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The symbolic value of being recruited by a high status multinational company likely represents an important marker of distinction. For the first time, a unique Destinations of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE) data-set is used here to model entry to elite multinational company in finance, accountancy and consultancy sectors among graduates of different social origins, universities, degree subjects and with different degree classifications. From a sample of 11,755 graduates working across these three sectors, we examine what predicts entry to 31 leading firms and then examine pay hierarchies among the 3,260 graduates working for these companies using random-effects models. At first glance, significantly, we find that elite recruits come from a much broader range of universities than might be imagined. However, a closer look at the highest paid graduates within these firms reveals more familiar patterns of social and institutional stratification. We argue that these patterns likely reflect the nature of work undertaken by graduates in these elite firms, with institutional and social origins of graduates differing according to the particular track taken in what are likely to be highly differentiated graduate recruitment schemes.
A new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of accent in relation to intergenerational social mobility is introduced here. Sociological analyses that attend to accent often focus on broader regional distinctions or construct limiting dichotomies of accents, rather than capturing the full variety and range of accents, often found at smaller geographic levels. Drawing on the case of the teaching profession and using qualitative data collected as part of a study of teachers, we illustrate how integrating sociolinguistics into a sociological analysis of social mobility would allow us to combine the micro-geography of class, mobility, and speech to a more granular level. The analytical tools provided by sociolinguistics, outlined here, could push forward work on understanding prospects for, and experiences of, social mobility.
This paper examines the role re-location has played in shaping the status of elite and middle-class schools in and around London. A Bourdieusian lens is applied to understand the institutional trajectories of 51 schools which moved from central London out to the suburbs and beyond between the 1860s and 1970s. It is argued that this strategy served to maintain, reinforce and create institutional prestige within the 'field' of schools serving the upper and middle classes. These re-locations have had a lasting effect on London's school system, pushing key institutions of elite social reproduction outwards and away from the city centre. In discussing the motivations for re-location, Bourdieu's (1996) theory of field and elite formation is used with specific reference to urban change, thus developing a Bourdieusian-historical approach to understanding the geography of social reproduction (Thiem, 2009). The focus on London also sets these relocations in the context of broader socio-spatial shifts within the British upper and middle classes, in which new social formations were emerging, with an aristocratic-financial elite concentrated in the south-east of England (Anderson, 1964;Rubinstein, 1977). Re-location formed part of a broader process of urban and socio-economic transformation which created a powerful educational infrastructure for the upper and middle classes in and around London.
There now exists a growing literature on educational mobilities, and this paper contributes to understanding the way contemporary youth imagine the geography of the United Kingdom and how this translates to their mobility intentions. Using Giddens and Massey and drawing on a unique multi-sited qualitative dataset, we examine how these flows can be understood as embedded within narratives of the self that are situated within a particular spatial structuring of social, economic, and ethnic difference. The multi-sited dataset provides a unique opportunity to see the simultaneity of these social relations across space, mutually shaping, and reshaping each other over time. We illustrate how embedded within imagined mobility narratives are deeply unequal structures of economic power, (re)producing oppressed and dominant positions across social and geographic space. Geometries of race and ethnicity are also shown to structure the ways in which different ethnic groups look upon the geography of their university choices. The patterning of these imagined spatial flows around the United Kingdom at the point of university entry can be interpreted as one further manifestation of deep-seated geometries of power that pervade social life.
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