Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs

by Fiona Devine

• ISBN13: 9780521809412
• ISBN10: 052180941X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This important new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Material help with education and employment

3. Financial choices and sacrifices for children

4. Expectations and hopes for educational success

5. Fulfilling potential and securing happiness

6. Contacts, luck and career success

7. Friends and networks in school and beyond

8. Conclusion

Appendix A. The interviewees

Appendix B. Doing comparative research

Notes

Bibliography.