Cosmopolitan class? Cruise ship training and employment in South East Asia the transnational relationally of class inequality

Beck has challenged those interested in social class to step out of the limits of methodological nationalism to investigate how inequality works on a global level. This has sparked debates in a number of sociological fields, including youth sociology, over the very vitality of class as a productive sociological concept in an increasingly interconnected and cosmopolitan world.

By investigating young people who train and work on international cruise ships, this paper discusses transnational class relations and speaks to the many issues that Anglo-European theorising about recent social change describes. The international cruise ship industry is a microcosm of the globalised labour force and has been described as ‘globalisation on the sea’. Balinese youth relatively high in cultural capital are being targeted by the cruise ship industry as service workers. Many are choosing this work rather than attending university. While the pay is slightly higher than what is available locally, the costs of training, agents and transport to ports see the workers virtually indentured to their employers. Families get loans to pay for training and it may take up to 4 years before the young people start to make anything.

This paper discusses this phenomenon through the lens and synthesis of several theories relevant to youth studies. These include the way personal choice and the negotiation of risk engage with global governmental discourses (individualization, consumerism); the increasing transnational relations of class inequality, where in this instance the middle class Balinese young people who often have servants in their own home, then pursue a career serving the mostly Western working class on holiday; and, can Bourdieu’s theoretical toolbox – habitus, symbolic violence, forms of capital and hysteresis in particular – maintain vitality outside the confines of the nation state or does Beck’s methodological critique consign it to the dustbin of zombie category?