SOCIAL CLASS IN MIGRATION, IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE RESEARCH1

David Block, ICREA, University of Lleida

INTRODUCTION

For the sake of brevity let us accept that the United States is a highly class
differentiated society, with large social and economic differences between the
owning and managing elites and the working-class majority, and a widening gap
between the incomes and education of middle class and working-class
households … Let us also accept that immigrant populations are sharply
differentiated with, for example, wealthy entrepreneurs, middle class
professionals, and low-wage service workers found among most groups. Put
briefly, class is a significant structural feature in the contemporary US, and it is
a significant ‘category of difference’ in immigrant communities. (Collins 2006:
3)

In this quote, Jim Collins makes the point that those who study immigration, and in
particularly applied linguists who study the interrelationship between migration, identity
and language (hereafter MIL), need to adopt class as key construct in their work. He
does so in the context of ongoing academic research North America examining how
bi/multilingualism often has been and often continues to be framed in a negative manner
in the United States (Urciuoli 1996; Lippi-Green 1997/2011) and how bi/multilinguals
themselves are often subjected to what Charles Taylor (1994: 25) calls the
‘misrecognition’, that is, they ‘suffer real damage, real distortion … [when] the people
or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible
picture of themselves’. A call for more attention to social class in research on MIL is in
no way an attempt to undervalue research on misrecognition. However, it does mean
questioning how much this research may achieve if the goal is to provide a complete
picture of the migrant experience in terms of all of the variables impacting on it or to
challenge inequality in societies, which may be seen as being as much about economics
as cultural issues (if not more). In this sense, Collins’s view is a mild critique of
researchers who have focussed exclusively on migrants in terms of their identities and
their language and cultural practices, but not with reference to their material existences
in unequal societies.
The aim of this chapter is to develop this critique in more detail with a view to
proposing a way forward. Class matters in migration and identity research because
migrants, like everyone else in society, live their lives within class-based hierarchies.
Where migrants are different is in the duality of their class-based existence: they
embody class-inflected subjectivities in their home contexts and they do so in their new
host environment. Interestingly, however, there is no guarantee that they will maintain a
class position from one context to the other, and indeed, as we will see later in this
chapter, declassing (losing one’s class position) and reclassing (resituating oneself in a
new class configuration) are a common occurrence (Block 2006, 2014).

1
Cite as: Block, D. (2016) ‘Migration, language & social class’. In S. Canagarajah (ed) Routledge
Handbook on Migration and Language (pp.TBD). London: Routledge.

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I begin this chapter with a lengthy discussion of key frameworks and constructs relevant
to the topic of migration, transnationalism and social class in applied linguistics. I then
discuss, briefly, the state of research which focuses on migration and MIL from a
political economic perspective which includes social class as a key construct. From here
I move to discuss what I see as key issues around research focusing on social class,
before considering the implications of working in such a way. I close with a brief note
about future directions.

OVERVIEW OF THE TOPIC

(Mobility) Migration and transnationalism
In recent years social scientists have come to the realisation that mobility and
migration are essential constructs in any informed understanding of societies and how
individuals and collectives live in them (Faist 2013; Grieco and Urry 2012; Sheller &
Urry 2006). Mobilities (in plural) come in many shapes and sizes, but here it is human
mobilities that are of interest. Human mobilities may be understood in two general
senses: (1) as the relative ability of people to move freely and easily, focussing on the
availability and/or disposition of people to move or to be moved (e.g. by government
institutions or companies), and (2) as the reality of people moving across geographical,
political, economic, social, cultural and linguistic borders.
Human mobilities are also known as migration, the study which has evolved
considerably over the past 30 years. In particular, from the 1990s onwards, prominent
migration scholars began to advocate and adopt approaches to research which framed
the phenomenon as a complex global force. Thomas Faist (2000) encapsulated this trend
well with his ‘multi-level migration systems theory’ , according to which migration is
framed as a series of overlapping and interacting systems working across scales of
human activity, from the macro to the meso to the micro. An integral part of this multi-
level approach to migration is the understanding that migrant experiences today develop
and unfold in ways which differ from what would have been the case, for example, 100
years earlier.
‘Transnationalism’ is a term that has been introduced with a view to capturing how
migrant individuals and collectives live their lives under increasingly complex
conditions in increasingly complex societies. The term was defined some years ago by
Basch et al (1994: 6) as ‘the processes by which immigrants form and sustain multi-
stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’. More
recently, it has been described as the ‘sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among
non-state actors based across national borders- businesses, non-government
organizations, and individuals sharing the same interests’ (Vertovec 2009: 3).
Importantly, as Jordan and Düvell (2003: 76-77) note, transnationalism ‘defies notions
of assimilation and acculturation to the national ‘core’, and goes beyond the ethnic
pluralism of multicultural membership … [,] suggest[ing] that dual or multiple forms of
nationality and citizenship might better reflect and recognize the realities of these socio-
economic systems’ (Jordan & Düvell 2003: 76-77).
A transnational approach involves several core notions, elements and positions. Among
other things, it tends to focus on ‘transnationalism from below’, or grassroots, emergent
social relations, as opposed to policy level and institution-driven ‘transnationalism from
above’. It aims to document, monitor and explain the processes by which migrants live
the aforementioned ‘multiple forms of nationality and citizenship’ (Jordan & Düvell

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2003: 77) and how they ‘build social fields which link their country of origin and their
country of settlement’ (Faist, et al 2013: 12). The individuals involved are not just
‘migrants’, they are ‘transmigrants’, who ‘build such social fields by maintaining a wide
range of affective and instrumental societal practices spanning borders’ (Faist, et al
2013: 12). Though not cited explicitly by Faist et al (2013), another key element in a
transnational approach should be an acknowledgement and engagement with the ways
in which political economic developments generate changes in movements across
borders and therefore the kind of transnationalism that takes place (Glick Schiller 2010;
Portes, 2010). For example, since the economic crisis of 2007/2008 began, southern
European countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have experienced great
changes as regards their incoming and outgoing migration patterns. Indeed, in a
relatively short period of time (some 20 years), they have moved from being countries
of rapid and intense immigration, from the early 1990s onwards as the economic boom
took shape, to being countries of emigration, as both recently-arrived immigrants and
long-term citizens leave due to considerably worsened short and long-term life
prospects (especially high employment which is particularly pronounced among young
people). However, it is worth noting that in earlier emigration periods, in the 1950s, 60s
and 70s, which again were the result of economic disequilibrium between northern and
southern Europe during the post-World War 2 boom (see below), those leaving these
counties tended to be less qualified citizens in terms of education and skills. In recent
times this trend has changed in that citizens of these countries across a range of
education and skills levels are departing and indeed, with reference to well-educated
and highly qualified émigrés, there is reason to frame what is going on as a ‘brain
drain’.

Differences among emigrants in terms of education and skills point to the increasing
complexification of migratory flows and the difficulty faced by those who cling to
crude, rough-and-ready classifications such as ‘Greek migrant’, ‘Italian migrant’,
‘Spanish migrant’ and so on. . And, they are ultimately class differences which index
the growing inequalities in countries around the world, even as these inequalities are, in
effect, exported elsewhere. But of course education and skills are but a small part of
what constitutes class as a key construct in any understanding of being contemporary
societies and individuals and collectives within them. In the next section, I take on class
as construct.

Social class
Marx (e.g. 1990 [1867]) is a common starting point for a discussion of class, even if he
never actually provided a clear-cut definition of the key construct in his work (Block
2014). Nevertheless, it is possible to glean what he meant by class from his discussions
of the relationship between individuals and the means of production in England and
other industrialising European countries in the 19th century, and how from these
relations there arose very different class-based ways of life and class based
consciousnesses. Scholars writing about class after Marx, from the 1880s onwards, bore
witness to the increasing complexification of societies, with Emile Durkheim (1980
[1893]) first, and later Max Weber (1968 [1922]) being the sociologists who most
thoroughly reconfigured understandings of class in the light of changes taking place.
Weber’s work is of particular interest as he introduced the notions of status and status
situation as a way of making sense of inequality and stratification in industrialized
societies, not only in terms of material conditions (economics), but also in terms of
more abstract, socially constructed cultural phenomena. The latter include practices and

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activities such as the consumption of particular goods and engagement in particular
pastimes, both related to differentiable lifestyles which are valued unequally in societies
in terms of what Weber (1968) called ‘prestige’ and what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) later
called ‘distinction’.

For his part, Bourdieu is an interesting unifying figure in the history of class-based
scholarship: while like Marx, he saw inequality in class terms as a matter of material
states and processes (see his ‘economic capital’), like Weber, he framed inequality as
emergent in the practices and cultural activity of individuals (see his cultural capital, as
legitimized knowledge and knowhow, and social capital, as social relations facilitating
paths to success in individual life trajectories) in fields, or domains of social activity. As
I note elsewhere Block (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016a), over the past several decades, there
has been a dominant tendency in sociology to conceptualise and discuss class in a
broadly Bourdieusian manner (e.g. Bennett, et al 2009; Crompton 2008; Savage et al
2013), allowing for a conflation of generally Marxist and generally Weberian views.
This Bourdieusian view is by no means free of deficiencies. For example, David Harvey
has written of his ‘profound objections to Bourdieu’s characterisation of personal
endowments … as a form of capital’(Harvey 2014: 186), arguing that while ‘[c]capital
undoubtedly uses … signs of distinction in its sales practices and pitches, … that does
not mean that distinction is a form of capital’ (Harvey 2014: 187). Rather, Harvey
argues, distinction is about the symbolic orders emerging from and intertwined with the
ongoing development of capitalism and the economic inequalities which come with this
development. It therefore need not bear the label of ‘capital’, even if it is obviously part
and parcel of the sociocultural construction of class and inequality in contemporary
societies.
These and other reservations about aspects of Bourdieu’s work notwithstanding, his
view of class, as I note above, has become central to any discussion of the phenomenon
and with this state of play in mind, I have, in recent years, attempted to frame class for
my own purposes by drawing on the foundational work of Marx and Weber and the
more recent contributions of Bourdieu (1984) and Savage et al (2013). I have put
together a constellation of interrelated dimensions model to capture the long list of
dimensions that index class: in different ways in different contexts, cultures and
societies. This model consists of five general categories which are then subdivided into
dimensions as follows:
Economic resources
 Property: land and housing
 Property: other material possessions, such as electronic goods, clothing, books,
art, etc.
 Income: Salary and wages
 Accumulated wealth: savings and investments

Sociocultural resources
 Occupation: manual labour, unskilled service jobs, low-level information-based
jobs, professional labour, etc.
 Education: level of formal education attained and the corresponding cultural
capital acquired
 Technological knowhow: familiarity and ability to use evolving technologies

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  Social contacts and networking: people regularly associated with as friends and
acquaintances in class terms (the extent to which middle class people tend to
socialize with middle class people, working class people with working class
people, and so on)
 Societal and community status and prestige: embodied, achieved and ascribed

Behaviour
 Consumption patterns: choice of shops, buying brands or not, ecological/organic
consumption, etc.
 Symbolic behaviour (e.g. how one moves one’s body, the clothes one wears, the
way one speaks, how one eats
 Pass-times: golf, skiing, cockfighting, online for a participation

Life conditions
 Political life: one’s relative position in hierarchies of power in society
 Quality of life: in terms of physical and psychological comfort and health
 Type of neighbourhood: a working class neighbourhood, a middle class
neighbourhood, an area in the process of gentrification
Spatial conditions
 Mobility: physical movement: from highly local to global)
 Proximity to other people during a range of day-to-day activities
 Dimensions and size of space occupied: layout of dwelling or place of work,
size of bedroom; size of office, etc.
 Type of dwelling: trailer, house (detached/semidetached), flat (studio, small,
large), etc.

Adopting this broad view of class is not without its problems and ‘handle with care’
seems to be a good caveat to insert at this point. I say this not least because the model
itself is under a constant state of revision (compare this version to one appearing in
Block, 2012) as my cumulative reading about class in different contexts across time
leads me to add, delete and reorder the various dimensions listed under the five
headings (and the five headings are, of course, subject to revision). In addition, there is
a degree of conceptual and categorical slippage in the conflation of more material
aspects with more cultural, status oriented ones, and the relative acceptability of
combining what in effect are Marxist and Weberian perspectives. This issue of
Marx/Weber commensurability vs incommensurability has been the subject of a great
deal of debate for some time (e.g. Giddens 1973; Wright 1985), although space does
not allow a thorough treatment of this debate (see Block 2014, for a discussion). It
reminds us of the complexity of class as something of a moving target which evolves as
societies themselves evolve.

Social class in migration research

However it is understood, class has had a chequered history in migration research, past
and present (Wu & Liu 2014), and there has not been a sustained strand of research on
migration situated firmly within a political economy frame, where political economy is
understood to be the study of the relationships between the individual and society, on
the one hand, and the market and the state, on the other, as well as how social
institutions, activities and the economy are interconnected (Block 2016b). Nor has there
been a clear line of research, philosophically grounded in the work of Marx, Weber,

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Bourdieu and other scholars who have focused on class, which frames social relations
related to migrant experiences in societies in terms of this construct. For scholars such
Glick Schiller (2010) and Wu and Liu (2014), the turn to transnationalism as the focal
point of research is at least partially to blame as migration has come to be understood
almost entirely in sociocultural terms while a more political economy based angle has
been left out of the equation. Migration research has, therefore, tended to marginalise
issues such as ‘the differences and tensions between co-ethnic employers and migrant
workers in terms of value system, resource access, social behaviours and uneven
distribution of income and profits, which have been reinforced by the uneven effects of
globalization’ (Wu & Liu 2014: 1392).

Of course, there have been exceptions to this trend over the years (e.g. Castles &
Kosack 1973; de Genova 2005; Piore 1979; Portes & Zhou 1993; Wills, et al , 2010).
For example, in Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, Castles
and Kosack focused on four wealthy industrialized Western European societies
(Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK) which by the late 1960s had received a
substantial number of immigrants from southern European (e.g. Greece, Italy, Portugal
and Spain) and non-European countries. Among the latter group were immigrants from
ex-colonial national states (e.g. migrants from South Asia and the Caribbean going to
the UK; migrants from North Africa going to France) as well as countries like Turkey.
This wave of immigration came on the back of the economic boom in Western Europe,
which began to take shape in the 1950s, generating labour shortages in key sectors of
the economy. While some of these new arrivals competed with the local working class
for skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs in factories and in construction, a good
proportion took unskilled poorly paid manual jobs, such as cleaning and serving, which
local workers would no longer do.
Migrants faced discrimination on several fronts. First, they had to deal with employers
who refused to hire anyone who was not local (and white). And when they were hired,
newly arrived migrants found that they were expected to do the jobs that local workers
refused to do. In addition, even when migrant workers were deemed to be performing
well, they were often denied promotion and pay rises simply because they were
migrants. Discrimination also meant that migrants were more often than not excluded
from trade unions, which faced the difficult balancing act between catering to the
indigenous white working class and extending class solidarity to newly arrived
migrants. To make matters worse, migrants were especially vulnerable to threats by
employers, who could fire them and thus jeopardize their access to housing or even their
permanence in their host countries. For these and other reasons, migrants lived in a
constant state of tension provoked by their extreme vulnerability, which turned them
into what in effect was a version of Marx’s (1990) ‘reserve army’, more willing to take
lower wages and put up with poor work conditions than indigenous workers.
Wills et al‘s (2010) Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour is a more
recent publication focusing on the ‘invisible’ migrant workforce which carries out the
low level service work, from cleaning to caring to serving, in London and other global
cities. The authors discuss the dramatic demographic changes which have taken place in
globalised environments around the world, in particular in a city like London, where the
figures for the foreign born publication had risen to over 30% by the beginning of the
21st century. There are important resonances between the earlier work of Castles and
Kosack (as well as that of de Genova 2005; Piore 1979; Portes & Zhou 1993) and Wills
et al, not least the ways that newly-arrived migrants are inserted into local labour

6
markets and how particular job sectors become racialised. As a result of this rapid influx
of newcomers, the authors note how ‘London’s labour market is now exhibiting clear
signs both of occupational polarisation- with a growing proportion of both very highly
paid and very poorly paid jobs- and of bifurcation at the bottom end, with high levels of
economic inactivity sitting alongside a growth in the proportion of those in low-paid
work, many of whom have seen their real wages fall in recent years’ (Wills et al, 2010:
37). Workforces thus become categorised in national and racial terms as employers’
hiring practices are mediated by an elaborate web of theories about different groups of
workers based on their attributed and sometimes self-embraced nationality and racial
phenotypes. Thus migrants may be classified as not being up to the task of doing certain
jobs while they may be deemed to be harder working than the local population, thus
resulting in discrimination against the latter when workers are hired.
These two examples provide us with a flavour of what a political economic perspective
on migration can provide. Migrants are presented not only in terms of their nationality,
their race, their ethnicity and culture, or in terms of how they are situated in established
gendered hierarchies, but also in terms of the material conditions of their lives and how
they are inserted into existing class systems both in their countries of origin and their
current host countries. This is an intersectional approach to both class and identity, in
that it shows us how any exploration of individual or collective identity must
necessarily include attention to how multiple dimensions interrelate. The result of such
an approach is a richer representation of the migrant experience and narratives which
are more explanatory of why migrants live the lives that they live. However, as I note
above, such an approach has been a minority strand in migration studies at best, even if
the way forward to more publications in this line can be found in recent publications
such as Parella, Petroff and Solé (2013), writing about the upward occupational
mobility of immigrant women in Spain, and Rutten and Verstappen (2014), writing
about the experiences of middle class Indian youth in London.

Social class and MIL research

If an approach to migration from a political economic perspective has been, on the
whole lacking in sociology, it has been virtually non-existent in applied linguistics.
There is, to be sure, a fairly well established strand in the field which focusses on MIL
issues (e.g. Bigelow 2010; Block 2006; Byrd-Clark 2007; Kanno 2003; Norton 2000,
2013), although, as I note elsewhere (Block, 2014), none of this literature is undergirded
by an explicit and well developed political economy frame with a specific focus on
social class. And even in collections which at least mention political economy or are
purportedly immersed in it (e.g. Duchêne, et al 2013; Pietikainen & Holmes 2013),
there is usually very little explicit focus on t class. In what follows, I will examine three
specifically migrant-focussed examples which somewhat buck this trend, albeit in a
very modest way.

Bonny Norton’s (2000, 2013) ground-breaking Identity and Language Learning

contains a somewhat indirect incorporation of class into the analysis and interpretation
of the language-mediated lives of migrants. I say this because while class does manage
to get a look-in, it is not theorised to any degree anywhere in the book. Norton focussed
on a cohort of five immigrant women in Canada over a period of 15 months in 1990-
1991, examining the interrelationship between identity and power in the women’s
access to and use of English in classroom and naturalistic settings. In two cases, she
invoked class, more specifically what we might call declassing and reclassing, as key
mediating factors in the relative access that her informants had to English-speaking
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networks. While declassing refers to changes in one’s life conditions and reference
points, specifically the loss of the economic power and prestige and status which
previously marked one’s class position, reclassing is about the reconfiguration and
realignment of class position in society due to changes in one’s life conditions (Block
2014). The first case which shows this class movement in action is that of Katarina, a
Polish woman in her mid-thirties, who had recently immigrated with her husband.
Katarina had an MA in Biology and claimed proficiency in Czech, Slovak, Russian and
German. However, she and he husband spoke no English upon their arrival in Canada
and this meant that they were divested of their professional identities and self-images.
Katarina was all too aware of her situation and the role of her lack of English language
competence in it, and she was eager to work her way out of it, learning English while
taking jobs well below her level of qualifications. The second case in which declassing
figured in Norton’s analysis was that of Felicia, a Peruvian woman in her mid-forties,
who had moved to Canada with her husband and three children. Like Katarina, Felicia
felt aggrieved with regard to the move to Canada, lamenting what she and her family
had given up not only in economic and comfort terms, but also in terms of their relative
status in society and overall quality of life. Especially hard hit was her husband, whom
Felicia presented as a successful businessman who had provided the family with a high
standard of living in Peru, but who in Canada was hardly able to find a job. Felicia
concluded that Canada was not a good country for wealthy and educated people like
herself, but that it was good for what she called ‘some kinds of immigrants’, whom she
defined as ‘people who lived in countries under communism … or people who never
had anything in their countries’ (Norton 2000: 56).

Some 12 years after Norton’s study, I carried out research on Spanish speaking Latinos
in London and in my data analysis I situated class more centrally, even if on my current
standards, I did not go far enough. In the lengthiest account of this research (Block
2006), I noted how Carlos, a well-educated Colombian who was married to an British
woman proficient in both English and Spanish, lived his personal life as a middle class,
transnational, cosmopolitan Spanish speaker. This despite the fact that his job was in the
relatively low-skilled service sector (he was a porter in a large building in central
London), thus making him a classic example of the kind of declassing and reclassing
that comes with migration discussed above. With reference to the workplace, I note how
Carlos was never completely at ease with his work colleagues, all white working class
Londoners, even if he did acquire basic survival strategies, among other things learning
how to engage in teasing banter in English. In addition, working intersectionally, I show
how Carlos’s physical appearance (in British census terms, he was ‘mixed race’: his
father was Black and his mother was Indígena), his national identity (Colombian) and
his middle class interests and pastimes (which included reading, going to the cinema
and relatively frequent weekend trips to European cities, all of which he could afford
because he and his wife owned property which they rented), created a degree of
dissonance and tension among his colleagues. The latter alternated between positioning
him either as the dark immigrant from a dangerous country associated with drugs and
violence, or as the embodiment of middle class values and interests which were, on the
whole, anathema to them. In the end, Carlos was never going to fit in and indeed he
never did, leaving for a better job in a hospital a year after my contacts with him.

Elsewhere, Stephanie Vandrick has focused on a very different type of migrant

experience, that of what she initially called ‘privileged international students’ (Vandrick
1995) and later referred to as ‘students of the new global elite’ (Vandrick 2011). In both

8
cases we are in the realm of young adults who ‘are comfortable with privilege and know
they will return to their countries and step into positions of power, wealth, and
influence’ (Vandrick 1995: 375). However, the use of ‘new’ in Vandrick’s more recent
work seems to be an attempt to capture the way that since the 1990s privileged students
have become that much more privileged and that beyond being more cosmopolitan than
the majority of their fellow students (privileged international students always have
been), they are extremely more cosmopolitan. Thus, ‘they have lived, studied, and
vacationed in various places throughout the world; they may carry passports or
permanent visas from more than one country; their parents may have homes and
businesses in more than one country; they may speak several languages; they have often
been educated at Western high schools—frequently boarding schools—and colleges’
(Vandrick 2011: 160). Ultimately, these students will take their places as fully-fledged
members of what scholars such as Sklair (2001) and Carrol (2010) have called the
‘transnational capitalist classes’, that is, the movers and shakers of 21st century
capitalism.

What can we glean from this brief review of three example studies in which the authors
have introduced class to some degree in their attempts to make sense of MIL
experiences? Two things come to mind. First, I would say that the three studies show
that there is something to be gained by taking such an approach, both in terms of refined
theoretical understandings of MIL and the educational policies and practices which
might derive from research Second, such work needs to be more firmly embedded in
general work in political economy and sociology which focuses on the intersection
between migration, on the one hand, and inequality, stratification and class, on the
other. Nevertheless, these are just too general points. There are, to be sure, bigger
issues remaining around class and how it intersects with various phenomena related to
migration, such as multiculturalism and multilingualism in contemporary societies. I
turn to a consideration of some of these issues in the next section.

ISSUES AND ONGOING DEBATES

As I suggested above, situating class as central in research on migration in general, and
MIL research in particular, is not an entirely unproblematic enterprise. Indeed, there are
a number of issues which are in need of consideration before proceeding. First, we
must understand that any version of class, such as the one I present above, is, as I have
noted, necessarily partial and incomplete as it is always possible to think of new
dimensions to add to the list. Class-centred research is therefore always organised
around a provisional category ij need on constant revision. Second, there is the need to
examine how the different dimensions of class outlined above tend to co-occur in
individuals, or ‘crystallize’ (Grusky and Ku 2008). Thus being from a wealthy
background is usually closely related to (i.e. it crystalizes around) other upscale
dimensions such as political power, high status and prestige in society, a spacious home
in a good neighbourhood, high income and accumulated wealth, ownership of multiple
dwellings and material possessions, membership in legitimized and respected social
groupings (social networking) and good health (quality of life). Meanwhile, being from
a poor background is usually closely related to the opposite: low political power, low
status and prestige in society, a small home in a rough neighbourhood and so on. In
order to exemplify this contrast applied to migrants, we need only go back to
Vandrick’s (2011) research to see how her informants embody the former values for key
class dimensions, while the informants in Wills et al (2010) are carriers of the latter
values.

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A third issue to consider is intersectionality, defined above, which reminds that any
exploration of individual or collective identity must necessarily include attention to how
multiple dimensions - such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality, religion,
disability and so on - interrelate and shape each other. Intersectionality arose out of
black feminist scholarship from the mid-1970s onwards (e.g. Combahee River
Collective 1977; hooks 1981; Crenshaw 1989) and much intersectional work has
focussed on the confluence of race (and ethnicity) and gender in the lives of individuals
(but see hooks, 2000 for an interesting triangulated discussion of race, gender and
class). However, it is also possible to research identity by starting with social class and
examining how it intersects with (and is intersected by) the aforementioned identity
dimensions. (Block & Corona 2014, 2016).

Related to intersectionality, there is question of emphasis, and here we come to a

distinction to be made between class and the identity dimensions cited above. As Nancy
Fraser (1995) noted two decades ago, in the second half of the 20th century a culture-
based view of identity and society came to the fore in many parts of the world and this
led to the rise of 'identity politics' as the focal point of debate and as central to
understanding how people lived together in increasingly more complex societies. Fraser
juxtaposes the emphasis on 'recognition’ with an interest in redistribution (understood as
the structuring and allocation of material resources in an equitable fashion) and she
notes how the former has come to take precedence over the latter in public debates and
in in the social sciences and humanities. Fraser does not propose the abandonment of
recognition claims, but she does argue for the need to explore how these recognition
claims intersect with material inequalities arising from capitalism - both globally and
locally - and vice versa.

Dealt with separately or in an intersected way, recognition and redistribution can be

treated in two very different ways. On the one hand, they can be subjected to
‘affirmative’ action, which provides ‘remedies aimed at inequitable outcomes of social
arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them’ (Fraser
2008: 28). With recognition, this is what happens when diversity and difference are
supported, promoted and provided legal guarantees in more self-consciously
multicultural societies. An example of affirmative action applied to redistribution would
be what happens when social democracy is practiced, for example when tax money is
used to finance the provision of resources and services to citizens. In neither case is
anything done to deal with underlying conditions which lead to misrecognition or the
existence of gross economic inequality. Thus for Fraser affirmation can never be
enough if we wish to do something about the roots of injustice and inequality in society.
For this to happen, ‘transformative’ action is necessary. Such action provides ‘remedies
aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying
generative framework’ (Fraser 2008: 28). Transformative recognition would mean
problematizing and undermining group differentiations, such as gay vs. straight, male
vs. female, black vs. white and so on. Meanwhile, transformative redistribution would
mean a deep restructuring of the political economy of a nation-state, that is, the arrival
of socialism.

In general, migration and MIL research has tended to adopt a purely recognition-
oriented agenda, although in the case of research which intersects social class with
migrant subjectivities, race, ethnicity, gender and nationality (see Block & Corona

10
2014, 2016; see more on this below), the emphasis is as much on redistribution as it is
on recognition. In such research, a more robust account of how inequality emerges and
occurs is needed, on the way to proposing transformative strategies (although we must
be reminded that one publication does not a revolution make!). Indeed, there is the
additional issue of the impact that a class-centred approach to MIL research might have,
a topic to which I turn in the next section.

IMPLICATIONS
Working from political economy and focusing on social class as central to
understandings of being in contemporary societies, together have serious consequences
for how research on MIL is framed. First of all, it means working in an interdisciplinary
manner, drawing on research and scholarship in political economy and social class, on
the one hand, and applied linguistics research on MIL, on the other. There is, therefore,
an attempt to link a long list of political economic phenomena, such as aggregate
economic activity, resource allocation, capital accumulation and income inequality, with
notions that have for some time formed part of the lexicon of applied linguists, such as
mobility, migration, space, sociocultural activity and communication. Interdisciplinary
research if done thoroughly and with rigour, is not easy and requires reading a good
number sources outside one’s area of inquiry.

Working from political economy and focussing on social class also means reconsidering
how we position ourselves with regard to ontology and epistemology: ontology refers
to what we consider to be the nature of being and existence, our ‘actual reality’ and
what it is we are studying, researching and writing about, while epistemology refers to
what we consider to be the origin, nature and limits of human knowledge, and how we
come to ‘know it’. Political economy and social class research are based on realist
philosophies, which are in conflict with poststructuralist approaches which have become
dominant in MIL research. As Patsy Duff notes,

Poststructuralism is an approach to research that questions fixed categories or

structures, oppositional binaries, closed systems, and stable truths and embraces
seeming contradictions. … Poststructural researchers examine how such
categories are discursively and socially constructed, taken up, resisted
(the site of struggle), and so on. (Duff 2012: 412)

Postructuralism is usually positioned as being in direct opposition to positivism, which

is about ‘fixed categories or structures, oppositional binaries, closed systems, and stable
truths’, and above all control of variables and prediction. In his elaboration of a critical
realist approach to the social sciences, Roy Bhaskar takes on part of the poststructuralist
agenda when he writes that the social sciences are about ‘the direct study of phenomena
that only ever manifest themselves in open systems [in which] invariant empirical
regularities do not obtain’ (Bhaskar 1998: 45) and which are ‘characterised by both a
plurality and multiplicity of causes’ (Bhaskar 1998: 87). His critical realist approach
thus eschews accurate prediction as a goal, not least because social phenomena cannot
be accessed at the level at which they are generated, in isolation from the effects which
they cause, as is the case with some physical phenomena. However, embedded in what
Bhaskar writes is the notion that there are deep-down causal mechanisms at work in the
social world which exist independent of our ability to know and understand them.
Indeed, Bhaskar criticises poststructuralists for committing what he calls the ‘epistemic
fallacy’, which takes social constructivism to the extreme of conflating representations

11
of social reality, as social constructed or discursively constricted, with social reality
itself, thereby reducing ontology to epistemology. As Bhaskar (1989: 17–18) puts it,
‘statements about being cannot be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about
knowledge . . . [and] ontological questions cannot always be transposed into
epistemological terms’. The way forward, according to Bhaskar, is to adopt his critical
realist perspective, according to which:

… there is no inconsistency between being an ontological realist . . . believing

that there is a real world which consists in structures, generative mechanisms, all
sorts of complex things and totalities which exist and act independently of the
scientist, which the scientist can come to have knowledge of . . . [and] saying
that that knowledge is itself socially produced; it is a geo-historically specific
social process, so it is continually in transformation … (Bhaskar 2002: 211)

Scholars in political economy and social class research adopt a view of the world which
is consistent with Bhaskar’s critical realism, and in this sense they may be considered,
at a minimum, default critical realists. My reason for introducing critical realism into
the discussion at this point is my belief that a key implication of developing MIL
research in an interdisciplinary manner (in this case bringing political economy and
social class into our discussion of MIL) is the need to be cognizant of the
epistemological and ontological frames within which source authors are working. It is
simply not enough to cherry pick a few ideas; researchers need to engage more deeply
with the disciplines they are intersecting with, even if in doing so they are led into a
kind epistemological and ontological dissonance that causes them to change their way
of understanding the world and how it works.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The future MIL research that emerges from everything discussed thus far in this chapter
will be based on the idea that migration is a complex phenomenon which is more
transnational in nature than it is international or even national. Migrants themselves will
be understood in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion and
other dimensions and variety of intersectional combinations of these dimensions. An
interdisciplinary approach to the topic will mean drawing on political economy and
research on social class to develop a fuller social understanding of migration processes
and the lives of migrants. Class will be understood as a complex multidimensional
phenomenon constituted and indexed by a long list of economic, sociocultural,
behavioural, and spatial and life conditions. The result will be research which starts
with political economy and class as the central construct and work outward to the
aforementioned identity dimensions.

Victor Corona and I have attempted to do just this in recent years (e.g. Block & Corona,
2014, 2016) as we have drawn on Corona’s research focussing on the life experiences of
male Latino adolescents in Barcelona (Corona, 2012). The parents of these boys
immigrated to Barcelona during the economic boom in Spain which lasted from the
mid-1990s until the economic crisis of 2007/2008 began to take its toll. Lacking in
economic resources (property, wealth) and sociocultural resources (education, skills,
technological knowhow, social contacts, societal status), many took jobs in the low-
level services sectors, such as cleaning, deliveries and home-care, as well as in
construction, and their adolescent children were on the way to similar work when the
economic crisis began. Corona's research does not cover the crisis and its aftermath, but

12
it does provide an excellent snapshot of the ways in which his informants lived their
lives and were constructed (by others) in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality and gender
My role in our ongoing collaboration has been to inject a more political economic and
class-based analysis which starts from social class and then works into race, ethnicity,
nationality and gender. One interesting aspect of this approach is that it allows us to see
how the coping strategies adopted by of Corona’s informants serve to reproduce the
lower class positions of their parents and how any kind of upward mobility becomes
virtually impossible. This is the case because these boys, like the ‘lads’ in Paul Willis’s
(1977) oft-cited study of working class adolescent masculinities in 1970s Britain, do not
take school seriously, abandoning their studies at the earliest opportunity (i.e. at the age
of 16). Meanwhile, they engage in behaviour and embody semiotic forms which convey
hard working-class masculinities. Intertwined with the latter is the adoption of new
forms of Spanish as the normal means of communication (Corona, et al 2013) and a
rejection of Catalan, marked as the official language of Catalan institutions (from
education to politics) and seen as a sell-out to middle class values (Corona 2012).
Meanwhile, in society at large, the boys are racialised, as having what is known in
mainstream society as ‘a South American appearance’, which in turn indexes relative
poverty, a position at the bottom of the Catalan economy and society, possible illegal
and/or violent behaviour, and ultimately a kind of erasure from mainstream polity. In
effect, the MIL narrative which emerges is a class based on embedded the political
economy of contemporary Catalonia.

SUMMARY
The example in the previous section brings to an end this chapter, in which I have
attempted to develop in more detail Collins’s (2006) critique of the lack of class (and
political economy) in most MIL research. After dealing with some theoretical
background on migration, transnationalism and social class, I have examined how class
has been a key construct in some migration and MIL research, although as I note, in
both areas of inquiry, class has generally suffered a form of conceptual erasure (Block
2014). This is the case not least because researchers have tended to focus exclusively on
issues around recognition (Fraser 1995) and have marginalised a more political
economic perspective on society which prioritises redistribution. My remedy for what I
see as a gap in MIL research is for researchers to take on board a political economy
agenda in their work and to seek out ways in which class intersects with race, ethnicity,
gender, nationality and other identity dimensions in the lives of their informants. Of
course, taking this step means taking on board the problematics of class based research
and I have discussed a few salient issues in this chapter in need of resolution. It also
means situating class as a core and central baseline aspect of being and belonging in
contemporary societies, an epistemological position which may be anathema to many
readers of this chapter. As I suggest above, moving in this direction is not a matter of
conducting blitzkrieg raids on political economy (or sociology, anthropology or
geography, for that matter) to pick up an idea or two; rather interdisciplinary inquiry is
serious business which requires more than a light engagement with what in all
likelihood are new ideas and above all, conceptual frameworks. There are also deeper
philosophical issues to consider, around ontology and epistemology, which I discuss
here. And out this consideration comes a very important question: Can one be a
poststructuralist and still carry out research which is framed in the critical realism, de
facto or otherwise, which is so foundational to current work in political economy? My
response is that one cannot have it both ways, which means that taking on board what I

13
propose in this chapter may require a fair amount of soul searching on the part of
interested MIL researchers.

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