The plurality of the Global Middle Class(es) and their school choices – moving the ‘field’ forward empirically and theoretically

The rise of multinational corporations, which have come to dominate the global economy in the last decades, has been supported and accompanied by an upsurge of a new group of globally mobile professionals. This global professional ‘class’ provides the expert knowledge and skills needed for the operation of multinational corporations, and consists of highly skilled professionals who circulate the globe – mostly between key global cities such as New York, London, Sydney, and Hong Kong, but also further afield in Stockholm, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, and so forth (as featured in the papers in this special issue). In recent years, researchers have begun to examine this emergent social group, who are so central in sustaining and advancing processes of globalisation (Beaverstock, 2017; Erkmen, 2018; Harvey & Beaverstock, 2017; Koo, 2016; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014). This special issue of Discourse builds on these contributions empirically and theoretically, through a crucial focus, that has mostly been neglected in the literature – the parenting strategies and educational choices of globally-mobile professional parents. The contributors to this special issue analyse these practices in various contexts in order to understand whether and how global professionals seek to transmit habits of international mobility and cosmopolitan orientations to their children and the practices they deploy to reproduce their privileged social position. Given the mobility of this group, it is important to understand in what social space the attempt to reproduce advantages is conceptualised and practised.

We want to begin this editorial introductory essay by acknowledging the work of anthropologists who charted the existence and emergence of what they called ‘the murky plurality of the global middle class’ (Heiman et al., 2012, p. 8) through the methodological lens of ethnography. This work is important as it brings together the conjunction of the ‘global’ and ‘middle class’ to consider more deeply ‘the relationship between global economic shifts and middle-class formations’ (p. 4). Implied here is that there are processes that contribute to a global middle class formation, and that these processes are multifarious, multidimensional and multi-scalar.

Scholars have variously attempted to name the GMC as ‘transnational managerial class’ (Cox, 1981), ‘transnational semi-proletariat’ (Tollefsen & Lindgren, 2006), ‘braceros’ – ‘immigrant citizens and transnational labour’ (Cohen, 2011), ‘global service class’ (Goldthorpe, 1995), and so on. We find these articulations for naming this social grouping(s) problematic because they pay too much attention to the professional status as a distinguishing feature. However, in our view, equally important, as Robson and Butler (2001) argue, is that ‘in analyzing middle-class formation it is important to avoid simply reading different groups off from their “objective” class/occupational positions’ (p. 71). They remind us that ‘the processes of (class) formation’ emerges out of –

the dialectical interplay of varying forms of social, economic and cultural capital and habitus on the one hand, and the distinctive opportunities of – across a range of fields – offered by metropolitan marketplaces on the other. (p. 71)

A second useful way of conceptualising the GMC is by taking a more ecological approach, in which this group is seen as more of a discourse-community. Romero (1998) argues that the concept of discourse communities emphasise the influential role communicative practices play in constituting the social world. Discourse interweaves language, action, and identity in a way that engages and connects its participants to give a sense of coherence and common purpose to a community. Examining whether such a discourse-community exists for one or several fractions that arguably constitute a GMC group is a critical endeavour within the social sciences.

Education is one such important field or potential discursive frame which constitutes the GMC. It is arguably an important class-making process where the GMC mindfully consider what school their children should ideally attend, and what broader educational practices should be engaged with. Hence, the collection of essays in this special issue challenge the ‘murky’ understandings of the GMC by taking ‘education’ as their focus. Through new empirical investigations and nuanced contextual analyses of GMC from different parts of the world, the special issue considers how we might conceptualise the apparent emergence of this group, and what might make them distinctive to other middle class fractions, and whether they can potentially be understood as a coherent social entity. The papers offer new insights into the plurality of the GMC as a group, as well as the multiplicity of their educational consumption practices.

This special issue puts GMC and School Choice in the spotlight for a number of reasons. First, we want to respond to Ball and Nikita’s (2014) article calling for continued research on GMC and school choice because the ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai, 1996) of this group has accelerated. International schools can now be found all around the world, which we assume is linked to greater demands for such provision by the GMC, as well as local middle classes. However, little is known about how diverse school choices made by the GMC are, and what factors might influence this. This question was clearly raised in Breidenstein et al.'s (2018) research of the Berlin GMC education ‘market’. A further study in Hong Kong found that GMC parents prefer that their children attend local Hong Kong schools. This is so as to ‘emplace’ them within the local culture and ensure they accumulate Chinese linguistic capital (Groves & O’Connor, 2018). The media also reports that international schools fees are increasingly out-costing many GMC families (The Straits Times, 23 Aug 2018; see also Adams & Agbenyega in this volume). Thus, further empirical studies are needed to understand how, why, and what schools GMC families choose for their children, and critically, what factors shape their choices (national setting, affordability, diversity of student cohort, language of instruction, desire to sustain a particular national identity).

Second, our special issue also seeks to respond to Ball and Nikita’s (2014) claim that ‘the educational choice-making of the GMC’ opens up a whole gamut of questions about ‘class identity, social relations and social practices’ (p. 89). It could be anticipated that GMC families are both anxious to reproduce or extend their class privilege, as well as seek to provide their children with opportunities to achieve but also to be fulfilled (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2013; Stefansen & Aarseth, 2011). What is arguably unique about a focus on the GMC is their mobility, which demands that we examine how movement through space, dislocation, managing uncertainty and ‘the unknown’, encounters with ‘Others’ both equally privileged but also less resourced local groups – affect the orientations and broader educational practices of this group. Even though all the contributions in this special issue focus on GMC and education/school choice, they actually offer broader engagements with a range of theoretical resources and reflections on the nature of this social group, which will be relevant to sociologists, anthropologists, and others; not only scholars focused on education.

Third, in their article, Ball and Nikita (2014) suggested that Beck's theoretical standpoint of a cosmopolitan sociology could reinvigorate the research on GMC and school choice. They argued that such a new theoretical framework is ‘a necessary condition for grasping the dynamics of an increasingly cosmopolitan reality’ (p.90). Following Beck's invocation, Ball and Nikita argue that any analyses of studies in GMC and school choice that locates itself within ‘national sociology’ runs into the problematics of ‘methodological nationalism’ because the GMC are uniquely positioned within transnational space. Yet, recent studies of GMC families have argued that the GMC do not ‘de-couple’ themselves from nation-states necessarily; to the contrary, where they come from originally has a powerful hold on their belonging to the nation (Yemini & Maxwell, 2018; Maxwell & Yemini, this issue). Indeed, the collection of essays in this special issue presents an even more complex picture.

In the first paper of this special issue, Claire Maxwell and Miri Yemini draw on a comparative perspective to explore how different practices of mobility shape the education strategies of non-mobile, immigrant and GMC families originating from Israel. The authors show through their data that whether you choose to re-locate or not, and how many times you move your family across borders encourages different modalities of cosmopolitanism to be embodied. Drawing on Andreotti, Biesta, and Ahenakew’s (2015) model of global mindedness, Maxwell & Yemini argue that the ‘moored’ (non-mobile) Israeli middle class engage with a form of cosmopolitan tourism, while the immigrant middle class (who have moved from Israel to London in their study) engage in a form of empathetic cosmopolitanism. Finally, the GMC families adopt a visiting approach, encouraged by their frequent mobility. The authors end their paper by suggesting that it is precisely this approach to cosmopolitanism – visiting – that allows GMC parents to so confidently narrate managing the uncertainty that is generated through constant mobility in relation to their children's education, sense of belonging and futures.

Maxwell & Yemini's contribution argues that form of family mobility shapes the ways geographical borders of space, in which they are making school choices, are conceptualised by middle class groups. Joanne Higginson, Julie McLeod and Fazal Rizvi, in the second paper in this special issue, focus in more specifically on GMC families moving to, or returning to, Melbourne, Australia. Their analysis of these families’ school choices suggests a more inter-connected conceptualisation of space is needed. Higginson et al. see the local, national and global as co-constitutive and overlapping. The authors draw on the concept of ‘geo-social strategies’ to describe how parents of such mobile families made use of new media technologies to research which schools would be most suitable for their children without having to visit the schools in person before relocating. Furthermore, the young people in the study use ‘hacking’ as a way to maintain their transnational friendship via polymedia. The case studies also illuminate which aspects of their previous schooling experiences, in other parts of the world, families and young people seek to reproduce in their new Australian homes (the physical look of the school; a large diverse, ‘international’ student population, etc). The authors conclude that we should ‘focus on transnational connectivities, generational dynamics, family and social life’, and not overlook the ‘national’ frame when studying the GMC and school choices.

Megan Adams and Joseph Agbenyega's contribution to this issue continues to emphasize the need for a temporal analysis when making sense of education practices and school choice aspirations, that takes into account parents’ own biographies, the reasons for mobility, and, as argued by Higginson et al., attention to the national specificity of where families are re-locating to. Adams & Agbenyega draw on data from GMC families who have recently moved to Malaysia. They coin the concept of ‘futurescaping’ to make sense of the imagined futures articulated by their participants, which they argue are dialectically related to the past. Critical to this contribution is the emphasis on how cultural values and experiences of growing up in quite different countries, shape school choices and aspired-to futures among this professional social group.

Paul Tarc, Aparna Mishra Tarc, and Xi Wu focus on a very specific professional group within the GMC – Anglo-Western international school teachers and their families, whose professional histories are replete with stories of transnational mobility. A careful examination of three family histories offers insights into how these professionals, themselves from middle class backgrounds, refashion their social class location through the elite, transnational environments of international schools in which they are simultaneously cultivating the future GMC workers of the future. Tarc et al.'s analysis details how these families accumulate and exchange economic, cultural and social capital, including facilitating access to an elite international education for their own children. The authors also emphasise an interesting conceptual point – that the ‘global’ in the term GMC need not necessarily refer to obtaining employment outside one's nation-state, but could also be understood as becoming ‘global’ through time spent in different parts of the world – but particularly within ‘transnational spaces’.

Moosung Lee and Ewan Wright's paper builds nicely on Tarc et al.'s by considering the implications of an international education, specifically an International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) one – which so many GMC families seek out for their children. The article demonstrates that the IBDP is likely to sustain social advantage for children of GMC families, as well as allow other young people to develop the necessary credentials and orientations/aspirations to enter into this professional group in the future. A second key finding is that the aspiration to develop cosmopolitan orientations among IBDP graduates can also have unanticipated consequences, suggesting a fragility in developing such modes of ‘global mindedness’. The data informing this argument comes from 42 IBDP alumni with upper middle-class backgrounds currently attending two ‘world-class’ universities in Hong Kong. Lee and Wright unveil the paradox that the ‘cosmopolitan learning’ (Rizvi, 2009) that these students received via the IBDP sets them apart from local students and does not appear to facilitate their participation in everyday cosmopolitan encounters, such as forming meaningful friendships and affinity spaces with local Hong Kong students. These IBDP alumni felt that they were in a social network of their own, and were to some extent excluded because their Cantonese was not strong enough.

Jennifer Waddling, Emil Bertilsson, and Mikael Palme offer an empirically rich and comprehensive study of GMC's school choices in Sweden within a Bourdieusian frame. First, they argue, this question needs to be studied within a specific social field – in this case – at the national level, so as to establish just how large this category of professionals actually is and what schools their children indeed attend. In the Swedish case, Waddling et al. find this internationally-mobile middle class is in fact quite small, especially those who have school-aged children. Second, through a comparative qualitative study of school choices in Stockholm and Uppsala, the authors are able to show that different kinds of aspirations and values shape the specific choices made by these various international professionals around schooling. The study also highlights that apart from those highly economically-resourced families, who choose independent international schools, many of the sample could either not afford this ‘choice’ or actively sought to resist immersing their children in these particular spaces. Preferring instead to send their children into the Swedish publicly-funded system. However, these parents often lack the necessary knowledge and capitals to succeed in these spaces. Waddling et al. further argue that the Swedish upper middle classes have not yet embraced ‘international’ forms of education, instead preferring the more traditional routes known to guarantee movement into and sustainment of relatively high socio-economic and cultural locations for their children.

In the final empirical contribution to this special issue, Joel Windle and Quentin Maire argue that we need to more carefully call forth the concept of the GMC and the links made between this group, notions of ‘innocent’ cosmopolitanism and desires for ‘international’ education. The authors call for a historically-located and post-colonial analysis of class and racial relations when studying the school choices of the ‘GMC’ (a northern concept in the main) or why there might be a growth in the desire for bilingual and/or international forms of education (understood here to be an articulation of cosmopolitan education). Based on an analysis of the IB provision in Australia, and the growth of bilingual schools in Brazil, Windle & Maire powerfully argue that the type of cosmopolitanism evident in these forms of provision is actually a strategy of distinction secured through the accumulation of cultural capital instead of promoting forms of intercultural communication with others in the local or national space. According to their analyses, the authors argue that forms of cosmopolitan education have been driven by, and are benefiting the already advantaged social groups. Like Higginson et al., Windle & Maire emphasize the need to avoid dichotomous positions of the local/national and transnational/global, which is how the GMC are often understood, but instead take a colonial-historical perspective to make sense of the growth of different, more instrumental forms of cosmopolitan education choices today. The authors also suggest, as do Waddling et al., that the drive for cosmopolitan education is not necessarily as strong as first assumed, and that those from GMC families are not over-represented in such forms of provision.

Our special issue is brought to a close by two exciting contributions of a different nature. An essay by one of our co-editors – Ayman Agbaria – focuses on a neglected, but critical, aspect of GMC scholarship – how religious identity and religious education (formal and informal) shapes identities, school choices and broader education practices of the GMC. Second, leading global city scholar, Saskia Sassen wraps up our special issue with a brief afterword, having read all the contributions. In her piece, Sassen reflects on the strong link between the GMC and ‘global cities’. She explores the ways the GMC are affecting the structures of ‘the city’ and contributing to cities’ dynamic but often unequal relations.

We are very grateful to the editors of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education for the opportunity to curate such an exciting special issue on a critical, under-researched and under-theorised topic. Just as Sassen says in her afterword, that global cities are ‘complex but incomplete’, we think the GMC and their practices of mobility complicate and enrich research on school choice, educational practices and social class formations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Claire Maxwell is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Her work examines the formation of elite systems and provision of education, and how pressures around internationalisation and from dominant social groups (including globally-mobile professionals) may be altering aspirations for, meanings of and the structuring of education systems.

Miri Yemini is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests focus particularly on how globalisation and imperatives around internationalisation are shaping the meanings, and provision of education.

Aaron Koh is an Associate Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published widely in the area of Globalization and Education, Sociology of Elite Schooling and Critical Cultural Studies in Education.

Ayman Agbaria is a Senior Lecturer and the Head of the Education, Society and Culture M.A programme at the University of Haifa. His areas of expertise include: education among ethnic and religious minorities, policy and pedagogy for civics education, Islamic education, and teacher training.