‘It’s Not Something I Can Change…’: Children’s perceptions of inequality and their agency in relation to their occupational choices

Abstract

Despite the increasing recognition of the significance of children's own perceptions of inequality and critical theorisations of, and much research on, the impact of inequality on human agency, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the impact of inequality on children's agency. This paper contributes to addressing this gap by exploring how children's perceptions of inequality impinge upon their perceptions of the efficacy of their agency with regard to their occupational choices. It uses questionnaire data from a sample of 862 South Korean school children aged 10-18 from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and follow-up semi-structured interviews with 42 selected children. The findings suggest that, while most of the children held meritocratic beliefs about academic and economic inequalities, some subtle but significant relationships existed between the children's perceptions of inequality, their socioeconomic status and their perceptions of their agency. The older children were significantly more likely both to be aware of their relative academic and economic positions and to have given up a desired occupation in response to their perceptions of the inefficacy of their agency. Across the sample as a whole, in the processes by which the children adjusted their future occupational ambitions, while their socioeconomic status (especially in terms of the father's occupation) had a significant impact, the children's awareness of their relative positions, especially their economic position, showed a more pervasive and significant relationship with their likelihood of having given up a desired occupation due to having perceived the inefficacy of their agency.

Income inequality predicts competitiveness and cooperativeness at school.

“…This echoes the words of Deutsch (1979) when he wrote “schools serve as a socializing influence on children to accept the dominant values within their society” (p. 393). However, our experiment also documents that the mere perception of societal income inequality (without provocation by an external agent) is enough to prompt perceived competitiveness and an orientation toward competitiveness (for additional relevant qualitative evidence, see Kim & Gewirtz, 2019).…”

‘Maybe Life Can Become Easier Because of My Good Grades’: Children’s Conflicting Repertoires on Aspirations and Life Chances

“…These children consider the risk of becoming poor rather small because of their parents' help. It seems that children are more likely to recognize that their financial home situation is in their favour than to their disadvantage (see also Kim and Gewirtz, 2019). Although a very few of our low-class pupils also state that they have little chance of becoming poor because of their family's help, it is mainly the middle-class children who explicitly refer to their comfortable home situation as a 'safety net':…”

“…However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which children subjectively experience the relationship between opportunities and success, and how children assess their own life chances (Betz and Kayser, 2017). Children's agency to deal with inequality has hardly been acknowledged (Kim and Gewirtz, 2019). Among the exceptions are studies that indicate that high-and low-class children have different perceptions of life chances and inequality, yet other studies argue that children's perceptions are more related to their position as children (e.g.…”

Towards a model for analysing adolescents' reflexivity: Reflectiveness, criticality and boundedness

“…In response, and as mentioned earlier, there has been a sharp decrease in public belief in the possibility of intergenerational upward social mobility. In this context, we might expect increasing inequality and declining social mobility to act as catalysts for greater public reflexivity with young people in particular who, while among the most highly educated in the world (OECD, 2019), face a fiercely competitive labour market, so feeling the increasingly rigid socioeconomic structure especially acutely (Kim & Gewirtz, 2019).…”