Re-materialising social class.

1. Re-materialising social class. Nick J Fox @socnewmat

2. Introduction • Sociology and social divisions. • The turn to matter in social theory. • Three criticisms of the sociology of class. • A materialist perspective on social divisions. • The micropolitics of class (re)production. • ‘Learning to Labour’ revisited. • Conclusions.

3. Sociology, social divisions and social inequalities • Neo-Marxist analysis of class. • Neo-Weberian analysis of class. • Bourdieu and class ‘distinctions’. • Recent analysis of social class – the Great British Class Survey (Savage et al., 2013).

4. The ‘new’ materialisms • Beyond historical materialism. • Materiality is plural, complex, relational and emergent. • Cuts across nature/culture dualism. • Not structures/systems/mechanisms but a micropolitics of events. • From human agency to material ‘affects’. • Research focus on assemblages, affects and capacities.

5. The sociology of class: 3 criticisms • Theories of class downplay material forces and the role of the non-human. • Contemporary theories of class are essentialist and individualist rather than relational; • Sociological classifications artificially aggregate dissimilar bodies.

6. A materialist perspective on social divisions • The relationality of social divisions. • A micropolitical focus on the events that produce social division and inequality. • From ‘symbolic capital’ to a concern with human and non-human matter.

7. Example: academics and class • Academic class position is relational, produced by interactions with a range of non-human relations, including: salary/pension; work spaces/physical environment; libraries/literature; office furniture; ICT resources; airplanes/ hotels/conferences; housing; vehicles; consumer goods; university environment

8. ‘Learning to Labour’ re-visited • Willis (1977): ‘how working class kids get working-class jobs’. • Culture clash between academic and ‘working-class’ values. • Working class school-resisters (‘the lads’) progressively shifted to non-academic classes (sport, manual crafts). • This led to them leaving school without qualifications and to tejm consequently taking manual jobs. • This, for Willis, is how class is reproduced across generations. • Critique: this series of events was based on a small sub-sample in his study. In fact, many working class children do succeed academically .

9. A micropolitics of class reproduction 1 • Analyse the range of materialities in the working-class environment: • human bodies (workers, school students, teachers, career advisors, employers, managers, family, friends and acquaintances etc.); • collective organizations and institutions; • physical spaces and structures; • tools, equipment and other material goods within these spaces; • the raw materials of production (iron and steel, wood, agricultural products etc); • products of work (goods, services, knowledge); • money and wages, and the goods these can purchase. • These interact in highly complex ways (see next slide).

10. A micropolitics of class reproduction 2 • These relations were assembled by a range of affective movements, including: • school’s orientation towards academic achievements; • an affect-economy that linked families, jobs, money and employers; • material activities/events (music, sport, sex, drinking alcohol, crime); • struggles between teachers and students for authority and control; • the needs of employers for appropriately-skilled workers. •  This complex affect-economy produced a wide range of capacities in children.

11. The complexity of social divisions • Some affects are powerfully aggregating, drawing together dissimilar individuals in terms of the capacities they generated. • However Willis documented some cases where affects countered these aggregations, to produce unexpected outcomes. • These affects fracture these aggregations, producing a range of capacities that open up possibilities for young people.

12. Discussion and conclusions • Micropolitical analysis reveals how schools produce capacities and incapacities in school students and future workers. • Capacities are emergent and context-specific, not fixed attributes of a body or reservoirs of social, cultural and other symbolic ‘capitals’. • To understand the breadth of relations and affects that influence social mobility and produce social divisions, we need detailed data on the complex affect-economies in schools, workplaces, households and wider communities. • Sociological study of social divisions and inequalities needs to move decisively away from efforts to generate classifications. • We need to acknowledge the complex affects of non-human matter on bodies.