Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to Extra iq, a shorter style of lseiq, where you'll hear parts of compelling interviews which didn't make the original podcast just because we didn't have the space to include them. I'm Sue Windibank from the IQ team, and in this episode you'll hear me talking to Professor Sam Friedman, a sociologist of class and inequality at lse. He spoke to me for an episode which asked, how does Class Define Us? Originally released in November 2022. Here's Sam explaining to me the conundrum of why a significant minority of middle class people in the UK mistakenly think of themselves as working class. I wondered if this was a phenomenon unique to the uk.
B (0:48)
One of the things we found in our research is that when you ask people about their subjective class identities, most people around the world tend to see themselves as middle class, even when they're actually, you know, fairly disadvantaged. And we really go against the grain and there's this enduring popularity of working class identities. As you say, even one in four of those from solidly middle class backgrounds in solidly middle class jobs here see themselves as working class. And what we found in the research, sort of looking, using interviews to sort of dig into this, is that largely what people explained in these scenarios, and you should say this is only a quarter of people, most people tend to match their background to the same way sociologists would, right? But this significant minority who didn't often interesting. When we asked them about, you tell us about your background, they wouldn't tell us about their upbringing. They would reach back further into these extended family histories. And, you know, if you go back two or three generations in most families in this country, you tend to get to a history of kind of working class struggle, Right. We were a country that was predominantly working class for most of the 19th and early 20th century. And I think what's interesting is that people find in those stories, I suppose, a kind of upward story that that helps them make sense of their own identity and helps them tell a kind of a humble origin kind of story, a story of meritocratic striving that I think is a very interesting one in terms of perhaps providing a sense of meritocratic legitimacy. But I suppose what we were highlighting in the research is that whilst this is to some extent real, right, this is people's real histories, they're not making this up. There's also a danger that sometimes, you know, that kind of searching for a kind of meritocratic story obscures and blinds people from reflecting on the fairly plain advantages that they've actually experienced in their own lifetime, in their own upbringings. And in some ways then perhaps sort of diverts attention or deflects. The paper we talked about, it's called deflecting privilege, deflects sort of an understanding of actually what the kind of socioeconomic picture that they're part of looks like in this country.