Social Class Privilege Research Articles

Development and Validation of the Privileged Social Class Attitudes Scale (PSCAS)

The goal of the study was to develop a scale to assess the social class attitudinal profiles of people with social class privilege. Based on social class theory and other models of privileged identities, we generated an item pool reflecting different attitudinal profiles. In Study 1, exploratory factor analysis revealed a scale with four core social class attitude subscales (Social Class Prejudice, Acknowledgement, Awareness, and Action) and three additional scales reflecting independent social class constructs (Social Class Identity Centrality, Guilt, and Fortune). In Study 2, we found that the subscales fit together in a multifactor correlational model and established construct validity. However, the Action subscale surprisingly correlated positively with the Prejudice scale. Post hoc analyses revealed this correlation existed only for those high in just world beliefs. Taken together, the Privileged Social Class Attitudes Scale provides a new tool for investigating the attitudinal profiles of people with social class privilege.

Bringing “Class” into the Classroom: Addressing Social Class Privilege Through Management Education

Research increasingly acknowledges the far-reaching impact of social class and the many ways in which it can meaningfully shape individuals’ work and working lives. As such, social class and concomitant class privilege represent relevant and necessary content for the management classroom. In this paper, we begin by offering an overview of select research addressing social class and work, which helps to emphasize the significance of social class in organizational life. Next, to help educators bring “class” into the management classroom, we present teaching resources from across disciplines. We also advocate for educator reflexivity, the development of broader vocabularies around social class, and engagement with activities that increase students’ understanding of class-based inequalities at the individual, institutional, and social or cultural levels. Overall, we bring together research and resources that relate to social class and work, to not only inspire and inform management educators, but also to offer resources that help students prepare for navigating a class-diverse workplace.

Outing class in the process of internationalisation

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the ways in which international students from Chile narrate their experiences in the US, and the extent to which mobility across national borders reshapes social class understandings and privilege. To complete this study, I conducted 13 in-depth interviews and a focus group with five Chilean graduate international students who enrolled in an elite research university in the Northeastern region of the United States. The data raised questions about how social class is negotiated in both education and space, challenging how we understand the relationship between social class and education in a global context. I argue that through a process of international mobility, upper-class students from Chile lose class privilege, which in turn influences them to denaturalise their class constructions. Based on discussion of social class within the sociology of education and insights from whiteness studies, the results of my study enable a dialogue about how mobility affects individuals within an international context. I conclude that while international mobility demands students to rethink their class constructions, the affective disruption of silence and guilt emerge as two strategies to justify and perpetuate social class privilege.

Code‐Switching to Navigate Social Class in Higher Education and Student Affairs

AbstractThis chapter outlines the concepts of social class privilege, highlights the experiences of students navigating social class, and examines the role of code‐switching as a strategy to navigate higher education.

Privilege without papers: Intersecting inequalities among 1.5-generation Brazilians in Massachusetts

This paper explores the case of 1.5-generation Brazilians who migrated to Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s and grew up as unauthorized. Compared to unauthorized youth from other Latin American groups, Brazilians who migrated during this time are relatively privileged: they often come from Brazilian middle-class families, are relatively lighter-skinned, and as visa over-stayers who migrated pre-2001, they have been better positioned to access the very limited pathways to citizenship. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews, I argue that “privilege without papers”—that is, the intersection of racial and/or social class privilege with (il)legality—shapes their lives in important and nuanced ways. Indeed, some 1.5-generation Brazilians are quite aware of their privilege relative to other unauthorized groups from Latin America. Many Brazilians have experienced movement toward legal inclusion in young adulthood either through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants partial inclusion, or through marriage or other legal dispensations that grant pathways to citizenship. Shifts in status have brought new opportunities, some peace of mind, and a degree of legitimacy. Yet, for many, including several who could pass as White, the legacy of legal exclusion has undermined their sense of belonging.

‘My baby and this mom body’: examining post-partum bodywork through stroller fitness

This article, based on ethnographic research, discusses the ways in which women exercise their class privilege in order to facilitate their membership in a postpartum stroller fitness class so as to be fit for their new maternal role. Privilege is linked to capital, a powerful social construct and an important resource which governs lifestyle practices and endows individuals with distinction in particular cultural fields. Feminist theory has explored the concept of capital and its relationship to women’s cultural practices and experiences. Utilising these theoretical frames, this analysis situates fitness and body image at the intersection of social class and gender, and suggests that stroller fitness classes allow postpartum women to acquire, demonstrate, convert, and reproduce particular forms of gendered capital. Specifically, this article details the nuanced mechanisms through which participants develop and deploy social and physical capitals in order to construct their new ‘mom body’ which operates as a visible illustration of social class privilege and the aptitude and ability to be a good wife and mother.

Are WE the world? A critical reflection on selfhood and global citizenship education

Although much debate exists on the conceptualization, nature, and goals of global citizenship education, there has been widespread support for incorporating ideals of global citizenship into the practices, texts, and curricula of U.S. schools and universities. This article offers an interpretive discourse-based critique of ideas of selfhood underlying global citizenship education. Based on analyses of two U.S. high school curricula and materials available on websites devoted to global citizenship, we develop a critique of universalizing constructs of selfhood that underlie global citizenship discourse. These assumptions obscure reflection on dynamics of social class privilege that shape global citizenship activism and situate global citizenship education as a potentially counter-productive neoliberal discourse. The article concludes with recommendations for practitioners interested in developing a more self-reflective and critical global citizenship education.

“Most Fitting Companions”: Making Mixed-Race Bodies Visible in Antebellum Public Spaces

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.

Disadvantage and Privilege in our Schools: How Teachers, Psychologists and Policymakers can do Better

By examining the ways in which teachers address social class in an economically integrated school, White, Mistry, & Chow (2013) call attention to a critical gap in the educational system. Their analysis indicates that although teachers are comfortable discussing diversity in a number of areas, social class diversity is not covered with the same care as other domains. The current paper uses White at al. (2013) as a starting point to discuss how teachers, psychologists, and policy-makers can better educate students about both social class privilege and disadvantage.

Social class privilege and adolescent women’s perceived career options.

This qualitative study examined the perceived career options of 10 White adolescent young women who experienced social class privilege in their families of origin. The model of contextual privilege and career selection for adolescent White women emerged from the data, and it describes how social class privilege, gender, achievement expectations, experiences, and verbal messages may influence perceived occupational possibilities. The model includes 4 categorical groups: (a) Social Class Identity and Perceptions, (b) Shared Perceptions of Achievement and Expectations, (c) Exposure, and (d) Evaluating Career Options. The findings suggest that social class privilege contributes to the perception of numerous career options. Yet it also contributes to a process wherein participants unintentionally limit their career aspirations to a very narrow range of options.

Supplemental Material for Social Class Privilege and Adolescent Women’s Perceived Career Options

Supplemental Material for Social Class Privilege and Adolescent Women’s Perceived Career Options

Managing Elites: Professional Socialization in Law and Business Schools. By Debra Schleef. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. vii+243. $75.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.

Managing Elites: Professional Socialization in Law and Business Schools. By Debra Schleef. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. vii+243. $75.00 cloth; $26.95 paper. Reviewed by Robert Granfield, State of New York, Buffalo Much of the scholarship on legal education has sought to articulate how professional training in law school reproduces dominant ideas about existing social relations. Several researchers have been occupied with the power of the capitalist marketplace and the expansion of large law firms in relation to the idealism of law students. Not surprisingly, much of this research tends to focus on the fate of public interest idealism in law school. Missing from much of this work is a systematic analysis of how social class privilege, not just professional dominance, is reproduced within professional socialization. While the reproduction of social class privilege is implicit in much of the work on professional socialization, including my own, the bulk of this work has not been as attentive to the subject of social class reproduction as it perhaps could have. Herein lie the contributions of Debra Schleef's new book on professional socialization in law school and business school. In this book, Schleef presents an analysis of the formation of elites in which she investigates how these elites-in-training contest, rationalize, and ultimately enthusiastically embrace their dominant positions in society (p. 4). Data for Schleef's study are drawn from randomly selected law and business students entering University (a large elite and highly selective private university) in 1992. Interviews were conducted with 37 law students and 42 business students during their first year. Eighty-five percent of these respondents were reinterviewed in their second year of training. She also interviewed each of the deans and engaged in participant-observation of the formal and informal educational processes over the course of four years. In addition, Schleef distributed a survey to her sample in 2000, receiving completed questionnaires from 82 percent of her total sample. This follow-up survey collected data on job history, current employment, occupational goals, and marital status. Using these data, Schleef seeks to illuminate how the habitus of elite professional education contributes to the reproduction of social class privilege. As Schleef illustrates, student motivations for entering Graham reflect their elite social class background. A significant number of the students in Schleef's study indicate being from the uppermiddle or upper classes. She finds that students came to Graham primarily by default, not because they had a commitment to law or business but because of the cultural and social capital available through their entering an elite profession. As she notes, what appeared to students as a defaulted decision actually translates into class continuity. This social class privilege is also articulated in the expression of collective eminence among students that they are able to surmount the challenges and rigors associated with this elite academic environment (Granfield & Koenig 1992a). While most of these law and business students experienced some degree of anticipatory socialization related to the horrors of attending the school, Schleef suggests that such experiences actually serve to solidify elite social class status by reinforcing an ideology of meritocracy. By constructing a worst-case scenario about the challenges of professional education at Graham and then overcoming them, students come to accept the legitimacy of their own elite status without necessarily seeing their educational and future occupational achievements as being largely a function of their class privilege. However, part of elite training is to develop a consciousness that students have not really bought into the goals and values communicated through their elite educational experience. …