Class Strategies and the Education Market

The Middle Classes and Social Advantage

Stephen J. Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134483525
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Class Strategies and the Education Market examines the ways in which the middle classes maintain and improve their social advantages in and through education.
Drawing on an extensive series of interviews with parents and children, this book identifies key moments of decision making in the construction of the educational trajectories of middle class children. Stephen J. Ball organises his analysis around the key concepts of social closure, social capital, values and principles and risk, while bringing a broad range of up-to-date sociological theory to bear upon his subject. From this thorough analysis, valuable and thought-provoking insights emerge into the assiduous care and considerable effort and expenditure which goes into ensuring the educational success of the middle class child
The middle classes are a sociological enigma, presenting the social researcher with considerable analytic and theoretical difficulties. Class Strategies and the Education Market provides a set of working tools for class analysis and the examination of class practices. Above all, it offers new ways of thinking about class theory and the relationships between classes in late modern society.

1: Introduction Between structure and hermeneutics

Of course, personal initiative is the hallmark of the middle classes …

(Lockwood 1995: 10)

… the middle class has in many ways been the central symbol of twentiethcentury life in the west, a reflection of western anxieties and hopes …

(Owensby 1999: 11)

This introduction is an exercise of meta-writing, an attempt to draw some lines and limits around a piece of work that constantly goes beyond itself and at every turn ‘stumbles against what it does not mean’ (Foucault 1974: 17). I therefore want to draw these lines in particular by accounting for what this book is not about, what it does not do. In this respect I shall endeavour, perhaps fruitlessly, to clarify the standpoints from which the book is written and guide the reader towards a position from which the book might be read as eclectic but nonetheless coherent. I do this in part because the book has some unconventional aspects to it, although in another sense it is a throw-back, a re-invention of old themes and concerns from within the sociology of education – in particular the multifaceted relationships between families, public institutions and educational inequalities. In this introduction then I will sketch in the general orientations of the project; specific aspects of these orientations are taken up in more detail in later chapters. Each of the substantive chapters focuses upon one or more key themes and works on these in interaction with empirical materials.

This is a book written between rather than against.¹, It defines itself as different from rather than opposed to and I am certainly not ‘trying to reduce others to silence’ (Foucault 1974: 17). Neither is this an attempt to have the last word, far from it; no closure is sought or claimed and I will be working on rather than closing off these concepts. It is intended to be read as a set of statements to be worked on, to be developed further in relation to an obdurate and brute reality. My project here has a particular concern with ‘appraising concepts as possibilities for future thinking’ (Colebrook 2000: 5).

… the peculiar difficulty of sociology, then, is to produce a precise science of an imprecise, fuzzy, woolly reality. For this it is better that its concepts be polymorphic, supple and adaptable, rather than defined, calibrated and used rigidly.

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 23)

I am interested in subtleties and nuances here rather than stark and distinct patterns and relationships, indeed this is not a field of analysis that lends itself to that sort of style of interpretation – if you are looking for some kind of clear-cut class story of stark oppressions and determinisms then you are reading the wrong book. To use a sociological cliché, this account is addressed primarily to ‘the revelation of complexity within cultural processes’ (Watson 1993: 193). In good part, as I have indicated, the task of the book is the assembly of a toolbox of analytic possibilities rather than the display of findings. It is a cautious and stumbling text. It is a pragmatic or synthetic sociology rather than an ideological one. It is about exploring the way ‘the social’ works. It is about mapping rather than explaining. There is no pristine theoretical exposition to be displayed nor any avantgarde posturing. I am attempting to gather together and elaborate a particular package of concepts, or a ‘moral vocabulary’ (Parkin 1979: 115) that may be useful for ‘the exercise of making things intelligible’ (114). In articulating this vocabulary I have sought, as far as possible, to escape from the seductive simplicities and the ‘comforts of certainty’ (Stronach and MacLure 1997) offered by the binary. Both in class research and in qualitative analysis binaries have a certain obviousness to them. But binaries can obscure as much, if not more, than they reveal; they avoid complexity and divert our attention from what lies between, that which is neither one thing nor the other. This text is littered with the promises and pitfalls of the dual classification and not all of these are eschewed but neither are they indulged in without care. Finally, the division of the text into chapters does not indicate neat divisions nor a linear narrative. Indeed, as you will see, the issues addressed and concepts deployed interweave, elaborate and build upon one another.

This text is, then, a hybrid. It is part empirical; data are deployed in various ways – sometimes to illustrate, sometimes to demonstrate, sometimes to speculate and I shall endeavour to be clear about which is which. The aim is to achieve a degree of plausibility. The text is also, as already noted, in part conceptual. I am attempting to define, develop and relate together a set of concepts which offers ‘perspective’ in understanding the complex relationships between social class and social justice in contemporary educational settings with a specific focus on the middle class. I shall focus on the rhythm and murmur of middle-class voices; their changing cadences and concerns, their expression of dilemmas and ambivalences. These are voices of confidence and uncertainty, which are sometimes also confused, voices which are articulate, persuasive and authoritative but also careful, measured and thoughtful. These voices are quoted at length in the text, in part because of what they tell us about class practices but also because they are a medium of practice. The middle class gets things done at home, work and in engagement with ‘expert systems’ through talk of a particular sort. They represent and perform themselves as moral subjects, as efficacious social actors and as classed agents, through talk.

I shall be working across the surfaces of class and trying to eventualize class. This is one form of what Savage (2000: 41) calls ‘a kind of “strategic inductivism”’. My focus is on key moments of anxiety, fear, action and efficacy, on the micropractices of social reproduction, and on the situated enactment of class skills, resources, dispositions, attitudes and expectations. These are moment of ordinariness and exclusivity (Savage 2000). I shall be dealing with tendencies and patterns here, and dominant discourses, but, where I can, I shall avoid trading in a simple essentialism of the middle-class subject. I am certainly not dealing here with a set of mindless inevitabilities – again complexity is favoured over parsimony. Thus, I am interested in the power and usefulness of exceptions and spend some time, at various points, on these. Also this is not an exercise in methodological individualism; my individuals are thoroughly embedded in social relations. I am interested in the ways in which ‘class structures are instantiated in people’s lives’ (Savage 2000: 150). I am seeking to excavate and interrogate the common sense and the naturalness which underpins individual reasoning and practices, what Eder (1993: 9) calls the ‘cultural texture’ of class ‘that is prior to the motivations of actors and their individual class actions’.² In all this I am very conscious of Bourdieu’s warning that:

… the perfectly commendable wish to see things in person, close up, sometimes leads people to search for the explanatory principles of observed realities where they are not to be found (not all of them in any case) namely, the site of observation itself.

(Bourdieu et al. 1999: 181)

This is also a further development of my work towards a policy sociology and more specifically the ‘policy cycle’ (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992; Ball 1994; Ball 1997b). This account focuses on particular moments in the policy cycle and the practices of policy enacted by groups of parents who are ‘called up’ by and ‘into’ policy as ‘choosers’ and ‘consumers’ of education. Each of these moments is represented by a different corpus of data, drawn from different research studies (see Appendix I). These moments are major points of transition and differentiation at which times key class resources are brought into play and issues of identity, responsibility and aspiration are up front. When advantage is at stake, I suggest, habitus comes fleetingly into view. In effect we have the possibility of seeing the same children and same parents in action at four different points of transition in the education/ care system – arranging pre-school child care, the move from primary to secondary school, compulsory to post-compulsory education, and the choice of higher education. At these points classed capitals and dispositions engage with classed policy regimes and, I shall argue, are differently legitimated and privileged. I shall also consider the relationships between middle-class parents and the state in other respects.

I am working hard here to embed education within broader trends of social change and changes in the class structure – and thus to relate the field of education to general social theory and class analysis. I draw heavily on Bourdieu throughout, and Parkin (1979) and Brown (2000) (see Chapter 2), and Crook (1999) in Chapter 7, and Jordan, Redley and James (1994) are key interlocutors in Chapter 6, as is Savage (2000) in Chapter 8 and elsewhere. In passing, I refer to Giddens’ (1994) and Beck’s (1992) work on individualism but express a number of concerns about the generality of their theorizing and their failure to recognize the relational nature of identity formation. I suggest that they give inadequate attention to the different ways in which different social groups are confronted by ‘systemic contradictions’ and the uneven distribution of resources, of different kinds, which enable reflection and choice, despite some passing disclaimers.

I have to say that I am not making, indeed cannot make, any kind of clear and simple argument claiming that the processes and perspectives that are described here are different from before. Nonetheless, at times this may be a logical and valid interpretation based upon the data presented – at least that which represents the perceptions of parents. In this respect, as we shall see, there are both continuities and differences to be addressed. Before-andafter comparisons are not my main concern here. What I am doing primarily is to indicate how things are within the current regime of policy in education. However, I am arguing that various conditions and contexts encourage or hail certain actions and attitudes in a different way from before (see Chapters 2 and 7).

For the middle classes it is the best of times and the worst of times; a time of affluence and risk, opportunity and congestion, celebration and anxiety. As always by definition this is a class-between, a class beset with contradictions and uncertainties. As Ehrenreich (1989: 15) puts it: ‘If this is an elite, then, it is an insecure and deeply anxious one’. Roberts (2001: 162) echoes this, suggesting that ‘the present day middle class is anxious rather than complacent and comfortable’. And yet, this was ever so. Lewis and Maude (1950: 273) wrote that ‘the attitude of the middle classes towards the future is much what the attitude of the individual breadwinner always is: an amalgam of dread and confidence’, and the ‘middle classes are beset with worries. But this is no new sensation’ (288). The combination of dread and confidence is a recurring theme in this book (see also Owensby’s, 1999, account of the Brazilian middle class).

In some respects, as noted already, as a recasting of the sociology of education this exercise is a return to the beginnings of work on class inequalities in the 1950s and 1960s, with its emphasis on locating the motor of inequality within the family (Craft 1970; Douglas 1964; Floud, Halsey and Marton 1956). While I would not want to turn back the clock as far as underplaying the role of institutional differentiation and other social factors in producing educational inequalities, there has been a neglect of the actions of families, and particular family members, in recent times (with a few exceptions like Crozier 2000; David 1993; Vincent 2000 and Reay 1998b). We now have the theoretical resources which enable attention to be paid to the differences within and between families without an immediate collapse into social pathology. According to Nash (1990: 446):

Through Bourdieu’s work we have been able to reconstruct a theory of the family and recover the centrality of family resources to educational differentiation within a radical context which allays fears of a retreat into cultural deficit theory.

Why are the middle classes interesting? In part simply because they constitute a major contemporary phenomenon in their own right. They are worthy of attention because they are there. Because there are so many of them: ‘The middle class is now Britain’s second largest; it is pressing on the heels of the working class and accounts for roughly a third of the population’ (Roberts 2001: 141). But further they are of particular importance within the sociology of education within education, because their actions produce or contribute to the perpetuation, inscription and reinvention of social inequalities both old and new. New forms of old inequalities and new forms of inequality. As Savage (2000: 159) argues:

If there is still a role for class analysis it is to continue to emphasize the brute realities of social inequality and the extent to which these are constantly effaced by a middle class, individualized culture that fails to register the social implications of its routine actions.

With more than a little over-simplification contemporary work on social class takes three main forms: class theory, the attempt to define classes theoretically, and recently to incorporate race and gender within such definitions (Anthias 2001; Crompton 1997); class analysis (or social stratification), the attempt to establish and operationalize systems of class categories, ‘who belongs where’, which can then be used for various kinds of correlational, comparative or mobility research (Goldthorpe 1980; Goldthorpe 1996; Halsey, Heath and Ridge 1980); and class practices, which incorporates a variety of work ranging from consumption research, work on identity, workplace studies and experiences of oppression, inequality and social reproduction – the last includes recent auto/biographical work on working-class girls ‘made bad’ (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997). Looking from the outside in on all of this is a more recent critical tradition which explores the demise of class (see Crompton 1998 for a definitive overview and below). However, within all of this, despite the recent upsurge of empirical interest in the middle classes, alongside a long-standing debate around the issues of definition and theorizing (see Scott 2000 for a good account), there is relatively little empirical or conceptual development around middle-class practices apart from the important work done by Savage and Butler and their colleagues and one or two others (e.g. Butler and Savage 1995; Savage, Barlow, Dickens and Fielding 1992; Savage 2000; Sulkunen 1992; Wynne 1998; Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody 2001 and Power, Edwards, Whitty and Wigfall 2002). This text engages neither with class analysis (boxes) nor class theory (abstraction). The focus is upon class practices. Specifically, this study contributes to a body of recent work which is attempting to return to an emphasis on the lived realities, the situated realizations, of class and class reproduction (Butler and Robson 2002a; Butler and Robson 2002b; Jordan, Redley and James 1994; Maguire 2001; Reay 1998b, etc.). I also locate myself theoretically and take up issues laid out within what Brown (2000) calls Positional Conflict Theory (see Chapter 2). As such my discursive terrain is hemmed in on all sides by analytic niceties and categorization systems, theoretical fideism, and postmodern scepticism – the idea that class is no longer that important.

Concepts of class, class analysis and class society are, as Pakulski and Waters (1996: 2) validly claim, ‘notoriously vague and tenuously stretched’ and as they go on to say: ‘The debate about classes combines issues of semantics and substance’ (2). Indeed the conceptual and methodological quagmires in which class is embedded often means that ‘one hardly knows what one is talking about’ (Foucault 1996: 447). So let me try to be clear. I shall be using and troubling these concepts at the same time. Holding some ambivalence towards the usefulness of class, set against a very strong sense of the presence of class within the politics and practices of contemporary education. In writing this classness into being I will inevitably give emphasis to its facticity. My topic becomes a resource.

I take it that class ‘is something that happens (and it can be shown to have happened) in a human relationship’ (Thompson 1980: 8–9). Class here is an identity and a lifestyle, and a set of perspectives on the social world and relationships in it, marked by varying degrees of reflexivity. Identities, lifestyles, perspectives and relationships are ‘constituted in the course of collective history’ and ‘acquired in the course of individual history’, which ‘function in their practical state’ (Bourdieu 1986a: 467). Class, in this sense, is productive and reactive. It is an identity based upon modes of being and becoming or escape and forms of distinction that are realized and reproduced in specific social locations. Certain locations are sought out, others are avoided. We think and are thought by class. It is about being something and not being something else. It is relational. Class is also a trajectory, a path through space and time, a ‘history of transactions’ (Walzer 1984). We are not always the same, or always able to be the same. Our current sense of who we are may be deeply invested in once having been someone different or wanting to be someone else in the future. Similar class positions are held and experienced differently, and have different histories. Class positions and perspectives are produced from and invested with the traces of earlier choices, improvizations and opportunities as well as being inflected by chance. Transactions are cumulative; ‘aspects of action and interaction are constantly being negotiated, reformulated, modified and so on as a result of experience’ (Devine 1997: 9). Each new choice or point of decision is confronted with assets or capital (economic, social and cultural) to be exchanged or invested; for an individual or a family volumes of capital may be ‘increasing, decreasing or stationary’ (Bourdieu 1986a: 120). Advantages in the form of capitals can be stored and accumulated for future use (Lee 1993). In other words, I take class to be dynamic and emergent, as Savage (2000: 69) puts it ‘people now have to achieve their class positions’. As such, reproduction is never guaranteed and mobility, up or down, is always possible (see Chapter 4). Such mobility is both contingently and strategically dependent. Here class and class inequalities are treated and ‘understood dynamically’ (Savage 2000: 69) as ‘a longitudinal process rather than a cross sectional one’, but nonetheless the analysis here primarily addresses the issue of the relative stability of class relations – stable and static are not the same: ‘real world classes are constantly being constructed around us, people are constantly doi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Between Structure and Hermeneutics
• 2: Class and Strategy
• 3: Class and Policy
• 4 Social Class as Social Closure: A Strategic Approach
• 5: Social Capital, Social Class and Choice
• 6 Values and Principles: Social Justice in the Head
• 7: Risk, Uncertainty and Fear
• 8: Class Practices and Inequality
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes
• Bibliography