Honourable mobility or shameless entitlement? Habitus and graduate employment

Abstract

This article explores the contrasting predispositions of a group of working-class and middle-class undergraduates to using nepotism to gain advantage in the labour market. Drawing upon a Bourdieusian framework, it is argued that the middle-class students, whose habitus was aligned to the field, were more likely to express a willingness to utilise whatever networks they could to secure a ‘foot in the door’. Meanwhile, the working-class students, who were more insecure about the legitimacy of their participation within a middle-class field, expressed a commitment to a form of honour which ruled out using contacts on the grounds that it was morally unacceptable. They discussed a desire to ‘prove themselves’ which is arguably symptomatic of a deeply ingrained reliance on meritocracy. I explore how this may arise due to their habitus having developed within a dominated position in society where respectability is crucial to generating feelings of self-worth and value.

Keywords:

• Habitus
• social capital
• networking
• graduates
• inequality
• social mobility

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Dr Nicola Ingram for her comments on a first draft of this article and for help with developing ideas. The author would also like to thank the students from the Paired Peers project for being so open with their stories and the rest of the Paired Peers project team for their help. The author would also like to acknowledge her supervisor Professor David James for his continual support, encouragement and guidance. Finally, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Notes

1. POLAR (Participation of Local Area) is a classification devised by the Higher Education Funding Council which represents the proportion of young people who continue to HE from each area. POLAR2 represents that this is the second version.

2. This focus on the working classes as lacking entirely in any form of capital is often the central tenet of criticism directed at Bourdieu, who is seen as a determinist. However, this is usually merely due to a misunderstanding of his concepts. Social capital is about having contacts who possess capitals which – whilst not objectively superior – are misrecognised as such and thus are more able to be traded in society and to return some form of profit.

3. Intermediate/unclassifiable was used for participants whom we felt did not solidly fall into either the middle or working classes. These were either those in intermediate classes or those whose parents appeared in differing class positions.

4. Following some initial dropouts, our sample remained relatively stable at around 70 whom we interviewed six times over the course of their degrees (2010–2013). For further information about the project, visit: www.bristol.ac.uk/pairedpeers.

5. Thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, the project has now been awarded funding for another three years to follow our students into the labour market; as such, this issue will need to be revisited later down the line to establish the extent to which nepotism continued to affect their chances of employment.