Experiences of working-class aspiration, social mobility and class transition :

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Experiences of working-class aspiration, social mobility and class transition : "
McAdam, David R.

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Record Number	:	896706
Doc. No	:	TLets810950
Main Entry	:	Nottingham Trent University
Title & Author	:	Experiences of working-class aspiration, social mobility and class transition :\ McAdam, David R.
College	:	Nottingham Trent University
Date	:	2020
Degree	:	Thesis (Ph.D.)
student score	:	2020
Abstract	:	This thesis examines working-class aspirants' experiences of class mobility and attempts at class transition in 'becoming' middle-class. Focusing on the interiority of aspirant endeavour it examines the psychical, emotional, ontological and existential features of this striving for a ‘better classed life’ and the class-related anxieties that can ensue. The discussion draws on the work of key contributors to discourses on class, self and upward mobility. Central to this is the work of Bourdieu and his use of the embodied habitus. I contextualise this framing concept and other conceptual tools such as misrecognition and symbolic violence in relation to the 'aspirant self'. Critiques by Bourdieu's adherents and critics are used to build an argument for the significance of the emotional and psychical challenges in the reflexivity of aspirational endeavour. The study undertaken by Sennett and Cobb of the 'hidden injuries of class' is used with related research on the loss of a 'familiar' or authentic selfhood. The discussion also examines the ontological insecurity that can arise as a result of shifting class identities during and beyond mobility and class transition. I also draw on relevant personal experience, presented in the form of vignettes, in order to further explore and convey the nature of working-class aspiration on an embodied self. The thesis makes a novel contribution to existing debates on the interiority and psychical issues of social mobility and class. By critiquing selected examples, I suggest that there is a basis for an existential sociology approach to class transition which places ontological insecurity and existential anxiety alongside the structural-determinist barriers of class as key components and inhibitors affecting class transition. The thesis therefore argues that working-class aspirants often experience psychical barriers in making this transition into middle-class life; that they carry injurious residues of their classed origins within their mobility trajectories, and that these often impose social and cultural constraints on a successful transition into the middle-class. In these ways the thesis makes a further contribution to the existing literature on the nuanced nature of aspiration and working-class mobility by extending the theme of hysteresis and conflicted interiority that can be experienced by working-class mobiles.
Added Entry	:	Nottingham Trent University