Re(2): question on class

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca)
Fri, 22 Oct 1999 11:18:09 -0400

I suspect that, although social class differences are a feature of most i=
f
not all industrialized and urbanized societies, there are important
differences between societies in the ways in which class influences the
details of daily life. In Britain, where I grew up - as did Valerie
Walkerdine - class was not simply a matter of occupation, income and
lifestyle. It permeated every aspect of life, particularly for those in
the lower middle class, who needed to be constantly on their guard lest
their mannerisms and particularly their accent give them away and
undermine the precarious foothold they had achieved in the middle class.=20
In my home, as children, we were constantly having our accent corrected,
in order to avoid the tell-tale vowels that betray one's origins. I have
not found this preoccupation with class - and not being taken for working
class - to be such a feature of life in Canada, where accents are much
more homogeneous and cross-cut anyway by differences introduced by the
influence of the different first languages of recent immigrants.

Although he is not an avowed follower of Vygotsky, I find Basil
Bernstein's work to be very compatible with a CHAT perspective. In his
later work on class and education, he developed a convincing account of
"the transmission of educational inequality" in terms of different
semantic coding orientations that are closely tied to the ways in which
individuals, as members of different occupational groupings, participate
differentially in the activities of production. In particular, he
differentiated between the semiotic processes involved, with literacy
playing a key role in the symbolic control which is characteristic of man=
y
middle class occupations. In work carried out with Holland, he
conceptualized social class in terms of

two interrelated structures, those of production and of symbolic control=
,
and a third structure which regulates and maintains the inter and intra
relationships of these basic structures. The third structure is the
State, which as control of the agencies whose ultimate strength lies in
the possibility of the use of force (the police and the army) and we hav=
e
called it the structure of power. Each of the three structures can be
conceptualized as a set of relationships based in materials, practices
and institutions, and their fundamental distinguishing characteristic, w=
e
suggest, is their relationship to the material base of the society.
(Holland, J. 1980. Social class and orientations to meanings.=20
Sociology, 15: 1-18)

It would not be difficult, I think, to relate this account to Engestrom=92=
s
work on activity systems.

Bernstein=92s theorization of different modes of semiotic mediation in th=
e
early lives of children in different social class environments has
received support in the work of Halliday and other systemic functional
linguists. Particularly important in this respect is the work of Ruqaiya
Hasan and her colleagues, who have made detailed studies of the
differential semiotic socialization of young children according to class
and gender differences. In her recent work, Hasan explicitly situates he=
r
research within a Vygotskyan perspective.

Gordon Wells
OISE/University of Toronto