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Anxieties of Entitlement: Elite Common Sense about Merit and Moral Worth
... Esta formación sobre el privilegio, 15 Boarding School norteamericano excelencia, basada en una infraestructura y recursos que la apoyan, desemboca en la generación de un ambiente de superioridad académica y moral frente al resto de la sociedad (Peshkin, 2001;Gessaghi, 2013). En ese sentido, estas elites serían merecedoras o tendrían el "derecho" a tener estos privilegios, ya que se lo ganaron (Sherman, 2020). ...
La tesis trató sobre los proyectos educativos de las escuelas de élite en Chile, así como la forma en que estos establecimientos reaccionan a las transformaciones de la sociedad chilena, en un contexto que cuestiona fuertemente las desigualdades educativas y los privilegios de clase. Complementándolo con un estudio sobre el campo de la educación de élite, se llevó a cabo un estudio etnográfico en dos establecimientos separados: una escuela católica tradicional y una escuela internacional. El análisis de las lógicas que operan en estos dos establecimientos revela una cierta heterogeneidad en la formación de las élites, así como una competencia simbólica, cuyo juego es el tipo de individuo a promocionar como élite. La tesis también revela la correspondencia entre los proyectos educativos y los grupos al interior de las élites chilenas (liberales, católicos, progresistas, conservadores, etc.), lo que condiciona la autonomía del campo escolar y la capacidad de estas escuelas para desarrollar su propio proyecto. Por otro lado, la investigación revela dos tipos de respuestas de las instituciones de élite a los cambios en el contexto social: una postura adaptativa y estratégica desplegada por el colegio católico y una postura más aislacionista y no transformadora del colegio internacional. Ambas reacciones se hacen eco de la identidad organizativa de cada uno de estos establecimientos. Al mismo tiempo, estas reacciones dan cuenta de los grados de autonomía de la que gozan estas escuelas, donde no solo reproducen (una fracción) de las élites, sino que participan en la construcción de nuevos proyectos educativos para las élites. Esta tesis busca contribuir a los estudios sobre la educación de las élites, particularmente desde el caso chileno, pero también a la discusión sociológica sobre la articulación entre las estructuras sociales y el lugar de la agencia en el campo social.
This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people’s ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK.
This paper contributes to debates in the broad area of generational differences at work. Specifically, we locate this study within the literature of the work values and expectations of the ‘Millennial generation’, also known as ‘GenMe’. Much has been made in the media and popular practitioner literature about how the latest generation of workers have a ‘sense of entitlement’ and therefore expect more from the workplace than previous generations. In this paper, we argue that this mainstream view of the sense of entitlement as a concept is problematic and requires a more critical examination. We consider two divergent bodies of literature on the sense of entitlement in relation to generational differences at work – a managerialist approach, which conceptualises sense of entitlement to work–life balance as a negative trait, and a second body, based on the seminal work by Sue Lewis and colleagues, that treats sense of entitlement as a situated process rather than an internal characteristic. We use data from a study of young adults leaving university in the UK, inspired by Sue's work. Our analysis challenges the notion of today's younger workers as more ‘entitled’ than previous generations. This study extends existing research by providing a contextualised analysis of young people's situated accounts of sense of entitlement at work.
This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure. It employs a modified version of Michèle Lamont’s promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries – the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life. Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees. It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions. The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation. Though fundamental to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in detail in contemporary cultural-stratification research.
This article examines the cultivation of transnational connections, cosmopolitanism and global class consciousness among members of elite social clubs in Paris. Drawing from interviews with members, it compares how – according to their respective characteristics – various social clubs promote different kinds of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, while rejecting the more recent internationalism of upper-middle-class service clubs such as the Rotary. Each club's peculiar ethos, practice and representations of social capital are related to the features of competing clubs through relations of mutual symbolic distinction; for example, some clubs emphasize the ‘genuineness’ of links while stigmatizing others for the accent they put on utility. The varied forms of cosmopolitanism that they promote partly replicate these logics of distinction, eliciting struggles over the authenticity or inauthenticity of transnational connections. Yet, clubs also oppose each other according to the unequal emphasis that they place on international ties per se, which creates a competing axiology within the symbolic economy of social capital accumulation.
This article asks how ordinary people in Germany perceive and legitimize economic disparities in an era of rising income inequality. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with respondents from higher and lower social classes, the paper reconstructs the ‘moral economy’ that underlies popular views of inequality. While respondents agree with abstract inegalitarian principles—i.e. income differentiation based on merit—they are concerned with specific instances of inequality, especially poverty and wealth. These are criticized because they are seen to imply intolerable deviations, both upwards and downwards, from a way of living presumed as universal, thereby fostering a segregation of life-worlds and social disintegration. Thus, perceptions of injustice do not seem to be based on the existence of income inequality as such, but rather on the view that economic disparities threaten the social bond.
In this introductory essay to our special issue on elites, we outline some of the major challenges to research in this area and propose a series of theoretical and methodological pathways to address them. Theoretically we make four recommendations: (a) greater attentiveness to and specificity about the relationship between elites and power; (b) a clearer articulation of the relationships between elites and the varieties of capitalism; (c) far more attention to diversity within elites and the use of elites to understand forms of domination like white supremacy and masculine domination and (d) expanding beyond the orthodox form of Bourdieusian theoretical frameworks. Methodologically we outline how research using survey instruments, social network analysis (SNA) (and multiple correspondence analysis), interviews, ethnographic observation, experiments, archival research, administrative data and content analysis can each be deployed, built upon or redirected to help bring elites into greater focus. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved.
Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class.
This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.
Data, do-files and author version are here https://www.karlijnroex.net/English/Academic/
Individuals with a higher social position are more tolerant of current income inequality than individuals with a lower social position. Besides this, attitudes towards income inequality are influenced by inequality-legitimising myths in a given society. Little is known about how these two factors interact. This study combines these two lines of research and argues that different social strata are more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies with strong prevalent meritocratic perceptions. We expect lower-status individuals (i.e. with a lower income or education) to experience a threat to their group esteem and therefore be less likely to support their society’s inequalities in societies with such strong meritocratic perceptions. This hypothesis was tested using data from the International Social Survey Programme 2009 (Social Inequality) on 39 countries. The results show that different social strata are indeed more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies where meritocratic perceptions are more prevalent. Our results are robust for income, but not for education. This suggests that in perceived meritocracies, people regard income as the primary indicator of effort and ability.
This major new contribution to the study of consumption examines how dominant groups express and display their sense of superiority through material and aesthetic attributes, demonstrating that differences from one society to another, and across historical periods, challenge current understandings of elite distinction.
This article explores the complex relationship between transnational elites and civil society through examining the contrasting orientations of two cohorts of ‘elite graduates’ from Paris and Oxford. Both cohorts believe their privileged status has been earned through hard work and ability. But they are also aware that they have benefited from advantages not available to all. Perhaps because of this, they express the need to ‘give something back’. However, the means through which they seek to discharge their social responsibilities are very different. While the Oxford graduates seek to ‘give something back’ through volunteering and third sector engagement, the Paris graduates will ‘give something back’ through public service. The article discusses how the contrasting relationship between the state, civil society and the education system in these two countries may shape dispositions, and speculates on the extent to which these elite recruits’ commitment to ‘give something back’ will make a difference.
The acceptance of income differences varies across countries. This article suggests belief in three narratives of modernity to account for this: the “tunnel effect,” related to perceptions of generational mobility; the “procedural justice effect,” related to the perceived fairness in the process of getting ahead; and the “middle-class effect,” related to perceptions of the social structure of society. The importance of the suggested narratives is tested by means of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2009 module, which includes 38 countries. The finding is that belief in the three narratives can account for a considerable part of the cross-national variation. Beliefs in procedural justice and the existence of a middle-class society clearly go together with high acceptance of current income differences, while the “tunnel effect” is more complex. In general, belief in generational mobility goes together with acceptance of current income differences. But personal experience of such upward social mobility actually lowers acceptance of current income differences, especially if overall generational mobility in society is believed to be backward. The framework explains most country-cases, which points to the existence of general patterns. But the models also indicate that the Philippines, and to a lesser extent the US and France, are special cases.
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the âeoeWeston School,âe an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school. Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a âeoeWestonianâe by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolnessâe"the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine oneâe(tm)s placeâe"is well known. For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimesâe"especially for young womenâe"a gilded cage for a gilded age. âeoeWould you send your daughter here?âe one girl asks him, and seeing his hesitation asks, âeoeBecause you love her?âe
The cultural elite are believed to be under siege due to significant changes in the ‘workings’ of cultural capital. Despite such changes, there is very little information about the class subjectivities of the ‘cultural elite’ themselves. The present article seeks to contribute to this shortcoming by taking advantage of in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals possessing great levels of cultural capital in a highly egalitarian country, Norway. This study shows that while the interviewees experience lack of recognition and honour from ‘the people’, they are far from passively descending. The main demarcation to other groups seems not to be cultural taste, but instead the orientation towards culture, broadly defined. While egalitarian sentiments are voiced, this does not hinder cultural elite awareness, but rather dampens how this can be expressed in public – merged into a form of elitist egalitarianism.
This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culture scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people's after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
There can be little doubt that the wealthiest Americans exert more political influence than the less affluent do. But there has been little systematic evidence about precisely what sorts of public policies the wealthy want government to pursue, or how the policy preferences of wealthy Americans resemble or differ from the preferences of ordinary citizens. Data from our recently completed SESA pilot study indicate that the top 1% or so of U.S. wealth-holders differ rather sharply from the American public over a number of important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. The more rarified, top 1/10th of 1% or so of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) appear on the average to hold still more conservative views – views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for an empirical puzzle: much public policy in the United States appears to deviate markedly from what the average U.S. citizen wants government to do. We discuss the implications of our findings for democratic theory.
Class affects not only our material wealth but our access to relationships and practices which we have reason to value, including the esteem or respect of others and hence our sense of self-worth. it determines the kind of people we become and our chances of living a fulfilling life. Applying concepts from moral philosophy and social theory to empirical studies of class, this accessible study demonstrates how people are valued in a context of the lottery of birth class, or forces having little to do with moral qualities or other merits.
There is a long tradition in social policy of discussing and critiquing the notion of ‘deservingness’ in relation to ‘the poor’. This paper will apply such debates to ‘the rich’ to consider the grounds on which this group might be considered ‘deserving’. The paper identifies three sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the appropriateness of rewarding merit/hard work/effort/risk-taking etc. The second concerns more consequentialist/economic arguments about providing incentives for wealth creation. And the third considers the character and behaviour of the rich. As well as discussing the potential criteria for deservingness, the paper will also debate whether the degree of income and wealth gained by the rich is deserved. Finally, the paper will discuss the social policy implications, including taxation policies, which emerge from this debate.
Debates over “entitlements” have lacked conceptual clarity because the term has at least six analytically distinct meanings. The psychological “entitlements” that many attack are distinct from the legalistic “entitlements” that others champion. Most importantly, however, entitlements are economic concepts. A benefit provided to all claimants meeting state eligibility requirements can be termed a “responsive entitlement”; its antithesis is a program that arbitrarily caps participation. Similarly, a program whose benefits are defined by the amount required to accomplish some specific purpose is a “functional entitlement; it may be juxtaposed with one providing only an arbitrary sum. The market through which public sentiments and claimants’ needs govern the generosity of benefits and the number of recipients served can be described in terms of familiar supply and demand functions. Responsive entitlements allow that market to clear. Artificially capping participation, by contrast, creates the same inefficiencies economists decry in price-controlled markets. Benefits lacking functional entitlements also may distort private markets. Moreover, entitlements are crucial to maintaining political transparency. Without them, programs’ scope, benefits, and eligibility requirements must be described in arbitrary terms few voters can comprehend. Voters tend to assume programs are entitlements, overestimating the support available to those programs’ target populations. Confusion among types of entitlements, and the complexity inherent in nonentitlements, further impedes meaningful debate. Recognizing this, some liberals have sought to avoid debate about costs by creating nonentitlements that they can slowly expand. Conversely, some opponents of means-tested programs have shifted from attacking programs’ funding to dismantling responsible and functional entitlements.