What does it mean to be working class? Exploring the definition of a social class identity through the eyes of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities

Abstract

What it means to have a working-class identity in the UK today is constantly under tension and debate. From socio-economic proxies used by large organisations as determinants of disadvantage to POLAR data, self identification and other metrics, academic literature has largely disagreed how to measure working class as an identity over the last 20 years. This paper draws on the findings from two parts of an EdD thesis which looked to understand the experiences of working-class professional services staff in UK Higher Education. Here, it presents the findings of the literature review which discovered the multiple ways in which working class identities are determined for the purposes of research recruitment in academic papers. In the subsequent part of this paper, empirical data from interviews with working class staff in UK Higher Education looks at the facets which participants considered defined them as having a working-class identity. Moving away from traditional conceptualisation of a working-class identity as solely connected to the means of production, it suggests that a working-class identity is inherently connected to many factors in 2023, predominantly to economic disadvantage but also by occupation, social mobility discourse, and access to goods technology and entertainment. Furthermore, it finds that there are implicit features of a working-class identity shared across the study which include access to facilitating networks, narratives of luck, and being underappreciated and undervalued. This interplay between the convergence of habitus and lived experience suggests that working-class people in UK universities are subject to a lamination of field, an intersection of multiple temporalities