White middle-class families and urban comprehensives: the struggle for social solidarity in an era of amoral familism

In: Families, relationships and societies: an international journal of research and debate, Volume 3, Issue 2, p. 235-249

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which families can operate against the dominant practices of the societies they are part of by focusing on a specific fraction of the white middle classes: those who can be seen to be acting against the grain of white middle-class orthodoxy by sending their children to schools with a substantial percentage of working-class and/or minority ethnic students. Drawing on concepts of 'amoral familism' and 'social solidarity', it explores the tensions the families confront between a strong commitment to comprehensive schooling and a wider collectivity, and a more narrow inward focus on the interests of the immediate family to the exclusion of wider society. It concludes that as long as neoliberalism remains the dominant ideology, there is little hope for the development of new ways of 'doing family' that involve looking out in inclusive open ways rather than focusing inwards in exclusive, and often excluding, ways.