The limits of capital gains

Abstract

The 2011 BBC Great British Class Survey (GBCS) provides a unique data set from which to begin a Bourdieusian analysis of social mobility. It provides both detailed measures of cultural, social and economic capital and, while its self-selecting sample resulted in substantial skews, the main groups that were overrepresented are precisely those apposite for a more detailed examination of upward social mobility: the occupationally successful. The concept of social mobility has become one of the key motifs of the current political era, with politicians of left and right now championing it as a core policy objective. This chapter investigates whether stocks of capital differ according to respondents' social origins. It presents 25 interviews with respondents upwardly mobile into elite National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) 1 occupations. These interviews largely corroborated the GBCS results concerning the capital deficit of the upwardly mobile.