Social Reproduction

Social reproduction refers to the set of processes by which the classes in an unequal society tend to replicate their status from one generation to the [Page 2011]next and to the way various social institutions such as education, politics, and the economy tend to ensure such replication. A large body of empirical data indicates that most children replicate the class status of their parents, despite the dominant American ideology of social mobility, whereby education is a means to movement in the class structure. Reproduction theorists typically focus on schools as a site that facilitates much of the intergenerational transmission of either privilege or disadvantage, depending on the class or group.

Social reproduction theorists are distinguished according to the mechanism by which they believe reproduction occurs. Reproduction theories can be conceptualized as existing on a continuum. On one end are theorists who believe that social reproduction is inevitable given the needs of a capitalist society. These theorists, exemplified by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their foundational work Schooling in Capitalist America, are known as structuralists. Structuralists characterize social reproduction through schooling in terms of the disadvantages faced by the poor and working class, as well as many racial and ethnic minority students. These disadvantages could include limited availability of resources, low levels of parental education, lower teacher quality, and also the socialization of such students to be compliant workers and laborers in a capitalist regime. Specifically, structuralists argue that processes of differentiation in schools create the same stratified workforce required to maintain the capitalist economy.

Structuralists assert that within schools, poor and working-class students are often taught differently than middle-class and wealthy students. Whereas middle-class and wealthy students are taught analytic skills that will serve them in professional careers, poor and working-class students are taught rote knowledge that will at best prepare them for typical blue-collar jobs. In this way, there is a tight link—what Bowles and Gintis call the “correspondence principle”—between what children learn in schools, how they are socialized to behave in the workplace, and their social class.

On the other end of the continuum are social reproduction theorists, who tend to believe that although social inequality is a feature of capitalist societies, individuals have more control or “agency” regarding their conduct and how they interact with institutions like schools. They critique structuralists for being overly deterministic and attaching little or no significance to forms of opposition or critique originating from subordinate groups. These theorists suggest that agency contributes to social reproduction just as much as does social structure. An example of such a theorist is Paul Willis, who in Learning to Labor studied the “lads,” a subculture of English working-class boys in the mid-1970s. Understanding that schooling would not allow them to move up the class structure, the lads consciously rejected schooling and aspired to move directly into the world of manual labor. Rather than analyzing the lads' conduct in terms of social reproduction theory as espoused in Schooling in Capitalist America, Willis shows that sometimes working-class students have a consciousness or “penetrative gaze” that causes them to contend directly with capitalism and reject the academic, social, and cultural patterns of schooling that they perceive to reproduce the privileges of the middle class, even if their actions ironically lead them to downwardly mobile outcomes.

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