British Journal of Educational Studies

ISSN: 0007-1005 (Print) 1467-8527 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20

Working-Class Boys and Educational Success:

Teenage Identities, Masculinities and Urban
Schooling
By Nicola Ingram. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. £19.99 (pbk), £39.99
(hbk). ISBN 978-1-137-40159-5 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-137-40159-5 (eBook).

Ross Goldstone

To cite this article: Ross Goldstone (2020): Working-Class Boys and Educational Success:
Teenage Identities, Masculinities and Urban Schooling, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00071005.2020.1725296

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Published online: 05 Feb 2020.

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British Journal of Educational Studies
2020, pp. 1–3

Review

Working-Class Boys and Educational Success: Teenage Identities, Masculinities and

Urban Schooling. By Nicola Ingram. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. £19.99 (pbk),
£39.99 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-137-40159-5 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-137-40159-5 (eBook).

In Working-Class Boys and Educational Success, Ingram draws upon ethnographic socio-
logical research to critically explore working-class boys’ experiences of educational
success in Northern Ireland. Focusing on two distinct educational contexts – a grammar
school and secondary school – the book aims to contribute ‘new ways of understanding
how educational success and identity are negotiated when the demands of the locality and
the demands of the school are not aligned’ (p. 3), and in doing so, provide a psycho-social
account of the implications of working-class boys’ educational success. Through drawing
upon the theoretical tools of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his concepts of habitus, capital
and field, Ingram hopes to demonstrate how educational success makes identity demands
of working-class boys and how the educational institution, through her application of
‘institutional habitus’, is important in negotiating and reconciling these demands. The
books focus on the importance of the education context and institution means that, in
addition to an academic audience interested in issues of social class inequality in education
and how such inequalities interact with gender identity and link to the theoretical tools of
Pierre Bourdieu, it is an appropriate resource for educational practitioners and those
interested more broadly in creating a more socially just educational system. Thus, it is
a book with an appeal spanning the academia, policy and educational practice.
The book constitutes eight chapters which reads smoothly, flowing from theoretical
discussions, to method and data, before offering concluding remarks. Chapter one offers
an introduction of the book to the reader, detailing the research aims and the research
questions posed. There is an interesting discussion of social class, particularly working-
class identity and its transition today into a key source of othering. This enables Ingram
to reflexively consider the deployment of social class as an identity label during her data
collection (p. 7–9). The following chapter introduces the core concepts throughout this
book: social class and masculinity, and their relationship to educational success. It is
helpfully split into two sections, wherein theoretical and empirical traditions related to
social class and masculinity are critically discussed. The first section helpfully traces,
historically, research into working-class boys’ relationship to education from early
conceptualisations accounting for working-class boys’ educational failure via cultural
deficiency (e.g. Willis, 1977) to more sensitive approaches problematising the role of the
education system itself in class-based inequalities. Conceptualisations of masculinity are
then critically explored to demonstrate the pitfalls of static notions of hegemonic
masculinity and the importance of context to understandings of masculinity.
Whilst the theoretical ideas of Pierre Bourdieu are introduced in earlier chapters, it is
in the third chapter that Ingram discusses her usage of these ideas in this study. In this

ISSN 0007-1005 (print)/ISSN 1467-8527 (online)

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2 REVIEW
chapter, Ingram outlines the Bourdieusian theory of practice informing her work and
offers a critique of the criticisms of such ideas, specifically focusing on Bourdieu’s
supposed determinist concept of habitus. This demonstrates to the reader how structure
and agency reside within the generative habitus, and the superficial reading of Bourdieu
characteristics critics of habitus are deterministic. Also of interest was the critical
discussion of conceptualisations of institutional habitus, wherein Ingram engages with
the thoughts of Atkinson (2011) and, drawing upon Bourdieu, suggests that institutions
are able to manifest as fields whist also possessing an institutional habitus (p. 74–75).
This section is particularly useful for those with interests in the positioning of educa-
tional institutions in shaping educational experiences. Chapter Four provides a gateway
into the empirical chapters of the book, detailing Ingram’s methodological approach as
a working-class Feminist researcher drawing on notions of reflexivity and positionality in
discussing her research methods. Particularly fascinating is the exploration of Ingram’s
gender identity and how this relates to her participants (p. 85). In addition, the discussion
of video-elicitation and plasticine modelling demonstrates a way through which ethno-
graphic and interview research can more effectively access the meanings participants
hold.
In chapter five, the broader and local institutional and educational context of the
boys’ lives is introduced which produces ‘a contextual framework for the discussions of
the young people in Chaps. 6 and 7ʹ (p. 100). In doing so, the experiences outlined in the
following chapter are foregrounded by a consideration of ‘the sorts of processes and
experiences that have influenced the boys and have become internalised as habitus’
(p. 133). The following two chapters ‘shed light on the sociological processes involved in
combining educational success with a working-class background’ (p. 136–137). Firstly,
examples of congruent, reconfirmed, and reconciled habitus are discussed to show how
a working-class habitus can interact differently within the same, arguably more inclusive,
educational institution. Thereafter, chapter seven reflects on the possibility of possessing
‘plural dispositions’ (p. 170) in the habitus, as a response to experiencing educational
success as working-class boys within a more authoritarian and middle-class grammar
school and the tensions this promotes in the habitus. These chapters fit well, through the
framework for responses to habitus conflict being empirically demonstrated in the lived
experiences of the working-class boys interviewed. This shows how the tensions between
originary habitus and institutional habitus can result in different outcomes, including
reconciliation, destabilisation, reconfirmation, or abandonment. It is thus these chapters
which demonstrate the complications explicitly tied to educational success for working-
class boys. The final chapter offers concluding remarks on the book’s findings before
reflecting on existing ‘cultural deficit’ models of working-class educational experience.
In summary, this book is able to dispel popular discourses surrounding working-class
boys’ and education, showing instead how educational success is experienced by work-
ing-class boys and the importance of the educational institution in the consequences of
such success for identity and lived experience. Thus, it succeeds in exploring ‘how
working-class boys negotiate educational success and reconcile this with identity’
(p. 4), illustrating how locality and institution alignment, or lack of, is important for
this negotiation. It is, therefore, recommended reading for any scholars interested in
class-based educational inequality and the development of Bourdieusian scholarship in
this area; as well as a welcome resource for those in educational practice, given it focuses
also on the institution in influencing class-based educational experiences.
 REVIEW 3
REFERENCES
Atkinson, W. (2011) From sociological fictions to social fictions: some Bourdieusian reflec-
tions on the concepts of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus, British Journal of
Sociology of Education, 32 (3), 331–347. doi:10.1080/01425692.2011.559337.
Willis, P. E. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class
Jobs. (Farnborough: Saxon House).

School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales R OSS G OLDSTONE

GoldstoneR@cardiff.ac.uk
© 2020, Ross Goldstone
https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2020.1725296