Is Education Really a Meritocracy?
Is education really a meritocracy? This article explores how class, cultural capital, teacher expectations and unequal opportunities shape educational achievement.
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Tag: social class
What Do Sociologists Mean by Social Class?
Social class is about more than income. This article explores how Marx, Weber and Bourdieu help us understand class, life chances, cultural capital, social mobility and the unequal distribution of opportunity.
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Who Gets to Decide What Looks Classy?
A trend for bare-looking nails raises a bigger question: who gets to decide what counts as classy? Bourdieu helps us see how everyday judgements about taste can draw social boundaries, often without us noticing.
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Satisfied? Student Surveys, Social Position, and the Limits of Experience Data
The National Student Survey ranks institutions, shapes league tables, and features in marketing materials as evidence of teaching excellence. But satisfaction is not the same as learning, and the social position of the student completing the survey shapes what they report in ways the instrument cannot detect. This article applies a Bourdieusian lens to the NSS — and finds that the data is telling us something rather different from what it is used to claim.
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The Hidden Curriculum of Soft Skills: Recognition, Capital, and Who Gets Left Out
Job adverts demand communication, leadership, and resilience. But who actually gets credit for them? Drawing on Bourdieu, Puwar, and Rivera, this article argues that soft skills are not recognised neutrally — they are filtered through class, race, and cultural capital. The result is a hiring system that mistakes social advantage for individual merit.
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The Debt Trap and the Class Gap: Why Student Loan Warnings Are a Form of Gatekeeping
This article uses Johanna Noble’s recent column on Plan 2 student loans to ask who is really put off university by talk of a “graduate tax”. Drawing on research on first-in-family and working-class students, it shows how fear of debt, school guidance, and weak vocational routes combine to reproduce classed access to higher education.
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Trading Places and the Myth of Meritocracy: A Sociological Analysis of Class, Race, and Capital
Watching Trading Places as a Christmas comfort film, it is hard not to see a ready-made sociological case study. The Dukes’ “experiment” looks like a simple nature-versus-nurture wager, but the life swap really turns on class, race and access to capital. This article uses Bourdieu’s framework to show how the film exposes—and then neatly smooths over—the myth of meritocracy.
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Is Marx Still Relevant? Marxism, Class and the Gig Economy
Marx wrote about factories and nineteenth-century class conflict, not delivery apps or algorithmic ratings. So how far can his ideas take us today? This article introduces Marx’s core concepts and tests them against platform capitalism and the gig economy, showing what still works, what does not, and where later theorists extend his framework.
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Taste and Distinction: How Class Shapes What We Like
How does social class shape taste? This article explores Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Goffman’s impression management, and contemporary critiques of taste hierarchies, gatekeeping, and cultural gentrification.
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