How does class define us?

That was the Audrey Hepburn playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady – a musical based on the 1913 play Pygmalion written by one of the LSE founders George Bernard Shaw. In the musical, the character Henry Higgins – a pompous phonetics professor - makes a bet that he can transform Eliza from a cockney working-class flower girl into a member of English high society by giving her speech lessons.

The scene we’ve just heard, and others, show a number of comic blunders that Eliza makes as part of Higgin’s – let’s face it misogynistic and classist - project to make her a ‘lady’.

While the musical was set in Edwardian London, does it still reflect how we wear and reveal our social class in English society today? Do accents really matter? Is it enough to ape ones supposed social betters to achieve social mobility? And what’s the cost of that to the individual?

Welcome to LSE iQ, the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I’m Sue Windebank from the iQ team where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas.

In this episode I ask, ‘How does class define us?’

I’ll be talking to a student who has overcome the challenges of being an asylum seeker and living in care to study law at LSE – about the impact of social class on her life.

I’ll hear from a Sociologist of class and inequality, about the arbitrariness of what is considered high culture

And I’ll speak to an Economic Historian who tells me that that class will probably determine who you marry

Sabrina: Yeah, so I originally came to the UK back when I was about four years old, and I came from a country called Eritrea. We were basically fleeing religious persecution. So I came as an asylum seeker. And we arrived in Salford, in Manchester, which is a very working class area.

This is Sabrina Daniel, a second-year law student at LSE

Sabrina: And then about age six I went into foster care. And since then I have been in foster care. And it was an experience, like having three or four different families. But for the past like nine years I've been with the same family, and we've lived in Newton Heath in Manchester, so another working class area.

And as for education background, I went to a state primary school, a state high school, and then I received a full ride scholarship to a private sixth form. And currently I'm studying law at LSE. So it's been a journey.

Sue:

It certainly has.

I asked Sabrina why she had chosen LSE

Sabrina: I looked at the league tables, and I looked at graduate prospects, because I think when you come to university and you're coming with the sole motivation of changing your background, changing your social class, that's what you focus on, the graduate job prospects. And so when I was looking at that, LSE was joint up there with Oxford for graduate prospects. So I was like, "This university is the one that will make me increase my chances of changing my social class." And so that was my particular motivation for LSE. And it has turned out to be true.

Sue:

So you come down to LSE, you meet your peers.

Sabrina:

Mm-hmm.

Sue:

Was there anything that struck you about them, that perhaps surprised you?

Sabrina:

Yeah, so I'd say growing up there was a comfort in other people of color. You'd assume that they were of the same social class, or the same type of background, or you'd have a lot of things that were familiar and similar to one another, whether it's household or the way you were raised. And I expected that to be the same at LSE.

So when I met other people of color students, or other black students, I just assumed that we would be from the same background. But actually, as you get to know them, when you're in conversations and they say certain things and then you're like "Whoa, we are completely different people from completely different worlds." ….

I also just didn't expect to meet so many privately educated students and grammar school students. I think I know about two people that have been fully state educated. And that was a shock, because I think that's where I found comfort, it's with people that were state educated and from the same working class background, because we just seem to get along. And this is something that I hadn't ever considered before, because when you grow up within the same environment, everyone's the same as you, don't consider what it's going to be like if you are in a completely different atmosphere, in a completely different environment, in a room with people that are nothing like you and have nothing common to you and do different things on the weekend to you.

Sue:

Did you feel that you had to sort code switch, change your behavior the way you spoke when you're here at LSE?

Sabrina:

I'd say changing behavior was difficult, so I just didn't know how to change behavior. I'd say I went a bit quieter, but as for other code switching tactics I did, I'd say clothes was a big one. I just would usually wear Primark or H&M. But actually there's certain brands here that I think other wealthy people would recognize and will signal what class you belong to. You're not going to expect a working class student to be walking around in Louis Vuitton, for example. But it'd be things like that, or certain old money brands, that people would be able to recognize.

And I began to recognize them because I'd see certain things on multiple different people, or certain brand that kept on recurring. And then I'd go and research it and then think, I need to go buy this because it's going to help me fit in. And I think to some extent it has a little bit. It's definitely made me feel a lot more confident just being on campus, because I dress like everybody else now. And I've saved up a lot of my internship money and ended up spending it on brand new clothes to try and fit in.

And I think that, to some extent, does help, because fitting in and feeling like you fit in, having the confidence to be in these spaces is a big part of faking it until you make it, and helping me to integrate a lot better….

Sabrina:

I'd say accent as well. At first I just thought it was a joke when people would be like, "You sound like a chav," or you know... Yeah, which is funny. And I remember at one point as well, I began to say it, just as a joke. So somebody asked me like, "Where are you from?" And I was like, "Manchester? Yeah, I know, I sound like a chav." And then he said to me, "No, you can't say that, that's classist." And that's when I thought, "Yeah, he's right, that is classist. Why did I just say that?"

So I began to pronounce my Ts properly, and so instead of saying like, "20," I'd be like "20." And making a conscious effort to do these things. Which can be exhausting, when you're constantly thinking about how it is that you're acting or how it is that you sound or how it is that you dress. ….

Continuing to widen access to, and participation in, higher education is incredibly important to LSE. The School wants the most academically able students – whatever their background - to feel that highly selective universities such as LSE are a realistic option for them.

However, for students like Sabrina, getting into LSE has only been part of the challenge. She’s felt that she had to change the way she talks and the ways she dresses to feel confident – in a way that someone from a middle class background would not. But where does the cultural standard Sabrina is seeking to emulate come from?

I spoke to Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology at LSE. His research focuses, in particular on the cultural dimensions of contemporary class division.

He talked to me about some of his research that he and his co-author Daniel Laurison wrote about in their book The class ceiling: why it pays to be privileged. They looked at elite occupations and how class affects who gets to the top.

Sam:

I think one of the key barriers and issues that those from working class backgrounds face is what we call in our book a misrecognition of merit. And this is really the sense in lots of different elite occupational environments that there is a kind of dominant behavioral code in terms of the way you should be at work, the way you should dress, the way you should act, what's appropriate?

And that tends to reflect who has done that type of work in the past, which in this country in most elite professions is white, privileged, able bodied men, who over time have been able to embed, even institutionalized in some cases, their own ideas about the right way to be in the workplace, that continue to be taken for granted in our everyday lives.

And what that means is that for those from working class backgrounds, who aren't socialized into those particular ways of speaking or dressing or acting or presenting oneself, they have this enduring mismatch and often express a sense that the only way to counteract that is to assimilate. That assimilation is both incredibly difficult when we're talking about having to really manipulate aspects of your identity that are very embedded, and also in many cases feel understandably very important to your sense of identity.

And there's also a sense that even when that assimilation is attempted, it perhaps doesn't communicate the same natural ease that those from privileged backgrounds would have and you often see this in phrases like polish, that you get in these elite occupations, that's seen as some people either have or haven't.

Sam has also done some work on how gender affects upward mobility in the civil service which revealed some of the same types of challenges for people from working class backgrounds.

…..

Sam: I did some work at the Civil Service, about the five minutes when you go into a meeting before the meeting starts, what do people talk about and how do they present themselves, whether it's talking about holidays, weekend, activities, their children, and you see all of these senses of what the appropriate types of behavior are…..

….I would often hear this sort of thing where people would say, "I'm just not telling people what I did at the weekend, I'm just not." And the word actually that one woman in the Civil Service used, which I thought was really powerful, she just kept talking about withdrawal.

Just this sense of withdrawal from those kinds of micro interactions. And then how in appraisals or in conversations with colleagues, people would say, "You're standoffish, you lack confidence." And she would say, "If you take me back to my family or my friends in the town where I grew up, nobody would say I wasn't confident." It's so context specific, but this sense that if you don't feel you can be yourself, this sense of withdrawal, what that looks like and then how you are read by others, it's really powerful, I think.

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You’re listening to LSE iQ. In this episode we’re asking, ’How does class define us?’ Sam Freidman’s research shows that the challenges facing Sabrina are likely to follow her into the workplace. We’ll come back to Sabrina and Sam in a moment.

if some of the cultural standards of elite society are arbitrary –the impact they have on people’s live are not. I spoke to Professor Neil Cummins , Professor of Economic History at LSE. He’s analysed historical big data on marriages in England and it reveals how class is an incredibly strong determinant of who we marry.

Neil:

Okay. Who we marry. Basically, I've got the marriage records for every single person in the UK since 1838 till about 10 years ago, so you got the vast majority of the population. But to look at this question of, say, the status background of spouses in marriage you need far more detailed information. So there we've used a big sample of parish records, nearly two million, and these are Anglican parish records and they have the unique feature that they show the occupations of the bride, groom and then the father's, of the bride, and the father's, of the groom. And you can look at the pattern of correlations within those records and that will give you the underlying connection in marriage but also the true intergenerational persistence rate through the magic of maths.

Sue: What does the intergenerational persistence rate mean?

Neil: Basically, we could think about it as a number between zero and one. So if the number is zero, it means we live in a classless society where your background has no predictive power in where you end up in society. This might be a utopia or a dream of many social planners. If the number was one, the rich stay rich forever as do the poor and there are permanent social classes. In reality, economists, sociologists, everybody interested in this question, has debated where this number is and it turns out the empirics of it are tricky. And so my research over the past 10 years has lent towards the revelation that that number is far closer to one than we ever realized and that has just stunning implications for how we understand our society and capitalism.

So how come intergenerational persistence is so high? And the reason is that the underlying matching in marriage has to be very close. If you had random matching in marriage that would actually mechanically lower that magic number, the intergenerational persistence number, down towards zero but people have to be very alike in order to keep that persistence so high just mathematically. ….

Neil: They're basically from almost exactly the same social background, on average. We can all think of exceptions but we're thinking about what's happening in English society over 200 years, on average, and it's really interesting because there could be many models. There could be more... Women could be more likely to marry up, men marry down, or vice versa but you're finding it's actually very symmetrical which kind of enlightens me as to what the process of matching is all about. People ask each other questions, they get to know each other and really a lot of it is trying to find someone who is very much like them.

Sue:

I feel like a lot of people are going to be disappointed that you've blown the premise of Pretty Woman out of the water with your research.

Neil:

But that could still be happening at the individual level. And that's why we're attracted to it in many ways. When you think about these unlikely love stories, we're attracted to them because we know damn well that that's not how reality works. And I think that you can have a woman from a very low background marrying into royalty, you absolutely can, but basically when you extract to the population level that just basically washes out as random noise and it's just what's happening on average, what's determining the dynamics of this social system which we find ourselves blowing around like dust in the wind here, are these gravities that tend to bind all of us, unfortunately, even if there is these exceptions.

Neil says his research shows that economists have actually over estimated social mobility. Despite all our agonising about answering questions about ourselves on dating apps, there is a deep force that brings us back to marrying someone who is just like us in terms of our class.

Now back to Sabrina, who has her eyes firmly set on social mobility.

Sue:

And you're interested in a career in law.

Sabrina:

Mm-hmm.

Sue:

Do you see class impacting that path for you, or has it already in terms of any internships you've already done?

Sabrina:

Yeah, I'd say class is a major factor for certain industries like law or finance. And I didn't think it was going to impact me that much if I just chose which firms said that they cared about social mobility. So some firms it's very obvious that they're not really interested in that, and that it's predominantly Oxbridge, privately educated students. So they're firms I tended to stay away from anyways.

Sabrina:

And so when I began applying for firms that said that they cared about diversity and social mobility, I thought, "If they do care then it's not really going to impact me." Until I'd notice things like when the other people on the scheme had work experience on their CV from high school at the best law firms in London. And there's no way they could have done that if it wasn't for connections or personal contacts at these firms, because there's no work experience you can get like that in high school.

Or when I was told that I needed to improve the interests section on my CV, and that was the only criticism that I got from my whole application. She liked everything just except that bit. And I thought, "Okay, thank you." And walked away. And then I began thinking about it a few weeks later, because I'm now considering applications again. And I realized what does that actually mean by interests? I think they were trying to get at, try to have more, whether it's middle class sports like tennis or hockey or something like that, or have some hobbies that would be attractive to the firm, and to the clients of the firm, so that I can fit in more. Because hobbies is a major signal of what type of class you are…..

Sue:

I know when we talked before I was quite struck by your tennis story, when you were like, I think you said you and your friend had been deliberately thinking-

Sabrina:

Yeah.

Sue:

"Yeah, what LSE society can we join?"

Sabrina:

Yeah.

Sue:

Could you expand a little bit on that?

Sabrina:

Yeah, so we were thinking of what middle class sports that we could join that would enable to be in those social circles of really wealthy students, and typical students here at LSE. And how we could try to fit in, and also to boost our applications, because firms clearly they look for stuff like this. But when we began looking at it, not only was the membership expensive, but it was also like £200 for a good racket. And so we were thinking, "Gosh, this is going to be a really costly society we're going to have to join." So we're considering something else.

Sabrina:

But that was one thing that I'm still considering now, just for the sake of trying to fit in within certain circles, because I think there's two things that working class students face at university and one's social and one's structural. So you can't participate in certain social settings, like tennis because we just can't afford it. And we've never done it before, and we've not had lessons on it, and we've never played it when we were younger. And then they're structural as well, like things about getting an internship, or getting a graduate job.

While Sabrina is seeking to find common ground with recruiters at potential employers, Sam Friedman’s research has shown an interesting and unexpected trend among elites by looking at 120 years worth of Who’s who – a reference book that appears annually, listing people who influence British life

Sam:

And I suppose what we found really, is that what counts as an elite hobby has really changed quite considerably over time. The dominant recreations of elites towards the end of the 19th century were what you would consider to be aristocratic pursuits, very much connected to the landed estate of the day, very much connected to horses and polo and things like that. And I suppose when you ask the question what makes them elite, I suppose what a lot of these things have in common is incredibly high economic barriers to entry.

You needed to be very rich to shoot, to hunt, to be able to play a lot of these elite games, as well as often having a certain type of education or orientation to actually understand the rules, to actually understand how to play this, so there was a logic of rarity both in the knowledge and the economic resources needed.

And then, I suppose, what we found is that really changed quite considerably at the beginning and early part of the 20th century, where you saw this move in terms of British elite life away from the country estates to the metropolitan centers, and particularly London, and the rise of what you might call traditional highbrow culture, particularly the arts. And I think the really interesting thing there in terms of what makes those things elite was a sense that suddenly now you had an idea that there was forms of culture that were aesthetically better or higher, hence the term highbrow, which interestingly was embedded by the state.

For example, institutions like the Arts Council, institutions like the BBC that emerged at that time very much supported the idea that going to the opera, the theatre, classical music, that these things were better, and as a result would dedicate time to them on the BBC or give public funds to those art forms, which very much, I suppose, embedded this idea that those things were things that the whole of society should emulate.

The really interesting thing, I suppose, that we find at the end of this paper is that's really changed in the last 50 or 60 years. And you see both, to some extent, these highbrow tastes still quite prevalent, but very much mixed alongside what we call ordinary elite pursuits. Spending time with family, friends, pets come up, and a lot of discussion of popular art, cinema. Football comes up a lot. And that's a really curious shift, we think, about how elites want to present themselves culturally.

I mean you have to remember Who's Who as a catalog, is a public document. It's something that anyone, including journalists, often actually look up to see, "Well, how do I make sense of this very elite person?" And I suppose our argument in the paper really is that in an era where economically elites are pulling away and have been for some decades, there is perhaps a worry or a fear that they would be considered to be out of touch and snobbish and that by signalling an ordinariness in the way that they present themselves culturally, they are attempting to forge a sense of cultural connection with the rest of the population.

Ironically while Sabrina is trying to find a way to leverage so-called elite hobbies and interests to help her ascend the social hierarchy, elites themselves are trying to appear more ordinary – perhaps wary of the growing inequality they embody.

But what are the costs to the individual of social mobility? Sabrina told me what it’s like when she returns home to visit.

Sabrina:

Yeah, I'd say currently I don't really fit in anywhere. Which accumulates to a general feeling of unhappiness, to be honest. Because I feel like I've lost myself so much since high school to now that I don't really have a particular persona. So when I go home, I'd say I'm still the same that I am here, which is in the middle of switching from being really working class to trying to be middle class….

I asked Sam about the psychological and emotional impacts associated with social mobility

Sam:

Absolutely, and I think this is one of the areas where the way we talk about social mobility at societal level is really restricted and restrictive. We tend to present social mobility as an alloyed social good, the upwardly mobile are the winners of meritocracy. That is the enduring policy goal, boosting social mobility and you'll hear every political party talk about that.

But having done now several 100 interviews with people who have experienced upward social mobility, many, not all, but many experience that movement in a very class ridden society as quite dislocating.

It often leaves people in a state of what I've characterized as cultural homelessness, that they are stuck in between their origins and their destinations culturally and that liminal state is quite disorientating, particularly, I think, in terms of relationships with your origins in terms of families, communities and friendships……

…..Similarly, there's this sense, as we've already discussed, that you perhaps never feel that you fully belong in your destination world, particularly at work. And so, I think there is a sense that that kind of emotional imprint of upward social mobility needs to be recognized fully and needs to be recognized in particularly institutional settings, in terms of how we support people who go on that journey, not just the workplace, but even places like LSE or elite universities, which is often the first real, powerful institutional stepping stone of this long range upward social mobility.

And I think institutions need to be bolder at recognizing and making people feel that they don't need to assimilate necessarily, or they certainly shouldn't feel any shame or sense of deficit about those really important aspects of their identity

Sam believes the behavioural codes that are routinely perceived as talent, when they are actually just the product of a privileged background, should be challenged.

People like Sabrina are caught in a Catch 22, they shouldn’t have to adapt themselves to middle class cultural standards to improve their career prospects and lives in general, but pragmatically that’s still the reality

And back to the question we started with. How does class define us? For Neil Cummins the answer is pretty stark.

Neil: I'd like to think that we all have hopes and dreams and souls and all of this social class nonsense doesn't matter but when you look hard at the data, and you see it revealed in people's love lives and their life decisions, it seems like people are matching so tightly on class that it seems like nothing else matters.

For Sam Friedman the tastes and behaviours that reveal our place in the social pecking order, and act to keeps us in our respective social places, need to be challenged.

Sam: regardless of how people feel about class, it's continuing to shape all of us whether we know it or not and I think it does so in two main ways really.

One is, it's literally written on the body in ways that we really have very little agency over, controlled by the way that we are brought up. It's in the way that we talk, it's in the way that we gesticulate, it's our posture, in our language choice, in our intonation and that's incredibly powerful, continues to be very powerful, particularly in a country like Britain.

But it also, I think, has an important bearing on the way we think and feel and assess and think about the world. And perhaps the best example of this is taste, right? Is the choices and preferences that we make and why those tend to be patterned in particular ways and that continues to fascinate me.

And I suppose the thought though, that I always want to come back to, is this concept of misrecognition that flanks all of this, whether it's the embodiment or the ways of talking and thinking or tasting, which is that we continue to have a sense in this country that there are particular ways of both of those things that are more legitimate than others and that's why these things tend to be ordered hierarchically.

But I suppose the goal of the sociological analysis is to reveal how arbitrary those ways of assigning value to one thing over the other are, because I think it's only in recognizing that misrecognition of some ways of speaking as more polished than others, so only by revealing that or the taste for classical music versus reality TV as being more superior, it's only in revealing how arbitrary those ways of assigning value are that we can really tackle, I think, class inequality.

Against this academic analysis we have Sabrina, optimistically – but at a personal cost - carving her own path

Sue: How does class define you?

Sabrina:

I'd say class defines me in different ways, from the way I act, the way I talk, the way I think, the way I dress, it is me. But I'd say I try to not think of it as, I have to stay within that class and that it's a bad thing either. Being working class is not a bad thing. And wanting to become middle class is also not a bad thing. So I'd say class defines me, but only to an extent, because I'm currently in the process of changing classes.

This episode was produced by me, Sue Windebank and editing by Ollie Johnson andMayan Arad. If you’d like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the show note notes. And if you enjoy iQ, please leave us a review. Ollie Johnson

Coming up soon on LSE iQ..... Mike Wilkerson asks, ‘Is gaming good for us?