The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged

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Product Details
Price
$34.95  $32.50
Publisher
Policy Press
Publish Date
Pages
384
Dimensions
5.7 X 8.6 X 1.4 inches | 1.25 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781447336068

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About the Author
Sam Friedman is Professor in Sociology, London School of Economics and a Commissioner at the Social Mobility Commission. He has published widely on social class, social mobility and elites. He is the author of Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a 'Good' Sense of Humour (Routledge 2014) and the co-author of Social Class in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2015). He tweets as @SamFriedmanSoc Daniel Laurison is Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, USA. Previously he was at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Associate Editor of the British Journal of Sociology and tweets as @Daniel_Laurison
Reviews
"Friedman and Laurison's exemplary study demonstrates what a contemporary, methodologically plural and empirically rich sociology of inequality can look like in the 21st century. It overcomes established conceptual tensions within the field and thus points far beyond its specific object of investigation." Soziopolis
"The Class Ceiling blows apart the myth of our supposed meritocracy." The National (Scotland)
"This seminal work has updated our understanding of both modern Britain and the nature of class itself. It fuses theoretical prowess, revelatory data, gripping narrative and clear prose. All of us interested in meritocracy, whether real or imagined, owe the authors an enormous debt of gratitude." Amol Rajan, BBC Media Editor
Recommended for all levels from upper-division undergraduates to faculty by CHOICE Connect. "An excellent, mixed-methods, Bourdieu-driven study of how privilege creates a "following wind" that helps push people to the top of elite professions... An important innovation of this study is that the authors use ethnographic interviews and observations in four work settings to see how privilege helps not only with "getting in" but also the even more consequential steps of "getting on," of rising to the elite levels."
"Marshals a wide range of data, analysis and experience in an accessible and readable manner... makes the continued existence of class bias in occupational and public life more difficult for cheerleaders of meritocracy to deny, and - crucially - offers ways to end it." New Humanist
"A landmark text...without a doubt the most wide-ranging and envelope-pushing representation of the new Bourdieu-inspired work on social mobility" Sociology
"The Class Ceiling was especially informative and an enjoyable, if not at times an angering, read." American Journal of Sociology
"With its careful attention to how social class and cultural capital operate across subfields, and for its attention to the need for change at micro, meso, and macro levels, Friedman and Laurison's The Class Ceiling stands as a valuable contribution to sociological knowledge of how class and culture operate within elite professions." Contemporary Sociology