Deservedness, humbleness and chance: conceptualisations of luck and academic success among Singaporean elite students

Abstract

In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students studying in Oxbridge, when accounting for their academic success. The emphasis on luck in their narratives is categorised into three themes. The students linked their luckiness to deservedness, used luck as a way to express humbleness, and attributed their success to factors of chance. These themes are analysed against the backdrop of strong institutional support they receive as part of attending elite schools and being scholarship recipients. By being attentive to how luck is evoked in these narratives, we show that luck does not have an essential meaning and can produce different representations of legitimacy. The paper proposes the integration between critical and pragmatic sociological perspectives in order to advance our understandings of how elite groups qualify for the positions they obtain, how they define themselves and make sense of their educational merits.

Luck and the ‘situations’ of research

“…2 It is entangled with moral questions that relate to justice and responsibility. And it is both a real thing, with real effects, and a discursive construct – something that, as Ye and Nylander (2021 , p. 418) write, ‘does not have an essential meaning and can produce different representations of legitimacy’. In practice most social research into luck – and especially that which has focused on luck within career paths – has focused on the latter of these two aspects, exploring how luck is framed within talk or practice, and how it is mobilized to particular ends.…”

“…In practice most social research into luck – and especially that which has focused on luck within career paths – has focused on the latter of these two aspects, exploring how luck is framed within talk or practice, and how it is mobilized to particular ends. For Bornat et al (2011) , ‘luck stories offer one way of accommodating the unexpected in narratives of career progression’ (p. 345); similarly, Ye and Nylander (2021) explore the complex ways in which elite university students frame luck (as being tied to both humility and to hard work, for instance). Most extensively, Loveday (2018a) has examined how early career researchers incorporate references to luck into accounts of their career paths, arguing that such references primarily appear in connection with moments of success, while failures are viewed as a ‘personal responsibility’.…”

“…In reflecting on this question we want to frame references to luck not only as a discursive resource – one that might allow a speaker to present themselves as modest or to gloss over the structural injustices of the academy ( Loveday, 2018a ; Ye & Nylander, 2021 ) – but also as a feature of academic practice, something with agency and a defining yet uncontrollable role in the lives of academics. Our aim is to encourage STS to take luck seriously, both in research that explores academic work and epistemic practice and in efforts to care for academic lives within research policy and management.…”

Testing elite transnational education and contesting orders of worth in the face of a pandemic

“…Higher education institutions in the region have tried to leverage this opportunity by offering appealing PhD scholarships to attract students, who have been offered places in top universities abroad, into their universities instead (Mok et al, 2021). Additionally, in the award of public service government scholarships in Singapore that has traditionally financed students to study abroad in elite universities in the anglophone world, the year the pandemic unravelled in 2020, the lowest number of scholarships was disbursed in recent history (Ang, 2020;Ye & Nylander, 2020).…”

A cry, a clash and a parting: a French pragmatic sociology approach to ‘the struggle over the teacher’s soul’

“…In conclusion, education research adopting this perspective has now started being published also in English, showcasing how conventions of worth and processes of justification can operate in education (Fürst & Nylander, 2020;Graß, 2018;Telling, 2020;Ye & Nylander, 2020). Here, I have focused another aspect of Boltanski's work, namely how actors formulate critique, via the example of Swedish adult education teachers.…”