North American Sociology, Social Sciences - Research, Employees - Hiring & Firing, Interpersonal Relations - Psychology, Education - Parent Participation for Parents, Relationships - Interpersonal, Education - Parent & Teacher Relationships, Social Mobili

Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs

Name: Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs
Author: Fiona Devine
ISBN: 9780521006538

by Fiona Devine

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Overview

This new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.

Synopsis

Explores how parents seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement.

About the Author, Fiona Devine

Fiona Devine is Professor of Sociology at Manchester University and has been a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She has published extensively and is a former Chair of the editorial board of the journal Sociology.