Harriet Bradley

Class Descriptors or Class Relations? Thoughts Towards a Critique of Savage et al.

The work of Savage et al. in relation to the Great British Class Survey is acknowledged as an important contribution to a reinvigorated sociological research agenda on class, with a major public impact, but it is argued that the analysis, although bold and responsive to current social transformations, is flawed. Three weaknesses are identified: the approach to class is gradational, not relational; the markers of cultural capital used in the model are highly selective, therefore skewing the empirical findings, and lead to a negative view of working-class culture; and the model of latent classes resulting from the analysis is not coherent, with groupings that might be better distinguished as class fractions. Finally, an alternative deductively based class schema is proposed, which tries to accommodate contemporary change.

Banking on the future : choices, aspirations and economic hardship in working-class student experience

‘Education, education, education’. The Blairite slogan appears on the face of it uncontroversial and designed to attract universal electoral support. We all ‘know’ that education is important as a means to success in a meritocratic society, that qualifications are increasingly crucial for accessing a good career and that university education continues to be rewarded with higher incomes over the course of a working life. We assume, probably rightly, that all parents want to see their children do well at school and that increasing numbers of working-class parents are joining the middle class in aspiring to a university education for their children.

Fitting In and Getting On

This chapter focuses on how students make their way through HE. We focus in particular on how students come to an understanding of their social-class positioning in relation to other students they encounter at university. We discuss processes of ‘fitting in’, in social and academic contexts. We focus on narratives of students who have a sense of being ‘a fish in water’ or ‘a fish out of water’. We highlight a phenomenon that has only been implicit in previous literature—middle-class students who feel themselves to be a fish out of water at a modern university. We discuss how their responses to being a fish out of water are quite different to those of working-class students at the elite University of Bristol, who also have a sense of not quite fitting in. We also explore how students engage in building up capitals—and the ways in which middle-class students at both universities successfully engage in the concerted cultivation of capitals, through extra-curricular activities and CV building.

The Degree Generation: Higher Education and Social Class

This chapter introduces the project, with details of its aims and methods. It locates the project in the wider policy context and in the relevant research and policy-based literature.

Narratives of Class and ‘Race’

This chapter explores intersections of class and ‘race’ in the context of HE. The chapter considers the largely unspoken whiteness of the HE environment in England, and then examines what ‘getting in, getting on, and getting out’ mean for students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. We focus on a number of individual student narratives that provide insights into how intersections of class and ethnicity shape HE experience and the opportunities for social mobility through HE. We tease out the opportunities, but also the constraints experienced by students from minority ethnic backgrounds, and how ‘race’ intersects with class and continues to shape the ways in which students’ identities are constituted in and through HE.

Two Universities, One City

The two universities in Bristol typify many of the widely recognized differences in the UK between those founded before and after 1992. The University of Bristol is an elite research-intensive university, while UWE Bristol is a modern university, a former polytechnic, with a focus on teaching as well as research, with a much larger undergraduate population (24,000 compared with 13,000 at the University of Bristol). These two universities represent a particular example of the stratification of HE in England. In this chapter, we discuss how stratification is a significant feature of HE systems internationally, and consider how this affects participation by social class in different parts of a stratified system in the UK. The chapter looks in detail at the two universities, and considers how each university is positioned in the stratified field of HE. The chapter further explores how reputational positioning in a stratified field creates not just effects but affects in the lives of students in the study.

Researching Class and Higher Education

The concept of social class and the categorization of individuals by social class is the subject of intense debate at the present time. Changing economic and labour market conditions, along with wider social changes, mean that social class is more contested and complex than ever before. This chapter addresses how we operationalized the concept of social class in this study. We discuss current debates about defining social class, such as the recent work of Savage and colleagues (Sociol 47:219–250, 2013), as well as the psycho-social nature of social class (Reay, Class out of place: The white middle-classes and intersectionalities of class and “race” in urban state schooling in England. In L. Weis (Ed.), The way class works (pp. 87–99). New York: Routledge, 2008; Camb J Educ 45:9–23, 2015) and how we assigned participants in the Paired Peers project to social-class categorisations of working-class and middle-class. The chapter also discusses the use of the work of Bourdieu and ideas developing from his work to understand the ‘classed’ experience of HE in the project.

Abrams Prize Winners - 2000 and 2001

Gerda Reith contends that we are living in ‘an age of chance’, and her detailed investigation of the relationship between gambling and the evolution of Western civilization makes the case convincingly. But rather than following the well-marked academic and popular path of condemning gambling as an addiction, a pathology, a sign of moral corruption in individuals or societies or both, she boldly sets out to provide an original view of gambling and gamblers as historically and culturally variable, but nevertheless linked by transcendental characteristics. The study documents the cultural history of the various games of chance, noting the specific contexts in which they were played, and examines the common elements of the games, their social framework, and the mindset of those who play. While acknowledging that the late 20th century has seen the emergence of ‘gambling studies’ in numerous academic works by specialists in sociology, psychology, mathematics, history, law, and economics, Reith argues that these efforts are essentially multidisciplinary views, each analysis determined by the methodology of an individual academic specialization. The Age of Chance is an attempt to provide a truly interdisciplinary analysis of the universal and cultural phenomenon that is gambling. The first chapter traces the history of ‘the idea of chance’ from its prehistoric beginnings in the world of Fate’s sacred manifestations or the will of the gods, through the Age of Reason and mathematical analysis, to the late 20th century and the unpredictability of phenomena underlying chaos theory. In ancient times, there was no such concept as chance. Random events were interpreted as signs of the gods which could be interpreted to reveal divine will, but by the 17th century, such events were regarded as subject to the mathematical laws of probability in the absence of certain knowledge. In this change over time, chance was transformed from a sacred to an epistemological entity. What were once regarded as divine laws were later