Class Inequality in Austerity Britain

Power, Difference and Suffering

W. Atkinson, S. Roberts, M. Savage, W. Atkinson, S. Roberts, M. Savage

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349437016, 9781137016379
• eBook ISBN: 9781137016386
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010 in claimed it would deliver not just austerity, as necessary as that apparently was, but also fairness. This volume subjects this pledge to critical interrogation by exposing the interests behind the policy programme pursued and their damaging effects on class inequalities. Situated within a recognition of the longer-term rise of neoliberal politics, reflections on the status of sociology as a source of critique and current debates over the relationship between the cultural and economic dimensions of social class, the contributors cover an impressively wide range of relevant topics, from education, family policy and community to crime and consumption, shedding new light on the experience of domination in the early 21st Century.

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Introduction: A Critical Sociology of the Age of Austerity

Will Atkinson, Steven Roberts and Mike Savage

The last 15 years or so have witnessed an extraordinary revitalisation of sociological research on social class in Britain. For some time in the doldrums, under attack from within and without academia, it is now back high on the agenda thanks in large part to a progressive deepening of the theoretical scope of its core concept to grasp themes generally excluded from previous programmes of research. Class is not just about exploitation and economic inequalities, it is now established, but cultural and symbolic domination too; it is not just about life chances and ‘equality of opportunity’, but about self-worth, suffering and denigration as well; and it is tied not only to a politics of redistribution, as crucial as that is, but also, at the same time, a politics of recognition. In pursuing these themes the key source of inspiration for researchers has not been Karl Marx or Max Weber, the opposing couple at the heart of the sociology of class through most of the twentieth century, but the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu.¹ For this Frenchman, social class is defined not by relation to the means of production, nor by possession of particular skills and capacities in the labour market, but by the possession of all forms of economic capital (wealth and income), cultural capital (education and ‘good taste’) and social capital (contacts, networks, names, club membership, etc.) which together shape the kinds of experience it is possible to have, the kinds of goods and opportunities it is possible to attain and the kinds of people one is likely to have regular contact with, and, in turn, the expectations, values, desires, tastes and lifestyles developed in adaptation. Far from all being bestowed with equal value, however, those possessing the most resources, and the most power, impose their own way of life – educational or economic accomplishment, being ‘cultivated’, ‘well-mannered’, self-interested and so on – as the legitimate, worthy and ultimately right way to do things, denigrating those not possessing the material conditions necessary for their achievement. This process Bourdieu famously dubbed ‘symbolic violence’.

For all its advances, however, this new direction in class analysis has been accused by some hanging on to older frameworks, less taken by Bourdieu’s ideas, of unjustifiably sidelining – not simply through choice of research object but in theoretical principle – economic inequalities, differences in life chances, the machinations of the business and political elite and the convulsions of capitalism.² It may well be supposed, therefore, that it is essentially powerless to understand or effectively critique the causes and consequences of not only the severe economic downturn of the late 2000s and the pervasive political climate of austerity that has followed in the UK but the larger global neoliberal movement from which they both spring. This volume aims to resolutely refute this claim and make the case that frameworks inspired to greater and lesser degrees by Bourdieu – including those developed by Loic Wacquant and Beverley Skeggs – not only can grasp and censure the current political-economic juncture but must. They can because differences in economic capital and power have always been fundamental to Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of conditions of life, the formation of tastes and lifestyles, likely trajectories through the class structure and possibilities of action, as have the forces of the capitalist economic field in producing them, it is just that they remain inextricably entwined with the fundamental human quest for recognition and, with that, symbolic power. Consider, for example, the fact that – contrary to Bourdieu’s critics who chastise him for presuming ‘high culture’ is necessarily the legitimated form of culture – symbolic domination is always a question of the precise balance of power between the dominant (economic) and dominated (cultural) fraction of the dominant class. In twenty-first century Britain, could it be that the economic fraction – comprised not only of business owners but of a fusion of higher managers and top-level professional too³ – has succeeded in asserting its dominance more than ever and thus further (though not entirely) imposed its hedonistic, materialistic lifestyle as the legitimate one, a move which yields a double victory insofar as they attain greater symbolic recognition at the same time as efforts by others to approximate them by purchasing the goods and services they produce or administer return evermore economic capital to them (profits, bonuses, shares)? Moreover, a Bourdieusian strand of research dedicated to mapping the structure and practices of the ‘elite’ – or the ‘field of power’ containing individuals from the economic field as well as from the intellectual field, political field and so on, all contending to impose their definition of the world, and the policies necessary to achieve it, as legitimate – is beginning to flourish.⁴

They must, on the other hand, because sociology is, as Norbert Elias⁵ claimed, a myth buster, tearing down prevailing misconceptions and folk beliefs, not least, as Bourdieu⁶ added, the myths wielded by the dominant and perpetuating the reproduction of inequality. Sociology is thus a means of defence against symbolic domination (which, among other things, sustains material domination) and the current tropes mobilised by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government of ‘fairness’ and compulsory austerity, as extensions of neoliberal orthodoxy, should be no exception. The ideas underpinning government rhetoric must, therefore, be scrutinised, the real effects of the 2008 recession and coalition policy must be demonstrated through rigorous empirical research and the true winners of the current political-economic moment must be unmasked. In short, Marxism, for all its insights, does not have a monopoly on the study of the economic dimension of class, nor does it, as Erik Olin Wright⁷ seems to imply in his categorisation of versions of class analysis, possess a monopoly on critique of the current order in the service of bringing a better tomorrow.

In this volume, then, we have brought together a range of rigorous yet engaged interventions, in the form of original research pieces or critical overviews of policy or evidence, from scholars united by their guiding interest in exposing the operations of class domination with reference to Bourdieusian themes yet covering a wide assortment of specialist areas. Broad concerns with the economic and symbolic violence inflicted on and through education, family life and community in the present and recent past weave through more or less every chapter, but the precise themes explored include the stratified impact of the late 2000s recession and austerity on family life and consumption (Atkinson), the deleterious effects of schools policy and cuts (Reay), the likely impact of the hike in higher education tuition fees given the disadvantages already suffered by working-class university students (Bradley and Ingram), the barriers to and denigration of working-class aspirations (Roberts and Evans), the myopic construction of parenting policy (Gillies), the economic and symbolic marginalisation of the most deprived sections of the working class and its role in the genesis of proscribed activity and the summer riots of 2011 (Clement, McKenzie) and the ignorance and hypocrisy of claims that communities in the UK are ‘broken’ (Savage), with Andrew Sayer offering an analysis of the rise of the new rentier class as a salutary reminder not to take our sociological gaze off those at the top in examining the suffering of those at the bottom. Ultimately, by pooling our expertise and acting as something more like the ‘collective intellectual’ of which Bourdieu spoke, we hope to offer a more thoroughgoing and comprehensive assessment and, with that, more effective critique of the bearing of current political practice on both conditions of existence and ways of seeing the world. This is robust scholarship, in other words, but in service of the commitment to contributing to political and popular debate to the best of our abilities.⁸

In the rest of this introductory chapter we want to sketch out the socio-historical context for the contributions and, in doing so, follow through on our claim that a Bourdieusian sociology of class possesses the means to make sense of not only the consequences of the current nexus of relations of domination but its genesis too. Specifically, and though constraints of space mean the overview will be suggestive rather than exhaustive, the hope being that it might spur further analysis, we seek to embed the economic crisis and its political fallout within an account of the rise and persistence in Britain of neoliberalism, not as simply an economic model easily imposed by a capitalist elite to serve their interests, as for Marxism, nor – for all its useful insights on the diffusion and reworking of neoliberal categories of thought in multiple contexts – as the overly fluid and decentralised cluster of ‘techniques’ examined by advocates of governmentality.⁹ Instead, the birth of the neoliberal creed and its various articulations, it will be shown, are anchored in the complex struggles and strategies (in Bourdieu’s sense) within and across a specific cluster of fields diffusing their effects into everyday life via multitudinous circuits of symbolic power.

The neoliberal revolution

On the 11^th of May 2010, David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party since 2005, was invited by Queen Elizabeth II to form a new government, ending thereby 13 years of New Labour power. Within weeks an ‘emergency budget’ was put together seeking, it was said, to rein in the excessive spending recklessly pursued by Gordon Brown’s shortlived administration, slash the bloated budget deficit and steadily navigate the choppy tides whipped up by worldwide recession. At the same time, however, this new government, incorporating an electorallybattered Liberal Democrat Party, sought to couple the new atmosphere of austerity with a determined rhetoric of fairness. Indeed, the official ‘coalition agreement’ penned by a small cabal of like-minded leading lights of both parties has the word boldly emblazoned on its third page in large type alongside ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, presenting it as a cornerstone of joint governance, and is crammed with warm words to the effect that the Prime Minister and his Deputy, Nick Clegg, will ‘ensure fairness is at the heart of those decisions’ on how to cut spending ‘so that those most in need are protected’ and ‘everyone, regardless of background, has the chance to rise as high as their talents and ambition allow them’.¹⁰ Despite this rhetoric, however, in the emergency budget and beyond the coalition have scrapped or whittled down those existing programmes which, however meagre and superficial, were aimed at reducing economic and educational inequalities, such as the Educational Maintenance Allowance – the payment to pupils entering post-compulsory schooling as a means of lessening the demands of economic necessity – and the Future Jobs Fund – the programme of subsidised youth employment. Notable too that, as new means of raising revenue, they have pushed up tax on consumption (VAT) rather than tax on income, which is known to hit those earning less disproportionately, allowed universities to triple tuition fees and sought to ‘reform’ the welfare system by reducing payments and imposing tougher criteria for receipt. Who exactly this is supposed to be ‘fair’ for is far from clear.

The shift from prosperity to austerity, however, and from New Labour to the coalition government, whilst offering so many ruptures and transformations in political practice to everyday perception, are in fact relatively small, though not insignificant, details in a much longerrunning articulation of state, economy and society sustaining and deepening domination – an articulation best grasped in terms of the ascent of neoliberalism, the economic-cum-political doctrine extolling the virtues of unfettered market forces and rapid state shrinkage. Before the 1970s it was confined, albeit obstreperously, to a marginal corner of the field of academic and political economics, overshadowed in all respects by Keynesianism, the economic model advocating active state regulation of markets and a robust public sector in the pursuit of growth and prosperity, but by the end of the decade a dramatic revolution in a multitude of national economic and political fields – those of the UK being first among them – had installed it as the orienting principle of statecraft and set the course for global diffusion. Fundamental to this upheaval, of course, was the shattering anomie in political-economics induced by mounting unemployment and surging inflation (together known as ‘stagflation’) in the early seventies. The products of a steady intensification of global economic transactions undermining assumptions born decades earlier – brought to a head with the collapse of the consensual system of international exchange controls (the Bretton Woods agreement) and the subsequent Arab oil embargo of 1973 following pro-Israeli US intervention in the Yom Kippur war – from a Keynesian point of view it was believed that these two phenomena simply could not occur together and required completely contradictory solutions (i.e. government spending and saving).

Yet neoliberalism eventually succeeded in this climate not thanks to simple rational progress – after all, a whole batch of ‘neo-Keynesians’ were desperately trying to rework the master’s model in order to conserve their position – but, instead, as a consequence of three interlinked strategies of subversion tenaciously pursued by its proponents to counter their domination in the field of economics.¹¹ First of all, they pushed a progressive mathematicisation, soon succeeding, through relentless one-upmanship against econometricians, in imposing statistical prowess as a novel criterion of intellectual credibility within the field with which to discredit the ‘gentleman scholars’ of Keynesianism. Secondly, academic advocates of neoliberal thought ardently engaged in vulgarisation, that is to say, the persistent courting of the sympathetic sectors of the media and political fields, manifest in the endless editorials, newspaper columns, debates and meetings, which forced them to hone their capacities in ideological debate and package their credo in ‘common sense’ ways. Thirdly, and most importantly, there was the drive toward internationalisation, or the constant determination to overcome marginalisation within one national context by fostering homologies in manifold nations across the globe through specific networks of individuals (e.g. the Mont Pelerin Society, the Chilean ‘Chicago Boys’) and the founding of think-tanks such as, in the UK, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute.

Indeed, it was from these quasi-academic bases that the advocates of neoliberalism endeavoured to impose their construction of the world on the British political field, particularly through the Conservative Party. However, the latter being itself a fractious system of difference and division, while neoliberal economists certainly appealed to the interests of and thus forged concrete links with particular members (e.g. future kingmaker Keith Joseph), the dominant fraction led by Ted Heath, Prime Minister in the early seventies, generally upheld the rapidly crumbling Keynesian orthodoxy. Only with his electoral defeat in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: A Critical Sociology of the Age of Austerity
• 2 Economic Crisis and Classed Everyday Life: Hysteresis, Positional Suffering and Symbolic Violence
• 3 ‘We never get a fair chance’: Working-Class Experiences of Education in the Twenty-First Century
• 4 Banking on the Future: Choices, Aspirations and Economic Hardship in Working-Class Student Experience
• 5 ‘Aspirations’ and Imagined Futures: The Im/possibilities for Britain’s Young Working Class
• 6 Personalising Poverty: Parental Determinism and the Big Society Agenda
• 7 The Urban Outcasts of the British City
• 8 The Stigmatised and De-valued Working Class: The State of a Council Estate
• 9 Broken Communities?
• 10 Facing the Challenge of the Return of the Rich
• 11 Conclusion: Three Challenges to the Exportation of Sociological Knowledge
• Select Bibliography
• Index