Social Mobility: The Dissociative Thesis and its Disputants
[For part of a chapter in a forthcoming MA dissertation, though stand-alone and adapted here]
The marked difference in participation rates to UK Higher Education across social groups, continues to be borne out in published materials, including more recent data (HESA, 2006, 2008, 2009b, 2017b). Despite this, a sizeable minority of young adults from socio-economic groups IV-VII do choose, or find their way to university (Jackson 2017) at a time of massified participation (Woolcock, 2019). Literature related to social and academic fit for such students is fairly voluminous, considering many different identity positionings (c.f. Law, 1995; Lucey et al., 2001; Mahony & Zmroczek, 1997; Reay, 2001; Rose, 1989; Walkerdine, 2003) and in particular their ‘fit’ within higher educational spaces considered ‘elite’ (Reay et al. 2009; Lehmann 2014; Hope, 2014, p.24). This is where this inquiry aims to situate itself productively.
As an example, for his part, Pierre Bourdieu’s own exceptional long-range upward mobility, he believed, left him with an indelible lack of fit between his academic achievement and his social origins (Bourdieu 2007); this he referred to as a habitus clive, a sense of self ‘torn by contradiction and internal division’ (2000,16). In other words, Bourdieu’s disdain for the misrecognition of academic legitimacy and, on the other hand, the insecurity of a ‘self-made Parvenu’ (ibid., 16). His own autobiography highlights the potential psychical pitfalls of the mobility experience, as one ascends through higher education, of its adverse consequences on kinship ties, intimate relationships and the ontological stability of the self through time. It has been noted that there is an irony at play in Bourdieu’s own arguments and his own experience of long-range social mobility; he argued that the dispositions instituted in a person’s habitus were durable enough so that in the majority of cases, it endured without changing through time (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 133). If this were as deterministic as it would imply, there may have not been the sociologist we knew as Bourdieu, preoccupied with social reproduction.
Bourdieu’s self-analysis (2007) should impel us forward into the subjective experiences of not just upward mobility, but its stymying, in the context of being a first-generation student. Indeed, the dilemmas of mobility were explored in detail by social scientists throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, in particular via a theoretical strand known as the ‘dissociative thesis’ (Hopper 1981; Musgrove 1963; Sorokin, 1956; Stacey, 1967).
Occupying a space between sociology and social psychology, these studies furthered the argument that social mobility — either upward or downward — had a largely ‘dissociative’ effect on the individual. Academic interest in the dissociative had ebbed since the 1980s, though some sociologists continue to have an interest in Sorokin’s argument. For example in the field of sociology, the study of social mobility has been dominated for almost three decades by John Goldthorpe and his various colleagues and conversational partners (Breen, 2005; Halsey et al., 1980; Marshall et al., 1997), who has relied, for the most part on large datasets. His qualitative work on mobility has been the exception (Goldthorpe et al., 1969), and its research design criticised (Friedman 2014). More recently, Chan (2017) has argued, from his own work, that there is no quantitative support for Sorokin’s dissociative thesis, both for long-range upward mobility and long-range downward mobility, and that all recent studies that draw on large-scale survey data do not support the thesis.
Of course, as Chan (2017) argues, highlighting the discrepancies between the sociologist Diane Reay’s (2009) largely positive upwardly-mobile circumstances of their autobiography and their research (Reay 2013) which is largely critical of the mobility experience, there is great variability, underlining in his view, ‘the need for large-scale and nationally representative data for us to gain a reliable view of whether, overall, social mobility has an adverse effect on the well-being of individuals’ (ibid., 2017, 186). As Marshall and Firth (1999, 30) indicate ‘writers of autobiography are almost by definition truly exceptional individuals … Case-studies of small groups among the socially mobile may or may not be representative and might well, therefore, point to misleading conclusions.’
Tight (2017) agrees that case study participants are almost always by their conception exemplary (p. 333). It would seem for this reason that seem worth researching (although other groups, including those locked out from higher-education enabled mobility, may be too). Overall, case study research design is in-depth, detailed, and particular: all necessary qualities if researchers wish to examine the finer points of students’ psychic and social lives (Tight, 2017, 164). This appears to make the case study research design more congruent with interpretivist and contextualist paradigms. Case studies also aim to be holistic (ibid., 164), that is, to understand ‘as much as possible’, though of course, the quixotic aim of understanding everything is not possible.
For example, as the working-class student in the case studies of Lehmann (2014) and Reay et al. (2009), demonstrates, prior theoretical commitment to Bourdieu’s concepts (in this case, habitus clive) may have shortcomings not least because in both papers these working-class students do pursue demanding educational options not characteristic of some of their former friends and family (cf. Sullivan 2002, 151), albeit at a time of relatively massifying participation in higher education (in Canada where Lehmann’s study is situated as well as in the UK). For this reason, this makes these two case studies somewhat exemplary, and worth researching (cf. Tight 2017, 383). Although a ‘range of methods’ is useful in studying the case in question, deductive use of theory is not best suited to such a task because a geographically-specific grounded theory account of how working-class academic and extracurricular social successes at university are happening (i.e. a strength of Lehmann’s account) might unobscure regional and personal differences in accounts.
The methodology for defining social mobility is surely important, though unnecessary to our inquiry as is the question of whether rates of absolute mobility in the UK have been in decline since the 1970s (Blanden et al., 2004; Goldthorpe and Jackson, 2007) or not. Statistical analyses do not obviate some need to go into experiences vis-a-vis the issue of discomfort and dissociation amongst first-generation and/or working-class students. Related to the dissociative thesis, as Friedman (2014, 362) discusses, the enduring importance of the concept of Habitus Clivé (or cleft habitus) is that:
‘…it illuminates the embodied inscription of this history has an indelible impact. It explains how, even the mobile person’s conscious presentation of self may align with the subjectivities of those that mobility has brought them into contact with, elements of their bodily ‘hexis’ — accent, pronunciation, vocabulary, posture, taste — may always bear the trace of their class origins (Bourdieu, 1977, 93–4).
In my research, I anticipate that adverse instances of mental health will arise as a theme — along with narratives of success and adaptation strategies — in our first-stage of coding. Evidence of diagnosed and undiagnosed mental health conditions will be worth sensitive probing and gaining the trust of respondents. This is because there is evidence that the current system is adding to the pressures already faced by young people. Economic insecurity, high levels of personal debt, and similar levels of anxiety do not help by the pressures created in an examination-focused school system and the intense scrutiny (and self-scrutiny) engendered by social media.
The National Union of Students (2016) conducted a survey in 2015 with 1,093 students. It found that 78% of respondents self-reporting that they had mental health issues the previous years; a third said they had suicidal thoughts. Among respondents who did not identify as heterosexual, the latter figure was 55%. IPPR (2017) found that 15,395 UK-domiciled first-year students disclosed a mental health condition in 2015/16. This was almost five-fold on the figure reported in 2006/07.
It would appear there are multiple burdens about tuition fees and maintenance loans (the abolition of maintenance grants came into effect in England from 2016/17) which are distributed unevenly, falling more emphatically on groups of students with fewer financial means, and their families; and progressively less so with students with other means of self-upkeep (parents, private investments etc.). This is partly because wealthier students have the possible option of paying tuition accommodation and related expense upfront, or sooner, thus incurring less interest (Merrick 2019).
For many students, not just first-generation, it would appear not an uncommon phenomenon that external factors, including family, work and other commitments directly — though differentially — take away from quantity and quality of available study time, on their attitudes and motivations for it, and participate in extracurricular activities and student activism (Leathwood & O’Connell, 2003; Crozier et al., 2008; Heath et al., 2008; Elliot & Brna, 2009; Hager and Hodkinson, 2009). Factors such as cultural capital and prior experiences have been shown to be an influential relationship to students’ decision making (Byrne & Flood, 2005; Brennan & Osborne, 2008; Hounsell & McCune, 2002; Thomas, 2002c; Read et al., 2003; Vermunt, 2005; Hockings et al., 2008).
The context of the institution itself also mediates some of how students experience the organisation of teaching, how assessments are set and marked, the structure of departments, how documents and resources are made available, and how support services are offered and promoted (Brennan & Osborne, 2005; Mann, 2008; Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009).
