Book | Chapter
(2010) Class, individualization and late modernity, Dordrecht, Springer.
So far the interviewees' life courses have disclosed an image somewhat at odds with Beck's (1992: 93) thesis that education involves simply "choosing and planning one's own educational life course" and, while revealing social change, confirm that this hallowed institution, which all the theories under examination describe as a critical device in the genesis of reflexive agents, remains a pivotal instrument in the reproduction of class inequality. But what of life after education? Is it possible that, notwithstanding their classed paths through their school days and post-sixteen options, social conditions have intervened in the interviewees' subsequent trajectories in social space, prompted widespread reflexivity and reduced the effects of accumulated capital to nought? To answer this clamant question we need to set our sights on the relevant disembedding mechanism flagged time and again by the reflexivity theorists: the oft-heralded transformation of the world of work from a steady guarantor of lifelong employment and limited intra-generational mobility to a source of unmitigated flexibility, transience and erratic movement within the social topography of the class structure.
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Full citation:
Atkinson, W. (2010). Topographical trajectories, in Class, individualization and late modernity, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 106-132.
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