Page 95 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

86 Cultural change and ordinary life

the UK. She considers the experiences of interviewees as children and younger
people (i.e. how their parents sought to help them in their educational pro-
gress) and as parents (i.e. what they are doing to help their own children
progress). Devine’s analysis is partly an outcrop from the tradition of British
class theory, but as with the literature considered in the previous chapter, I
consider that it is pertinent outside some of the sometimes sectarian and
increasing technicist parameters of some aspects of that activity. It also repre-
sents another aspect of the approach that seeks to connect class back to a range
of cultural activities.
Devine voices her dissatisfaction with the more narrow economically
based versions of class analysis, some of which are informed by rational action
theory (RAT). In particular, she admires the focus of writers such as John
Goldthorpe on resources that are used as a base for class advancement, but
suggests that he conceives them in too narrow and economistic ways. In many
respects she argues, his analysis is close to that of Bourdieu, which, as shown in
an earlier chapter, does consider a range of resources theorized in different
forms of capital. Devine seeks to reintegrate the different forms of capital in
analysis of class advancement, without making narrow assumptions about the
reasons for human action:
While I have always believed in the importance of human agency, that
people make choices and make decisions, I have never liked the econo-
mistic and often brutal sounding nature of cost-benefit analysis. Social
life – especially family life – has always seemed much richer than that to
me. In sum, it was my view that much has been lost in the explicit
development of a theory of middle-class reproduction.
(Devine 2004: 7)
Having carried out lengthy qualitative interviews in the UK and the USA,
Devine finds that the parents of her interviewees did indeed seek to mobilize,
and in many cases did succeed in mobilizing, economic resources on their
behalf. Thus, in the USA parents ‘used their money indirectly in being able to
afford to live in affluent communities where they could send their children
to good public schools’; whereas ‘in Britain, economic resources were used
directly and indirectly to ensure children secured entry into the best state
grammar schools possible’ (p. 175). Those from more modest backgrounds
who have succeeded did so via the better parts of the state sector and with as
much financial help as their parents could provide. Thus the nature of the
education system in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was of help to those seeking
to advance themselves. The changing nature of that system had introduced
greater uncertainty for the interviewees in promoting the advancement of
their own children. This meant that economic resources had increased in
importance. Sometimes this meant that education was paid for privately. This
was, of course, more difficult for the less affluent: ‘Middle-class reproduction,
for these parents, therefore, was not easy or straightforward especially when
the mobilisation of economic resources could only increase the propensity
for academic success, but certainly could not guarantee it’ (p. 177). This
meant that some of the children had had difficult educational paths and had
not been successful in conventional terms. Thus, in these processes where