Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs

Based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain, this comparative study addresses the key issue of the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction of advantageous opportunities. It specifically questions how parents will continue to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Considering the decline in the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labor market since the 1970s-1980s, the study concludes that the reproduction of advantage is more difficult to maintain now than in the affluent decades of the 1950s-1960s.