EDM 6210
Education Policy and Society
Lecture 12
Education Policy and Social Integration:
Individualization & the Debate on the Death
of Social Class
Wing-kwong Tsang
1
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 The process of individualization
“Modernization does not just lead to the formation of a
centalized state power, to concentrations of capital and to an
ever more tightly woven web of division of labor and market
relationship, to mobility and mass consumption, and so on. It
also leads …to a triple ‘individualization’: disembedding,
removal from historically prescribed social forms and
commitments in the sense of traditional contexts of
dominance and support (the ‘liberating dimension’); the loss
of traditional security with respect to practical knowledge, faith
and guiding norms (the ‘disenchantment dimension’);
and …re-embedding, a new type of social commitment (the
‘control’ or ‘reintegration dimension’). (Beck, 1992, p. 128)
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3
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 The process of individualization
Life Situation
(objective)
Consciousness/Identity
(subject)
Liberation
Loss of Stability
Reintegration
4
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 The process of individualization
Beck’s definition of individualization: “‘Individualization’
means, first, the disembedding and, second, the ‘reembedding’ of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in
which the individuals must produce, stage and cobble
together their biographies themselves. Thus the name
‘individualization’, disembedding and re-embedding …do not
occur by chance, nor individually, nor voluntarily, nor through
diverse types of historical conditions, but rather all at once
and under the general conditions of the welfare in developed
industrial labour society, as they have developed since the
1960s in many Western industrial countries.” (Beck, 1994,
p.13)
5
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 The process of individualization
Zygmunt Bauman’s definition of individualization:
“’Individualization’ consists of transforming human ‘identity’
from a ‘given’ into a task and changing the actors with the
responsibility for performing that task and for the
consequences (also the side-effects) of their
performance. ….Human being are no more ‘born into’ their
identities. … Needing to become what one is the feature of
modern living - and of this living alone. …Modernity replaces
the heteronomic determination of social standing with
compulsive and obligatory self-determination.” (Bauman, 2000,
p. 31-2)
6
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 The process of individualization
Institutionalized ‘beds’ - identity bases - for the reembedment of modern individuals
‘Beds’ in capital market, e.g. occupations, professions,
social-class positions, etc.
‘Beds’ in institution of marriage and family, husband, wife,
father, mother, etc.
‘Beds’ in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens, members
of new social movements, such as environmentalists,
feminist, anti-gloabizationists, etc
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Instrumental
Identity
Modern Identity
nationalcitizenship
identity
Class
identity
Gender
identity
Achieved
Constructed
Identity
Given
Essential
Identity
Local-ethnic
traditional
Identity
Primordial Identity
8
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 Individualization in Informational Age & Liquid Times
“What distinguished the ‘individualization’ of yore from the
form it has taken in ‘risk society’ …. No ‘beds’ are furnished
for ‘re-embedding’, and such beds as might be postulated and
pursued prove fragile and often vanish before the work of ‘reembeddment’ is complete. There are rather ‘musical chairs’ of
various size and style as well as of changing numbers and
positions, which prompt men and women to be constantly on
the move and promise no ‘fulfilment’, no rest and no
satisfaction of ‘arriving’, of reaching the final destination,
where one can disarm, relax and stop worrying.” (Bauman,
2000, p. 33-34)
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Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 Periodization of individualization
Individualization in Reformation: In the Enlightenment in
Europe, individuals were liberated from the Church and then
from the Christian worldview and resumed and achieved the
identity of the modern men.
Individualization in industrial capitalism: In the process of
industrialization, commodification and capitalization ,
democratization, and urbanization in the 18 to 19th centuries,
individuals were disembidded from traditionally ascribed
identities of families and clans, local communities and
villages, religious groups, guilds, etc. and re-embedded into
achieved identities of citizens, factory workers and union
members, professionals, etc.
11
Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization
and Beyond Status and Class
 Periodization of individualization
Individualization in informational-global capitalism: In the
Informational-global age, individuals are disembedded from
identities of national citizenship and social class and reembed into identities of global migrants or citizens,
employees of multi-national corporations, or even any freefloating identities in the internet.
12
Modern
Hyper-linked
Identity
Identity
nationalcitizenship
identity
Liquid Identity
in
Liquid Life
Class
identity
Gender
identity
Achieved
Virtual
Identity
Identity
Given
Identity
Local-ethnic
traditional
identity
Primordial Identity
13
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
 Beck’s thesis of structural contradiction in late-modern
society
Persistence of social inequality
Waning of class effects: Questions concerning
inequality are no longer perceived and political handled
as class struggles.” (Beck, 2006, p. 143)
Thesis of beyond status and class: “Individualization
actually leads to a dissolution of lifeworlds associated
with class and status group subculture."
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Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
 Structural changes in late-modern scoiety contributing
to further individualization of class structure in
industrial capitalism
The emergence of the “New Classes”
The emergence of the managerial class in private sector:
As (i) corporate ownerships are transformed into
shareholderships and (ii) ownerships of means of
production are further divided into legal/nominal
shareholdership and the managerial power control over
use of means of production in actual production process;
there constitutes a class of managers who are employees
and yet have direct control over the process of production
in private sector.
16
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
 Structural changes in late-modern society contributing
to further individualization of class structure in
industrial capitalism
The emergence of the “New Classes”
The emergence of the class of technocrat and bureaucrat
in public sector: As state apparatuses expand, employees
who manage the technocratic and bureaucratic know-how
of governmental and public agencies increase substantially.
17
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
 Structural changes in late-modern society ….
The emergence of the knowledge class: As
information technology spreads and knowledge
production replaces manufacturing industries to
become the core section of wealth accumulation in
knowledge economy, there emerges a new class of
know as “symbolic analysts” (coined by Robert B.
Reich). The employments of the symbolic analysts
may include scientists and researchers;
programmers, designers, engineers, marketer and
advertisers, consultants in enterprise management,
ecology, public relation, etc.
18
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
 Structural changes in late-modern society …
The emergence of the McProletariats: It refers to “new
proletariats” who are unskilled and poorly paid service
workers employed in outsourced centers. Its “reigning
symbol is the McDonald’s worker, decked out in the
colors of the corporate chain, working near the
minimum wage without basic benefits, repetitively
performing carefully monitored simple task.” (Kingston,
2000, p. 184)
19
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
The emergence of the cybertariats: Cybertariat is coined
by Ursula Huws in her collection of essays entitled The
Making of a Cybertariat (2003) to indicate growing
number of low-level, routine, non-manual office workers
who are aligned by numbers of structural changes in
office work into a common class position, comparable
to proletariat in industrial capitalism. These structural
changes include
Automation and digitalization of productive process of
traditional manufacturing industries have given rise to
growing number of routine non-manual workers, who fall
between the class divisions between bourgeois and
proletariats in orthodox Marxist’ sense.
20
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
The emergence of the cybertariats: ….
Changes in marketing strategies in regard to
customization of manufacturing goods and provision of
after-sale services have given rise to another large number
of non-manual white-collar workers.
Growth of service industries ranging from life-insurance
sales to tourist guide or from website designer to image
consultants has boosted yet another sector of non-manual
labor.
Automation and digitalization of clerical, informationprocessing and filing work and the shift from Fordist to
“information-intensified” noe-Fordist management have
not only expanded the population of white collar workers
but also “disaggregated”, “unbundled” and made
outsourcing of white-collar work possible. (Huwa, 2003) 21
Changes in Class Structure in
Late Modernity
The emergence of the cybertariats:
The development of global telecommunication has made
office work “delocalizable”, i.e. it can be outsource to any
part of the world. As a result, it has put white collar workers
in developed countries in a global labor market and in
competition with clerical workers in third world countries.
Taken together, these changes have constituted a
relegating or downward mobility effects on white-collar
workers, i.e. making of a cybertariat.
22
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 Globalization and denationalization of class relation in
capitalism
In informational-global capitalism, bourgeoisie as a class are
no longer restrained by borders of nation state. They and
their production lines are practically globally mobile.
23
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 Globalization and denationalization of class relation in
capitalism….
Proletariat or more general wage laborers are fragmented into
various or even antagonistic sectors. They range from
executive workers in multi-national corporations, “core labor
force” of information-global economy made up of informationbased managers and “symbolic analysts” to “disposable
labor force” that can be automated and/or hired/fired/offshored.
Proletariat as a class has not only been fragmented
economically but they have been dismantled geographically.
They range from worldwide recruited experts to nationally or
even locally pit-downed unskilled manual workers.
As a result, antagonistic class relations, not to mention class
struggles, are practically unable to constitute.
24
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 Globalization and polarization effect of class
situations among wage labor: As Robert B. Reich
underlines, globalization does not only insert
relegating effect on working class in general but also
insert elevating or upward mobility on the upperstrata of the knowledge class, in Reich’s own term
symbolic analysts. It is because knowledge or skills
possess by symbolic analysts are now put onto the
global market for sale. As a result, any knowledge and
skills that of really profitable or marketable will be
auctioned globally. That explains “why the rich are
getting richer and the poor, poorer.” (Reich, 1996)
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Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 Disorganization effects of welfare state on the
communal ties of working class (Beck, 2006): Policy
effects of welfare state: Social policies of welfare state
have caused the traditional working class
communities built around manufacturing plants hard
to sustain. These social policies include
public housing policies, which uproot working class families
from their working class locality;
universal education policies, which not only changes the
class habitus of working class students, but also provide
them with chances for upper mobility from the working-class
origins.
27
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 Disorganization effects of welfare state on the
communal ties of working class (Beck, 2006): Policy
effects of welfare state:
other social-wages policies, which substantively improve the
living standards of the working-class households.
28
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The emergence of flexible work and flexible family
“The very concept of a job is changing. In the years after World
War II, industrial societies constructed the ideal of a full-time,
secure job working thirty years for one company with everrising real wages. Pay in this job would be high enough that
within American family households, only the man had to work.
His wife could stay at home, raising the children and managing
the household. The ideal of secure work and increasing
consumption was matched by government policies that
constructed social security (old-age pension, unemployment
insurance, and health insurance) largely around the ideal of a
men and very little paid work for women is going by the boards,
and the new information technology is only one cause of
change. The simplest description of the nature of this
transformation is increased flexibility.” (Carnoy, 2000, p.64-65)
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30
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The emergence of flexible work and flexible family
Flexibility in work implies:
Flexible in work schedule as well as work duration
Flexible in work locations as well as positions
Flexible in work conditions, flexibility has replaced fixed-term
contract and long-term commitment between employers and
employees
“With increased competition in the globalized economy and the
rapidly rising capacity to use ‘world time’ to enhance
productivity, the very best workers are now those who never
sleep, never consume, never have children, and never spend
time socializing outside of work.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 143)
31
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The emergence of flexible work and flexible family
Fundamental contradiction in functions of flexible family
“What result is a serious social contradiction: the new
workplace requires even more investment in knowledge than in
the past, and family are crucial to such knowledge formation,
especially for children but also for adults. The new workplace,
however, contributes to greater instability in the child-centered
nuclear family, degrading the very institution crucial to further
economic development.” (ibid, p.110)
32
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The advent of the culture of consumerism
The proliferation of mass consumption, mass communication
and mass media has spawned the culture of consumerism. As
a result, the culture of work ethics has been replaced by
aesthetics of consumption and populism.
33
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The advent of the culture of consumerism…
Zygmunt Bauman's thesis of the culture of consumerism:
According to Bauman, the culture of consumerism bears the
following definitive features
Hedonism: Consumption as need-satisfaction was replaced by
consumption as desire-creation, i.e. "desire does not desire
satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire." (Bauman,
1998, p. 25)
Ephemeralism: "Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to
disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is
intrinsic to their very denomination as objects of consumption"
(Bauman, 1998, P.28)
34
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The advent of the culture of consumerism
Zygmunt Bauman's thesis of the culture of consumerism:
Instantaneousness: "Ideally, the consumer's satisfaction ought
to be instant, and this in a double sense. Consumed goods
should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no delay, no
protracted learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork; but the
satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for their
consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a bare
minimum." (Bauman, 1998, p. 25)
Fetishism: From consumption of commodity to collection of
commodity; from consumption as act of desire-satisfaction to
consumption (or possession) as identification of status and life
style.
35
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The advent of the culture of consumerism
Class identification and class culture, which nurture and
precipitate in work life has been eroded if not totally replaced
by ephemeral identification of consumer goods, taste and
style in ever changing culture of consumerism.
36
Changes in Class Formation in Late
Modernity
 The rise of networked individualism and cyberbalkanization
Manuel Castells indicates in his work The Internet Galaxy that
identity is the information age can be characterized as network
individualism.
“Networked individualism is a social pattern, not a collection of
isolated individuals. Rather, individuals build their networks,
on-line and off-line, on the basis of their interests, values,
affinities, and projects.” (Castells, 2001, p. 131) It is basically a
virtual identity in the virtual community of the Internet in self
discretion.
This self-selecting virtual identities have also posed
significant to formation of the cultural-spatial based identity of
social class.
37
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism: Reproduction and Resistance
Theories Revisited
 Paul Willis' three waves of 'bottom-up' responses of
foot soldiers of modernity
Willis construes subordinate and working-class students'
educational attainment paths in post-WWII England as helpless
foot soldiers in the long front of modernity.
Willis makes the distinction between
'top-down' practices and initiatives of planners and decisionmakers in education policies and
'bottom-up' responses of working-class youths in schooling
system
Willis relates his ethnographic studies of youth cultures to
three waves of bottom-up responses to educational changes in
English society.
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39
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 First wave responses to "competitive modernization"
and universal schooling:
Willis' ethnographic studies of working-class 'lads' in the 1970s
(1977) Learning to labor: How working class kids get working
class jobs.
Working-class students waged forceful resistance to school
culture in form of anti-intellectual, anti-authority and hardtough masculine counter-culture.
However, Willis underlined that the lads were in fact faced with
double entrapment of schooling and work, in which education
achievement seemed to be the only way out.
40
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or
postindustrial modernity:
Willis and his collaborators published The Youth Review in
1988. It reported a studies of youth cultures in the in 1980s UK.
Willis et al. reported that "In the early 1980s UK became the
first industrialized country to experience massive losses of the
manual industrial work that has previously available to the
working classes. …Form the point of view of the working class,
work opportunities have shifted away from well to reasonably
paid skilled or semi-skilled industrial work to much lower-paid
service and out-of-research white-collar work." (Willis, 2006, p.
511)
41
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or
postindustrial modernity:
Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads
"The dominant experience of the young unemployed is one
of very limited sociability. They are isolate and homebound,
traversing acres of boredom by themselves or in conflict
with parents for whom their enforced dependence is often
wholly unwelcome. The young unemployed have more free
time than any other social group but, ironically, they are
excluded from leisure activities, which overwhelmingly now
require consumption and commercial power." (Willis, 2006, p.
512)
42
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or
postindustrial modernity:
Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads
"The pride, depth, and independence of a collective
industrial cultural tradition, forged from below and neither
reliant on patronage nor punished for its cultural
impertinence, is giving way to the regulated indignities of
becoming client to a reprimanding state." (Willis, 2006, p.
513)
43
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or
postindustrial modernity:
Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads
"Forms of working-class masculinity are being thrown into
crisis…, uprooted from their secured and central lodgings
within proletarian relations of manualism, 'pride in the job',
and breadwinner power. …The anti-mentalism of the
counter-school culture cannot be securely cloaked in
traditional proletarian masculinity. Antimentalism loses the
counterpoint with a viable predictable future in manual
work." (Willis, 2006, p. 514)
44
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Third wave response to "commodity and electronic
culture"
In 1990, Willis and another group of collaborators
published yet another ethnographic study entitled
Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the
Everyday Cultures of the Young.
45
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Third wave response to "commodity and electronic
culture"
The advent of the commodity and electronic culture:
"New global electronic forms of communication are sideling
old sensuous communities — face-to-face interactions with
known others — with now literally hundreds of TV channels
available through digitalization. …The postmodern cultural
epoch is characterized by this qualitative expansion of
commodity relations form the meeting of physical needs —
food, warmth, and shelter — to the meeting and inflaming of
mental, emotional, expressive, and spiritual needs and
aspiration." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)
46
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Third wave response to "commodity and electronic
culture"
Evaporating of working-class identity among youths in the
face of the "Common Culture" of consumerism:
"At the level of culture, young people are becoming less
defined by neighborhood and class than they are by these
new relations of commodity and electronic culture. …Most
young working-class people in the UK would not thank you
now for describing them as working class. They find more
passion and acceptable self-identity through music on MTV,
wearing baseball caps and designer shoes, and socializing in
fast-food joints than they do through traditional class-based
cultural forms." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)
47
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Third wave response to "commodity and electronic
culture"
“Young and working-class people are caught up in the
front line of engagement. They acculturate the materials
of commodified culture almost as a matter of cultural
life and death, not least because they find themselves
with ever-diminishing inherited folk cultural resources
and with little or no access to legitimate and bourgeois
form of cultural capital.” (Willis, 2006, 536)
48
Learning to Labor in Global-Informational
Capitalism:
 Third wave response to "commodity and electronic
culture"
“While the continuing educational question for first wave
modernization concerns whether state education is a means of
liberation or ideological confinement for the unprivileged
majority, the late modernist question for the same social group
concerns whether the commodification and electrification of
culture constitute a new form of domination or a means for
opening up new fields of semiotic possibility. Are the young
becoming culturally literate and expressive in new ways, or are
they merely victims of every turn in cultural marketing and
mass media manipulation?” (Willis, 2006, p. 517)
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Lecture 12
Education Policy and Social Integration:
Individualization and the Debate on the Death of Class
END
50