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The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged
Please note: this is a change to the scheduled speaker
The hidden barriers or ‘glass ceilings’, preventing women and minority ethnic groups from getting to the top are well documented. Yet questions of social class – and specifically class origin – have been curiously absent from these debates. In this talk I begin by drawing on new data from Britain’s largest employment survey, The Labour Force Survey, to demonstrate that a powerful and previously unrecognised “class pay gap” exists in Britain’s higher professional and managerial occupations. I then switch focus to ask why this pay gap exists. Specifically, I draw on 175 interviews across four occupational case studies – television, accountancy, architecture, and acting. This demonstrates that the class ceiling can only be partially attributed to conventional measures of ‘merit’. Instead, more powerful drivers are rooted in the misrecognition of classed self-presentation as ‘talent’, work cultures historically shaped by the privileged, the affordances of the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, and sponsored mobility premised on class-cultural homophily.
Date:
3 June 2019, 12:45
Venue:
Department of Sociology, 42-43 Park End Street, OX1 1JD. Access building via Tidmarsh Lane. Seminar to be held in lecture theatre, ground floor
Speaker:
Sam Friedman (LSE)
Organising department:
Department of Sociology
Organiser:
Christiaan Monden (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
Antoinette.Moffa@sociology.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Antoinette Moffa
