Social class as a blessing in disguise? Beyond the deficit model in working-class and higher education studies

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-02-2022-0040
• Published date: 05 September 2022
• Date: 05 September 2022
• Pages: 193-209
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
• Author: Kamil Luczaj

Social class as a blessing in

disguise? Beyond the deficit model

in working-class and higher

education studies

Kamil Luczaj

University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Rzeszow, Poland

Abstract

Purpose –The overarching question of this paper is, “What are the advantages of being an upwardly mobile

academic?”The extant academic research on working-class academics has usually emphasized various kinds

of “deficits”of working-class academics. In this paper, the author demonstrates that although class positions

can constitute a formidable burden, they can translate into specific advantages in academia.

Design/methodology/approach –This study is based on the narrative, phenomenological approach, which

has been applied in working-class studies and higher-education research. The empirical material comprises the

collection of 25 narrative interviews conducted and analyzed according to the biographical narrative

interpretive method (BNIM).

Findings –This paper looks at the experience of working-class academics from a holistic perspective,

including both the downsides and upsides of being an “outsider within,”or “insider without.”It uncovers four

assets of a working-class background –referred to as “navigational capital,”“revolutionary potential,”

“wisdom”and a distinct “working-class pedagogy.”

Practical implications –The working-class pedagogy can be turned into support programs for working-

class individuals. Their navigational capital can foster evolutionary changes and small improvements for the

benefit of the entire academic community.Their revolutionary dispositions can trigger major reforms, and their

unique experiences can be utilized as case studies in teaching.

Originality/value –This paper engages with the literature on the cultural mismatch and cleft habitus in the

academic context. It analyzes the positive but rarely discussed aspects of being an upwardly mobile academic

with a working-class background. By recognizing these unique assets, it engages with the literature on

inclusive universities and can help make higher education more inclusive and sustainable.

Keywords Social class, Widening participation, Upward mobility, Academic habitus, Navigational capital,

Working-class academics

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

Being a working-class academic has significant consequences. The extant literature has

typically analyzed the working-class background, poverty and rural origins (Xu, 2020)as

handicaps in different cultural settings. Various authors have investigated class-related

shame or stigma (Lee, 2017), embarrassment (Case, 2017), class neurosis (Gaulejac, 2016) and

impostor syndrome (Reddin, 2012;Friedman, 2016). Most of these studies suggest that “the

choice to both move away and become different to the natal family can evoke powerful

feelings of anxiety, loss, guilt and fear alongside the more accepted emotional responses of

hopeful anticipation, excitement and pride, resulting in an ‘emotional tightrope’” (Reay, 2005,

p. 921). While the negative aspects of these life trajectories may seem more salient from the

perspective of social inclusion, there is a scarcity of research focused on what I refer to as

“working-class privilege”or the positive sides of having a working-class background. In this

paper, building on the narrative interviews from Poland, I demonstrate that the simple deficit

Social class as

a blessing in

disguise

193

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant ID: UMO-2019/35/D/HS6/00169).

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 15 February 2022

Revised 20 May 2022

Accepted 10 August 2022

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 42 No. 2, 2023

pp. 193-209

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-02-2022-0040

model is inadequate, and, although class positions can constitute a formidable burden, they

can translate into very specific advantages even in academia, the natural habitat of “Homo

Academicus, supreme classifier among classifiers”(Bourdieu, 2003, p. XI). The original

contribution of this paper is the argument that working-class scientific habitus (Bourdieu and

Wacquant, 1992: 121) can be an asset at the level of (1) the entire higher education system,

(2) a particular institution or (3) an individual academic. The analysis of biographical life

events and practices of working-class academics enabled me to deepen the understanding of

scattered categories utilized in the academic literature to discuss the assets of the dominated

and propose a new analytical category by applying Erving Goffman’s concept of “blessing in

disguise”to the class analysis.

Literature review

Papers devoted to upwardly mobile academics discuss many different kinds of “resource

deficits,”ranging from poverty (Friedman, 2016;Walley, 2013), low social respect (Adair et al.,

2007;Hurst and Warnock, 2015;Butler, 2021), inadequate –i.e. non-middle class –demeanor,

clothing, language, taste (Skeggs,2004;Oldfield, 2007;Case, 2017;Lee, 2017;Crew, 2020), lack of

cultural knowledge (Mckenzie, 2016;Crew, 2020) or unfamiliarity with academic norms and

customs (Oldfield, 2007), insufficient self-confidence (Reddin, 2012;Warnock and Hurst, 2016;

Case, 2017), “survivalguilt”(Walkerdine,1994;Walkerdine et al., 2001), to lacking social relations

with gatekeepers and key figures in a given field (Crew, 2020). One of Teresa Crew’s interlocutors

summed these accounts up very concisely: “I am playing catch up, economically and culturally,

in comparison to those who had a smoother transition intoacademia”(Crew, 2020:40).

The focus of these papers on various deficits is fully understandable, as the working-class

background is still an obvious disadvantage in academia. Furthermore, unlike public

discourse on the “deficits”of working-class people (cf. Mckenzie, 2016, p. 28), these studies

analyze the discourse not to strengthen it but most often to highlight its inadequacy. As

Pierre Bourdieu (2003, p. 21) noted, “the sociologist is only recording a fact of evaluation which

he attempts to explain by relating it to the ensemble of the social conditions of its existence,

and he can even see in it the explanatory principle of the form of the value judgment destined

to ‘refute’it.”Nevertheless, as 

Avila Reyes et al. (2021, p. 9) state, the deficit thinking may

overstate individual aptitude, guide institutional support initiatives toward bridging general

competences and subject matter contents and overlook the role of structural inequalities and

actors’agency. Furthermore, the various “deficits”may conceal the positive sides of being of

the working class, even as working-class backgrounds are often being discussed as assets in

the interviews (Reddin, 2012, pp. 79–80; Crumb et al., 2020, p. 219). This is another obstacle in

recognizing working-classness as an asset, along with the primary difficulty identified by

Lisa Mckenzie (2016, p. 33), who argues that the agency of working-class individuals “is not

recognized because their capital is misrecognized.”In terms of Bourdieu’s theory, this is a

result of a tacit principle that the recognized capital is necessarily the middle-class or upper-

class capital, along with the mechanism of neglecting the inequalities between different social

classes by the education system (Bourdieu, 2011, p. 37).

This study builds on Tara Yosso’s (2005, see: Crew, 2020 for a revealing discussion of

these concepts in the context of social class) theory of “community cultural wealth.”She

challenges the traditional interpretations of cultural capital made from the point of view of a

critical race theory (CRT). More specifically, Yosso opposes the view that students of color

come to the classroom with cultural deficiencies. Instead, she observes that communities of

color “nurture cultural wealth through at least six forms of capital such as aspirational,

navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital called”(Yosso, 2005, p. 77, see:

Table 1). It seems that what Yosso says about race holds true about class [1], and the proposed

capitals can be an antidote to the simplistic deficit model. Although I do not wish to “trace”

EDI

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