Life Chances, Education and Social Movements

By Lyle Munro

'Life Chances, Education and Social Movements' explains the sociology of life chances; the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK; and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. Ralf Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model, according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089956

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Life Chances, Education and Social Movements

Life Chances, Education and Social Movements

Lyle Munro

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Lyle Munro 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-994-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-994-6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Part I The Sociology of Life Chances

Introduction

1 Life Chances in Theory and Practice

2 Generations and Life Chances

3 The Inequality Spectrum

Part II Education Institutions and Movements

4 The Necessity of Education

5 The Widening Participation Movement

6 The Lifelong Learning Movement

Part III The Transformative Power of Social Movements

7 Social Justice Movements

8 Risk Movements Confront Existential Threats

9 Student, Worker and Citizen Movements

Conclusion

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 The Main Determinants of Life Chances over the Life Course

2.1 Coming of Age during the Wars of the Twentieth Century

3.1 The Inequality Spectrum

4.1 The Cycle of Disadvantage

5.1 Different Cohorts of Students at Sydney University from the 1850s to the Present

8.1 A Selection of Global Existential Threats

Tables

2.1 The Historical Setting of the Harvard Grant Study Birth Cohort

2.2 Young Female Workers’ Occupational Aspirations Compared to Their Actual Destinations in the Three Most Popular Industries

3.1 Contrasting the Well-being of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians in 2005

4.1 Liberal and Vocational Characteristics

7.1 Correspondence between Various Perspectives on Social Movements

7.2 Structures of Domination and the Four Giants of Inequality

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to record my sincere thanks to a number of institutions and individuals for their assistance in writing this book. When I first began to think about the topic, Monash University and then Federation University Australia provided the necessary facilities without which the book would not have been completed. These facilities included a room with a view at the attractive Gippsland campus in regional Victoria and access to the excellent library resources at both Monash and Federation University; the latter also facilitated access to the extensive collection of library materials at the University of Melbourne. I am especially grateful to the librarians of these universities who were consistently willing and able to offer their services, especially Myles Strous at Federation University whose professionalism and expert understanding of online research and computer software saved many hours of research time for which I am very grateful; Myles also provided much welcome relief from the frustration involved in dealing with computer hiccups in the final stages of the production. Roberta West, Research Officer in the School of Arts at Federation University, was always ready to lend assistance on administrative and research matters.

I would like to thank a number of individuals from a variety of professional and academic fields who have been most helpful in responding to my requests for comments on the contents of the book. Les Hardy and Geoff Clark were enthusiastic and critical readers from the beginning, offering detailed comments from different academic perspectives. It was a challenge to accommodate their sometimes conflicting views, but as for all the other comments on the various chapters by different readers, I take responsibility for the choices I made. Those who offered useful comments and encouragement for which I am grateful included the following individuals: Alistair and Diana Carr, Martin Elliot, Lindsay Fitzclarence, Cynthia Karena, Chris Lord, Ebonnie Lord, Rex McGowan, Michael Stolz, Richard Webber and Keith Wilson. Thanks also to Michelle Prezioso for the design of the front cover and to Kate Zizys and her colleagues Irene Proebsting and David Hollis who provided the badge design for the back cover.

It will be clear to the reader that I have been influenced by the work of a number of sociologists, most of whom have been cited in the book. The most important of these is the late Ralf Dahrendorf, the distinguished academic, university director and politician whose monograph on Life Chances, published exactly 40 years ago, inspired the writing of the book.

To Anthem Press I offer my thanks to Tej Sood, Anthem’s publisher and managing director, who initiated and supported the project from the beginning. Thanks also to the several editorial assistants I had the pleasure to deal with; they have all been patient and professional in their communications during the production process. I especially want to thank the copy editor whose thorough checking of the manuscript greatly improved the text.

All authors need a good editor and apart from Anthem’s staff, I was very fortunate to have one living under the same roof. Jennifer Barlow, to whom this book is dedicated, has applied her highly developed writing skills and keen eye to making stylistic improvements in every chapter. Danke Schatz.

Part I

THE SOCIOLOGY OF LIFE CHANCES

INTRODUCTION

There are three parts to the book as implied in the title. Part I explains the ‘sociology of the life-chances’ concept based on Ralf Dahrendorf’s reworking of Max Weber’s original idea and its relationship to the well-being of individuals and generations. Part II describes the transformative power and necessity of education in the lives of individuals and the role of education movements, specifically the widening participation movement and the lifelong learning movement. Part III focuses on social movements (SMs) aimed at improving the life chances (LCs) of human and non-human animals; the chapters include the social justice movement, risk movements against threats to the planet and movements instigated by students, workers and citizens. The book mainly centres on Australia, with comparative examples and case studies from the UK, Europe and the United States.

Dahrendorf’s monograph Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory – published four decades ago – provides the theoretical spine of the book’s structure. He argued that LCs were a function of options and ligatures, where options were defined as choices or structural opportunities, and ligatures as linkages or networks. I argue that education via formal institutions and informal groups in the community provides the most important opportunities for enhancing individual LCs. I propose that the linkages in Dahrendorf’s thesis are SM networks of advocates and activists whose campaigns are designed to improve the lives of an increasing number of disadvantaged groups in affluent countries. These are people, perhaps a majority, whose lives continue to be blighted by forces allegedly beyond their control.

A simple way of describing how the three parts of the book are linked is shown in the formula LCs = f (O, L), where LCs are described as a function (f) of options (O) and ligatures (L). In Chapter 1 of Part I, the theory and practice of LCs are explained including the difference between the ubiquitous term ‘lifestyle’ and – what is arguably of greater importance in the lives of most people – the less developed, life-chances concept or Lebenschancen, as coined by Max Weber and reinterpreted by Dahrendorf in his above-mentioned monograph. Chapter 2 focuses on the LCs of different generations from the early twentieth century to the present. The experiences of these cohorts are documented in several exemplary longitudinal studies in the United States, the UK and Australia. Chapter 3 begins with what I call ‘the inequality spectrum’, along which people’s lives are experienced as positive (defined by their general well-being) or negative (defined by levels of disadvantage). As in the previous chapter, the testimonies of individuals reported in longitudinal studies are used to shed light on the lived experiences of people from different walks of life and from a variety of economic and social circumstances.

The title of Part II on education institutions and SMs is meant to convey the notion of education as a formal social institution (i.e. schools, universities, colleges.) and as a field of SM activity (e.g. widening participation, lifelong learning and community movements). The key idea in Chapter 4 is that a good basic education is a necessity if people are to achieve a decent standard of living, a reasonable quality of life and a healthy level of general well-being. While there are plenty of successful individuals who have not had a formal education, there are few who are able to enjoy a comfortable life if they lack the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and an ability to communicate effectively. In the digital age these skills remain the essential foundations upon which the acquisition of new learnings depends. The chapter includes an analysis of traditional formal education as it is practised (particularly in Australia) from preschool to post-compulsory education. Topics include the role of the family in socialising children, how education contributes to the well-being of individuals and how illiteracy and innumeracy do the opposite; finally, issues relating to post-secondary education are alluded to and taken up in the remaining two chapters of Part II.

The focus of Chapter 5 is the controversial widening participation movement which has emerged recently in Australia and elsewhere as a response to shortfalls in government expenditure on universities. The arguments I present may be seen as biased in favour of the movement’s critics. However, I have based my position on the evidence provided in expert reports on the success and failure rates of university students as well as testimonies from a range of students from different social and economic backgrounds. The key point of the chapter is to suggest that university is not for everyone and that there are other avenues for developing useful skills and knowledge.

This idea is developed in Chapter 6 on the lifelong learning movement, which supports people who have missed out on acquiring the basics taught in schools or who want a second chance in mastering more advanced skills offered by universities, Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges and adult education courses. Also included in the chapter is recent work in the UK, Germany and Australia, which calls for a reenergised apprenticeship system, one that offers the prospect of employment opportunities for school leavers who would benefit more from a TAFE course rather than one from a university. That idea is developed by asking whose interests are served by lifelong learning and who benefits most from it.

While Part II puts the case for education’s role in enhancing the LCs of individuals, the question posed in Part III is whether collective action in SMs can protect humans and other animals from some of the greatest threats we confront in the early twenty-first century. Chapter 7 on social justice issues explains the essential tasks of SMs in solving or at least lessening the negative impacts of four structures of domination that relevant SMs seek to challenge: classism (exploitation), sexism (gender violence), racism (ethnic and religious conflict) and speciesism (animal abuse). As social problems – defined as things that society would be better off without – they are amenable to social solutions. It will be argued that SM theory and activist practices are the best tools for resolving these social problems. Some commentators have suggested that SMs are more effective than the state in dealing with problems afflicting groups and individuals. However, the position I take is that both are needed.

Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis introduces the points discussed in Chapter 8, which deals with some of the main existential threats to human and non-human lives – risks that have been identified by scientists and researchers, including SM theorists. Of necessity, choices had to be made on what existential threats to include in the chapter. On the basis of threats nominated by expert commentators as the most immediate and most dangerous, I have chosen to focus on pandemics and climate change, and the links between the two.

Finally, Chapter 9 examines the role of student movements, worker movements and citizen movements in the past and the present. Although these categories clearly overlap, their roles can be described as distinctive: knowing (student role), doing (worker role) and being (citizen role). Students, workers and citizens are a fundamental part of a proposed mass mobilisation against the wealth and privileges of a neo-liberal minority whose policies and practices have diminished the LCs of the masses.

I argue that a coalition of these groups and others is necessary if the threats to our collective well-being are to be effectively challenged. The Occupy movement is the most recent example of what a coalition movement of students, workers and citizens might achieve, as most people – at least in developed countries – are in these roles at different times during their lifespan. The chapter looks at the possibility of a ‘common cause’ movement strong enough to lessen, if not to eliminate, the dire consequences of various global threats to our collective well-being and survival as a species. The book ends on an optimistic note, with references to a number of prominent scholar-activists who see hope in the potential for mass mobilisation and social change for a better, fairer and safer world.

Chapter 1

LIFE CHANCES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Introduction

This chapter explains the importance of the neglected concept of Max Weber’s original idea of Lebenschancen (life chances; LCs) and Ralf Dahrendorf’s comprehensive analysis of the idea’s theoretical and empirical importance.¹ Dahrendorf’s sociology of LCs includes a number of significant concepts relevant to society in the twenty-first century in particular his idea that LCs are a function of options (O) and ligatures (L). While these concepts provide the basis for Dahrendorf’s theoretical argument, it is important to explain how these abstractions are relevant to improving the LCs of ordinary people. The life-chance concept, defined in ordinary language by Gerth and Mills is the chance to stay alive after birth, to remain healthy and grow tall, and if sick to grow well again quickly and to avoid becoming a juvenile delinquent, and very crucially, the chance to complete an intermediary or higher educational grade.²

For Dahrendorf and many contemporary sociologists, education is the key to achieving a decent standard of living for individuals based on material resources and a good quality of life, typically characterised by the ubiquitous term ‘lifestyle’.

In developing countries, however, the quest for better LCs is about achieving lower rates of morbidity and living longer, that is, the political economy of survival. The philosopher and economist Amartya Sen is perhaps the most prominent writer on enhancing the LCs of people in the developing world. His work on the Capability Approach (CA) has some resemblances to Dahrendorf’s model in that CA is ‘much concerned with the opportunities that people have to improve the quality of their lives […]. The crucial role of social opportunities is to expand the realm of agency and freedom’. The options that a person has depend greatly on relations with others and on what the state and other institutions do.’³ As I see it, expanding the realm of agency and freedom corresponds to Dahrendorf’s idea of liberty as the expansion of people’s options and opportunities or LCs; the relations with others which Dahrendorf refers to as ligatures or networks and what I argue in Part III are available to people through social movement (SM) participation.

The scope of the chapter and the book is limited mainly to the LCs of individuals in developed countries and how they are enhanced by education; for disadvantaged groups, SMs provide the best prospects for challenging the oppressive structures of domination – in class-, gender-, race- and species-wide relations – that restrict the LCs of those on the losing side of the relationship.

Dahrendorf’s concepts of options and ligatures are used as proxies for education and SMs, respectively, and as the essential tools for enhancing our individual and collective LCs. The key concepts to be explained in the remainder of the chapter include those used by Dahrendorf as well as the associated topics such as lifestyle politics, poverty, genetic inheritance, luck, economics and politics.

LCs à la Max Weber and Ralf Dahrendorf

It is now four decades since the publication of Dahrendorf’s Life Chances, and it remains the only comprehensive study of the concept derived from Weber’s sketchy outline in Economy and Society⁴. The concept’s sociological importance remains almost totally neglected in the sociological literature, its potential practically eclipsed by the ubiquitous idea of lifestyle.⁵ However, Weber did make it clear that one’s lifestyle is dependent upon one’s LCss; the latter provide the opportunities for achieving the lifestyle practices and choices people make voluntarily or are forced to make as a consequence of either life-chance advantages or disadvantages.

From the outset then, it should be obvious that this is not a ‘how to’ book in the genre of a self-help, do-it-yourself (DIY) list of tips on how to live or to extend one’s longevity, but rather an explanation of the sociological meaning of LCs and the ways to enhance our individual prospects via education during the life course. I argue that the LCs of disadvantaged groups are best improved by SM activism.

Issues of inequality and social justice are the raw materials of sociology and will be discussed along with related issues such as mortality rates and differences in the quality of life for rich and poor people alike. Lifestyle politics, I argue, is a sideshow in the main game of LCs and survival for humans and other animals.

Andrew Sayer laments the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology when lifestyle and identity politics replaced the political economy of LCs, thus ignoring ‘the biggest change in class structure over the last 30–40 years: the return of the rich’ the implications of which he claims is a minority’s ownership of the means of production, land, money and other financial assets.⁶ Tilly calls this ‘opportunity hoarding’⁷, a practice that has enriched the 1 per cent to be discussed in Chapter 9. How the mechanisms of closure and exclusion operate for this purpose is explained by focusing on the worst features of Anglo-American capitalism and neo-liberalism: ‘The poverty, social inequality and inequitable distribution of wealth is legitimised not only by government policies, corporate governance structures and neo-classical economic theories, but also by the highly visible hand of contemporary accounting practices’.⁸ Maximising shareholder value appears to be the rationale of Anglo-American capitalism in contrast to the welfare capitalism of Japan and continental Europe; in these countries, there is a culture of balancing the interests of different groups, rather than the single category of privileged shareholders.⁹

It is widely acknowledged that income differentials are most pronounced in the United States, where the market is most free and where neo-liberalism was challenged by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to be discussed in Chapter 9. Of all the negative consequences of inequality on people’s lives, perhaps the most disturbing, is its impact on child mortality. Collison, Hannah and Stevenson (2007) have made a strong argument based on a large data set that indicates a causal link between income inequality and child mortality in wealthy OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.¹⁰ The impact of the unequal distribution of LCs is featured in Chapters 2 and 3.

Dahrendorf’s Theory: LCs = f(O, L)

Dahrendorf’s The Modern Social Conflict¹¹ records the author’s lifelong scholarly interest in conflict theory as the driving force of social change in modern societies. The opening chapter of the book is titled ‘Revolutions and Life Chances: The Two Faces of Modernity’. Dahrendorf was no revolutionary in the conventional meaning of the term; his use of the term is in reference to the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution which he notes were concerned, respectively, with the expansion of provisions (basic goods and services) and the expansion of entitlements (citizen rights). For Dahrendorf, LCs are about how a society achieves a fair balance between provisions and entitlements: ‘The battle for more life chances provides the theme of the modern social conflict.’¹² The argument in his essay Life Chances stated that LCs were a function of options and ligatures where options were defined as choices or structural opportunities; furthermore, ‘options are specific contributions of entitlements and provision.’¹³

For Dahrendorf, liberty means enhancing citizens’ LCs by the expansion of both provisions and entitlements; no society, he claims, can be truly civilised if it fails to provide access to both.¹⁴ He sees the conflict over LCs as a contest between what he calls the ‘provisions party’ and the ‘entitlements party’ with the former emphasising economic welfare – economics defined as the science of provisions – by providing basic essentials of life, that is, food, clean water, shelter, clothing and the latter concerned with providing access to these entitlements defined as the ‘socially defined means to access.’¹⁵ A good society needs to offer both provisionsand entitlements since rights without choices and opportunities in the absence of access would be pointless. For example, a basic education is today perceived as both a right and an opportunity. Clearly, the right to a basic education provided by the state would be meaningless in the absence of authentic learning opportunities such as in strict religious schools where rote learning of sacred texts was the norm. Likewise, the provision of formal institutions of learning that only a select minority could access would fail the test of liberty.

The task of liberty, writes Dahrendorf, is to maximise both entitlements and provisions while acknowledging the tension between the two ‘parties’: the provisions party insists that a society must enjoy economic prosperity before citizens can access the civil and political rights proposed by the entitlements party. The result is seen in citizenship struggles emerging in civil society often led by churches, NGOs, voluntary associations and the like and on the broader front by social movement organisations (SMOs) in the SM sector. It is here in this latter case that we see the battle for enhancing people’s LCs as involving the opportunity structure and the networks created by SM activists. Thus, opportunities available to some but not to others are understood by social justice advocates as the unequal distribution of LCs especially in the contexts of class, race, gender and species relations. Put simply, SM activists build networks of like-minded groups to target the interests of individuals and organisations seeking to maintain the status quo: in the relations of class (employers/workers), race (whites/non-whites or ‘the other’), gender (men/women) and species (human/non-human animals).

Dahrendorf rarely mentions SMs, emphasising instead, the ligatures of civil society as essential resources for facilitating social change. He defines ligatures as ‘deep cultural linkages that enable people to find their way through the world of options.’¹⁶ He argues that achieving more chances in life depends on these linkages, providing as they do, a sense of belonging, solidarity and hope against the feeling that nothing can be done as individuals to change society for the better. As suggested in the previous paragraph, these sentiments can be found in many progressive NGOs and SMOs which suggests the possibility of building common cause campaigns with a variety of actors.

The core feature of LCs is ‘the element of generalised opportunity’¹⁷ provided by the social structure. LCs for Dahrendorf are not the attributes of individuals but rather opportunities provided by different societies and social resources like educational facilities, libraries, schools and so on. He argues that LCs are a function of options (choices) and ligatures (linkages, connections or social networks), both of which are embedded in the social structure that individuals need to negotiate in order to enhance their chances in life.

Options without ligatures would be meaningless, while ligatures in the absence of options would be oppressive. Put differently, options include entitlements and the provision of basic goods and services, so that eligibility without choices and choices without eligibility are pointless.

My argument in this book is that the most important options or choices available to individuals to enhance their LCs is through formal education while the ligatures, networks or bonds – the structurally available institutions such as churches, community groups and the like – can be found in SMs capable of enhancing the lives of disadvantaged categories of individuals such as the poor, the unemployed, the homeless and minorities lacking the resources to fend for themselves.

According to Dahrendorf, the extension of LCs to more and more people as a broad societal goal is the measure of a society’s liberty.¹⁸ Educational opportunity is fundamental to this objective as I explain in the next section.

Education and Life Chances

As this topic is the subject of Chapter 4, only a brief note to foreshadow the necessity of education for enhancing LCs is provided here. Dahrendorf was never an advocate of equality of outcomes in the life-chances debate which would only lead to the impossible prospect of ‘equal lives’. He was, however, a persistent advocate of equal opportunity in education, especially for disadvantaged working-class children. He would undoubtedly endorse measures to improve their access to education such as the provision of free school buses, reduced tuition fees, correspondence education, services like School of the Air, mobile libraries and making the most of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to break the tyranny of distance for students in remote areas.

He explains how LCs develop in three stages: a process of emergence, enhancement and extension. He uses the example of education to illustrate these stages: ‘The foundation of the Academy documents the fact that education as a life chance has emerged.’¹⁹ He goes on to argue that the enhancement of LCs should not mean more of the same thing. Thus, in the Australian tertiary education sector, many commentators are calling for greater diversity in the curriculum (e.g. to accommodate the interests of working-class students or those from disadvantaged backgrounds) as well as breaking down the barriers between the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and university sectors. However, Dahrendorf’s conservatism, or perhaps common sense, is revealed when he argues against the current orthodoxy of extending the LCs of more and more individuals via post-compulsory education: ‘The extension of the life chance university degree to fifty percent of each age group destroys the chance itself.’²⁰

In Australia, the Gillard government’s proposal to increase the number of 25- 34-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree from 32 per cent in 2009 to 40 per cent in 2025 would no doubt attract Dahrendorf’s misgivings. His argument seems to be that equality – in certain situations such as equal educational outcomes (e.g. a majority with a bachelor’s degree) – is counterproductive and a threat to liberty, a position which, on the surface, is counterintuitive. However, if he means, for example, that under the conditions in which more and more individuals will be encouraged or expected to acquire more and more qualifications, then the case he makes for the price of equality – namely the loss of liberty – is sustainable since there will be many reasons why any number of people will not want to acquire a university degree. We will see in Chapter 5, how the widening participation movement actually restricts educational opportunities by its advocacy of a narrowly defined educational pathway to future success. For the moment, it is important to clear up any confusion there might be in interpreting the related concepts of Weber’s Lebenschancen (life chances) and Lebensstil (lifestyle).

Lifestyle Politics

For Cockerham, Rütten and Abel (1997), the value of Weber’s life-chance concept is that it has the capacity to operationalise a lifestyle via the interplay between individual choice and the social structure. LCs refer to the probability or likelihood of realising lifestyle choices, that is, the means (opportunities, choices) to achieve particular goals whether material, cultural or psychological. They add that ‘lifestyles are not random behaviours unrelated to structure but are typically deliberate choices influenced by life chances’.²¹

Anthony Giddens is the most prominent exponent of lifestyle politics by which he claims issues of personality, identity and self-actualisation are more important to people in today’s consumerist world: ‘Life politics is a politics not of life chances, but of life style.’²² For Giddens, choices trump chances since for him structure and agency are intermediaries between life choices and LCs. He does acknowledge that emancipatory politics is still vital in a radical approach to social problems; however, he argues life politics is about how we should live in a world where nature is no longer natural and traditional ways of doing things have been transformed. Thus, individuals in late modernity must construct a ‘trajectory of the self’, that is, a life plan in which they seek self-actualisation by a balancing act between opportunities and risk. The argument in the present book is that life-political concepts of identity, self-actualisation, self-development along with expressions such as ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, life planning, self-therapy and the like are of less significance when contrasted with what is at stake in the social distribution of LCs.

Wilkinson makes this point when he notes how ‘matters of individual consumer lifestyle and the aesthetics of self-identity have come to dominate sociology to the point where little or no attention is given to the ways in which power