Childhood health and social class reproduction in China

In previous studies on social stratification and mobility in China, education is considered as the core mediatory factor in social reproduction and mobility. This paper, however, investigates how childhood health affects social stratification. Using data from Urbanization and Labor Migrant National Survey (2012), this study examines the effects of nutrition, hygiene, and health before age 14 on adult socioeconomic status attainment, including education, the international socioeconomic indexes of first job and current job, and family income per head. The structural equation model results show that the nutrition intake (whether one experienced starvation and the frequency of fish and meat intake) and hygiene (indicated by the source of drinking water and the toilet type) have significant effect on adult socioeconomic status attainment. However, the effects change at different life course stages. Moreover, childhood health (indicated by adult height) has significant impact on adult socioeconomic status attainment, but no significant impact on the international socioeconomic indexes of first job and current job. We conclude that investment in childhood health is an important mechanism affecting social class reproduction and mobility. Therefore, health intervention for children from poor and disadvantaged families are necessary. It will benefit children’s education and encourage upward mobility.

‘English is always proportional to one’s wealth’: English, English language education, and social reproduction in South Korea

While quality English language education is not equally accessible in many EFL countries, neoliberalism and its ideology of language as a neutral skill that everyone can acquire has obscured inequalities caused by the heavy emphasis on English as a dominant world language. Using South Korea as an example, I examine how individuals, especially young adults, living in the neoliberal market economy perceive and recognize the overwhelming emphasis on English as a dominant world language and its underlying mechanisms that contribute to social reproduction in EFL countries. In analyzing the popular Korean discourse Theory of Spoon Class (sujeogyegeublon), I examine how English is beginning to be recognized as an active tool to maintain and solidify social class reproduction, and how the construction of English as a purchasable good then results in feelings of despair, hopelessness and resentment among individuals, especially young adults who need to survive in the precarious job market with rising unemployment rates and prolonged economic stagnation.

Bourdieu and Education

The French social Pierre Bourdieu became known as a key sociologist of education from the 1970s, contributing seminal books and articles to the “new” sociology of education, which focuses on knowledge formation in the classroom and institutional relations. His own social background was modest, but he rose through the elite French schools to become a leading intellectual in the second half of the 20th century. Much of his early work dealt with education, but this only formed part of a wider research corpus, which considered the French state and society as a whole: culture, politics, religion, law, economics, media, philosophy. Bourdieu developed a highly original “theory of practice” and set of conceptual thinking tools: habitus, field, cultural capital. His approach sought to rise above conventional oppositions between subjectivism and objectivism. Structure as both structured and structuring was a central principle to this epistemology. Early studies of students focused the role that education played in social class reproduction and the place of language in academic discourse. For him, pedagogy was a form of “symbolic violence,” played out in the differential holdings of “cultural capital” that the students held with respect to each other and the dominant ethos of schooling. He undertook further extensive studies of French higher education and the elite training schools. He was involved in various education review committees and put forward a number of principles for change in curricula, all while accepting that genuine reform was extremely challenging. He catalogued some of the tensions and conflicts of contemporary education policy. Both his discoveries and conceptual terms still offer researchers powerful tools for analyzing and understanding all national education systems and the particular individual practical contexts within them.

Conformists or rebels? Relative risk aversion, educational decisions and social class reproduction

This paper tests the theory of Relative Risk Aversion (RRA), which argues that educational decisions are intended to minimize the risk of downward social class mobility. We propose a structural model which distinguishes the instantaneous utility of educational decisions from the future utility of these decisions with respect to reproducing one’s parents’ social class position. We analyse British data and find that RRA accounts for some of the observed social class differences in educational decisions. We also find that while more than 90% of individuals derive utility from reproducing their parents’ social class position (RRA ‘conformists’), a small group of individuals experience disutility from reaching their parents’ social class position (RRA ‘rebels’). Individuals who experience disutility from reproducing their parents’ social class position are characterized by low cognitive ability and a high incidence of behavioural problems in childhood.