, given the common ground between these two ideological
directions, that the most politically powerful dimension of social mobility tends to be social
closure at the top, and particularly within elite professions.
In the mid-20th century, there was a very lively sociological tradition of interrogating
the social composition of elites. But from the 1980s, this 'sociology of elite recruitment' was
overshadowed by researchers who were more interested in looking at broader patterns of
social mobility within the class structure. This approach, first advocated by Goldthorpe but
now adopted as a standard by mobility researchers around the world, is based on
aggregating individual occupations into 'major' social classes. From here, researchers can
then compare people's class of origin (in terms of their parents' occupation) with their class of
destination (in terms of their own occupation) and measure the movement or mobility
between them. This is obviously an essential platform for analysis.
Yet it has also created major gaps in our knowledge. In particular, we know little
about how open or closed different elite occupations are, and thus we do not know exactly
where in the labour market elite production takes place.
Origin and destination in contemporary Britain
To set the background for our analysis, it is first important to explain the basic architecture of
social mobility in Britain. Amid the maelstrom of political slogans and technocratic debates
about mobility figures, this basic empirical picture is often overlooked: how many people
actually work in Britain's elite occupations, and what is their class origin?
The conclusion is that upper-middle class people are about 6.5 times more likely to be in elite
jobs than working class people. In other words, origin is still strongly related to destination in
contemporary Britain.
Bourdieu and the london shadow of class descent
To understand these patterns of mobility, we need to understand what class origin means
and how it matters. So far, we have used a rather narrow definition of class origin, looking at
what someone's main breadwinner was and then placing this occupation in a classification of
socio-economic classes. In this book, we use this type of measure for largely pragmatic
reasons. We think occupation is probably the best approximation we have for class origin,
the one piece of information that in itself says the most about the likely socioeconomic
conditions that characterised a person's upbringing. Yet for us, occupation is nothing more
than that, an approximation of class. Our own approach to class, and especially to class
origins, has been heavily influenced by the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
According to Bourdieu, our class is defined by the three primary forms of capital our
parents possess: economic capital (wealth and income), cultural capital (educational
qualifications and possession of legitimate knowledge, skills and tastes) and social capital
(valuable social connections and friendships).
The legacy of cultural capital is more complex. The material wealth of the educated
upper middle class, Bourdieu argues, provides them with a certain distance from economic
necessity, which is then strongly reflected in the way they socialise their children. In
particular, they instil a certain 'habitus' - a set of dispositions that organises how their children
understand and relate to the world around them. Some of these dispositions are embodied;
they are expressed in specific ways of physical behaviour, such as accent, voice inflection,
gestures and posture, as well as in clothing styles, etiquette and manners. But perhaps most
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, important is the way privileged parents instil in early childhood a tendency towards what
Bourdieu calls 'symbolic mastery'. This includes a certain mode of language use, including an
extensive vocabulary and "correct" grammar, a general familiarity with abstraction and
theoretical ideas, as well as a certain detached, aesthetic orientation towards culture and
taste. For Bourdieu, the importance of this aesthetic disposition, as well as other aspects of
symbolic mastery and embodiment associated with a privileged upbringing, is that they tend
to be (mis)recognised as legitimate in social life. They constitute only one - in Bourdieu's
view rather arbitrary - way of knowing the world. Yet they are often assigned a high value
and act as signals of cultural significance. It is much harder to detect the intergenerational
transmission of cultural capital, which is why we tend to (mis)read it in everyday life as a
signal of someone's 'natural' sophistication (that they have an 'eye for fashion' or a 'refined
taste', for example), or even of their innate intelligence. In other words, by simply expressing
their tastes or opinions, privileged people can cash in on their embodied cultural capital in
multiple settings.
Annette Lareau looked at how cultural capital is built into the family. She studied the
family lives of 9- and 10-year-olds from different classes and discovered major differences in
parenting styles. Upper-middle-class parents (those with professional jobs and university
degrees) approached raising their children as a project in 'joint cultivation' - they provided
extensive support with homework, ensured a careful range of extracurricular activities and
consistently involved their children in conversations and discussions, all of which helped
cultivate their capacity for symbolic mastery. Working-class and poor parents, on the other
hand, practised what Lareau calls 'accomplishing natural growth'. These parents were
equally committed to ensuring that their children grew into healthy, secure adults. But they
approached their role differently.
Lareau carefully emphasises, and we agree, that neither approach is intrinsically
better or worse, and that there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches from
the perspective of child development. Nevertheless, because upper-middle-class people are
often in charge in schools, most workplaces and many other institutions, there are enduring
advantages to middle-class parenting.
This research on cultural capital suggests that the effects of class descent are
pervasive and long-lasting. And class defines who you are in ways that a simple change in
circumstances - more money, a university education or a better job than your parents - will
not necessarily erase. This is not to say that people do not learn and change over the course
of their lives, and adapt to new situations - of course we do. But this work suggests that our
early years leave a deep and graded imprint.
Lessons from the glass ceiling
A plethora of research shows that people's origins cast a long shadow over their lives.
However, this research does not address how exactly this affects the area we focus on in this
book: careers in elite occupations. Nevertheless, two rich and related research traditions can
offer important leads.
The first is based on the experiences of members of racial and ethnic minority groups
and white women in the elite labour market. Here, the metaphor of glass, and in particular
the glass ceiling, has been usefully used to point out the invisible but enduring barriers these
groups face in achieving the same rewards as white men in the same positions. This can be
direct discrimination (in the sense of racism or sexism) or more subtle (stereotyping,
microaggressions, homophily, etc.).
The key point that emerges from this crystal-clear literature is that what we
conventionally understand by "merit" is not the only, or perhaps not even the most important,
determinant of career success. Study after study has shown that even when women and
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