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Ethnographic Study in Limited Opportunity

Jay MacLeod's book, Ain't No Makin' It, is an ethnographic study of the aspirations of two groups of teen-aged boys in Clarendon Heights, a housing project in a northeastern city. MacLeod asserts that in this country there is a dominant ideology that says that any individual can attain status. Barriers to success are mostly due to unwillingness to work and apply oneself in education (1). He undertook a lengthy study of the two groups of boys in order to determine whether or not there was variation in beliefs about aspiration to social mobility.

MacLeod reviews various researchers' opinions on reproduction theory and defines aspirations, "an individual's view of his or her own chances for getting ahead . . . an internalization of objective probabilities" (13). Of particular interest are the theories of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital holds that the different classes in the United States retain different cultural capital and that the schools more or less trade in the capital of the upper middle class. Students who already have a certain amount of approved knowledge and behaviors can trade that for superior academic performance which is then parlayed into success in the job market (12).

This cultural system places students from other classes at a tremendous disadvantage because what they value is not necessarily valued by the schools. The end result is limitation in economic opportunity. Bernstein's theory centers of the special codes within languages which are specific to the classes as well. Linguistic codes are rooted in the division of labor and roles within families. The lower class families develop a restrictive code, and the middle and upper class families develop an elaborated code (16). The restricted code is suited for getting along with particular people and routine blue-collar jobs, and the elaborated code is better suited for more sophisticated problem-solving needed in the pr...

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Ethnographic Study in Limited Opportunity. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:47, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681759.html