Abstract
Over the last 50 years, the number of professional occupations has expanded and higher education has done likewise to provide the labour supply. In a meritocracy, bright working class youth go to university, acquire degrees and enter these middle class occupations and so gain social mobility. This book explores that experience.
Matthys’s focus is the life course and careers of university graduates born into working class families in the Netherlands and Belgium (Flanders). Data is drawn from in-depth interviews with 32 male and female respondents employed in a range of occupations. They are asked to retrospectively make sense of their working lives through the prism of their class origins. It is a study of their subjective experience and the construction of their identities as they transitioned from the working to the middle class. It is an ‘inside out’ study, Matthys says. If existing research has focused on external, structural factors, his intention is to emphasize individual agency with the ‘accent […] on individual active formation of the social context and the social position within’ (p. 15). The author is one of his subject group and in the wrong hands the book (after the popular newsstand magazine) could have turned into ‘Cosmopolitan Sociology’ – all about me; an autobiographical search for meaning and self-validation. While the start of the book is personal exposition, it quickly moves into being an important study of ‘the other’, derived not from gender or sexuality but class.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide lengthy discussion of the relevant debates and theories about the expansion of higher education, social mobility and identity. A sense of belonging and its contribution to identity is central to Matthys’s thesis as he draws on Mead, Parsons, Bourdieu and Giddens. Subsequent empirical chapters chronologically examine the life course of his subjects through family, school, labour market entry and career development (chapters 4–7). The final chapters (chapters 8 and 9) return to the issue of agency in this working life course and emergent issues for future research.
The early years’ development of Matthys’s subjects followed a common pattern: traditional but happy working class homes with strong, ambitious mothers, absent fathers and peer jealousy of their intellect. They often struggled at university, dropped into the deep end of a new culture for which they were not equipped and lacking support or advice from their parents, for whom university was alien. In any case parents and school friends receded in influence and could even be hostile to their new student ways.
Having gained the necessary human capital for the professions, Matthys’s subjects then found their lack of the appropriate cultural and social capital limited their careers. Sometimes stigmatized at work, they quickly realized these capitals’ absence can rarely be made good and they were often inhibited from fulfilling their potential. ‘Being good is not enough to be accepted at the top’, says one. ‘You have to be resigned to function in the periphery’ (p. 174). They feel like and are treated like imposters; betrayed by their accents, attitudes and manners. ‘I’m respected’, says another, ‘but I’m an outsider and that message is subtly conveyed’ (p. 175). Moreover, while they are projected into the middle class by their job titles, they are ambivalent about it; attracted to middle class lifestyles but repelled by and dismissive of middle class ways of being at work, specifically the political game playing.
Despite their marginalization, his subjects work hard, usually harder than their colleagues from middle class origins. They become workaholics. Matthys claims that gaining task expertise can lever a ‘synthesis’ of working and middle class being. Judging by the evidence, however, it might be more accurate to suggest that his subjects are cut adrift in terms of class, estranged from both their social origins and their social destination. Work might be a bridge from one class but it does not quite extend to the other.
Here there is a simultaneous duality of, on the one hand, individual agency as his subjects claim to have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and, on the other, de-individualization as the host class rejects these efforts and sees not a striving individual but a social interloper (chapter 9). Given that one of his theoretical anchors is Bourdieu, it is surprising that Matthys does not employ the concept of symbolic violence to articulate and explain this denigration by the host middle class. Moreover, more should have been made of the ambivalence in the subjects’ agency. They repeatedly make clear that their journeys are driven less by choice and more by reaction and adaptations to challenges – in other words to external, structural factors. They have exercised choice in their careers, but within constraints and, as a consequence, some of those choices were not to their liking. It should also be said that in structure and tone, the study is written like an earnest doctoral thesis. There is even a section entitled ‘My contribution’.
However, a nuanced analysis of work’s impact on class is to be welcomed. With the rhetoric of meritocracy and the decline of manufacturing, the working class has become deemed an irrelevance, a dinosaur relic of the past. In the UK we only think of working class people when privately schooled politicians and comedians poke fun at their supposed rump – the Chavs. This research shows the working class as strivers not skivers, but still falling short of the mark – not through their own lack of effort but their reception by others. With social mobility stalled, social inequalities growing and graduate under-employment emerging despite widened higher education, this is a timely book. It is a study that deserves to be replicated beyond the Low Countries with their tight coupling of higher education and jobs.