Abstract
Sociological research on social mobility in Britain has been proceeding down two different tracks for some time now. On the one hand there is the established Nuffield tradition, launched in the 1970s and 1980s by John Goldthorpe and his colleagues at the University of Oxford and anchored in a broadly Weberian approach to class. On the other there is a rather different strand of research that emerged in the 1990s and has steadily gathered steam thereafter – a strand often inclined towards examining the experience of social mobility through qualitative methods and typically mobilising Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus to make sense of it (see, for example, Lawler and Payne, 2017; Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997). Now, within months of each other, two landmark texts standing broadly within each tradition have been published and provide an opportunity to consider the condition and direction of the field.
Erzsébet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe’s Social Mobility and Education in Britain continues the Nuffield tradition. In many ways the book is an update and elaboration, using newer birth cohort studies, of Goldthorpe’s (1980) earlier pioneering work. There are, therefore, evident continuities in approach: the authors use the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC), an approximation of the class scheme Goldthorpe developed in the 1970s, and log-modelling – accompanied by some brief biographical sketches – is their favoured method for core analyses. There are differences too, however, not least their intention to produce a multidimensional account of social mobility. Class origin is still a major independent variable, but parental status and education are also factored in as means to untangle the effects of economic, social and cultural resources in helping people get on or holding them back.
Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s major arguments are as follows. First, while it is true that downwards mobility has surged in recent decades following slowed growth of the salariat class, relative rates of mobility – the chances of someone in one class being socially mobile compared to people in other classes – have remained more or less constant over the same period and, moreover, class background still seems to be key (Chapters 2–4). Second, when examining the relationship between social mobility and education it emerges that parental class and education are fundamental to success within and beyond the school and university and far outweigh the effect of demonstrated cognitive ability (Chapters 5–9). The prevailing political focus on educational expansion as the solution to inequality is thus shown to be flawed and, in all probability, a means to legitimise neoliberal economics.
In contrast to Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s familiar tools and arguments, Friedman and Laurison’s book is without a doubt the most wide-ranging and envelope-pushing representative to date of the newer, Bourdieu-inspired line of research on social mobility. Following the renewed intellectual interest in the top slice of society in recent years, the pair are concerned specifically with social mobility into elite professions in Britain and, unlike many others within the Bourdieu stream hitherto, they deploy both qualitative and quantitative methods to try and explain disparities.
The first part of the book establishes, via analysis of the Labour Force Survey, not only the stark differences in chances of accessing the top professions by class background but the sizeable ‘class pay gap’ within professions (Chapters 1–2). Put simply, those from working-class backgrounds tend to earn less than their counterparts from more advantaged origins. Level and status of education, being based in London or not and being employed in a large and prestigious organisation as opposed to a smaller player seem to contribute to this, but they are hardly the full story (Chapter 3). To push the analysis further, therefore, Friedman and Laurison introduce their qualitative data: interviews with 175 people drawn from specific case-study employers or groups (Chapter 4). These are a national television broadcaster, an accountancy firm, an architectural practice and self-employed actors. First, Friedman and Laurison establish that those from working-class backgrounds tend not to be found in the higher-paying roles or departments of their respective organisations. This, they posit, is the reason for the class pay gap – it is not that people are being paid unequally for the same work, but that there is a ‘class ceiling’ preventing people from working-class backgrounds rising to the higher echelons of their professions. The next five chapters are devoted to unravelling the causes of this class ceiling. Key here are parental finances (economic capital), support from likeminded senior figures (social capital), ease and familiarity with high culture (cultural capital), a sense of (ill-)fit with the class-based culture of the organisation and self-elimination, as those from working-class backgrounds, intuiting the barriers and judgements they would face, moderate their career aspirations (habitus).
Both studies, then, clearly undermine any notion that Britain today is a meritocracy or that educational expansion has served to promote social mobility. Both are based on rigorous and detailed empirical analyses using large-scale datasets, and both aim to break out of the academic bubble and gain wider traction. There is no ignoring the fact, however, that the two studies sit in rival intellectual traditions, one old and venerable, the other new and developing, and that beneath the shared general message there are significant conceptual and procedural disagreements. It might even be argued that their assured prominence means they serve as beacon-like indicators of the overall state and likely course of the field – the tensions and antagonisms, the old guard and the newcomers, the orthodoxy and the heterodoxy. For their part, Friedman and Laurison, figures from the newer generation, are respectful towards the Nuffield tradition but intent on going their own way. Bukodi and Goldthorpe, on the other hand, are evidently unimpressed with the Bourdieusian strand of research. They are dismissive of qualitative studies, openly reject Friedman’s previous work on the psychological costs of social mobility and warn that the focus on elite recruitment can lead to misplaced and excessive conclusions (pp. 9–10, 33, 86–88). Friedman and Laurison would doubtless respond that the narrower and broader foci should be seen as complementary rather than competitive, but it is also abundantly clear that the fine-grained multi-method approach they advocate, looking at entry into and progression within specific professional fields, reveals substantial regularities – like the class pay gap and the intra-field class ceiling – and specific mechanisms – like the effects of habitus and taste – hidden by reliance on the NS-SEC and statistical analysis alone.
Perhaps most remarkable, though, is the degree to which Bukodi and Goldthorpe appear to surreptitiously adopt Bourdieusian themes. It is not just that their discussions of the unintended effects of educational expansion and notions like ‘counter mobility’ and ‘glass floors/ceilings’ frequently evoke (without invoking) passages from Distinction on the varying effects of the post-war schooling boom on trajectories (Bourdieu, 1984). Despite Goldthorpe being famously hostile towards the notion of cultural capital (see Goldthorpe, 2007), he too has to acknowledge the power of parental and acquired education – the prime proxies for cultural capital – in shaping people’s pathways alongside economic resources; he and Bukodi recognise that measured cognitive ability, with all its impact on journeys through the class structure, is likely to be bound up to a large degree with the class milieu of one’s childhood; and at more than one juncture he and Bukodi draw approvingly on the famous Bourdieu-inspired work of Annette Lareau (2003) to postulate the existence of middle-class parental strategies to ensure the educational success of their children. Bukodi and Goldthorpe ground the latter in the psychology of ‘loss aversion’, but their discussion is in harmony with Bourdieu’s focus on educational strategies. For Bourdieu these strategies stemmed from the habitus, of course, whereas Goldthorpe has, in the past, dismissed that idea in favour of rational action theory (something largely sidelined in the new book). Yet Friedman and Laurison cogently demonstrate, through their excellent qualitative work, what statistical analysis alone, or paired with cursory biographical stories, never could: the attunement of expectations and aspirations to the intuited possibilities and impossibilities furnished by capital possession – the feel for the game that is definitive of habitus, in other words. Despite their explicit denunciation of the newer generation, therefore, could it be that the Nuffield troops continue their march only by covertly giving ground or neglecting the methods and orientations that corroborate the alternative construction of the object under investigation?
