The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
Politicians continually tell us that anyone can get ahead. But is that really true? This important, best-selling book takes readers behind the closed doors of elite employers to reveal how class affects who gets to the top.
Friedman and Laurison show that a powerful 'class pay gap' exists in Britain's elite occupations. Even when those from working-class backgrounds make it into prestigious jobs, they earn, on average, 16% less than colleagues from privileged backgrounds. But why is this the case? Drawing on 175 interviews across four case studies - television, accountancy, architecture, and acting - they explore the complex barriers facing the upwardly mobile.
This is a rich, ambitious book that demands we take seriously not just the glass but also the class ceiling.
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Become an affiliate"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