INEQUALITY IN BRITAIN
Introduction
Social stratification is about the different social classes and relative positions of social groups within a given country or community. In most societies, it has to do with the level of wealth each social category yields, but there are several concepts and theories that relates to it. This includes level of education, norms, social activities and preferences as well as the expectations society places on certain people within each class which leads to taste and the formation of identities. As a result of this, there is the famous “Top 1%”, the upper class, the upper-middle, the middle class, lower class, extremely poor. Categorisation has historical backgrounds and it goes back to ancient tribal, feudal and other socio-economic pointers that persists today often relating to the rules of the land and other distributions of power.
Britain has gone through a lot of changes and modifications over the past 5 centuries. However, there have been numerous reforms in the social classes of the UK, which has caused a more equitable distribution of wealth and a better quality of life for people in the country. Some people claim that the traditional social boundaries have been eroded. The purpose of this essay is to examine the research question:
This research will commence with a critical analysis of literature and this will cover the authoritative works of Bourdieu and other scholars. This will be applied to the situation of Britain and critiqued in order to draw conclusions.
Literature Review
There are many aspects of social stratification. This includes a series of methods of classifying people into groups and levels. Social classes are conceptualized on the basis of composition of capital and social trajectory. Different types of capital are exchanged or flows within each class and social grouping.
Karl Marx is known for presenting the argument that the aristocracy controlled wealth in ancient societies and this was taken over by the bourgeoisie class. After the Industrial Revolution the bourgeoisie class enslaved the working class who have to work for low wages in order to pay rent from their meagre income to the bourgeoisie class who owned landed property.
Max Weber, who shared some of Marx’s perspective in many matters divided social stratification into three components – power, status and class which are all pointers that influences the way people get categorised.
“Bourdieu adopts the analytical language of class reproduction and reconversion strategies to distinguish his approach from mainstream social mobility research.”. He identifies class, habitus and social capital as the main system through which people are classified and stratified in modern society.
Social capital includes embodied, objectified and institutional social properties that give social group some value. These are non-financial assets that promotes social mobility. Thus, one could mention the connections a person had, the kind of associations a person identified with amongst others.
Habitus “internalised form of the class condition and of the conditionings”. This includes the circumstances and preferences that a given class or group of people had in order to achieve and attain their ends in life.
Field is a setting with agent and agencies that ensure social systems thrive. This includes the agents and agencies of socialization and how people lived their lives and the limits that were placed on them by the circumstances around them.
Thus, the three things, social capital, habitus and field come together to define the social classification and stratification of a given community or state. This means that they explain the environment within which people live and how they carry out their activities and make a living.
Critical Analysis
This section of the essay will critique and analyse the extent to which Britain can be considered a meritocracy. This will be done with reference to British higher education and the possibility of the commoner gaining the best of everything based on his ability and effort as opposed to birth position and family status.
In a classless society, the status a person joins and what a person becomes should be solely based on the person’s effort and abilities. However, in a class-based society, there is a system whereby rigid social fields and habitus exist. This creates boundaries within which social capital is exchanged for specific groups of people. Thus, this section will be concerned with whether Britain’s higher education system encourages classed-based systems in the 21st century or not.
Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) presented the social reproduction thesis, which focused on the relationship between education, family and social class. In their view, the classes in society are regenerated over the years through education, family and social classes. Thus, education is instituted to ensure that certain families and people from certain classes transfer wealth to their children and their children’s children.
In their thesis, the concept of symbolic violence is explained as a trend whereby the educational system shows a learner about the inequality of power in society. Children learn them and reproduce these inequalities in the power structure of the society in their adult lives. This leads to a social compass, which guides students into adults who belong to specific classes.
Power relations and class interests are not visible, but they exist in various subtle ways and forms. The society appears to be neutral but these exist class interests and symbolic violence still exists in various ways and forms.
In the UK, higher education which used to be heavily subsidized is now to be paid-for by students. A study in the UK has to come up with £9,000 a year to complete an average degree that used to go for £2,000 per year for UK and European students. These were rates that were only limited to foreign students. Therefore, this shows that certain people from some backgrounds will either have to forfeit university education and study programs that are of a lower earning capacity of the students.
However, even before students get to the university level, they will have to go through a sixth-form college which makes the difference in shaping the future of people. A good sixth-form college will charge about £50,000 for two years. These colleges almost always produce students who make perfect scores – AAA. On the other hand, students from poor backgrounds – like the child of a migrant living in a place like Peckham have to study in colleges where they pay £3000 for the whole course. Such students will be very pleased if they get CCC or mid-range scores in their Advanced Level certificate courses.
It is no secret that A-Levels are the shapers of people’s destinies. The best universities and universities that were attended by the richest nobles and elite classes of the 70 years ago only open up to the people with perfect scores. And it is only the grandchildren of such rich elites who can afford sixth-form colleges that use strong module systems that ensure that their students make AAA. These are the elites who own property in the UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United States. They can afford to pay £100,000 if that is what will cause their children and grandchildren to get to the same university they graduated from.
Meanwhile, a number of new universities in the UK have been known to be frequented by foreign students. These universities have often been called sub-standard and others have even been called scams. Such universities open up for foreign students who pay a lot of money to enrich the owners and they keep slots for disadvantaged UK students who make low grades at their A Levels. After graduating, one will hardly get a place in a good job. Even if one manages to get such a place, that will be considered a privilege and such a person might have to do twice as much as the child of a rich person whose grandparents sit on the board of directors of such a company.
“By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the education system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give. This consists mainly of linguistic and cultural competence and that relationship of familiarity with the culture which can only be produced by family upbringing when it transmits the dominant culture.”.
The statement above shows that education determines the structure of society. And it is positioned to favour those who are native to the culture and community. This is because the making of the curriculum is politicized and the interest of the state is to be put at the forefront of the entire process. Hence, there is a general trend towards the creation of systems that favors the children of the elite.
Empirical studies show that there is a strong correlation between the academic success of students based on their family’s cultural capital. Historically, Britain has always used social classes as a vehicle to reproduce power and inequality. Trusts are created by the rich to transfer wealth specifically to their descendants in times when conquests were common. Thus, in today’s world where it is illegal to conquer another territory, it follows that the elites will still find ways of protecting their best interest in order to transfer their wealth to the next generation. In this time, education is the main tool through which the wealth of the rich in Britain could be transferred to their children and grandchildren.
The way education has been used as a mechanism for transferring wealth from one class to another can be summed up in the following pointers.
Establishment of permanent core of specialised agents (teachers and institutions) that go through homogeneous training: There are certain agencies and institutions that naturally provide legitimacy and a reputation to institutions. For instance, where one mentions Oxford and Cambridge, the thought that comes to mind is high-quality in education. The fact that one went through such an institution makes him or her a privileged candidate. Even if such a person graduates with the worst grade, he might have some positivity attached to the certificate. Thus, these institutions are considered to be permanently positive and productive and the rich keep their links to them and their directors in order to ensure that their children are given admission in there.
Standardised and standardising instruments: Education is standardised throughout the UK. Thus, there is a general notion that the best go through certain institutions. This is abused by the rich and powerful who ensure that commoners with specific IQs study in certain institutions whilst the rich and their children go to the best of institutions in order to gain a positive reputation.
Creation of a Field and Habitus in Elite Institutions that Exclude the Lower Class: There is a general system whereby the social activities in elite institutions only favor the elite and their children. Thus, when a person does not fit into a specific elite institution, that person might not survive locally. As such, s/he might want to study elsewhere. The parents might be intimidated and might just want to encourage their children to study elsewhere that is less demanding.
Ritualisation of the Educational Process: There are numerous means of pushing people through the educational system and this includes examination, essays and practicals and since this is instituted by the elite, they ensure their children get the best to the detriment of the servant-class. This includes the creation of institutions that train children who have the ability to ace examinations and go through these rituals. This leads to better results for the rich whilst the poor remain in the sidelines.
Denial of Symbolic Violence: Generally, stratification in industrialised nations like Britain tend to be viewed as “open” but the upper class always have a means of reinventing themselves. In any situation where objections are raised in the existing educational system, there will be people who will rise to deny it. This is almost always something that ends up in rigorous debates which ultimately goes to the House of Lords and other entities of government who make changes. However, in the normal sense, the rich and powerful do nothing but just deny that symbolic violence in any form exists in the UK.
There are absolute and relativist mobility barriers. These include barriers that cannot be challenged and those that can be challenged to a degree of success. In either way, there is some kind of limit that is placed on the commoner and ordinary person – particularly the disadvantaged. This prevents them from getting to certain heights in society and leads to many problems and issues.
Changes in 20th Century Britain included “class and status, social and geographical mobility, standards of living, and the family, and explains how these changes have been affected by economic growth, liberal and Marxist theories, and the power of the state.”. These systems created a coherent body of processes that changed the United Kingdom significantly and made it easier for the ordinary person to get a better quality of life. This improved social mobility and enhanced trends for the ordinary person.
However, social class still provides a “predictive schema” through which people’s probability of gaining a certain form of education to better their lives can be evaluated with a high degree of accuracy. Thus, it cannot be denied that education plays a fundamental and basic role in the way and manner in which people thrive in the British society. Education is a major indicator of a new social class.
Conclusion
Britain has made a lot of advances in the past century. A hundred years ago, there were laws that made it almost impossible for the commoner to achieve certain goals in the UK. However, a lot has changed in Britain and the commoner and the immigrant can work to achieve almost the same level of results as the member of the House of Lords or a wealthy beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution.
In spite of these major advances in the UK, there are still class differences in terms of income, social capital and other observable differences in classes and groups of people. Education is one of the mediums through which this inequality is instituted and transmitted across generations. There are various social systems that create a habitat within which only the wealthy can thrive. And due to the fact that there is the standardization of the educational system and the integration of various limiting factors, it is very difficult for the commoner to get a place in the best institutions. Thus, in the end, these persons have to settle for the bad institutions and this keep them at the lower margins of life in society. Therefore, it can be said that although a lot has changed and the UK system is deemed to be “open” and “fair”, there are various invisible blocks and limits, placed in and around the entry into institutions of higher learning in the UK that makes it a class-based society.
Bibliography
Blunden, A., 2011. Bourdieu on Status, Class and Culture. [Online] Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7910510/Bourdieu_on_Status_Class_and_Culture[Accessed 18 May 2016].
Bourdieu, P., 1986. Forms of Capital. In: R. G. Richardson, ed. Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, pp. 241-256.
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-. C., 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.. London: Sage.
Conelly, R., Gale, V. & Lambert, P., 2016. Social Stratification: Trends and Processes. London: Routledge.
Crompton, R., 2008. Class and Stratification,. 3rd ed. London: Polity Press.
Doob, C., 2012. Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society. 1st ed. London: Pearson Education.
Erikson, R. & Goldthorpe, J. H., 1993. The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Wotton-under-Edge: Clarendon Press.
Goldthorpe, J. H., 1987. Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halsey, A. H., 1995. Change in British Society. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks.
Lawler, S., 2005. Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities. The Sociological Review, 53(3), p. 429 – 446.
Macionis, G. & John, L., 2010. Sociology. Toronto: Pearson Canada.
Matthys, M., 2012. Cultural Capital, Identity, and Social Mobility. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Reay, D., Crozier, G. & Clayton, J., 2009. Strangers in Paradise? Working Class Students in Elite Universities. Sociology, 43(6), pp. 1103-21.
Reid, I., 1998. Class in Britain. London: Polity Press..
Saunders, P., 1990. Social Class and Stratification. London: Routledge.
Schwartz, D., 2012. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spaaij, R., 2011. Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries. London: Taylor & Francis.
