Social Class Stigma

Social class is more than a word, more than a label, it is a description of the norms and values of a social group in society. It is powerful description, a description so powerful that many people live their lives around it. With all groups, there are stigmas that surround it. A stigma is a negative social label that not only changes others’ behavior toward a person but also alters that person’s own self-concept and social identity. In order to show that social class is not just an economic label of groups but a social construction, Robert Granfield uses the idea of stigma to discuss the experience of working-class students in prestigious universities of law. He does so in his article ‘Making it by Faking it’.
In his article, Granfield discusses

the ways in which working-class people undergo a sensation of difference and marginality within an elite law school. He then discusses how those students act on their new-found stigma by administrating information about their backgrounds. Next he discusses Ambivalence, by demonstrating that management strategies, of information, lead to identity ambivalence and forms of adjustments that students use to resolve the issue.
Finally, Robert talks about why social class studies can benefit from the insights made by Goffman’s research on Stigma
A study was conducted on 23, highly successful and over achieving, working-class students that received admission to one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States. Granfield (1991) states that “Working-class aspirants to the social elite must accumulate cultural capital before they are able to transcend their status boundaries” (p. 333). In order to succeed in an environment dominated by a different social class, an individual must embrace the norms and values of that social class. Learning the norms and values of a social class is made possible through socialization (Conley, 2011).
According to Granfield (1991), the working-class students, who were admitted to the prestigious law school, entered their elite school with great class pride. The class pride is reflected because a larger percentage of working-class students entered law school with the intent of social change than their elite-class counterparts (p. 334). Granfield also said that “identifying with their working-class heritage produced not only a sense of pride but a system of values and ideals that greatly influenced their initial career objectives” (p. 335). However, after gaining admission to law school, their identity with the working class began to disappear. The working-class students discovered that they were too different and that their class identity was sometimes a burden. Without the appropriate social capital to communicate with those of the elite-class, working-class students were at a disadvantage in succeeding at the university and in receiving a job offer.
According to Granfield “recognizing that job recruiters seek homogeneity is an important lesson that upwardly mobile working-class students must learn if they are to gain admission into high status and rewarding occupations” (p. 341). Just like deviants who learn to survive by adjusting to non-deviant behavior, Working-class students that became of aware of that bias started to adjust their habits and appearance. Those students learned to adjust with the help of the law school counselors whom regularly offered advice on how to gain employment in fields dominated by the elite-class. They soon realized that although they lacked the social capital of the elite-class, they could successfully copy those of the elite-class. Unlike stigmas of race or gender, stigma of social class can more easily be managed. Which led to the working-class students to conceal their background.
Despite the actions of the working-class students to transform to a higher class, the students were sometimes having trouble leaving their previous identity behind.

In fact, many of those students experienced identity issues on their climb to a higher class. The attempt to manage their class stigma led to what Goffman (1963) calls identity-ambivalence. “Working class students who sought to exit their background could neither embrace their group nor let it go” (Granfield, p. 343). One of the main issues that working-class students had with earning social capital or socializing with those of the elite-class was their guilt. As long as the guilt of them leaving their previous class behind is there, those students will continue to have trouble successfully climbing to a higher

class.
One strategies to reduce the guilt and thus be able to successful migrate to a higher class is to work in elite firms, because by doing so they would better be able to help those who they left behind (in the working class) which would lessen the guilt. Another strategy is volunteer in social justice areas, but maintain an occupation in an elite job. A more extreme method is to simply avoid those still in the working-class and thus slowly forgetting them. However, that can sometimes lead to hostility.
In Granfield’s article ‘making it by breaking it’, it was showed that by focusing on stigma we can successfully analyze class relations on how to better adapt or advance in the hierarchy of economic status.

However, overcoming the stigma is more an individualist effort than a collectivist effort (p. 348). Goffman’s research on stigma influenced Granfield’s research in many ways as seen above. It is because of hegemony that we feel a need to change our identity to successfully adapt in environments dominated by social classes different from ours. We change our identity though socialization, usually with the help of an agent (of socialization), in this article it was the school. However, one question that sociologists still wonder is if we can ever truly adapt to a different social class or forever be a stranger in paradise, and forever feel like outsiders in both our original class from which we came from and new class to which we

aspire.