Aspiration paradoxes: working-class student conceptions of power in ‘engines of social mobility’

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between ‘aspiration’ and identity as rendered within discourses of power. Focusing on the deeply ingrained values of a group of 23 white working-class boys from South London (aged 14–16), the research critically considers the conception of power within a neoliberal era which produces both new subjectivities and new counter-narratives. The research examines a group of boys who fully acknowledge that post-compulsory education would enhance their power in society but who simultaneously articulated how accruing power made them feel uncomfortable. There exists a tension between the working-class values inculcated in the community and the neoliberal prerogatives of the school; as a result, their shared habitus engages in a continual process of reconciling competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be powerful.

Keywords:

• Aspiration
• counter-narratives
• habitus
• kinaesthetic
• neoliberalism
• visual methods
• white working-class boys

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Dr Pere Ayling for their feedback and previous drafts of this article.

Notes

1. In North America, researchers have highlighted the issue of the pressure experienced by black youth and their families to conform to often competing, mainstream values versus preserving their cultural identities (Carter, 2005). Carter (2005) distinguished between dominant and non-dominant cultural capital. The former constitutes the cultural knowledge and skills of high-status racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups – in the case of the US, the white middle class. Non-dominant cultural capital ‘consists of a set of tastes, appreciations, and understandings, such as preferences for particular linguistic, musical, and dress styles, and physical gestures used by lower status group members to gain ‘authentic’ cultural status positions in their respective communities’ (Carter, 2005, p. 50).

2. In defining the class status of the participants, I used a combination of factors. Free school meals (FSM) were a problematic proxy as, through my dialogues with the leadership team of the school, I learned that many families did not know they were eligible to receive FSM or refused to apply for it. Few of the parents had post-16 education with the notable exception being that some of the fathers had completed training courses in trades such as plumbing and electricity.

3. When habitus accords with the logic of the field, ‘it finds itself ‘as fish in water’; it does not feel the weight of the water and takes the world about itself for granted’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127).

4. Arguably, this is a classed rendering of power and contrasts with the gender work of Mills (2001), in which he argues that ‘masculinity is often at its most ‘glorious’ when it presents the domination of other men’ (p. 23). The boys’ approach to power, therefore, suggests a rejection of competitive aspirations based on a competition for top status jobs (cf. Stahl, 2015).