Abstract
In 1895, H. G. Wells published The Time Machine, a vision of a future in which the descendants of the working classes, the Morlocks, have degenerated into apelike creatures who live underground whereas the elf-like descendants of the upper classes, the Eloi, enjoy the freedom of the above-ground. Wells would not be surprised to learn that, over 100 years after his indictment of class barriers, the UK is still a land in which the 7 percent of people who are privately educated claim most of the top jobs across a range of professions that include the law, the military, medicine, and journalism. Even more telling is that less than 1 percent of the UK population attends either Oxford or Cambridge universities, yet fully 78 percent of barristers are graduates of these ancient institutions (Kirby, 2016).
The unequal distribution of opportunities in UK society is well known. The new book by Friedman and Laurison is therefore covering familiar ground. The authors endeavor to frame their book as a riposte to the hopeful claims of politicians, such as Tony Blair and Theresa May, that the class war is over and the struggle now is to combat inequality. The authors also position themselves against the claims of Ulrich Beck (1992) who dismissed class as a “zombie category” in that it no longer defined people’s individualization in an era in which each person is expected to construct a self-identity rather than inherit one based on structurally defined classes. Against the claims of Beck and others, who position people in a fluid sociological space of risk and opportunity, Friedman and Laurison adopt a Bourdieusian perspective that emphasizes the benefits of different types of social capital—economic, cultural, and social—enjoyed by the offspring of the upper-middle classes relative to the offspring of the working classes. People with wealthy parents are subsidized in their career starts by their parents. These offspring of the upper classes have typically attended good private schools and have cultural capital that provides a good career fit across a wide range of elite jobs.
The authors show, for example, that having a breadwinner parent from the upper-middle class, as opposed to the working class, makes it 6.5 times more likely that one will enter into an elite occupation. None of this should be surprising for anyone who has grown up in the UK or the U.S.—societies in which people from wealthy backgrounds enjoy a host of resource benefits from birth to adulthood that are denied most working-class children. The value of this book, therefore, lies in the detail by which the perpetuation of privilege is demonstrated and illustrated rather than in the revelation that people with high paying and highly prestigious jobs ensure their children gain similar advantages.
The book draws from data on social mobility collected as part of the Labor Force Survey of over 18,000 people working in elite jobs in the UK from July 2013 to July 2016. The introductory chapter lays out the basic argument of the book, borrowing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu on different forms of capital that enrich the prospects of those born to privilege. The authors follow Bourdieu, for example, in emphasizing the ways in which privileged parents pass on a symbolic mastery of vocabulary, grammar, dress, and etiquette that is denied the offspring of working-class parents. I was reminded of how colleges within Cambridge University train incoming students to become members of the upper classes through extensive experience in fine dining (Dacin, Munir, and Tracey, 2010).
According to the authors, people are imprinted with class identities, leading to beneficial or dire consequences for their career aspirations. Chapter 1 demonstrates that, notwithstanding the evidence I have mentioned concerning the efforts of Cambridge colleges to prepare students from all backgrounds for life at the top, a lower-class origin penalizes people’s access to top professions even if people go to university and achieve the highest grades. Chapter 2 zooms into the details of elite professional achievement and reveals that individuals from the working classes earn 16 percent less than their colleagues from more privileged backgrounds. Chapter 3 shows that these pay differentials are partly due to those from privileged backgrounds tending to work in London for large firms and in high paying professions such as medicine, law, and finance.
The second part of the book provides case studies that feature not only statistical analysis and observations by the authors of different occupational arrangements, but also extensive interviews with individuals. Chapter 4 introduces us to a number of settings including a TV broadcasting company, an accounting firm, an architectural practice, and a number of self-employed actors. The authors argue that the class origins of individuals sort working-class people in these case studies into less prestigious specialties than their upper-class-origin colleagues, with the result that working-class-origin people fail to reach the top of the hierarchy. Like H. G. Wells’s Eloi, it is those from elite backgrounds who access the upper reaches of these worlds.
Chapters 5 through 9 investigate the absence of confidence that seems to be a major difference in the reports of working-class interviewees relative to upper-class interviewees. The hidden drivers of the “class ceiling” are therefore the extent to which individuals are supported in their early adulthood career strivings by the bank of Mum and Dad (chapter 5); the availability of sponsors who fast-track protégés’ careers (chapter 6); and the ability to fit into elite workplaces in terms of dress, cultural references, accent, and other components of cultural capital (chapters 7, 8, and 9). Chapter 10 casts the book’s contribution in a detailed Bourdieusian lens that emphasizes how embodied cultural capital in terms of taste and self-presentation secures advantage for those who hail from the upper-middle class. Chapter 11 provides a summary of themes.
Overall, the book provides compelling reading concerning the ways in which a modern country sorts its privileged children into career tracks that matter hugely for the welfare of society. What is missing is any sense of whether new high-tech occupations that dominate the economy are similarly closed off to the aspirations of ambitious people from lower occupational backgrounds. These occupations are likely to be less circumscribed by the need for cultural capital than the ancient Inns of Court in which Bourdieusian privilege reinvents itself. Also missing is any sense of life in the precarious gig economy of food delivery and warehouse work in which many people find themselves after the disappearance of middle-class jobs in large organizations, as documented by Adam Cobb and others (e.g., Cobb and Stevens, 2017). There is also no engagement with the identity-reconstruction narratives that characterize many life trajectories in a world of boundaryless careers (e.g., Ibarra, 1999).
If H. G. Wells were to use his time machine to visit modern Britain, he would undoubtedly be impressed that people like himself—a child of the servant classes—enjoy free education, free healthcare, access to the best universities, and a range of opportunities denied to the working classes in his own day. In his 1895 dystopian vision, Wells envisaged the endgame of the class war in terms of the Morlocks farming the useless elites for food. The recommendations of Friedman and Laurison are mercifully less drastic in the epilogue to their book. Their remedies to ameliorate elite advantage include banning unpaid and unadvertised internships and providing legal protection for those who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Is the glass half full or half empty for those from the less privileged strata of society? The subtitle to Friedman and Laurison’s book gives the game away: as long as people are free to use their wealth to enhance their children’s life opportunities, it will always pay to be privileged.