Transcript Class

Class in language and
identity research
David Block
Institute of Education, University of London
[email protected]
The abstract
In recent years, many scholars/researchers in language related fields have
adopted identity as a central construct in their work. In doing so, they have
followed a general trend in the social sciences where culturalist view of identity
has become dominant. Paralleling goings on in post industrial societies at large,
there has been a growing interest in what is commonly known as ‘identity
politics’ (although another and perhaps more appropriate term used by Nancy
Fraser and others is ‘recognition’). The self conscious approach to identity has
revolved around particular inscriptions, such as gender, race, ethnicity,
nationality and increasingly, sexuality and religion. What has been left to the
side in these developments is an interest in identities linked to the material
bases of human existence , in particular class (which would be consistent with
what Fraser calls ‘redistribution’). In this paper I aim first of all to discuss the
general culturalist approach to identity before introducing the idea that perhaps
a more economically, materially-based approach is necessary. I will briefly
discuss class in terms of definitions as well as associated concepts and
practices, before ending with some ideas about how class might be more central
to future identity-based research in applied linguistics.
Neoliberalism and Applied
Linguistics argues that while
applied linguistics has become
more interdisciplinary in
orientation, it has ignored or
downplayed the role of political
economy, namely the way in which
social, political and economic
factors relate to one another within
the context of a capitalist economy.
The authors take the view that
engagement with political economy
is central to any fully rounded
analysis of language and languagerelated issues in the world today
and their collaboration in this
volume represents an initial attempt
to redress what they perceive to be
an imbalance in the field.
To think about …
The discourse of social justice, once centered on
distribution, is now increasingly divided between claims
for distribution, on the one hand, and claims for
recognition, on the other. Increasingly, too, recognition
claims tend to predominate. The demise of communism,
the surge of free-market ideology, the rise of ‘identity
politics’ in both its fundamentalist and progressive formsall these developments have conspired to decenter, if
not extinguish, claims for egalitarian distribution. (Fraser,
2004: 7-8)
and
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Unfortunately, educational discourse on the “left” has
been awash in “postmodern” platitudes that sublimate
class and valorize uncritical and fetishized notions of
“difference” while marginalizing socialist alternatives to
the social universe of capital. (McLaren & ScatamburloD’Annibale, 2004: 47)
Identity and the Poststructuralist frame
By poststructuralist, I mean an approach to the study of
social phenomena and human behaviours which moves
beyond the search for stable social structures and
universal explanatory laws to a concern with issues that
are arguable unique to the times in which we live,
embedded as they are in social contexts emergent in the
runaway world of late modernity.
The post structuralist take
Identity is generally pluralized as ‘identities’, which are seen,
not as phenomena fixed for life, but as ongoing lifelong
narratives.
A balance is always sought: “ontological security”, or the
possession of “’answers’ to fundamental questions which all
human life in some way addresses” (Giddens 1991: 47).
Individuals orient to the past, present and future.
This is a dialectal process whereby often-contradictory
forces must be synthesised via processes of negotiation.
There is a strong rejection of an essentialist position
whereby ‘the attributes and behavior of socially defined
groups can be determined and explained by reference to
cultural and/or biological characteristics believed to be
inherent to the group’ (Bucholtz 2003: 400).
Agency in evidence BUT there is the need to
acknowledge that there are social structures- e.g. job
markets, educational systems and peer groupsconstraining the amount and scope of choice available to
individuals as regards what they can and cannot do.
Identity inscriptions (ascriptions and
affiliations)
Ethnic
Racial
National
Gender
Social Class
Language (ethnolinguistic)
Sexual
Religious
…
What is globalization? The runaway
world?
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The power of nation-states to dictate local policy is often
superseded by global collectives and structures which escape
its control
In debates about citizenship and national identity, there is much
talk about the breakdown of traditional society and culture as
individuals live their lives in more individualized, local and
ephemeral networks
Heterogeneity and diversity seem more appropriate descriptors
of many societies than do homogeneity and uniformity
And so on …
But above all we see how strong affiliations to state
market economic policy (West European style Social
Democracy) have given way to the unfettered capitalism
of neoliberalism, as articulated in the so-called
Washington consensus.
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political
economic practices that proposes that human well-being
can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights,
free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create
and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such
practices. … if markets do not exist (in areas such as land,
water, education, health care, social security, or
environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state
action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should
not venture. (Harvey 2005:2)
Postmodernism (Bhaskar, 1998)
1.
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4.
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An emphasis on difference, relativity and pluralism.
An accentuation on the emphasis of language
characteristic to twentieth century philosophy.
Scepticism about or denial of the need to say anything
about the world.
The impossibility of giving better or worse grounds for a
belief, action (including speech action) or practice.
Life is viewed as a pastiche, not a totality; an assemblage
not a whole.
The failure to universalise …
To explore class is to:
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examine what unifies individuals across putative cultural
boundaries (related to nationalism, race, ethnicity,
religion and so on);
view life according to a big narrative (of class struggle);
engage with the concept of material reality;
make reference to a ‘real’ world; and
take a stance as regards good and bad, right and wrong
etc.
Recognition at the level of discourse and attitudes is of
course important, but it is not enough, and at worst may be
tokenistic. It is easy for the dominant to grant discursive
recognition and civility to the dominated or socially
excluded; giving up some of their money and other
advantages to them another matter. (Sayer, 2004: 64)
Class: a brief archaeology
Marx
Weber
Durkheim
Bourdieu
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will,
namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in
the development of their material forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
arises a legal and political superstructure and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their
consciousness. (Marx, 1904 [1857-58]: 11) CCPE
What is class?
The owners of mere labour-power, the owners of capital,
and the landlords, whose respective sources of income
are wages, profit, and ground-rent, in other words, wagelabourers, capitalists and landlords, form the three great
classes of modern society resting upon the capitalist
mode of production. (Marx, 2006 [1864-65]: 1031)
With some over-simplification, one might thus say that
classes are stratified according to their relations to the
production and acquisition of goods; whereas, status
groups are stratified according to the principles of their
consumption of goods as represented by special styles
of life. (Weber, 1968 [1924]: 937)
What is class?
By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of
disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw
material of experience and in consciousness. … I do not see class
as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in
fact happens … in human relationships. … And class happens when
some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared),
feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different
from (and generally opposed to) theirs. The class experience is
largely determined by the productive relations into which men are
born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in
which these experiences are handled in cultural terms; embodied in
traditions, value systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the
experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not.
(Thompson, 1980 [1963]: 8-9)
What is class?
… economic barriers – however great they may be in the
case of golf, skiing, sailing or even riding and tennis- are
not sufficient to explain the class distribution of these
activities. There are more hidden entry requirements,
such as family tradition and early training, or obligatory
manner (of dress and behaviour), and socializing
techniques, which keep these sports closed to the
working class … (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 217)
Bourdieu’s metaphorology: capitals, habitus, fields, body
hexis, etc.
What is class?
Class is a social category which refers to lived
relationships surrounding social arrangements of
production, exchange, distribution and consumption.
While these may narrowly be conceived as economic
relationships, to do with money, wealth and property, …
class should be seen as referring to a much broader web
of social relationships, including, for example, lifestyle,
educational experiences and patterns of residence.
Class, therefore, affects many aspects of our material
lives. (Bradley, 1996: 19)
Rampton (2006) on class: two levels
1. material conditions, ordinary experience, and
everyday discourses, activities and practices – the
‘primary realities’ of practical activity which are
experienced differently by different people in different
times, places and networks; and
2. secondary or ‘meta-level’ representations: ideologies,
images, and discourses about social groups, about the
relations of power between them, and about their
different experiences of material conditions and practical
activity. (Rampton, 2006: 222-223)
Dimensions of class (Block, in preparation)
Dimension
Gloss
Property
This refers to one’s material possessions, such as land, housing,
electronic goods, clothing, books, art, etc.
This refers to disposable income/money and patrimony (e.g.
what owned property is worth in financial terms).
This refers to the kind of work done across a range of job types,
such as blue-collar manual labour vs. white-collar knowledgebased labour, or service sector jobs vs. manual jobs, etc.
This can refer either to the type of neighbourhood one lives in
(is it identified as poor, working class, middle class, an area in
the process of gentrification or upper class?) or the type of
dwelling (individual house, flat, caravan, etc.).
This refers to the level of schooling attained and the acquired
cultural capital one has at any point in time. There is close link
here to Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital.
Wealth
Occupation
Place of
residence
Education
Dimensions of class continued
Dimension
Gloss
Social
networking
This refers to the often unspoken reality whereby middle
class people socialise with middle class people, working class
people with working class people, and so on. There is a close
link here to Bourdieu’s notion of social capital.
This might refer to behaviour patterns like buying food at a
supermarket that positions itself as ‘cost-cutting’ vs. buying
food at one that sells ‘healthy’, organic and expensive
products. Or it might refer to buying particular goods (e.g.
food, clothing, gadgets) in terms of type and brand.
Consumption
patterns
Symbolic
behaviour
This includes how one moves one’s body, the clothes one
wears, the way one speaks, how one eats, the kinds of
pastimes one engages in, etc.
Class positions (e.g.)
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Upper class (rich)
Upper middle class (high level professionals)
Middle class (broadly medium to high level services)
Working class (manufacturing, lower level services)
Working poor
Outcasts (AKA ‘undeserving poor’)
Class as felt
Dickens’s novels
Friedrich Engels’s (1844) The Condition of the Working
Class in England
Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb’s (1972) The Hidden
Injuries of Class. London: Norton.
bell hooks’s (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters
Lynsey Hanley’s (2007) Estates: An Intimate History
Class and other identity inscriptions
… discussions of working class lives in Britain are too
often elided with discussions of whiteness, so that
working class black and minority ethnic people in Britain
are defined by their ethnic heritage alone. Indeed white
Britishness is often seen as being exclusively working
class. (Rogaly & Taylor, 2009: 4)
… it is important to attend to the intersectionaltiy of
gender, ‘race’ and class, and to avoid reducing them into
each other … . Contrary to what is implied in much
British academic wiring, working class does not
necessarily mean ‘white’ working class. (Rogaly &
Taylor, 2009: 14)
The post-industrial state of affairs …
… class conflicts, if they can be called that, are now
situated at the level of overall and especially financial
management, rather than at the level of work and the
organization of production. Industrial society was based on
the factory or the workshop; and it was at this level that
trade unions emerged, with their demands, their strikes and
their collective bargaining. The image suggested by
globalization is that networks of information and exchange
which might possess practically no material existence; and
transformation of firms over the last twenty years has often
consisted of outsourcing sectors of production, in
fragmenting, and thus considerably reducing, the size of
firms. (Touraine, 2006: 24)
We are all middle class now.
There is the‘embourgeosiment thesis’, according to which
the 1960s brought full employment, a fully functioning
welfare state and higher salaries to working class people,
who in turn began to live their lives in ways previously
deemed the preserve of the middle class (more spacious
housing, car ownership, appliance ownership and so on).
But class is all around.
Books:
e.g. Hanley (2007), Jones (2011)
Political discourse:
e.g. ‘class warfare’, ‘the feral underclass’
Television:
Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse
Class in applied linguistics: SLA,
Bilingualism and identity
SLA: Gass and Selinker (2008), Ellis (2008), Ortega (2009)
Bilingualism: Cummins (2000), Bhatia & Ritchie (2003),
Garcia (2008), Baker (2011), Harbert, McConnell-Ginet,
Miller & Whitman (2009), Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen
(2009), Bigelow (2010), Edwards (2010)
Identity: de Fina, Schiffrin & Bamberg (2006), Omoniyi &
White (2006), Caldas-Coulthard & Iedema (2008), Lin
(2000), Nunan & Choi (2010), Llamas & Watt (2010),
Higgins (2011)
Journal of Language, Identity and Education
Social class in early sociolinguistics
William Labov’s (1966) The Social Stratification of English
in New York.
Basil Bernstein’s (1971) Class, Codes and Control, vol 1.
Peter Trudgill’s (1974) The Social Differentiation of English
in Norwich.
More recently:
Rampton (2006 and others)
Snell (e.g. 2011)
Three bits of data
Class invoked as attack on new rich
Class in and around a story
Class done in London workplace
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it’s hard to understand Dan / because if you listened to
the recording (.5) I think that even for English people /
his English is very closed / he cuts his sentences a lot /
he reduces words / he compresses them a lot / so it gets
to a point when it’s exhausting to follow his conversation
/ and well / you’re just there to listen to him / and then
suddenly he asks you a question / and you do the best
you can and (1) but after a while / after about ten
minutes / the conversation flows / but from his side /
without any meaning <laughing> / because he’s very
very … (Carlos, 4/12/03)
es duro entender a Dan / porque si escuchaste la
grabación (.5) creo que para los mismos ingleses / es
muy cerrado su inglés / el corta mucho las frases / las
palabras las reduce / las comprime mucho / entonces
llega un momento en que es agotador seguirle la
conversación / y ya bueno / lo haces simplemente por
escucharlo / y de pronto te hace una pregunta / y tu la
coges por ahí y (1) pero después de un momento /
después de unos diez minutos / ya la conversación fluye
/ pero de lado de el / sin haber ninguna significación
<laughing> / porque es muy muy … (Carlos, 4/12/03)
One of the lads?
Many verbal exchanges on the shopfloor are not serious
or about work activities. They are jokes, or ‘pisstakes’, or
‘kiddings’ or ‘windups’. There is a real skill in being able
to use this language with fluency: to identify the points
on which you are being ‘kidded’ and to have appropriate
responses ready in order to avoid further baiting. (Willis,
1977, p. 55)
my previous experience / let’s say academic (.5) gives
you confidence to go to the doctor / for example / to kind
of do things in your normal life / but it’s a little like feeling
strengthened by that intellectual situation that allows you
to gain confidence / And I have thought about this as
well / or I have seen how the people who don’t have /
let’s say / this support (.5) are weaker / more vulnerable
… (Carlos, 4/12/03)
la experiencia mia anterior / digamos académica (.5) te
da confianza para ir al médico / por ejemplo / para hacer
un poco las cosas en tu vida normal / pero es un poco
sentirse como afianzado en esa situación intelectual que
te permite como ganar la confianza / y he pensado
también / o he visto que la gente que no tiene / digamos
/ ese sustento (.5) es más débil / es más venerable …
(Carlos, 4/12/03)
It is worth noting that there is a bigger issue related to
Carlos’s case, and that is how one makes sense of how
migrants insert themselves (and are inserted by others)
into established class systems. This is a pending matter
in sociology, where some early studies in this direction
(in the UK, Rex and Tomlinson, 1979) have not been
followed up as much as they might have been (but see
Wills, Datta, Evans, Herbert, May and McIlwaine, 2010).
However, it is safe to say that Carlos did not fit into the
class positionings afforded him in the workplace, while
away from the workplace he felt at home with middle
class Spanish speakers. (Block, 2012: TBD)
Social class and new citizenship
In many educational contexts around the world today, there
has been a reconceptualisation of citizenship against the
backdrop of dominant discourses of globalization.
The new ‘good citizen’ is understood to be:
(1) someone who has acquired English as well as
something like ‘intercultural communicative competence’,
and
(2) someone who self positions and is positioned by others
as an ‘international’ or ‘global’ citizen.
Are we talking about the members of the emerging global
middle/upper (super?) class? People who:
(1) share interests across nation-state and continental
borders;
(2) share modes of behaviour and ways of thinking which
take precedence over local behaviours and worldviews; and
(3) have the capacity to effect control over events
independently of their nation-state affiliations.
As a result of these three characteristics, they come to see
themselves as global cosmopolitans, perhaps with a greater
loyalty and affiliation to their transnational lives than to their
lives as strictly local and within their nation-states of origin.
+ what to do about the parents
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The work of Annette Lareau, Carol Vincent, Stephen
Ball, Diane Rheay etcs.
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Melissa Benn’s (2011) School Wars
End
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Where do I go from here?
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Where do you go from here?