Session Foregrounding Parents As Players in Meritocratic Competition XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

This session is interested in the growing agency exercised by parents in optimising school experience and achievement. Sociology of education has long recognised the underlying relationship between family background, parent disposition, and a child's school trajectory. In this sense, parents and the home have always been in the background. However, we are interested in the conditions now cultiv...

This session is interested in the growing agency exercised by parents in optimising school experience and achievement. Sociology of education has long recognised the underlying relationship between family background, parent disposition, and a child's school trajectory. In this sense, parents and the home have always been in the background. However, we are interested in the conditions now cultivated under processes of individualisation (Beck, 2000), responsibilization (Rose, 2004), credential inflation (Brown, 2001), hidden privatization (Ball and Youdell, 2008) and neoliberal marketization more generally. These agendas demand more conscious strategy from parents, urging them to exercise choice and discretion, judging quality on their own terms. To date, attention has been paid to the professional middle class’s curation of educational opportunity for children (Crompton, 2008: Lareau, 2011; Vincent, 2009) and to less established fractions of the middle class (Windle, 2015). This session will broaden the gaze, inviting papers interested in the multiple ways in which all parents, across class positions, are being mobilised to act in their children’s interests. This may be through voucher schemes, as school governors, through school satisfaction surveys, purchasing private tutoring, or appealing placement decisions. Does this foregrounding of parents’ agency erode mutual trust (eg Silova, 2009), placing teacher-parent relations on a more suspicious footing than as partnership? Greater scope for parent agency also foregrounds parents’ normative theories about what education ‘should’ be. These logics are being accorded more weight in the cultural politics of education. What does what this mean for the expert knowledges of teaching professionals?

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