Coronavirus has brutally reinforced that it pays to be privileged. Yet despite the advantages enjoyed by those from middle-class backgrounds, it is precisely these individuals who believe most strongly that meritocracy is working; that “hard work” is the key to success.
One explanation for this is that many simply do not see themselves as privileged. Britain certainly has an unusual attachment to working-class identities. While in most western countries people tend to identify as middle class, Britain has long been an intriguing outlier. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class. Even more curiously, a quarter of people in such jobs who come from middle-class backgrounds – in the sense that their parents did professional work – also identify as working class.
How do we make sense of this? Our research published today addresses this question, drawing on 175 interviews with actors, architects, accountants and television professionals, 36 of whom were from middle-class backgrounds but identified as working class.
Our findings indicate that such misidentifications are built on particular origin stories that people reach for when asked about their backgrounds. These accounts tend to downplay people’s own, fairly privileged upbringings and instead reach back into working-class extended family histories that incorporate grandparents and even great-grandparents. Here people find stories of the past – of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving – that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity.
But should we think of these as misidentifications? After all, these people correctly identify the socio-economic conditions of their working-class ancestors and simply argue it is the legacy of that history that scaffolds their identity. In some ways, they’re right. Research shows that the class position of our grandparents does, on average, have an effect on our own destinations.
Yet we shouldn’t overstate this. The “grandparent effect” on life outcomes is small in comparison with that of our parents. It is also telling that it was only those from privileged backgrounds who reached back in this way, and there was often a certain awkwardness, even defensiveness, when they did.
Take Ella, an actor who was conscious that her claim to a working-class identity might be undermined by her middle-class accent (“I consider my background to be a working-class one even though I don’t sound like that”). She also tried to play down her private schooling (“one of the small ones, quite cheap”). Or Mike, a partner in an accountancy firm who gave a long family history when asked about his background, focusing less on his father’s career as an architect (“he was a technician made good, really”) and more on his grandmother, who had worked in a mill as a child.
In our report, we argue that these intergenerational understandings of class origin should be read as having a performative dimension; they deflect attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their origin stories to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious.
It is also striking that such misidentification was higher among the actors and television professionals we spoke to. This is not coincidental; there is arguably a particular market for downplaying privilege in these professions. Not only are these arenas disproportionately dominated by the privileged, with class an increasingly fiercely debated topic, but the precarious nature of the work itself – often freelance, short-term, poorly paid, and reliant on informal networks – tilts decisively in favour of those insulated by the bank of mum and dad. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that people feel a particular pressure to tell a humble origin story.
But this research also tells us something broader. It shows us another worrying byproduct of our fetishisation of meritocracy. Michael Sandel has recently written about the meritocratic hubris of the successful, who increasingly feel they deserve the disproportionate rewards they receive.
What is less understood, though, is how this meritocratic hubris also impacts how the successful narrate their origins. Here, the privileged face competing pressures: they must on one hand ward off suspicions that their achievements have been accelerated by inherited advantage, and on the other answer to a policy agenda that presents the upwardly mobile as meritocracy’s winners. Their answer, it seems, is to reach for extended family histories that allow them to tell an upwardly mobile story.
Whether this is intentional or not is hard to adjudicate;. This may be how people really make sense of their origins; equally, it might simply be how they choose to narrate it in public. Either way, it surely indicates that the “meritocratic ideal” not only acts as the yardstick by which we evaluate life outcomes, but also shapes how we appraise our own and others’ starting points.
Sam Friedman is a sociologist at the LSE, and a commissioner at the government’s Social Mobility Commission