Social class, youth and young adulthood in the context of a shifting global economy

This chapter frames an agenda for the critical study of social class and schooling inside the restructured global economy. Here I call for an examination of the deeply woven connections between ‘official knowledge’ and its global distribution, parental capital and the uneven demands of schools, and the nested nature of class, race and gender in identity formation and class production. Reviewing existing research while simultaneously calling for substantial extension of said research, I suggest that we must extend and explore these connections if we are to unravel the relationship between social class and deepening inequalities in the new global economy. Noteworthy ethnographic work has been conducted which both elicits class culture and identity and describes and theorizes this identity in relation to schools. Such discussion, however, has been tempered in the USA in particular, if not altogether ignored, since the 1980s, as scholarship targeted more specifically to issues of race and/or gender as well as broader issues of representation has taken hold. Such scholarship, while critically important, has often delved into issues of race, gender and/or representations irrespective of a distinct social class referent, much as earlier scholarship on social class ignored gender and race – a point which critical race theorists (McCarthy 1990), theorists of ‘whiteness production’ (Fine et al. 2004), and feminist theorists across race and ethnicity have commented upon at length (Crenshaw 1989). With the clear turn in the global economy, one accompanied by deep intensification of social inequalities (Reich 2001; Piketty and Saez 2003), the need for serious class-based analyses could not be more pressing. Bearing in mind the above point, this chapter outlines elements of an agenda for the critical study of social class and schooling. In so doing, I assume that social class, while perhaps a ‘phantasmatic’ category, organizes the social, cultural and material world in exceptionally powerful ways. The books we read or if we read at all; our travel destinations and mode of travel; the clothes we wear; the foods we eat; whether we have orthodontically straightened teeth; where (and if) our children go to school, with whom, and under what staff expectations and treatment; the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of home-and school-based interventions if our children ‘fail’; where we feel most comfortable and with whom; sports/games our children play and where they play them; the extent and type of extracurricular activities our children engage in; where we live and the nature of our housing; and, specifically in the USA, whether we have health insurance and if so, what kind and with what coverage, are all profoundly classed experiences, rooted not only in material realities but in culturally based expectations, whether recognized or not. With deep respect for many of my more poststructurally inclined scholar-friends, then, I analytically embrace categories of social identity while recognizing the ways in which such identities are both ‘fiction’ and ‘real’. Indeed, recognition of the structuring effects of class has never been more pressing, given shifts in the global economy. This is not to deny the fully and partially independent effects of race in relation to class, a point which is particularly salient in the United States, yet increasingly important in the UK, France, Germany, and Canada, where large immigrant populations of color have significantly altered the social and economic landscape. Rather it is to suggest that class is a fundamental organizer of social experience, both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, an organizer that has been eclipsed over the past 20 years by other forms of interrogation and analyses. As McCarthy (1990) reminds us, however, the experiences and subjectivities of racially subordinated groups cannot be read entirely from class. Toward the end of this chapter I take up the ways in which class must be understood and theorized as ‘nested’ in race and gender rather than as an independent node.

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