Introduction
Key concepts
● social mobility
● equality of opportunity
● equality of outcome
● meritocracy
● meritocratic legitimacy
● economic capital
● cultural capital
● social capital
● habitus
● symbolic mastery
● class ceiling
● cultural matching
● tokenism
● homophily
Social mobility & inequality
- social mobility speaks to the principle of fairness → the question of who has access
to jobs is a question of economic equality and distribution of earnings
Meritocratic legitimacy
- economic inequality is not necessarily a problem as long as there is equality of
opportunity → any inequality of outcome is acceptable
- keypoint → merit is not the only or maybe even the main determinant of career
success
Bourdieu and capital
- economic capital (wealth and income)
- cultural capital (educational credentials and possession of legitimate knowledge,
taste, skills)
- social capital (valuable social connections and friendships)
Inheritance of cultural capital
- habitus → set of dispositions that relate to how children understand and relate to the
world around them
- specific modes of bodily compartment → accent, gesture, posture, style, etiquette,
manners
- symbolic mastery → language, elaborate vocabulary, ‘correct’ grammar, theoretical
ideas orientation to culture and taste
- these tend to be (mis)recognised as legitimate in social life
- it is possible to trace the genesis of a person’s economic assets or social
connections, but it is much harder to detect intergenerational transfer to cultural
capital and therefore we tend to (mis)read it in everyday life as a signal of someone’s
‘natural’ sophistication
, Class ceiling refers to invisible barriers
- direct discrimination (sexism, racism)
- subtle forms (stereotyping, microaggressions, tokenism, homophily)
Getting in and getting on
- people from working-class backgrounds may face challenges within elite
occupations, these are acute barriers of ‘getting in’ → process of cultural matching
1. top firms eliminate nearly every applicant that did not attend an elite college
or university
2. ‘informal’ recruitment activities such as cocktail parties, that are
uncomfortable or unfamiliar for those coming from working-class backgrounds
3. formal interviews: evaluation on common interests
- getting on: even when people get in, do they get on? are they for example paid the
same?
1&2
Getting in and getting on
Key concepts
- Getting in
- Getting on
- Micro-class reproduction
Micro-class reproduction
- tendency of children to follow directly in their parents’ occupational footsteps
Getting in and getting on
- The working-class that gets in, struggles to get on
3
Untangling the class pay gap
Key concepts
● Occupational sorting
Demographic differences
- people in elite occupations tend to earn more the older they are
- however, people from working-class origins in top jobs are older on average than
privileged origin people in top jobs
- it is likely the result of changes in structure of british workforce over time
- comparing people of the same age, we see much larger class pay gap with
demographic controls; the pay differences are bigger, but with no controls there is still
a pay gap
- the demographic differences do not explain the class pay gap
