Class Practices
How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs

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

Fiona Devine (Author)

9780521809412, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 April 2004

298 pages, 4 tables
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.605 kg

'This is a fantastic book that adds much to the growing collection of literature on middle-class practices, higher education and the perpetuation of class privilege. It is well written, intelligent and accessible, enabling undergraduate use as well as providing an excellent study for those in higher levels. Devine offers a powerful analysis of the everyday micro practices of class advantage, and for all of this Devine should be applauded.' Sociology

This important 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.

1. Introduction
2. Material help with education and employment
3. Financial choices and sacrifices for children
4. Expectations and hopes for educational success
5. Fulfilling potential and securing happiness
6. Contacts, luck and career success
7. Friends and networks in school and beyond
8. Conclusion
Appendix A. The interviewees
Appendix B. Doing comparative research
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Economics [KC], Education [JN], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Social issues & processes [JFF]