Living class in a ‘meritocratic’ Australia: The burdens of class and choice on young people’s end-of-school transitions

Beyond the choice–class dualism in youth studies

For more than two decades, sociologists have positioned choice as a defining force in youth biographies. Youth researchers have often characterised the social world as a ‘risk culture’ in which individuals perceive their futures to be open to their own agency, rather than constrained by structural forces such as gender, class and locale (see Huntley, 2006). In a foundational work, Beck (1992: 135) contended that ‘individualisation’ has shaped social life by placing each person’s biography in her own hands, to ‘learn, on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself as the center of action, as the planning office with respect to his/ her own biography’. Sociologists have argued that individualisation has heightened relevance for young people. Conceiving of themselves as the authors of their own ‘choice biographies’, young people are increasingly likely to eschew the ‘normal’ linear transitions from school to work and family that previous generations followed (Wyn and Woodman, 2015). They are asked to actively plan and manage their lives to a greater extent, a process often described as ‘reflexivity’ (Giddens, 1991). Additionally, they are less likely to acknowledge the impact of structures and inequalities on their lives and in the world around them (Bulbeck, 2012; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007).

It is a ‘caricature’, however, to frame this choice biography school of thought as antithetical to considerations of class (Woodman, 2009). Especially in Beck’s work, opposition to class analysis was not so much an argument about the death of class but more a critique of how the notion of class is often used in ‘a lifeless way that misses too much complexity in the contemporary world’ (Woodman, 2010: 742). In his original outline of the choice biography, Beck allowed room for the influence of economic inequality on the course of people’s lives. He argued that we have ‘a capitalism without classes, but with individualised social inequality’ (Beck, 1992: 88). Youth sociologists continue to grapple with how class is lived in contexts where choice dominates understandings of identity (Furlong et al., 2011; Wyn and Woodman, 2015). This has great sociological significance: how young people negotiate identity with the structures of their historical context has implications ‘for the processes by which inequality are reproduced’ (Furlong et al., 2011: 357).

In an effort to capture the current complexity of young people’s experiences of class, there has been a shift in youth sociology towards Bourdieu’s work on ‘habitus’, which explains how individual dispositions are structured by – and in turn structure – the class context around them. Habitus generates social practices by structuring how individuals are able to respond to different institutions and ‘fields’ throughout their lives. As defined by Bourdieu (1984: 171), habitus ‘organises the perception of the social world’, and is ‘the product of internalisation of the division into social classes’. Cultural class analysts have drawn upon the notions of habitus and field – as well as economic, social and cultural capital – to argue that class, even if not openly acknowledged, is bound up in the way people understand themselves and their place in the social world (Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 2004). This Bourdieusian conception is especially useful to youth studies as it theorises class relations without the need to refer to institutional economic positions of class power (e.g. owner or CEO).

Bourdieu’s habitus is, as a consequence, at the heart of debates about the relative roles of choice and class in youth biographies. As Farrugia (2015) observed, these debates often proceed with a mischaracterisation of habitus as the deterministic antithesis of agency: as a mechanical, automatic force that overrides any conscious thinking and choosing. This strawman version of habitus is set in opposition to a similarly distorted definition of reflexivity, which is taken to be a form of ‘emancipatory’ agency unaffected by social structures and practices.

Youth research is replete with evidence of young people actively thinking about and managing their lives (Bottero, 2010; Bryant and Ellard, 2015). The question of reflexivity is not a matter of whether active, conscious thought processes occur in young people’s decision-making, but how these processes relate to the dispositional. Bourdieu was impatient with critiques of his work as deterministic (Sweetman, 2003). He saw the dispositions of habitus not as structure overpowering agency, but as a route past the tired structure–agency divide. He emphasised the ‘generative capacities of dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 13). Dispositions do not render irrelevant the reflexive; rather, each person’s conscious thoughts and behaviours are shaped and constrained and encouraged by their dispositions. Understood in this way, habitus provides a ‘feel for the game’, an embodied sense of the world that each person internalises through their experiences, intersubjective interactions and discursive encounters. Farrugia (2013: 292–3) argued that the dispositional relates to the reflexive by providing a ‘practical sense of what is possible for them and of who they are in relation to the world’.

The dispositions of the habitus are not necessarily coherent or consistent. Each individual has internalised a variety of dispositions, which vary not only in content but also in strength, stability and transferability (Lahire, 2003). As people pass through a plurality of ‘fields’ in their lives, different dispositions may be called upon and manifested. The rules for one game are not always applicable in another; aspects of a person’s habitus may be emphasised above others depending on the social contexts they traverse. As Reay et al. (2009) found in their study of working-class students at an elite university, the students displayed adaptability in their responses to an unfamiliar field. These students flourished as learners and gained confidence in a typically ‘middle-class’ setting, ‘whilst retaining … a commitment and sense of loyalty to family and home background’. They managed the tensions of moving through multiple fields, understanding that they had to ‘move in and out of different identity positionings’ (Reay et al., 2009: 1115–16). Reflexivity here is revealed as an individual’s navigation of identity in negotiation with complex social fields.

Reay et al.’s study points to a key contrast between the reflexive processes of young working-class people, on one hand, and of their middle-class peers on the other. The dispositions learnt in the middle-class home are likely to have congruence with the dispositions of the broader institutions – such as schools, the media and politics – that define young people’s lives. These dispositions include high levels of academic ambition, a belief in the power of their own agency, and an understanding of university credentials as the key to the ‘good life’ (Allen, 2014; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007). It has been observed that working-class young people internalise and express these same prevailing discourses (Bulbeck, 2012). After all, they too belong to institutions that emphasise the near-limitless possibilities of being a young person in a ‘meritocratic’ society. I hypothesise here that the point of departure for working-class young people is that they are likely to have embodied another set of more ‘traditional’ working-class dispositions from their own experiences and the experiences of their families. This working-class habitus, one that stresses limits and being ‘realistic’, has been characterised extensively (Skeggs, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Willis, 1977). This habitus is antithetical to the prevailing discourses of meritocracy and ambition. Yet as the findings sections of this article detail, I found that many working-class young people had internalised both the dominant discourses and the ‘traditional’ working-class understanding of the world. These conflicting dispositions play out in the reflexive work that working-class young people engage in as they approach the end of secondary schooling and think about their futures.

Methodology

This article presents qualitative-led mixed methods case study research with 16- and 17-year-old students from four government high schools in New South Wales, Australia, who were nearing their end-of-school transitions. The schools that were selected as research sites were chosen to reflect ordinary lived experiences of class among Australian youth, rather than the extremes of the class divide. All four schools are located in areas where income, employment and education levels do not deviate dramatically from the Australian averages. Two academically selective and two comprehensive government high schools agreed to participate, and have been given pseudonyms that reference both the region they are situated in, and their school type: Western Sydney Selective High School (WSS), Western Sydney Comprehensive High School (WSC), South Newcastle Selective High School (SNS) and South Newcastle Comprehensive High School (SNC). ¹ School leadership at all four schools were supportive, and allowed students to complete surveys and participate in focus groups and interviews on-site during scheduled class time.

The research utilised an exploratory sequential design where quantitative survey data was followed up with interview-based methods. In the first stage, students completed a questionnaire that asked them to respond to 25 Likert-type items that included indicators for their levels of reflexivity and confidence, their ambitions, the advice about higher education they were receiving, and their attitudes towards meritocracy and choice. This survey instrument was designed for the purposes of this research, and drew on items included in Bulbeck’s (2012) Imagining the Future student surveys. Following Greenbank (2009), it contained an option for students to write down their email address if they were interested in participating in a focus group (approximately 1 in 5 students chose to do so). While schools did not mandate that students complete the surveys, 416 questionnaires were returned out of a total Year 11 student population of approximately 490 across the four schools (85%). Descriptive statistical analysis techniques were applied to this data, rather than inferential analysis, as this is qualitative-driven case study research not seeking generalisation beyond the sites selected.

Second, the results of the survey data analysis were used to build themes and questions for semi-structured focus groups. In total, there were nine focus groups involving a total of 41 students, and each focus group lasted approximately 45 minutes to an hour. Separate middle-class and working-class groups were held at each school, and separate boys and girls focus groups were held for working-class students at the comprehensive high schools. The focus groups were then followed up with one-on-one, in-depth interviews with seven students who were selected from the focus groups. In total, almost 70,000 words of qualitative data were collected. Transcripts were analysed through close and repeated reading, using thematic analysis in a grounded theory approach. Participants have been anonymised through pseudonyms.

To organise participants into working-class and middle-class groups, the research adopted Savage et al.’s (2013) new classification schema. This schema aims to assess not only the economic capital of people, but their cultural and social capital too, based on analysis of the BBC’s Great British Class Survey, which asked respondents about their networks and participation in cultural activities. This was not without problems (see Skeggs, 2015). On the basis of their on analysis of the BBC’s survey, they posit that class divides in late modern countries have led to the development of seven classes. Savage et al. provide a typology of over-represented occupations for each class category. As researchers have done for the purposes of empirical research with other complex class models (see Le Roux et al., 2008), I narrowed Savage et al.’s seven classes to three: middle class (55% of respondents; typical occupations include directors, engineers, and medical and legal professionals), intermediate class (13%; typical occupations include electricians and retail staff) and working class (32%; typical occupations include secretaries, hospitality staff, drivers and cleaners). Analysis focuses on the middle-class and working-class categories. Students were classified into one of these three classes according to highest occupation of either parent, which they reported in the demography section of the questionnaire.

‘Doxa’ and young people’s dispositions: meritocracy, agency and ambition

In Bourdieu’s terms, each field has a ‘doxa’: taken-for-granted norms and discourses that are considered by agents in the field to be true, natural and obvious (France and Threadgold, 2016). The prevailing doxa of the institutions that young people move through – schools, media, politics – is that the world is a meritocratic place that justly rewards certain individual traits and choices such as hard work, self-determination and strategic planning (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Bulbeck, 2012). Throughout my research, it was clear that young people had internalised, and would readily reproduce, this aspect of the doxa. As a corollary, they placed individual agency at the heart of their explanations for events in their lives. Successes and failures were not seen as the results of gender, class or god, but rather the consequences of decisions they made. In focus groups, this belief in actually existing meritocracy was held by a substantial majority of students and transcended class lines. In their survey responses, more than three-quarters of students from working-class and middle-class backgrounds agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, ‘Anyone can succeed if they work hard’.

In focus groups and interviews, when students were asked about the factors that affect a person’s chances of success, the discussion consistently focused on individual qualities and decisions. When Bradley (SNC, middle-class) was asked what he thought made people successful, he responded in a way that was typical of attitudes about agency:

I think definitely the biggest would be attitude, because if you don’t have attitude you don’t have motivation, and motivation would be the other one. If your attitude is crap, then you’re going to try hard for a little bit and then you’re just going to drop out. But if you have a good attitude and you really want to make it there, you’ve got something that’s really bugging you and you really want to get there, then you’ll make it eventually.

Although meritocratic beliefs were certainly widely held, ambivalences in students’ perceptions of meritocracy and agency were revealed when these beliefs were challenged. Contrary to recent findings that young people show a refusal to recognise the class and gender constraints on their lives (Bulbeck, 2012; Fine et al., 1997), participants in each one of my focus groups recognised that a person’s class background could impose constraints upon their life. For example, students at the WSS middle-class focus group spoke about class in terms of ‘success chances’, and Kea (WSC, working-class) – reflecting the consensus of the focus group she participated in – argued that having a wealthy family meant that ‘everything is going to go right for you, you have the money to be able to push through, you have some sort of safety net’.

There were notable class differences in how the impact of class was discussed. Working-class students talked about class in immediate, everyday ways, while middle-class participants were more likely to see the effect of class as hypothetical or potential, or as something that constrained the life chances of people in other countries. This finding is similar to the observation made by Vromen et al. (2015), who found in their online discussion groups that participants from low socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to discuss money in concrete ways. In the focus groups, students were asked if class has an effect on whether a person succeeds. A discussion from the female working-class focus group at SNC was representative of working-class responses:

It is worth recognising that these ambivalences in young people’s beliefs in meritocracy were only exposed as a result of specific questions about class inequalities. For the most part, it was evident that agency and meritocracy beliefs constituted a key aspect of young people’s worldviews. Linked to this, young people – and especially young working-class men – also expressed high levels of personal ambition.

There is a strong tradition in the sociology of education of characterising working-class boys as more likely to refuse authority in educational institutions and reject aspirational discourses. This tradition begins with Willis’s work on English working-class ‘lads’ in Hammertown, whom he argued had internalised a ‘counter-school culture’ (Willis, 1977: 2). Masculinity, in Hammertown, was defined by violence, resistance to authority and ‘acting out’ in school. More recently, researchers have identified similar problematic anti-education or anti-authority cultures among working-class boys (McDowell, 2003). This stereotype is so pervasive that in the public discourse too, educational success for working-class young people ‘is not about the valorisation of working-classness but its erasure; education as escape’ (Reay, 2001: 334).

In terms of educational ambitions, the working-class boys I surveyed did not fit the characterisation of the Willis school of thought (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Responses to educational ambition indicator.

The Australian gender theorist Connell (1989) introduced a very different type of working-class boy. She argued that in certain contexts, the interplay of education and the prevailing aspirational discourses meant that working-class boys were likely to embrace a masculinity that was based on the values of hard work, responsibility and mobility. Roberts (2012) and Archer and Phillips (2001) recognised a similar manifestation of masculinity in their interview research. In my focus groups and interviews, it was the most common type of working-class masculinity. Boys took pride in working hard. Asked about the things that would help them succeed, the working-class boys at WSC had a common answer:

This trait was most pronounced, and in some ways most unexpected, in working-class boys, but it was shared almost ubiquitously among the young people in my research. More than 85% of middle- and working-class students agreed with the survey statement, ‘It is good to be ambitious about your career’.

Reflexive decision-making and ‘decision points’

In this discursive context, it is unsurprising that young people described themselves as in control of their own biographies. The doxa of agency and meritocracy encourages young people to think of themselves of individual actors in a social context of choice. In focus groups and interviews, they framed their decisions about their post-school futures in ‘choice biography’ terms: considering the options before them, weighing the costs and benefits of different courses of action, and seeking out information and advice before making a choice. More than 70% of students agreed with the survey statement, ‘I think about my future a lot’.

More often than their middle-class peers, working-class students appeared to be choosing between multiple post-school options. In focus groups, a majority of the working-class students framed the end of Year 10 – the final year of compulsory schooling in NSW – as a key decision point in their lives. As Laughland-Booy et al. (2015) also found in their study of Australian youth, working-class young people provided more varied answers to the question of what they wanted to do once they had finished school. Many deliberated between either coming back to school, entering the workforce or beginning an apprenticeship. Asked about the major decisions they had made, participants in all working-class focus groups raised the choice they made to stay on at school. Even working-class students at academically elite selective schools considered leaving. Regardless of school type, most working-class students experienced a decision point at the end of Year 10:

Oh yeah I was thinking about leaving at the end of Year 10 because I was thinking about being a carpenter. (Tim, WSC, working-class)

I got a part-time job halfway through last year and did a lot of work during the school holidays and really enjoyed it and really pondered not coming back to high school because I enjoyed it so much. (Marli, WSS, working-class)

In contrast to these working-class accounts, Ball et al. (2003) introduce the figure of the ‘embedded chooser’, a type of academically successful middle-class high school student. It goes without saying that they will graduate high school and is almost certain that they will go to university. The real decision they have to make is which university to attend and degree to choose. In my research, I found that a majority of middle-class students, and especially middle-class selective school students, fit the ‘embedded chooser’ characterisation. When middle-class respondents reported feeling uncertain about their post-school transition, it was typically because they had not decided which degree to do. When Amira (WSS, middle-class) said in a focus group that she still had to make ‘university choices’, I asked her what she meant.

Course choices, career choices, like I’m not really sure where it is I want to go after school. Yeah I guess that’s something I’ll have to deal with.

Amira’s answer was typical of middle-class ‘embedded chooser’ decision-making. While all young people emphasised that individual choice is formative in their lives, it is interesting to note class-based variance in the type of future thinking and decision-making required by the landscape of increased choice.

Imagining classed futures

Young people across the class spectrum appear to share a view of the world around them in which meritocracy, choice and agency are salient. Working-class students, however, are more likely than their middle-class peers to imagine futures in this context that are insecure and uncertain; coloured by risk rather than opportunity. This produces a different kind of decision-making, one that prioritises stability and security in their futures.

Middle-class young people, my survey data shows (Figure 2), are more likely to be confident about their post-school options.

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Figure 2.

Responses to confidence in post-school options indicator.

This confidence disparity is not just classed, it is also gendered. Working-class young women are the least likely to say they will have lots of options once they finish school. This finding echoes the research of McLeod and Yates (2006), whose longitudinal research in Australian schools also revealed marked confidence differences between middle-class and working-class girls. Harris (2004) points out that the media’s construction of an idealised self-driven, resilient ‘can-do’ girl is most likely to be middle-class. She argues that it is working-class girls who are left out of these discourses, and often instead constructed as problematic ‘at-risk’ youth by the media, their schools and themselves.

In focus groups, two themes emerged that illustrated the class differences in confidence and optimism when it came to imagining the future. The first is that the way working-class participants understood the magnitude and consequences of failure was distinct from middle-class framings of failure. Working-class students discussed failure as something that could ‘destroy someone’, as this interaction during the female working-class focus group at WSC reveals:

Failure, described by these working-class girls, is significant. It breaks apart families and puts people out of work. In contrast, middle-class students understood failure as something that individual agency could overcome:

I think failure does get a lot of people because it’s inevitable, at some point you’re not going to get what you want or be where you want to be. But I think you can overcome the fear of failure and that will kind of help you … be where you want to be. Just having confidence and stuff is really important, you know, of where you want to go.

(Kea, SNS, middle class)

Middle-class students saw failures as setbacks; as events that individuals will bounce back from. They were confident in their ability to eventually succeed, even if this success did not come easily or quickly. This echoes Borlagdan’s (2015) recent finding that wealthy young people are better able to manage risk in transitions, in part because they are less afraid of mistakes.

The second aspect of the class differences in confidence is that working-class young people imagine a future full of uncertainty and risk, where no security or stability is assured. In the male working-class focus group at SNC, participants were not confident about their employment prospects:

University degrees are not cast as the guaranteed path to a career that many middle-class students see them as. Instead, university is a risk in itself. It is time that could be spent working, or gaining experience in a trade. The financial burden of university also imposes more risk on the future. In the female working-class focus group at SNC, just one participant had a parent who had been to university. She described how her mother’s university debts concerned her:

It’s a worry because it’s like, well am I going to be able to get a job that’ll pay it back? How many times can I change my mind and not have too much to pay? So that’s there, I can’t choose too many, or change my mind, or all that. (Emma)

For working-class students, the uncertainty of the future appears to loom large. In this context, necessity is more likely to drive their career aspirations. Working-class young people tend to prioritise secure, stable, ‘realistic’ careers. Blustein et al.’s (2002) study into young people’s conceptions of the functions of work revealed that those from low socio-economic backgrounds saw work as a means of survival, while those from higher socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to link work to their self-concept. It has also been found that the most disadvantaged young people are the most likely to enunciate hopes for a ‘normal’ future of stable employment, a home and a family (Bryant and Ellard, 2015). Across all of my working-class focus groups, but especially those in comprehensive schools, working-class participants were more likely to describe their ambitions in terms of stability and security. This often encouraged working-class students to consider going straight into the workforce once they finish school:

Well, with everything that’s going on in the world, I just think that getting a job straight out of high school is really the best option as jobs are becoming fewer and fewer, so trying to get a job as quickly as possible is really what you need to do. (Michael, SNC, working class)

University is expensive, and I don’t want to be paying off student debt for the rest of my life … this is why I would like to go out into the workforce and get some money before I settle into education, if that’s what I choose to do, because I want that security. (Marli, WSS, working class)

Middle-class students, in comparison, largely prioritise ‘fulfilling’ and ‘desirable’ careers. They aim for jobs that will make them happy, and that align with their values. As Kea (SNS, middle class) put it, ‘hopefully we’ll all have an ATAR [Australian Tertiary Admission Rank] that can give us the career we want to do, not just a career’. Middle-class students, assured of their survival and confident in their capacity to succeed, construct aspirations that are distanced from necessity. Yet the ambitions of their working-class peers are tied down by necessity.

Conclusion

How do young people live class in Australia today? And how are their experiences of class woven through their end-of-school transition? My argument in this article has been that working-class young people are more likely to face a contradiction in their dispositional ‘feel for the game’. They have internalised, at least to the same extent as their middle-class peers, the doxa of meritocracy, agency and ambition. Working-class students readily reproduced these taken-for-granted discourses in focus groups and interviews. Yet they also described how this context of increased choice and possibility imposed greater burdens on them, asking them to make more challenging decisions between multiple post-school options.

Working-class boys and girls not only approached the world with this discursive background. Their experiences and their family’s experiences inform them in an immediate, practical way of the risks and constraints they face in their lives; and these too, become embodied as dispositions, influencing the kinds of futures they imagine for themselves. Opportunities and constraints, risk and security, are not distributed equally in a class-stratified society. How young people understand the risk of university, or the security of the job market, is informed by their position within the structure of inequality. As a consequence, working-class young people are less confident when imagining their futures in the society they regard as ‘meritocratic’. While their middle-class peers – removed from the fears of unemployment and financial need – are free to construct ambitions based on desired lifestyles or values, working-class students largely prioritise stable, secure employment. This is particularly true of working-class young women.

For youth researchers, this article suggests three key future directions for empirical work. First, there is a need for the hypothesis set out in this article – that working-class young people are more likely to experience conflicting dispositions as a result of a clash between doxa and experience – to be explored in other settings with different cohorts of young people. Second, extending on this hypothesis, there is a question about misrecognition to be asked. While class inequalities persist, the prevailing beliefs in meritocracy and agency appear to obscure these inequalities, hiding them for even those most affected by class structures. In young people’s descriptions of the limits of their choice biographies, how much does class inequality feature as an explanatory variable for the possibilities denied to them? Finally, it is suggested here that class imposes a double penalty upon working-class young people: once at a formal, institutional level by restricting access to certain schools and educational resources, and separately by affecting the ways in which they conceive and plan for their futures. There are many ideas being circulated to reduce formal, institutional class inequality (Stiglitz, 2012). More work could address potential directions for reform, either in policy or discourse, that may reduce the informal burdens of class on young people’s thinking and decision-making. At a time when inequality is widening in Australia and elsewhere (Douglas et al., 2014), these questions will only become more important for youth sociology.