Archer, Louise;
Francis, Becky;
Henderson, Morag;
Holmegaard, Henriette;
Macleod, Emily;
Moote, Julie;
Watson, Emma;
(2024)
Get lucky? Luck and educational mobility in working-class young people’s lives from age 10–21.
British Journal of Sociology of Education
, 44
(5)
pp. 843-859.
10.1080/01425692.2023.2211234.
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Abstract
Scant sociological attention has been given to the role of luck within social mobility/reproduction. This paper helps address this conceptual gap, drawing on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working-class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10–21. We explore the potential significance of luck within the trajectories of 13 educationally mobile young people who were the first in family to go to university, six young people who achieved similar educational levels to their parents and one young person whose status was less clear cut. Our analysis suggests that particular forms of luck may be instrumental in creating opportunities for social mobility, although the consequentiality of these are mediated through interplays of agency, structure, habitus and capital. We conclude that paying further attention to luck may help augment sociological understandings of structure/agency and Bourdieusian understandings of social reproduction.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Get lucky? Luck and educational mobility in working-class young people’s lives from age 10–21 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/01425692.2023.2211234 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2023.2211234 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Bourdieu; luck; social class; social mobility; social reproduction; trajectory |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10169596 |
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