Drawing on data from interviews with 63 London-based families, this article argues that there are difficult and uncomfortable issues around whiteness in multi-ethnic contexts. Even those parents, such as the ones in our sample, who actively choose ethnically diverse comprehensive schools appear to remain trapped in white privilege despite their political and moral sentiments. This is a complicated question of value; of having value, finding value in, getting value from, and adding value. Even those white middle classes committed to multi-ethnic schooling face the perils of middle-class acquisitiveness, extracting value from, as they find value in, their multi-ethnic `other'. In such processes of generating use and exchange value a majority of both the white working classes and the black working classes, those who are perceived not to share white middle-class values, are residualized and positioned as excessive. Symbolically, they come to represent the abject `other' of no value.

At a time when the public sector and state education (in the United Kingdom) is under threat from the encroaching marketisation policy and private finance initiatives, our research reveals white middle-class parents who in spite of having the financial opportunity to turn their backs on the state system are choosing to assert their commitment to the urban state-run comprehensive school. Our analysis examines the processes of 'thinking and acting otherwise', and demonstrates the nature of the commitment the parents make to the local comprehensive school. However, it also shows the parents' perceptions of the risk involved and their anxieties that these give rise to. The middle-class parents are thus caught in a web of moral ambiguity, dilemmas and ambivalence, trying to perform 'the good/ethical self' while ensuring the 'best' for their children.

The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies is still relatively underexplored. This article examines the role of resentment in the construction of a particular form of ‘anti-welfare populism’ advanced by the Coalition Government in the UK after 2010. We argue that UK political parties have appropriated the discourse of fairness to promote fundamentally divisive policies which have been popular with large sections of the electorate including, paradoxically, many poorer voters. In focus group research in white working class communities in the UK undertaken just before the 2010 General Election, resentments related to perceived unfairness and loss emerged as very strong themes among our respondents. We examine such resentments in terms of an underlying ‘structure of feeling’ which fuels the reactionary populism seen in ‘anti-welfare’ discourses. These promote increasingly conditional and punitive forms of welfare in countries experiencing austerity, such as the UK, creating rivalries rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’ and drawing attention away from greater inequalities.

Recent research on social class and whiteness points to disquieting and exclusive aspects of white middle class identities. This paper focuses on whether 'alternative' middle class identities might work against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be 'middle class' at the beginning of the 21 st Century. Drawing on data from those middle classes who choose to send their children to urban comprehensives, we examine processes of 'thinking and acting otherwise' in order to uncover some of the commitments and investments that might make for a renewed and reinvigorated democratic citizenry. The difficulties of turning these commitments and investments into more equitable ways of interacting with class and ethnic others which emerge as real challenges for this left leaning, pro-welfare segment of the middle classes. Within a contemporary era of neo-liberalism that valorises competition, individualism and the market even these white middle classes who express a strong commitment to community and social mixing struggle to convert inclinations into actions.

K. (2010) Neoliberal policy and the meaning of counterintuitive middle-class school choices. Current Sociology, 58 (4). p. ISSN 0011-3921We recommend you cite the published version. The publisher's URL is http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011392110368003Refereed: Yes (no note) Disclaimer UWE has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited.UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. 3 Introduction Michael Apple speaks for many when he notes the "…increasingly powerful discourses and policies of neo-liberalism concerning privatisation, marketisation, performativity, and the "enterprising individual"". Apple also suggests "…that any analysis of these discourses and policies must critically examine their class and race and gender effects at the level of who benefits from their specific institutionalisations and from their contradictory functions within real terrains of social power" (Apple, 2001, p.409, emphasis added). This paper attempts to enter into such a critical examination with regard to "counter-intuitive" educational choices amongst white middle class families in urban England. We begin by describing a research study that has provided data and analysis which we feel helps to illuminate the issues at hand. We then suggest two ways in which the situation being studied is "globally connected" -one to do with parental readings of social change, the other to do with neo-liberal discourse. This leads us to highlight the importance of a mutual affinity between middle class families and state secondary schools in performative conditions. Finally, we argue that dominant themes in policy do not reflect the complexity and subtlety of the relationship between social class and education, and that contrary to appearances, the experiences and effects of counter-intuitive school choice suggest the continuation of class-based advantage being realised through educational means, albeit in a subtle and unusual form.