Working-class Backgrounds Research Articles

Striving to Be Super: The Contradictions of Academic Success in High-Achieving, Working-Class Girls’ Pathways to High-Tariff Universities

ABSTRACT Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff UK universities. Against the backdrop of neoliberalism and postfeminism, the stereotype of an academic ‘supergirl’ incites these young women to construct their pathways to high-tariff universities individualistically and to invest in aspirational futures beyond where they grew up. However, this stereotype also places a heavy burden on them, as young women from working-class backgrounds, to take responsibility for their own outcomes. Using Margaret Archer’s concept of ‘autonomous reflexivity’ to analyse the research findings, the paper shows how the girls find themselves pincered between the powerfully enabling and constraining effects of their social class alongside their academic success. It highlights complexities and contradictions of striving to be a high-achieving, working-class girl that are not currently well understood within the research literature or widening access and participation agenda.

Towards the Concept of Digital Grassroots Youth Innovation

In recent years, young people have acquired a more active role in different areas of public life, such as culture, politics and gender debates. However, the relevance of their role in innovation processes has remained largely undiscussed. Are young people, in particular those from working class backgrounds, a forgotten actor for innovation and technological change policies? This study aims to understand whether the youth population—who are widely connected to the Internet, who do not necessarily participate in formal educational spaces but are increasingly acquiring digital skills autonomously—can be considered as an agent of innovation. Specifically, this study aims to propose and define the concept of Digital Grassroots Youth Innovation. It is based on both empirical and theoretical sources. On the one hand, it relies on a compilation of experiences of innovative activities related to digital technologies led by young people in Argentina. On the other hand, it is supported by a theoretical discussion on (a) the different types of innovations and their subjects, (b) the specificities of the ‘marginal mass’ in informational capitalism and (c) the characterisation of the young population in Argentina as ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment or training). Finally, we ask about the role played by digital technologies and non-formal learning in these particular innovation processes.

‘Helping academics shine’: An exploration into the relationships working-class professional services staff have with others in UK higher education

AbstractDrawing on research interviews with thirteen self-identifying working-class professional services employees in Russell Group institutions, this article attempts to develop a nuanced approach to understanding institutional cultures in UK universities, through the relationships within these establishments. Throughout the study, the tensions between working-class professional services or administrative staff and their counterparts working on academic trajectories became clear. Often highly qualified themselves, the participants in this study describe feelings relating to inadequacy and often negative attitudes proliferated towards them by academic staff. These relationships are framed within the perspective of three themes: academic hierarchies and superior academic value, treatment of staff, and language codes and patterns. In contrast, the participants in this sample often describe their relationships with their networks in professional services as highly positive, developmental, and enriching. This study focused on working-class professional services staff specifically. In the field of working-class research, professional services staff from working-class backgrounds have currently been largely omitted from research, which tends to focus on working-class students and working-class academics. Not all professional services staff identify as working-class, but due to this deficit of evidence in the research field, it is this group in particular that this paper focuses on. The findings in this paper suggest that the relationships these professional services staff have with academics are often fraught, difficult to manage, and at times, derogatory in their nature. This finding comes at the juxtaposition of the wider inclusion agenda UK universities pursue.

‘Sir, if I let you blow me, will you not put a behaviour point on?’ The working-class, gay teacher and the limits of neoliberal inclusion

This study examines social-class and sexuality in the context of being a teacher in a secondary school in England. It is pertinent as some levels of LGBT inclusion, are currently expected in English schools, however this varies within and across schools. This study explores the case of a single, gay, man from a working-class background, in relation to the homophobia and harassment he routinely experiences as a teacher, as well as the (in)active response of his institution. Findings suggest that the school is (re)produced as hostile for the gay teacher, through a combination of discourses where gay is positioned as subordinate by the students, and where gay is sublimated by the school and staff. Moreover, despite the teacher’s resilience, these problems are enhanced by the current individualized model of neoliberal inclusion, which may not be inclusive of all LGB people.

In between the neoliberal reality and the humanities imagination: a narrative inquiry of an English major’s identity construction in China

ABSTRACT This study reports an ethnographic case study of a Chinese female English major of a working-class background – Faye (pseudonym) and her English learning and use experience in an elite community in the Chinese context. Drawing on the data collected from a 13-month longitudinal inquiry, the study employs Darvin and Norton’s [2015. ‘Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics.’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35:36–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190514000191] model of investment to explore her identity transformation through English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) practices. Findings suggest that Faye’s investment in EFL practices appeared to transform with her evolving perceptions of EFL learning and imagined identities, which were shaped largely under the influence of neoliberal and humanities discourses. The study argues for a critical interrogation of the impact of neoliberalism on EFL learning and humanities education, cautioning against its tendency to constrain identity potentials and sustain structural inequalities. Pedagogical implications are suggested at the end of the article.

“The Dance, the Music, the Rave”: Partying, Pleasure, and the Politics of Cultural Production in Morvern Callar 1995 and Morvern Callar 2002

ABSTRACT This article explores the meaning of two acts of cultural production: the writing of novels and the acid house and dance music scenes as represented in Alan Warner’s 1995 novel Morvern Callar. Reading the novel against its 2002 adaptation by Lynne Ramsay, it historicizes the representation of working-class pleasure in relation to the developing discourses of the creative industries propounded by Tony Blair’s New Labour. Drawing a link between the concept of the creative industries and the well-established conversation linking “cultural independence” and devolution in Scotland, it argues that Warner’s novel represents acid house as a moment in which working-class pleasure and cultural production was a significant threat to establishment cultural values. By contrast, Ramsay’s film presents Morvern’s desire to party as indicative of a traumatized subjectivity which can be healed by the rejection of her working-class background and the embracing of a middle-class lifestyle informed by literature and travel. In this respect, Ramsay’s film is unable to metabolize the transcendent potential of partying and pleasure, instead mobilizing well-worn tropes of acid house’s meaningless hedonism to represent Morvern as an exceptional individual whose inborn distinction allows her to escape her background.

Adaptation, change and reaffirmation: investigating the limits of young working-class men adapting to elite higher education institutions

ABSTRACT Historically, and in contemporary society, the pursuit of higher education remains an integral part of social mobility. The research presented in this article aligns with previous research capturing the complexities many students from non-traditional backgrounds face in transitioning to tertiary education. We focus on a small cohort of young men from working-class backgrounds who were able to access elite higher education institutions. Statistically, this population is the least likely to attend university or engage in post-secondary education and training. We explore how they adjust aspects of their identities to align with their perception of an elite university context. We see their journeys as a process of negotiation, of identifying with certain aspects associated with elite settings while rebuffing others often through reference of historically embedded aspects of working-class culture. To decipher these negotiations, we focus specifically on four key themes present in the data: a sense of exceptionalism; confronting the competitive culture; fitting in; and reaffirmations of working-class culture.

“I Don’t Even Talk About It”: Applying Ray’s Theory of Racialized Organizations to Class Stratification in Academia

ABSTRACT In this paper, we develop a working theory examining how the organizational apparatuses of colleges and universities, as well as larger trends in higher education, contribute to unequal outcomes for faculty from working-class backgrounds and their upper- and middle-class counterparts. Based on 30 interviews with a nationwide sample of academic faculty and graduate students in sociology, we adapt an analytical approach introduced by Victor Ray, a theory of racialized organizations, to identify several common mechanisms in higher education that hinder working-class faculty members’ ability to form professional relationships and gain prestige at post-secondary institutions, disrupt efforts to diversify faculty bodies socioeconomically, and preserve class-based inequalities by masking the saliency of social class in faculty settings. Adapting Ray’s analysis, we divide these organizational features of higher education into three categories—superstructure (collective ideologies), structure (policies and norms), and substructure (individual schemas)—illustrating how these features uphold and reinforce one another.

Rethinking Trans Trajectories via Life History

This article provides a life history analysis of Pepa Moreno, a transgender individual from Puebla, Mexico. The life events that she narrated in the interview conducted at her home and business—her move out of street sex work and her start as a business and property owner—offer a glimpse into the intertwining of personal/familial history and the processes unfolding in the spaces of society and economy. The article employs a critical realist framework around identity, based on life history as method, setting the scene around major restructurings of economy that private property regimes, urban transformation, morphing class realities, and capital investment (under neoliberalism) effected over her life: from adolescence into middle age. These transformations conjugate with changes across Pepa's own trajectory; key here are the meanings of “legitimate” work and moral worth that lie at the heart of the moral-legal economies that trans people in town, especially of working-class backgrounds, must confront. Labor status and class deeply intersect with a remaking of herself, which culminates with her naming herself as transgender once she has established herself as property owner and businessperson. However, even while invoking this category, she does not use it in line with the activist and sexological discourses that arose from the late 1990s on in Mexico City and which became prominent in Puebla in the early 2000s. The article thus maps the changing positions—and positionalities—of Pepa, examining the dialectics between lived experience and social structure, and the spaces of agency achieved through identity work.

What causes social class disparities in education? The role of the mismatches between academic contexts and working-class socialization contexts and how the effects of these mismatches are explained.

Within psychology, the underachievement of students from working-class backgrounds has often been explained as a product of individual characteristics such as a lack of intelligence or motivation. Here, we propose an integrated model illustrating how educational contexts contribute to social class disparities in education over and beyond individual characteristics. According to this new Social Class-Academic Contexts Mismatch model, social class disparities in education are due to several mismatches between the experiences that students from working-class backgrounds bring with them to the classroom and those valued in academic contexts-specifically, mismatches between (a) academic contexts' culture of independence and the working-class orientation to interdependence, (b) academic contexts' culture of competition and the working-class orientation toward cooperation, (c) the knowledge valued in academic contexts and the knowledge developed through working-class socialization, and (d) the social identities valued in academic contexts and the negatively stereotyped social identities of students from working-class backgrounds. Because of these mismatches, students from working-class backgrounds are likely to experience discomfort and difficulty in the classroom. We further propose that, when attempting to make sense of these first-order effects, students and teachers rely on inherent characteristics (e.g., ability, motivation) more often than warranted; conversely, they overlook extrinsic, contextual factors. In turn, this explanatory bias toward inherent features leads (a) students from working-class backgrounds to experience self-threat and (b) their teachers to treat them unfairly. These second-order effects magnify social class disparities in education. This integrated model has the potential to reshape research and discourse on social class and education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Entrepreneurial working-class masculinities and curating the corporeal: social media influencers, porntrepreneurs and the case of OnlyFans

PurposeFor the most part, the majority of the research on entrepreneurial masculinities has focused on the traditional business and finance sector, capturing a masculinity infused with notions of dominance, a cut-throat disposition and corporate acumen. There has been relatively less attention focused on the reproduction of masculinities and monetized body work in digital forms of entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article explores some of the entrepreneurial and performative skills utilized by male OnlyFans creators as they curate not only their bodies but also their sexualities in order to attract subscribers and maximize profits.FindingsMapping the relationship between entrepreneurialism and masculinity on OnlyFans is significant considering the platform’s popularity and the changing nature of digital entrepreneurship. Drawing connections to previous research on working-class entrepreneurial masculinities, we highlight how male OnlyFans creators, who are largely from working-class backgrounds, are actively practicing entrepreneurial skills.Originality/valueWe foreground the work of social media creators as sexualized and aesthetic labour, making connections between digital entrepreneurship, working-class masculinity, sexuality, and (idealized) bodies. Our article concludes with making recommendations for future research on the study of gender and sexuality within for-profit digital entrepreneurship.

Bringing out Abdellah Taïa: sexuality, social mobility, and the discursive contexts of reading

The ideas and discourse associated with homosexuality and queerness provide a useful and relevant critical framework for understanding Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa’s works. My essay expands this existing frame of reference by discussing the portrayal of poverty and social mobility, which I argue is an equally meaningful yet neglected aspect of Taïa’s writings. I develop this argument by showing that shame is linked not only to sexuality but also to social class. For a comparative perspective, I examine texts by Didier Éribon and Édouard Louis, who, like Taïa, are queer writers from a working-class background. Despite these shared characteristics, there is a significant difference in the framing and critical reception of Taïa’s writings, on the one hand, and those of Éribon and Louis, on the other. This essay investigates the reasons for this difference by exploring the phenomenon of the transfuge de classe and the crucial role played by the absent dimensions of race and coloniality. Situating narratives of queerness and poverty in relation to each other suggests a dialectical mode of reading attentive to different discursive contexts.

The Sea and Underwater Transport in Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute for Taxi Poetry

ABSTRACT This article discusses the link between public transport and literary practices by analyzing Imraan Coovadia’s 2012 novel, The Institute for Taxi Poetry. In this novel, Coovadia comments on South Africa’s palimpsestic history from the precolonial to the postcolonial. One way in which Coovadia does this is through the motif of the taxi. The taxi refers to a mini-bus taxi which in South Africa is a form of public transport primarily used by people from working-class backgrounds. Another way concerns the proposal of a fictional genre that plays a prominent role in this novel: taxi poetry. The article explores the ways in which the novel uses the taxi and submarine vessels to open up the geography of the sea as a transport surface whose impact on the histories of the dispossessed is visible from both below and above the waterline. Through engagement with the humanities turn in mobility studies and with scholarship in the oceanic humanities from the Global South, the article argues that the national and terrestrial readings of public transport in African literature(s) undervalue the sea, a prominent transport arena in Coovadia’s novel, as both a space of transit as well as a public space with shared transnational histories. The article engages the novel’s imagined literary sub-genre to evaluate how the text’s subterranean extensions of the South African taxi industry, and public transport generally, unearth the layered narrative of South Africa as nation.

Short-Term Vocational Courses as a Career-Building Program for the Youth in Chhattisgarh, India

Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is a short-term skill development program in India aiming to train young job seekers, make them employable, facilitate employment and revitalize vocational education in India. Vocational Education and Training (VET) in India suffers from weak links with the labor market, low enrollments, and slow industry demand, hampering the expected outcomes. This paper uses grounded theory to explore young people’s perceptions of PMKVY as a career-building program. Qualitative data was collected from trainees (N = 30) in three districts of Raipur, Raigarh and Korba in Chhattisgarh, India, through personal interviews with young people enrolled in PMKVY using semi-structured questionnaires. It was found that the understanding of possible career-building among young people mainly varied based on their age and educational attainment when they entered the program. One’s choice, utilizing spare time, seeking experiential learning, benchmarked quality training and improving communication skills were the factors through which they looked at their career-building process. The paper considers the implications of these findings in the context of large-scale skill development and VET initiatives in India. It concludes that vocational education continues to be associated with lower esteem and is considered a last resort for students with poor academic records. Short-term programs like PMKVY can provide career-building opportunities to young people who are largely drawn from working-class backgrounds. PMKVY's targeted approach toward imparting employability skills and facilitating transitions to various employment opportunities acts as a buffer in the significant success of the program.

Not wanting to class or be classed: Student teachers in Ireland from working class backgrounds reflecting on class and class categorisations

This article is about the perspectives of student teachers from working class backgrounds in Ireland about social class. In the context of drives to diversify the teaching profession internationally, examining how those from under-represented groups understand their identities assumes great importance. Employing constructivist grounded theory, 31 interviews were conducted with 21 student teachers from working class backgrounds exploring their perspectives on social class. While participants were clear that class ‘existed’ and remained highly relevant in Irish society, they emphasised silence about class in Ireland, except through forms of euphemising. Despite describing themselves in classed terms, most were critical of class categorisations believing they involved looking down on someone or being looked down on, resulting in feelings of shame and unworthiness. The findings are discussed relative to previous scholarship regarding silences about social class in Irish policy and cultural sociological theories of (class) disidentification.

Investigating the role of identity versatility in the discursive production of working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have sought to address the historical and cultural embedded (gendered) practices which influence the identity work of working-class boys. This conceptual article contributes to the study of working-class boyhood and education through first synthesizing key themes present in the historic and contemporary literature before adopting a feminist post-structural stance to consider how these themes are informed by our understandings of the discursive production of masculinities. Then, in the second half of the paper, we make visible what has been at the margins in the scholarship – identity versatility – which we define as contextual and agentic adaptation. Attention to versatility, we feel, offers the potential for a nuanced analysis regarding working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement.

Interdependent behavior only benefits employees from working-class backgrounds when it is both enacted and valued.

Social class disparities are pervasive in American society. In higher education, one critical driver of these disparities is the cultural mismatch between the interdependent norms of people from working-class backgrounds and the independent norms that pervade higher education. However, after graduating from college and entering white-collar workplaces, people from working-class backgrounds have frequent opportunities to collaborate in teams-that is, to enact interdependent behavior. Do these opportunities reduce cultural mismatch for people from working-class backgrounds? Across two survey studies and two experiments with college-educated U.S. employees (total N = 2,566), we find that they do not. We theorize and document that this is because there is often a decoupling between enacting interdependent behavior and whether such behavior is valued as part of being a "good" employee. We find that employees from working-class backgrounds only experience a cultural match and its benefits (e.g., sense of fit, high retention intentions) when interdependent behaviors are both enacted and valued. In contrast, when interdependent behaviors are enacted but not valued, employees from working-class backgrounds experience a cultural mismatch. Furthermore, we find that this pattern is unique to employees from working-class backgrounds: Employees from middle-class backgrounds report similar fit and retention regardless of whether there is a coupling of enacted and valued interdependent behavior. Taken together, our results suggest that it is critical to examine multiple elements of culture simultaneously (e.g., both enacted and valued behavior) to fully understand and predict the consequences of cultural (mis)match. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Class Ceiling in the United States: Class-Origin Pay Penalties in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations

Abstract Gender and racial pay penalties are well-known: women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) earn less, on average, even when they gain access to occupations historically reserved for White men. Studies of social mobility show that people from working-class backgrounds in the US have also been excluded from top professional and managerial occupations. But do working-class-origin people who attain top US jobs face a class-origin pay penalty? Despite evidence of class-origin pay gaps in higher professional and managerial occupations elsewhere, we might expect that the central role of race and racism in US stratification processes, along with the relatively low salience of class identities, would render class origins irrelevant to earnings in exclusive occupations, at least within racial groups. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to link childhood class position to adult occupation and earnings, we describe the racial and class-origin composition of different high-status occupations and the earnings of people within them. We show that when people who are from working-class backgrounds are upwardly mobile into high-status occupations, they earn almost $20,000 per year less, on average, than individuals who are themselves from privileged backgrounds. The difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being less likely to have college degrees, but it remains substantial (around $11,700) even after accounting for education, race and other important predictors of earnings. The gap is largest among White people; there is a class-origin penalty in top US occupations that is distinct from the racial pay gap.

María Victoria Menis’s María y El Araña

Middle-class children and adolescents have been represented in several Argentine films of the twenty-first century. In María y El Araña [ María and Spiderman ] (2013), María Victoria Menis tackles the representation of youth who are at risk due to both their working-class backgrounds and the absence or incapacity of any parental figures. Her film also engages with the difficult topics of adolescent sexualization, sexual abuse, and physical violence perpetrated against disadvantaged youth. While the cinematic depiction of destitution, also known as ‘poverty porn’, generally deploys realism, I argue that Menis avoids the dangers of the paedophilic gaze in María y El Araña , by briefly providing the point of view of the young female protagonist, as well as a glimpse into one of her dreams. The director also relies on fairy tales to narrate this story about the dangers of adult violence against vulnerable adolescents to educate viewers about these abuses and their threat to civilized society. Because fairy tales offer access to imaginative worlds, despite the film’s themes, María y El Araña has an unusual ending for a Latin American film featuring at-risk young protagonists.

Triple jeopardy: The impact of race, class, and gender on girls and women in sport and physical activity.

Thirty-six million youth athletes participate in and benefit from sport each year in the United States. Along with developing sport skills, the lifelong benefits of physical activity for girls and women are significant and include improved dietary habits and quality sleep, decreased risk for breast cancer and osteoporosis, among other benefits (Erickson et al., 2019; Zarrett et al., 2018). In addition, girls and women that engage in sport are more likely to experience additional professional benefits with 94% of women business executives reporting they played sport in their youth (Kotschwar, 2014). However, as in many performance domains, the benefits are not experienced equally by all would-be participants. Research indicates that girls and women of color do not have the same access to quality sport and physical activity opportunities (National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA], 2021; Smith-Evans et al., 2014). In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of racial unrest have widened the participation gaps and the resulting psychosocial and health benefit gap for girls of color and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The purpose of this article is to signify the important role sport and physical activity play in socioemotional development, physical fitness, and health of girls and women. By centering the experiences of girls and women who are currently not equitably served by the existing youth sport environment (e.g., girls and women of color and girls from working-class backgrounds), the authors will identify barriers that prevent access to physical activity opportunities for everyone. In addition, strategies for change will be offered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).