Nicola Ingram

Higher education, social class and the mobilisation of capitals: recognising and playing the game

Strategies employed by middle-class families to ensure successful educational outcomes for their children have long been the focus of theoretical and empirical analysis in the United Kingdom and beyond. In austerity England, the issue of middle-class social reproduction through higher education increases in saliency, and students’ awareness of how to ‘play the game’ of enhancing their chances to acquire a sought-after graduate position becomes increasingly important. Using data from a longitudinal study of working-class and middle-class undergraduates at Bristol’s two universities (the Paired Peers project), we employ Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to examine processes of capital mobilisation and acquisition by students to enhance future social positioning. We highlight middle-class advantage over privileged access to valued capitals, and argue that the emphasis on competition, both in terms of educational outcomes and the accrual of capital in the lives of working-class and middle-class students, compounds rather than alleviates social inequalities.

Within school and beyond the gate: the complexities of being educationally successful and working-class

Much educational research on working-class boys has focused on their failure and lack of aspiration. However, there has been little research on working-class boys’ experiences of success. The very idea of being educationally successful and working class is problematic, as success has been argued to be dependent on the abandonment of aspects of working-class background. This article highlights the difficulties that some working-class grammar school boys face in reconciling their identity with educational success. For these boys the issue of identity is complex and there is a conflict between their identity, based on their class background, and their identity as an aspiring student. Using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, this article explores the complexities associated with identities that are developing in social fields different from those in which they originated, and discusses how this impacts emotionally on working-class boys.

Working‐class boys, educational success and the misrecognition of working‐class culture

This article contributes to the theory of institutional habitus by exploring the differing ways in which the institutional habitus of two schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland mediates the local habitus of working‐class boys. All of the boys in this qualitative case study live in the same disadvantaged working‐class community but attend two different schools, depending on whether they succeeded or failed in an examination at the age of 11 years. It is argued that these schools have different mediating effects on the boys’ common habitus. While most studies of working‐class boys focus on underachievement, and most studies of working‐class success focus on females, this article draws together the strands of success, failure, working‐class boys and locality, and examines the ways in which identity is constructed and reconstructed in response to schooling. Questions are raised about the interpretation and/or misrecognition of working‐class culture in schools and within the wider discourses of society.

Well-founded social fictions: a defence of the concepts of institutional and familial habitus

This article engages with Atkinson’s recent criticisms of concepts of collective habitus, such as ‘institutional’ and ‘familial’ habitus, in order to defend their conceptual utility and theoretical coherence. In so doing we promote a flexible understanding of habitus as both an individual and a collective concept. By retaining this flexibility (which we argue is in keeping with the spirit of Bourdieuian philosophy) we allow for a consideration of the ways in which the individual habitus relates to the collective. We argue that, through recognition of the complexity of the interrelated habitus of individuals, collective notions go beyond individualist accounts that perceive only the relational aspects of the individual with the social field. Our approach allows us to consider social actors in relation to each other and as constitutive of fields rather than as mere individuals plotted in social space. These arguments will be woven through our responses to what Atkinson calls the three fatal flaws of institutional and familial habitus: namely, homogenisation, anthropomorphism, and substantialism.

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.

Research and policy in education

Geoff Whitty’s new book is a major contribution to the field of sociology of education policy. Research and Policy in Education showcases his extraordinary breadth of inquiry, intellectual rigour a...

Degrees of Masculinity: Working and Middle-Class Undergraduate Students’ Constructions of Masculine Identities

Exploring the current perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ and what might be seen as its opposing stance, that society now facilitates more inclusive forms of masculinity, this chapter considers research with young undergraduate men from working-class and middle-class backgrounds. We argue that the crisis of masculinity is somewhat overstated. Middle-class men in particular can present a veneer of inclusivity attuned to being a modern liberal man but this masks a refashioning not the reforming of traditional male power relations. Meanwhile our study’s working-class men demonstrate elements of tension with constructions of masculinity seemingly resolved in the emergence of more positive identifications. We therefore conclude that masculinity is neither in crisis nor radically reformed.

White Middle Class Identities and Urban Schooling.

This book focuses on the perspectives of white middle-class parents who make ‘against’-the-grain school choices for their children in urban England. It provides key insights into the dynamics of class practising that are played out in these choices and the multiple narratives and contexts that influence them. Drawing on a rich blend of social theories, the authors explore whether these ‘atypical’ parents have found new strategies to reproduce their classed and cultural locations or whether they are genuinely engaging with a more equitable cosmopolitanism that requires a restructuring of their children’s white middle-class identities. Their in-depth analysis ‘troubles’ both the practices and positioning of these parents, exploring the contradictions and psychic dilemmas that arise in trying to combine ethics and principles around social justice and egalitarianism with the ‘best interests’ of their children. Of course ‘best’ interest, like school choices itself, is not a neutral phenomenon – but is deeply embedded in perspectives and perceptions of ‘what counts’ and what is valued in the education and well-being of children and of society (Devine and Luttrell forthcoming). It becomes especially anxiety laden with the attendant riskiness, uncertainty, change and flexibility that is part of an increasingly individualized and competitive social order. Class strategies and the preservation of middle-class identities ‘under siege’ are then an important backdrop to the analysis of the motivations, contradictions and aspirations of the parents in this study. Situated within the broader framework of globalization, neoliberalism and increasing class polarization, the authors signal their intention to move the analysis of inequality from the margins to the centre, to the ‘normative’ white middle classes as they struggle to maintain familial advantage within an overarching ethical framework that is pro-welfare and left leaning. While they note their sample is not large enough to provide a comprehensive theory of ‘class’, they specifically focus on ‘urban seeking’ middle classes – who chose to send their kids to schools that ‘encapsulate the rich diversity of the cities they live in’ (6). In so doing, their choices appear to signal the generation British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 33, No. 2, March 2012, 303–314

‘Talent-spotting’ or ‘social magic’? Inequality, cultural sorting and constructions of the ideal graduate in elite professions

Graduate outcomes – including rates of employment and earnings – are marked by persistent inequalities related to social class, as well as gender, ethnicity and institution. Despite national policy agendas related to social mobility and ‘fair access to the professions’, high-status occupations are disproportionately composed of those from socially privileged backgrounds, and evidence suggests that in recent decades many professions have become less socially representative. This article makes an original contribution to sociological studies of inequalities in graduate transitions and elite reproduction through a distinct focus on the ‘pre-hiring’ practices of graduate employers. It does this through a critical analysis of the graduate recruitment material of two popular graduate employers. It shows how, despite espousing commitments to diversity and inclusion, constructions of the ‘ideal’ graduate privilege individuals who can mobilise and embody certain valued capitals. Using Bourdieusian concepts of ‘social magic’ and ‘institutional habitus’, the article argues that more attention must be paid to how graduate employers’ practices constitute tacit processes of social exclusion and thus militate against the achievement of more equitable graduate outcomes and fair access to the ‘top jobs’.

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.