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  • Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs
  • David Karen
Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs By Fiona Devine Cambridge University Press. 2004. 285 pages. $26.99 (paper).

In Class Practices, Fiona Devine engages the empirical and theoretical work of John Goldthorpe to delve into the processes underlying patterns of social mobility and social reproduction in the United States and Great Britain. Devine wants to understand precisely how the middle class arrived at its status and how it attempts to maintain that status in the next generation. In particular, she is concerned that Goldthorpe has adopted a perspective that is too economistic to understand all the ways that families invest economic, cultural and social resources in their mobility projects. She also argues that Goldthorpe and Bourdieu, whose theory she also examines, are too deterministic in their claims about class mobility and reproduction. To study this issue, she samples doctors and teachers in the Boston and Manchester areas and, through life history interviews with 86 parents of 116 children, attempts to reconstruct the processes by which these professionals became middle class and how they are attempting to maintain or increase their children's social positions.

Concerned that Goldthorpe has focused too much on economic resources and neglected the role of cultural and social resources in determining class mobility and stability, Devine presents three pairs of chapters about how her respondents have used each of these types of resources. The first chapter of each pair discusses how the interviewees' parents invested in a given resource to produce the interviewees' social positions; the second recounts how her interviewees have invested that resource in their children's attainments. Though this is a clever analytical strategy, the potential benefits of Devine's rich qualitative data are undermined by the mode of presentation. Instead of presenting in a nuanced, textured way how families balance their varied resources in employing strategies of class mobility and reproduction, we get a pair of chapters on how the respondents used their economic resources, another pair on their use of cultural resources, and another pair on social resources. Subsequently, readers will fail to understand how families struggle with their decisions about balancing the investment of the different types of resources at their disposal. This tactic also doesn't allow the leverage gained from the comparative approach to highlight the U.S.-English differences. Though Devine is quite intrigued by Bourdieu's theory and wants to adopt, or at least adapt, parts of it, she misses the opportunity to construct, in a "thickly described" manner, her respondents' habitus – their perceptions of the opportunity structure, of what's in the realm of the possible – and to explain how, in the context of that perception, families invest in their economic, cultural and social capital in different ways. In the endnotes, Devine provides intriguing glimpses of a more holistic account of a given family's investments, one that not only conveys the subtleties of family mobility strategies but makes clear that Goldthorpe's theory misses some key elements of the process. These should have been in the text itself.

In the end, Devine makes two key points. The first is that family resources do not convert in any simple way to specific inter-generational patterns: there is much complexity and indeterminacy. The second point – this is more of an assertion — is that economic, cultural and social resources are equally important in reproducing privilege and power (pp. 178, 186). Along the way, there are many useful nuggets that provide depth to these broad emphases. Much of her work on social resources, for example, speaks to "the class character of social networks." (p. 144) In particular, she gives a number of concrete examples of how one's friends and one's school, over and above one's family, affect one's perceptions of future possibilities. Throughout the book, Devine scatters empirical instances of specific connections among economic, cultural and social resources.

I believe Devine probably got as much information as possible from her two-hour interviews and she seems to have squeezed from them enough analytical material for her tripartite [End Page 2359] resource story. At the same time...

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