“I’ve never met a barrister that sounded like I do”: accents, barristers and Bourdieusian capital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Use of Received Pronunciation (RP) is a proxy for particular kinds of elite social capital, but it is also a professional norm and part of the Bourdieusian habitus of the Bar. This article uses the first empirical study of accent discrimination in relation to barristers in England and Wales as a basis for a theoretical consideration of the interaction between barristers and others: clients, jurors, judges and other barristers. In particular it evaluates ways in which understandings about accent, as a facet of social or cultural capital, impact on individual career decisions. It concludes that while considerable progress has been made on diversity of the profession, targeted action by the regulator and the profession is required to address perceptions of discrimination (and manifestations of discrimination itself) in a profession to whose activities speech is foundational.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".