It is well documented that educational achievement in Western societies is related to family background. Yet we know less about how people who have completed university degrees experience the importance of their education. How is education related to the different culturally embedded structures of nation states? How do highly educated people perceive the pertinence of their education? Such questions are rarely posed in the literature on social class, but recent research on the middle class in Britain offers a background for comparisons. Based on results from interviews with a sample of people having higher educational diplomas, the article discusses the particularities of the Norwegian case. We find much ambivalence over class identification and there is a remarkable tendency to downplay the importance of education. Our findings indicate that the Norwegian middle class has internalized egalitarian values embedded in Norwegian culture and thus, compared to the British case, more often hesitates to set up boundaries between itself and other classes. We argue that such findings diverge from conventional typifications of western 'middleclasses' and have wider methodological implications for the study of class systems.

PurposeThis paper provides an analysis of the notion of dugnad (collective effort) in the context of the first weeks of the outbreak of COVID-19 in Norway. By appealing to people's sense of collective effort (dugnadsånd) Norwegian leaders successfully managed to coordinate the actions of the population and beat the outbreak.Design/methodology/approachThe argument builds on the pragmatic sociology associated with Boltanski and Thévenot and their “orders of worth”. Building on qualitative interview studies of the Norwegian middle and working classes a moral ideal type labelled “the socially responsible citizen” is identified.FindingsThe authors argue that dugnad is embedded in a moral repertoire of the socially responsible citizen that is indicative of a specific Norwegian welfare mentality and that is imperative for the sustainability and resilience of the Norwegian welfare model. This repertoire is found across social classes and has to be understood in light of the Norwegian welfare model and the role of civil society.Social implicationsThe analysis explains the societal impact of the appeal and endorsement of the notion of dugnad in the context of the outbreak of COVID-19.Originality/valueThe paper explores the roots and impact of a social phenomenon that has not been a matter for much sociological analysis.

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