‘Becoming Middle-Class’

This article examines social mobility among University of Cambridge students from working-class socially mobile (WCSM) backgrounds. It makes three main arguments: first, top-down, theoretical class categorisations fail to capture these students’ class position. Second, WCSM students undergo an extended and incomplete process of ‘becoming middle-class’, during which time different forms of capital interplay to create contested class identities. Finally, students struggle to achieve a narratively coherent sense of self, due to the ways in which the social mobility narrative leaves them trapped between ‘failing’ and ‘selling out’, and between ‘sincerity’ (fulfilling their social role) and ‘authenticity’ (rejecting their social role). WCSM students therefore internalise the external contradictions of their class position and undertake significant identity work, a potentially isolating process that can be destabilising when undertaken without support. One of the arguments this article sets forth, then, is that class position impacts on such fundamental processes as self-formation.