a new class paradigm?

A New Class Paradigm?Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion by Louise Archer; MerrynHutchings; Alistair Ross; Carole Leathwood; Robert Gilchrist; David Phillips; Class Strategiesand the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage by Stephen Ball; Educationand the Middle Class by Sally Power; Tony Edwards; Geoff Whitty; Valerie WhiteReview by: Mike SavageBritish Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), pp. 535-541Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593321 .

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British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 4, September 2003 Carfax Publishing Taylor& Francis Group

REVIEW ESSAY

A New Class Paradigm?

MIKE SAVAGE, University of Manchester, UK

LouISE ARCHER, MERRYN HUTCHINGS, ALISTAIR Ross, WITH CAROLE LEATHWOOD, ROBERT GILCHRIST & DAVID PHILLIPS, 2003

Higher Education and Social Class: issues of exclusion and inclusion

London, RoutledgeFalmer 227 + xii pp.

STEPHEN BALL, 2003 Class Strategies and the Education Market: the middle classes and social

advantage London, RoutledgeFalmer 213 + ix pp.

SALLY POWER, TONY EDWARDS, GEOFF WHITTY & VALERIE WHITE, 2003 Education and the Middle Class

Buckingham, Open University Press 175 + vii pp.

Since the early 1980s, legions of sociologists have proclaimed the end of class. Epochal social changes associated variously with postmodernism, post-Fordism, globalisation, individualisation, and the like were held to presage the end of social relations organised fundamentally around class inequalities and identities. To be sure, this view was contested. A small but influential group of sociologists based at Nuffield College, Oxford, notably John Goldthorpe, Anthony Heath and Gordon Marshall, insisted on the persistence of class as a key structuring force in British society (see, for example, Heath, 1985; Marshall et al., 1988; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Marshall, 1997). The arguments of this latter group are impressive in their own terms, and have in the past decade led to considerable technical sophistication in the elaboration of the new National Statistics Socio-economic classification (see Rose & Pevalin, 2003). This new class schema, strongly influenced by Goldthorpe's distinction between a professional and managerial service class, an intermediate class and a working class, has been validated in quantitative terms by exercises showing that the scheme is a good measure of

ISSN 0142-5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/03/040535-07 ? 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0142569032000109431



536 Review Essay

employment relations. It is also correlated with a range of important medical outcomes. Its supporters promise ('above all') to 'both government and academic users ... a tool which lends itself to the explanation of relationships' (Rose & Pevalin, 2003, p. 265). Nonetheless, it is striking that this exercise has not (yet) considered the meaning of class, the nature of class consciousness, and the relationship between class and solidarity that have pre-occupied earlier generations of class analysts. For this reason, their arguments are unlikely to impress the 'end of class' writers who make much of the apparent weakness of class identities. The result is two entrenched camps of critics and defenders of class who have little to say to each other.

Can this debate be re-worked so that a new account of the inter-relationship between

class, identities, and inequalities can be generated, which recognises the significance of

contemporary social and cultural change? In the past few years there have been signs that a new kind of cultural class analysis, informed above all by Bourdieu's work, is

developing around this issue (see, for instance, Skeggs, 1997; Charlesworth, 2000; Savage, 2000; Devine et al., 2003). A theme of this work is that there have indeed been fundamental social changes in recent years, but these involve the re-working rather than eradication of class. For much of the twentieth century, it might be argued (see Savage, 2000), social relations in the UK were defined by a powerful-although subordinate- working-class presence, against which the middle class defined itself. Social relations were

organised around a powerful series of oppositions, between working class and middle class, city and suburbs, wage and salary, low and high-brow, and so on. Class was a visible marker of social differentiation. By the late twentieth century, however, the

working class had been largely eviscerated as a visible social presence. Of course there continue to be large numbers of people in working-class jobs, but de-industrialisation, the eradication of apprenticeship as a distinctive mode of training, and the declining fortunes of trade unions and the Labour movement, meant that the working class was no longer a central reference point in British culture. The middle class then colonised the resulting empty social and cultural space, with the result that it has become the 'particular- universal' class. That is to say, although it was in fact a particular class with a specific history, nonetheless it has become the class around which an increasing range of

practices are regarded as universally 'normal', 'good' and 'appropriate'. Rather than there being socially recognised tensions between practices seen as appropriate for

working and middle classes, the practices of the middle class have increasingly come to define the social itself (see further, Strathern, 1990). Socially recognised class conflict

dissipates into individualised identities in which those who live up to middle class norms see themselves as 'normal' people while those who do not see themselves (and are seen

by the powerful) as individual failures. This has entailed a powerful change in political discourse, with the New Labour government in general, and Tony Blair in particular, representing a middle-class politics that does not speak its name, in which middle class self-interest is couched as a universal good. Much recent social science, including that of eminent social scientists such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Robert Putnam, as

well as schools of thought such as rational choice theory, can be seen as exemplifying this kind of unacknowledged middle-class standpoint.

These new kinds of class relations demand a new kind of critical social science. We can

no longer rely on the class paradigm of Marx and Weber, characterised by a class formation paradigm that explores how people become class conscious. People do not have the kind of collective class awareness that might allow one to talk of classes as these kinds of social actors. It is now necessary to invoke a much more subtle kind of class

analysis, a kind of forensic, detective work, which involves tracing the print of class in



Review Essay 537

areas where it is faintly written. Above all, the innocence, the kind of unacknowledged normality of the middle class needs to be carefully unpicked and exposed. This is

precisely the area where sociologists of education have pioneered a new kind of class

paradigm in the influential contributions of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein stretch-

ing back to the 1960s. These three books, all published within a few months of each

other, take this project further and represent a major contribution not only to the

sociology of education, but to critical social science more generally.

The Three Studies

Ball's is a largely qualitative study of middle-class parents and their educational strategies, adopts a lively discursive tone, and engages with a wide range of sociological argument about class. Ball draws on four ESRC-funded projects conducted between 1991 and 2001 involving a wide range of well-known and expert collaborators. These projects have

already led to high-profile publications, such that they have become key reference points in current debates (for instance, they are widely referred to by both the other books under review here). Because all four studies involved some qualitative research on

parents, Ball cleverly pools his data on middle-class parents, allowing him to extrapolate and link findings from different projects in an imaginative and provocative way. One can

only be impressed by the range, verve and sociological imagination on display. During the course of his book Ball engages deftly with the marketisation of education, middle- class educational strategies, social closure and social capital, risk and the generation of

inequality. The result is always readable, sometimes controversial, and highly innovative. Power et al.'s study is very different in tone and style, although it comes from the same

stable (the Institute of Education) and there is clear cross-fertilisation with Ball's work (Ball refers to it, presumably when it was in draft form, on several occasions). The book reads

largely as a research report, involving a quantitative and qualitative study of the longitudinal trajectories of children drawn from a sample of private and state schools. This study draws on a sample of 347 children born in 1971 studied in 1986 when they were 15, and

followed-up 12 years later when they were 27 [1]. This book therefore represents an extension of their assisted places project, which has been reported in earlier publications and which has had a significant impact. Different chapters follow children from their choice of

school, their experiences of school and school achievements, their entry to higher education

and, finally, into the labour market. This book represents an impressive indication of the value of a focused longitudinal study, although I return later to the issue of what one can do with an unrepresentative sample such as this. Although the authors are aware of the theoretical issues raised by Ball, they prefer a more austere account, in which theory is kept clearly subordinate to their concern to do justice to their data.

Archer et al. reads more as an integrated collection of related papers focusing on divisions in student access to higher education. The book draws on secondary sources such as UCAS data to chart inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity with respect to

education. Several chapters report original research carried out by the Institute of Policy Studies at London Metropolitan University. Unlike the other two books reviewed here, the original fieldwork is focused on working-class and lower-middle-class people, and includes surveys, focus groups and interviews. Chapters cover participation rates, the kind of information about higher education that working-class and lower-middle-class students have access to, their sense of the value of higher education, the kind of financial barriers they face, and how their identities affect their attitudes to higher education. This is contextualised by two very useful chapters outlining the dramatic expansion of higher



538 Review Essay

education, and in particular focusing on the changing significance of the binary divide between old and new universities (formerly known as polytechnics).

Between them, these three books therefore cover the entire educational cycle, ranging from

parental strategies, experience of school, and access to and experience of higher education. Let us see how far they individually and collectively stake out a new class paradigm.

From Old to New Paradigm?

Of the three books under review, Archer's is closest to the old class paradigm, although even so it ends up subverting and challenging it. Archer et al. take some of their premises (although not their conclusions) from what might be defined as an orthodox agenda, which sees higher education itself as largely a 'given', and the key policy issue being how those under-represented within it can improve their prospects. The policy focus is not therefore on challenging the middle-class hold on higher education (except in those rare cases that might be attributed to residual middle-class prejudice, as in the Sarah Lawrence affair), but on how the 'excluded' themselves can be made to participate more. The power of this book is that while it takes this agenda seriously, and provides relevant research findings for it, it concludes with a much more radical statement regarding the need to challenge middle-class colonisation of the higher education process itself. The more orthodox parts of the book are indeed the weakest. The book's discussion of class

theory is lame and out of date, and those chapters involving secondary analysis of UCAS statistics are fairly mundane and produce few unknown findings. The later chapters, however, represent important and original statements. The authors show that 'tinkering with the system', for instance in terms of providing better information for students (one of the reasons, after all, for the TQA and subject review process that have exasperated academics since the early 1990s), is hardly likely to make serious inroads into encourag- ing more working-class students into higher education. However, they show how the kinds of stigmatised class awareness of non-middle-class students stops them from feeling able to take up higher education. In this respect there are overlaps with the recent

arguments of Reay and her associates, as they note. If the government is really serious about improving access, they need to challenge the culture and values, the 'institutional habitus' of higher education itself. There is little sign that the Government realises this.

The conclusions of Archer et al. are thus very much in line with the tenour of Ball's book. Ball clearly identifies himself as staking out a new paradigm. His key argument is that the rendering of education as a market process allows the middle classes to gain advantages within it because of their strategic orientation. This allows Ball to develop a

distinctive, highly original, take on the middle class as the 'universal-particular' class. The effectiveness of middle-class children within the education system is not deemed to be linked to their class (their particularity), but can be related to their effective rational

operation of markets (a universal process). Thus the marketisation of education, (and by extension, other services) allows middle-class advantage to be enhanced, not in the name

of class, but through apparently 'rational' mechanisms. Ball is emphatic that marketisation is much deeper than the use of private education. Indeed, he shows that state education continues to be the preferred choice of most middle-class parents, with

significant numbers of parents who were taught at private school choosing to send their own children to state schools. Their engagement with state education invokes market mechanisms. Here middle-class parents do not act out of middle-class consciousness, seeking status privileges for their children, but act as reflexive strategic actors, and they thus see themselves simply as rational players, rather than as overtly vested with class



Review Essay 539

prejudice. This leads them to be anxious and insecure, denying any sense that there is a kind of educational 'conveyor belt' taking their children to approved universities.

Hence, marketisation creates identities of risk and uncertainty that appear to undermine

any sense of class belonging and security, yet in fact Ball argues that this kind of ethos

goes hand in hand with the kinds of strategic planning that will allow their children to do well in the educational system.

Ball is also concerned to show that education markets also give access to a range of 'non-market' processes that advantage their children. The education market is not a

'spot' market, in which one exchanges money for a good or service at one discrete moment in time, in the way that you might buy a car, for instance. Rather, it is a

generative market, in which parents buy into a cluster of practices that allow their children to develop cumulative advantage, many aspects of which are opaque to outsiders. Thus, Ball shows how middle-class parents have a kind of social capital that allows them to equip their children with the kind of contacts to permit them access to certain universities. Class identities and values are therefore still evident, even when they are not overt or self-conscious, and they become linked to forms of localised belonging. Thus, class struggle is not really eradicated in the new class society premised on middle class hegemony, it is displaced.

Ball's study will become a key reference point for future discussion. He opens up new vistas and questions. Of course, not all relevant issues are exhausted in this book. Ball's study is to some extent limited by not being able to show how the concerns of middle-class parental strategies actually feed through into their children's educational outcomes. The assumption is that the kind of reflexive middle-class strategising he exposes here is indeed effective in

allowing their children to perform well. While this is certainly plausible, it is not directly attested to here. There is also a sense of mis-match between Ball's interesting remarks

regarding the localisation of middle-class strategising linked to their concern to find the right school for their children, and the abstract style of his analysis. Although many of his sample are from London, he does not, for instance, explore whether there are distinctive metropolitan forces at work here (although he approvingly cites the work of Butler and Robson who do, by contrast, make precisely this point). The lack of a working-class 'control' group makes it difficult to be precisely sure that education markets fit onto class as neatly as it sounds here

(although to be fair to him, this is an issue that is explored in some of the co-authored work

arising from these projects). Power et al.'s study covers some similar terrain to Ball. They emphasise that large

numbers of the middle classes remain involved in the state sector and that the expansion of private schooling has in no way constituted it as normal for middle-class children.

They show that sending children to certain types of schools does not just entail giving them differential prospects for passing examinations, but also gives them different kinds of habitus and dispositions that affects their future trajectories. Thus, private and

grammar schools encourage pupils to pursue 'traditional academic' subjects at elite

universities, while middle-class state schools are more likely to send their pupils to less elite universities. Power et al. draw attention to the lack of any perception of class

inevitability in education, arguing that pupils themselves are often aware of risk and

uncertainty, and that some pupils do not do as well as expect. Yet this perception was not matched to their objective prospects. One of the most arresting features of Power et

al.'s study is their demonstration that it is almost impossible for the children of the middle classes to be downwardly mobile. Ninety-one per cent of children of fathers who had had

higher education themselves went into higher education, as did 93% of children with mothers who went into higher education. Instead, pupils who might be deemed



540 Review Essay

successful in objective terms construe themselves as failures. An interesting example of this

process is the way that pupils in some schools that had high numbers of Oxbridge entrants felt

they were failures for going to other universities, or even sometimes for being one of the large cohort applying to Oxbridge. These findings strengthen Ball's argument that there is no automatic conveyor belt transmitting class advantage, but that class position is individualised and has to be achieved. The result is that those involved in the education system themselves are only too aware of potential failure even while there are predictable patterns of success and failure. Any link between perception and reality is therefore weak.

One difference between Power et al. and Ball is the former's concern to differentiate the

middle class, to see what kind of internal fractions it may possess. This is one area where there is dialogue to be had with the 'orthodox' approach to class. Goldthorpe's approach, now enshrined in the new class schema, sees the key distinction as lying between the

professional and managerial service class and other classes, and in many respects this is in line with Ball, who emphasises the commonality of the middle class's relationship with education. Power et al., by contrast, subtly trace through different ways of conceptualising the middle class, differentiating them by assets (cultural, organisational, entrepreneurial), socio-economic class, field of production (differentiating between symbolic and material

production), and the public and private sector. Power et al. indicate that one meaningful differentiation is according to sector of employment: fathers working in the public sector are more likely to send their children to state schools, and those who went to private schools are somewhat more likely to work in the private sector. However, such statistics are problematic since Power et al.'s sample is skewed by their particular choice of schools, with the result that

they do not have a representative sample to allow them to generalise about the educational

profiles of different middle-class groups as a whole. Indeed, it is a shame that they did not

try more extensive triangulation of their (rather small) sample with those available in other data sets, for instance the British Household Panel Study or the various cohort studies. This would have been especially useful in the interesting analysis of their respondents transition from higher education into employment.

The stronger part of their analysis is when they focus on schools and their cultures. Here

they illuminatingly show how different schools invoke different types of expressive and instrumental values, and skilfully draw on Bernstein's analysis to explicate these differences. Private schools have strong instrumental cultures, as do the state grammar schools, while

comprehensive schools were more likely to have expressive values. These differences, which the authors map on to distinctions between old and new middle class, are interesting, but it is unfortunate that they are not traced through other aspects of educational transitions.

Conclusion

These three books do indeed indicate that a new kind of class paradigm, recognising the mutual constitution of markets, classes and individuals, is reaching maturity. This it of interest far beyond the sociology of education, and indeed has ramifications for the social

sciences more generally. This is not to say that these books can be read as definitive statements of such a paradigm. Theoretically, Bourdieu's work has been crucial in

constituting this new paradigm (and, indeed, he is a central reference point for these

books), yet it is not averse to criticism. Feminists have emphasised the limits of his

thought for registering the significance of gendered inequality, although certainly all three books are attentive to the interweaving of gender and class, with Ball, for instance

drawing on Reay's (2000) concept of emotional capital as a means of extending Bourdieu's work. There are still concerns that Bourdieu's work is determinist, since his



Review Essay 541

emphasis on the habitus might imply that people's dispositions are largely fixed. It is

certainly interesting that both Ball and Power et al. return to Bernstein, who perhaps offers a more subtle rendering of the relationship between class and individualisation than Bourdieu.

Bourdieu's social theory can be defended by insisting that the habitus needs to be

placed in the context of different fields, with the result that it can be dynamic. Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of a new kind of 'reflexive' habitus, in which the middle classes are not characterised by fixed tastes (Crossley, 2001, especially pp. 136-137). This would be compatible with the growing sociological literature on culture and consumption, which argues that the main class divide is not between 'high brow' and 'low brow', but between 'omnivores' and 'univores'. The former sample different genres, while the latter have unitary tastes (see Warde et al., 1999).

It can be suggested, then, that Bourdieu's work is subtle and wide ranging, and does indeed provide a robust foundation for the new paradigm. However, there is still a

danger that it depends on a kind of 'false-consciousness' perspective in which the weakness of working-class awareness is held to demonstrate the power of class. Bourdieu's account downplays the possible significance of popular cultural resources, by only dealing with working-class identities as stigmatised ones. Indeed, Archer et al. indicate some positive aspects of working-class identities. Certainly, without this more

positive reading, then the kind of story related in these books becomes extremely depressing, with no obvious indication of how the ongoing reproduction of the middle classes is to be seriously challenged. While both Ball and Power et al. emphasise that the middle classes feel insecure, the gist of their account is that this insecurity encourages reflexivity, and hence an enhanced ability to play the market effectively. It is not clear what politics, therefore, are linked to the new paradigm, other than a kind of fatalism that might actually further enhance the game-playing mentality.

Correspondence. Professor Mike Savage, Department of Sociology, University of

Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

NOTE

[1] Rather remarkably, I have had to extrapolate details about the timing of the survey from offhand comments.

REFERENCES

CHARLESWORTH, S. (2000) A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). CROSSLEY, N. (2001) The Social Body: habit, identity and desire (London, Sage). DEVINE, F., SAVAGE, M., CROMPTON, R. & ScoTT, J. (2003) Rethinking Class: cultures, identities and lifestyles

(Basingstoke Palgrave). ERIKSON, R. & GOLDTHORPE,J. H. (1992) The Constant Flux (Oxford, Clarendon). HEATH, A. (1985) How Britain Votes (Oxford, Pergamon). MARSHALL, G. (1997) Repositioning Class (Cambridge, Polity Press). MARSHALL, G., NEWBY, H., ROSE, D. & VOGLER, C. (1988) Social Class in Modern Britain (London, Hutchinson). REAY, D. (2000) A useful extension of Bourdieu's conceptual framework? Emotional capital as a way of

understanding mother's involvement in their children's education, Sociological Review, 48, pp. 568-585. ROSE, D. & PEVALIN, D. (2003) A Researchers Guide to the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classfication (London,

Sage). SAVAGE, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Milton Keynes, Open University Press). SKEGGS, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender (London, Sage). STRATHERN, M. (1990) After Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). WARDE, A., MARTENS, L. & OLSON, W. (1999) Consumption and the problem of variety: cultural omnivorous-

ness, social distinction and dining out, Sociology, 33, pp. 105-127.



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