scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals Social Class, Identity and the ‘Good’ Student: Negotiating University Culture

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Pearce ◽  
Barry Down ◽  
Elizabeth Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Participation Rates ◽  
University Culture ◽  
University Experiences ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
The University

Through the use of narrative portraits this paper discusses social class and identity, as working-class university students perceive them. With government policy encouraging wider participation rates from under-represented groups of people within the university sector, working-class students have found themselves to be the objects of much research. Working-class students are, for the most part, studied as though they are docile bodies, unable to participate in the construction of who they are, and working-class accounts of university experiences are quite often compared to the middle-class norms. This paper explores how working-class students see themselves within the university culture. Working-class students' voices and stories form the focus of this paper, in which the language of ‘disadvantage’ is dealt with and the ideologies of class identity explored.

scholarly journals Anglican Clergy Husbands Securing Middle-Class Gendered Privilege through Religion

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah-Jane Page
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Spiritual Capital ◽  
Clergy Wives ◽  
Cultural Markers ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Clergy Spouse ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church

Traditionally, clergy wives have been obliged to assist the Church in an unpaid capacity; such work has been feminised, associated with the assumed competencies of women ( Denton 1962 ; Finch 1980 , 1983 ; Murphy-Geiss 2011 ). Clergy husbands are a relatively recent phenomenon in the Church of England, emerging when women started to be ordained as deacons in 1987 and priests in 1994. Based on interviews with men whose wives were ordained as priests in the Church of England, this article will explore the dynamics of class and gender privilege. Most clergy husbands were middle class, defined through educational, occupational and cultural markers ( Bourdieu 1984 ). The narratives highlighted how gender and class privilege was maintained and extended through the clergy spouse role. The interweaving dynamics of class and gender privilege secured preferential outcomes for participants, outcomes that were less evidenced in relation to working-class spouses. Using Bourdieu's (1984) concepts of habitus, field and capital and Verter's (2003) conceptualisation of spiritual capital, this article will highlight the complex ways in which gender and class advantage is perpetuated and sustained, using the Anglican parish as the analytical context, thereby emphasising the role religion plays in consolidating privilege.

scholarly journals Re-establishing Class Privilege: The Ideological Uses of Middle and Working-Class Female Characters in Downton Abbey

2017 ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Laetitia Kevers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
Class Privilege

This paper argues that the British period drama Downton Abbey, which aired between 2010 and 2015 and encountered worldwide success, uses working class and middle-class female characters to promote the aristocracy and conservative ideas, while hiding behind historical accuracy and seemingly progressive patterns of behaviour. Through a close reading of four female characters, I will demonstrate how the series’ author, Julian Fellowes, uses the show to endorse his own political agenda, as a Conservative member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament.

scholarly journals How class identities shape highbrow consumption: A cross-national analysis of 30 European countries and regions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Using Data ◽  
National Analysis ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cross National

Highbrow culture may not always be central to cultural capital and, in such circumstances, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture may diminish, becoming more similar to working-class consumption. Using data from 30 European countries, I explore this issue through examining three questions: 1) is class identity associated with highbrow consumption; 2) does this association vary across countries; and 3) is the relationship between class identity and highbrow consumption altered when the majority of people in a given society identify as either ‘working-class’ or ‘middle-class’? After accounting for other socio-demographic controls, people who identify as middle-class are more active highbrow consumers than those who identify as working class. Yet, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture varies across countries and is negatively correlated with how many people identify as working-class in a society. As more people identify as working-class (rejecting middle-class identities) highbrow culture less clearly distinguishes middle-class and working-class identifiers. In the absence of any class-structured divisions in highbrow culture, whether and how cultural practices function as a form of cultural capital is likely quite different, reinforcing the claim that the centrality of highbrow culture to cultural capital varies geographically.

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Working Class Women

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

scholarly journals Class and Narrative Accrual: Personal Troubles and Public Issues in Five Vignettes

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Matthew Spokes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Public Issues ◽  
Diverse Student Body ◽  
Diverse Student

This paper develops Bruner’s (1991) notion of narrative accrual, in conjunction with ‘lifestories’ and ‘event-stories’, to focus on the accumulation of experiences as a contributor to working-class identity. Situated between Mills’ (1959) personal troubles and public issues, and framed by Nouri and Helterline’s (1998) argument that identity is framed by social interaction with signification systems and other people, the author’s own experiences as an early-career academic in two different British Universities – one more research-oriented with a predominantly middle-class student body, the other more teaching-oriented with a more class diverse student body – are utilized to forward ‘personal narrative accrual’ as a way of both conceptualizing and unpacking class associations, reflecting on Warnock’s (2016) fivefold typology of alienation, cultural capital, stereotyping/microaggression, survivor guilt/impostor syndrome and middle class networking. Ultimately, this paper considers the interrelated problems of working-class identity, career development, and ‘playing the game’ through autobiographical vignettes, and suggests the potential application of personal narrative accrual in decreasing feelings of isolation in academia by working-class academics.

The Institute of Community Studies, 1953–1958

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-157
Author(s):  
Lise Butler
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
The Family ◽  
A Site

Chapter 4 turns to the Institute of Community Studies, the Bethnal Green-based social research organization where Young and his colleague Peter Willmott published probably their best-known work, the 1957 Family and Kinship in East London. This and other Institute of Community Studies publications, such as Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, suggested that the family and extended family were crucial sources of mutual aid and social support for working-class communities, and that this aspect of working-class life had been overlooked by middle-class policy makers and urban planners who thought in terms of a more isolated and conventionally middle-class ‘nuclear’ family of parents and young children. This chapter shows that while Young and his colleagues did detect strong kinship networks in the communities they studied, their emphasis on the extended family was informed by a variety of contemporary developments in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and by a political project to challenge the Labour Party’s emphasis on male labour and suggest that the extended family could provide an alternative to the workplace as a site of social solidarity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of women in Young’s dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, which argues that Young idealized women, and the relationships between them, for being less defined by work and professional status.

Through the Abyss

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-60
Author(s):  
Laura Hartnell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Upward Social Mobility

This essay is an autoethnographic account of my transition from the working class to the middle class. It argues that performativity is central to upward social mobility, and that in my case this process has resulted in a loss of working-class identity. I perform this argument by having my working-class self comment upon the middle-class form to which I have committed my childhood. By making this split visible, I aim to evoke the complexities that are bound up in this class migration, and to question the middle-class academy's role in shutting out the working class.

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