Dr. Andrew Morrison's presentation to the Sheffield Institute of Education Seminar, Sheffield Hallam University 14 October 2015

1. A three-part theoretical framework to
explain undergraduates’ perceptions
of barriers to employment in primary
teaching in the UK
Andrew Morrison
Sheffield Hallam University

2. The study focus
• Small-scale qualitative investigation into
undergraduates’ perceptions of possible barriers
to obtaining employment within primary
teaching in the UK.
• The barriers focused upon related to accent and
gender.
• The study also examined the students’ sense of
(in)justice in relation to perceived barriers.

3. Origins of study
• Between October 2010 and January 2011 a small-
scale investigation conducted into undergraduates’
perceptions of barriers to employment within three
different professional areas.
• Results published in Journal of Education and
Work in 2014.
• Barriers engendered a strong sense of injustice.
• Follow-up study to focus on barriers to primary
teaching conducted October 2012—February 2013.

4. Three-part theoretical framework
1. Bourdieu—habitus, capital and field.
2. Sayer’s (2005) discussion of lay normativity.
3. Fraser’s theory of two-dimensional social
justice.

5. Lay Normativity
• Andrew Sayer (2005) The Moral Significance of
Class
• Our sense of what is good or bad and how we
expect to be treated.
• May be inconsistent or incoherent.
• But forms the rationale for individuals’
commitments and identities.

6. The Bourdieusian schema
• The habitus--an individual’s set of dispositions
by which they navigate their way through the
social world.
• The field--social space as a competitive
structured social relation.
• Positions are determined by the types of
resources, or ‘capital’, that individuals can bring
to the field: economic; cultural; social.
• Conversion of capital: economic -cultural

7. Linguistic capital
• Bourdieu shows the inter-relationship between
different forms of capital.
• Thus, social differentiation lies along several
intersecting axes.
• Accent may be understood as one axis of
differentiation among others.
• Despite relative decline of RP, still considerable
research evidence to show that certain English
regional accents, and many Scottish and Welsh,
seen as less prestigious (Snell, 2013).

8. How can Bourdieu help?
• Approach to language applies and develops the
trio of concepts that underpin the wider theory
of practice.
• Linguistic utterances are products of a relation
between an individual’s ‘linguistic habitus’ and
‘linguistic field/s’.
• Linguistic habitus is a deeply embodied sub-set
of the dispositions of an individual’s habitus.
• Accent is the result of a certain mode of moving
the tongue or lips—’articulatory style’.

9. A sense of place
• Linguistic utterances are always produced in
particular contexts or fields.
• Properties of these fields will endow linguistic
products with a certain ‘value’.
• Through linguistic habitus, individuals develop a
degree of anticipation of the value of their
linguistic utterances within different fields, e.g.
the labour market/s.
• This linguistic ‘sense of place’ is a practical
competence.

10. Linguistic, symbolic and material
capital
• Capacity to produce linguistic utterances that are
highly valued across different fields is one that is
unevenly distributed across society.
• In other words, different speakers possess different
quantities of ‘linguistic capital’.
• As Thompson (1991: 18) observes, linguistic capital
often maps onto other forms of capital.
• In general, the greater the linguistic capital that an
individual has, the more they are able to secure
symbolic and material profits from the field.

11. The need for critical normativity
• Bourdieu offers a sophisticated theoretical
framework through which to conceptualise the
power relations.
• However, as Thompson (1991: 31) notes,
although Bourdieu’s work offers real critical
potential, it is above all a sociological theory, not
a normative political theory.

12. Two-dimensional justice
• Nancy Fraser, a leading American social theorist
and socialist feminist.
• Class, 'race' and gender as bi-valent categories
along a cultural-material conceptual spectrum.
• 'Race' and gender in the middle of the spectrum.
• Redistribution and recognition remedies--pull in
opposite directions?
• How to bridge the gap?

13. Perspectival dualism
• All social practices are to be considered
simultaneously economic and cultural (although
not always in equal measure).
• Redistribution and recognition are two
perspectives to view the economic dimensions of
what are normally considered cultural processes
and vice-versa.
• A normative theory of justice, requiring (a) legal
equality; (b) distribution of resources and (c)
‘intersubjective equality’ (Fraser, 1999: 137).

14. Fraser and Bourdieu
• Outcome is a ‘dual systems’ (Anthias, 2005)
approach to economy and culture.
• Bourdieusian framework: economic capital and the
various forms of cultural capital are analytically
separable but entwined in concrete circumstances.
• Study concerned with factors perceived to affect
access to employment (= distribution justice;
economic capital).
• Accent and gender are products of cultural status
order of society, or what Bourdieu terms cultural
capital.

15. The study
• Case-study institution is a post-1992 university
in South Wales, recruiting principally from
within the South Wales area.
• Third year cohort of the BA (Hons) in Education
Studies.
• 2012—13: 147 students, of whom 122 (83%) were
female and 25 (17%) were male.
• Seven focus groups between 6 October 2012 and
21 February 2013: 34 females and 7 males.

16. Accents: fear of prejudice
• Melanie: I know it sounds really bad but I think a
lot of Welsh are labelled as sometimes ‘thick’ maybe
‘cos of their accents and things in the media and
stuff and I think that maybe they might judge me
because of my accent and that I’m not as clever as
someone from Oxford who can pronounce their
words properly and speak properly.
• Jade: I think if someone from Oxford was sitting
next to you or someone who’s well-spoken and
you’re talking with a Welsh twang like we are, I
think it would jeopardize [employment
opportunities]. (Focus Group Seven)

17. A linguistic sense of place
• Focus groups facilitated group reflection upon
the dispositions of a collective linguistic habitus.
• Students were reflecting upon their ‘linguistic
sense of place’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 82).
• Students were exercising a practical sense of
anticipation with regard to the likely value
accorded to their linguistic utterances within the
wider field of primary teaching employment
beyond Wales.

18. A sense of injustice
• Kim: They could have the same ability as someone who
speaks la-di-da anyway
• Rachel: I mean, you could even be the best, better person for
the job than someone who talks like that.
• Christine: But they might discriminate just ‘cos...
• Rachel: Definitely. Personally, I think that’s a big factor.
• Kim: It’s really unfair though...
• Amy: Yeah, it is unfair but...it’s discrimination, isn’t it?
• Kim: ‘Cos people who haven’t got, like, anything, their
family haven’t got any money, they work so hard for it and
just because of where they’re from then they can’t get a job
that they’re capable of doing, do you know what I mean?
(Focus Group One)

19. A claim for inter-subjective equality
• Students appear to be making a recognitional
claim for ‘intersubjective’ equality.
• “...institutionalized cultural patterns of
interpretation and valuation express equal
respect for all participants and ensure equal
opportunity for achieving social esteem (Fraser,
1999: 37).
• Fear of injurious processes of misrecognition
which may harm their chances of obtaining
teaching employment (distributional justice).

20. But...?: The morally responsible
teacher
• A perception across the focus groups that accent
is important in teaching and that speaking
‘properly’ had an important professional
function.
• For some students, this was tied to the need to
be a ‘morally responsible’ teacher who did not
lead the children ‘astray’ through their own
accent.

21. But...?
• Hannah: I definitely find myself talking much
better when I’m in the classroom or even in this
situation
• Joanna: You’re more aware
• Hannah: Yeah, talk more clearly, definitely, yeah,
but I think it’s just important for young children
that you do speak clearly and correctly which is
good yeah.
• Melanie: It’s really important because they’re
learning off of you.
• (Focus Group Seven)

22. But...?
• Expressed in a certain distancing from and even
disavowal of their own accent.
• There are hints here of Bourdieu’s (1991)
argument for the way in which a linguistic sense
of place acts as an internalised constraint on
linguistic production, thereby having the effect
of a form of self-censorship and of hyper self-
correction.

23. But...?
• For other students, the concern about having the
‘correct’ accent was related to more instrumental
reasons.
• Focused upon the need to present oneself as
‘employable’.

24. But...?
• Interviewer: How important do you think your accent is
when you are looking for a teaching job?
• All: Massively [general agreement, nodding]
• Susan: The way you speak, the way you talk, the words you
use, I think that they really have a massive effect on, like, the
interview process. If you go in there speaking all chavvy
[general laughter], people are going to be, like where are you
from?
• Jane: I think my English speaking is rubbish! My voice is
slow! [General laughter]
• Susan: It’s true ‘cos when you talk to people and you hear
the way they speak, it’s like errr! [General laughter]
• (Focus Group Two)

25. Compromise formations
• Students interpreted accent to include grammar
and vocabulary.
• Conflation of accent with other linguistic factors
reflects anxiety over linguistic sense of place.
• Bourdieu (1991): all language production is
characterised by the need for a degree of
euphemism or 'compromise formations' that are
congruent with the schemes of evaluation of the
relevant field.

26. Systematic discrepancies
• Language production is characterised by systematic
discrepancies between linguistic fields and the forms
of (self)censorship associated with them, and the
capacities of individuals to produce linguistic
expressions appropriate to the field.
• Individuals with high levels of cultural capital
usually experience a close alignment between their
linguistic habitus and the requirements of formal
occasions such as job interviews (Bourdieu, 1991).

27. A rationally adaptive response?
• Students' comments indicate a collective
linguistic habitus that is not comfortably aligned
with the anticipated linguistic evaluation
schemes of the wider field of primary teaching
beyond Wales.
• Could be argued that students’ perceived need to
speak ‘properly’ reflects a rationally adaptive
response to anticipated prejudice because of
their accents or other forms of linguistic
production.

28. An act of misrecognition?
• A critical sociological viewpoint may also say that
the students are ‘buying in’ to the reproduction of
their own oppression.
• Acceptance of such a value system (however
unwillingly) is itself an act of misrecognition that is
helping to support societal processes of
misrecognition which serve to position their accents
negatively.
• Essence of Bourdieu's (1991) argument that the
exercise of power through symbolic exchange always
rests on a foundation of shared belief.

29. Concluding remarks
• Application of dual-systems approach to
economy-culture.
• Drawing on Bourdieu and Fraser.
• Dual systems allows us to avoid collapsing the
distinction between economy and culture.
• Thereby understand what is distinctive between
recognitional and distributional claims for
justice.

30. Concluding remarks
• Students' fears of employer prejudice (if realised
in practice) would have clear distributional
implications (economic capital).
• But, fears of likely employer prejudice related to
their accents are a valid claim of injustice
regardless of the possible distributional
implications of such prejudice in terms of future
employment opportunities.

31. Concluding remarks
• Focus of study was on students' perceptions of
prejudice, not experience of it.
• In Bourdieusian terms, study asked students to
reflect upon their dispositions towards a field in
which they are not yet actual ‘players’.
• Qualification is important because dispositions
are always relational, being formed, at least in
part, through the encounter between the
individual’s habitus and the relevant field.

32. Concluding remarks
• Important to understand the exercise of ‘practical
sense’ by which undergraduates may anticipate
possible employment-related barriers, and the
effects of this upon their sense of personal
employability.
• Undergraduates have widely differing volumes and
compositions of capital, and this affects their ‘sense
of place’ within the fields of the labour market.
• Working-class 'localism' conditioned by many
factors, including anticipated prejudice.

33. References
• Snell J (2013) Dialect, interaction and class
positioning at school: from deficit to difference to
repertoire. Language and Education 27(2): 110-128.
• Thompson JB (1991) Editor’s introduction. In:
Thompson JB (ed) Language and Symbolic Power.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1-31.
• Anthias F (2005) Social Stratification and Social
Inequality: Models of Intersectionality and Identity.
In: Devine F, Savage, M, Scott J, Crompton R (eds)
Rethinking Class. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
24-44.