Journal of Education Policy Vol. 22, No. 6, November 2007, pp.

595614

Successful subjectivities? The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions

Simon Bradford* and Valerie Hey
Brunel University, UK
Journal 10.1080/02680930701625205 TEDP_A_262370.sgm 0268-0939 Original Taylor 2007 0 6 22 Dr simon.bradford@brunel.ac.uk 00000November SimonBradford and & of Article Francis Education (print)/1464-5106 Francis2007 Policy (online)

This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young peoples understandings of success. It considers ways in which discourses of success, as part of New Labours project of re-inventing schooling, may shape young peoples subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. In particular, the article explores how class, gender and ethnicity shape discourses of success and how they are implicated in their distribution. In conclusion, the article indicates how current education policy (particularly in relation to educational success) articulates the public domain with dimensions of the private self and suggests that understanding this is vital in the pursuit of social justice.

Introduction In New Labours Britain it seems impermissible for the citizen to be anything other than successful. In education there has been an unrelenting focus on successful pupils and students, successful teachers and, of course, successful schools. New Labours Beacon schools, identified as amongst the best performing in the country and represent examples of successful practice (DfES, 2004a), were established in 1998. Beacon schools were phased out in 2005 becoming incorporated into the Leading Edge partnership programme, designed to be at the forefront of the drive to reform secondary education (DfES, 2004b). High-performing schools were recruited to these programmes to collaborate with less successful schools in furthering New Labours approach to school improvement and raising standards. This article explores the understanding of success of a small group of students in two secondary schools in west London (originally Beacon schools, one now a specialist humanities college and the other a Leading Edge lead school). It discusses
* Corresponding author. School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK. Email: simon.bradford@brunel.ac.uk ISSN 02680939 (print)/ISSN 14645106 (online)/07/06059520 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/02680930701625205

596 S. Bradford and V. Hey preliminary findings from a small pilot investigation into how young men and young women imagine their futures in the context of an incessant exhortation to become (a successful) somebody (Wexler, 1992). We briefly explore the discursive and policy context in which success discourses emerged and, through the voices of the young people interviewed, the ways in which social difference (class, ethnicity and gender) have become key elements in the constitution of success on New Labours educational landscape. We suggest that New Labours education agenda is designed, in part, to keep middle England psychologically and psychically on side in respect of its childrens pathways into and through state schooling. Contemporary appeals to middle-class priorities, unashamedly expressed through the standards and excellence agenda, can be seen as an attempt to retain middle-class support for state education. Initiatives such as gifted and talented, excellence in cities, Beacon schools and Leading Edge partnership schools, all forming a complex of policy and governance designed to raise standards, have been designed to demonstrate the capacity of the state system to both maintain and reproduce middle-class advantage as well as advance the promise that other young people (the socially excluded, for example) can achieve some educational and social mobility. This should be understood in the context of recurrent moral panic over the condition and performance of state education in England and young people whose educational outcomes are not deemed successful. The article explores the processes of articulation (in both senses of the word; see Hall, 1996)1 of subjects to the project of successification whose appeal lies in its promise to offer pathways from recognisably disadvantaged spaces to more desirable ones. More specifically, we consider how some young people (defined variously by their teachers as successful) come to understand themselves and their futures in schools that have acquired the accolade successful school. What does being a successful school imply for these young people? How do young men and young women from different backgrounds (class and ethnicity) come to recognise themselves in the success discourses that our two schools promote? Re-inventing education: New Labour and the governance of ambition The collapse of the post-war settlements that constituted the welfare state (Clarke & Newman, 1997) irrevocably altered the landscape of education that New Labour inherited in 1997. Since then, New Labour social policy has evolved through a commitment to the developing narrative of the so-called Third Way. This is a response to perceived globalisation(s), the rapid emergence of knowledge economies and the development of a reflexive modernity (Giddens, 1998, 2000). Third way politics circumscribe a new ethics and seek to emphasise a duality of freedom and responsibility appropriate to a radically altered world. As such, the third way is essentially a normative ethical framework situating welfare policy including education. Choices for the welfare state in the global economy are, apparently, stark:
A privatised future, with the welfare state becoming a residualised safety net for the poorest and most marginalised; the status quo or the Governments third waypromoting

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 597

opportunity instead of dependence, with a welfare state providing for the mass of the people, but in new ways to fit the modern world. (DSS, 1998, p. 19)

Gewirtz (2002) points to a corpus of retained New Right ideas that form the third way and which have shaped New Labour education policy (marketisation, privatisation, managerialism, the promotion of work and central control of schools and curriculum). Social inclusion (generally defined through the prism of labour market participation), social cohesion and equality of opportunity2 are also elements in a constellation of concepts shaping education policy and practice. As the aptly named White Paper on lifelong learning, Learning to Succeed, puts it, Our vision is to build a new culture of learning which will underpin national competitiveness and personal prosperity, encourage creativity and innovation and help to build a cohesive society (DfEE, 1999, p. 13). This is an attempt to reconcile ideologies of competitiveness with discourses of personal fulfilment. As such, education and learning have become the means, par excellence, of achieving a range of governmental objectives by aligning outcomes for the nation in a global economy (national competitiveness), goals for the domain of the social (social cohesion) with the desires and aspirations of individual subjects (creativity and personal prosperity, for example). Implicit in this configuration is the responsible citizen, maximising their own human capital in constructing a viable and rational identity that incorporates ambition and aspiration as principal elements of self. Schools and other educational institutions are enjoined to encourage their students to think of themselves as ambitious and aspirational subjects, in charge of their own futures. Beacon schools in particular exemplified these policy objectives of excellence, achievement and success and these have been absorbed into the diversity of schools that has grown under New Labour. Successful schools: unleashing aspiration3 Beacon and Leading Edge schools have embodied the objectives of spreading excellence, sharing success and working collaboratively (DfES, 2001, p. 38) within the mixed economy of provision that has become so familiar in the re-invented welfare state of the last 20 years. Beacons attempted to bridge social democratic commitments (collaboration and networking, for example) to values associated with modernisation: standards, achievement and excellence (Fergusson, 2000). By embodying these, such schools have become powerful symbols of New Labour education policy reflecting the essentially communitarian position taken up by New Labour in its critique and re-moralisation of competitive individualism. Communitarians argue that the market cannot provide a rational foundation for ethics because the good can only be understood in the context of collective, rather than individual, identities (Frazer, 2000). This critique is mirrored in three elements of Beacon and Leading Edge philosophy that have become established in a normative model of the successful school. First, it challenges the idea of the atomised and autonomous school (reflecting the rejection of strong individualism) in preference for connectedness and collaboration. Second, it advances a notion of rights that entail corresponding duties, countering the

598 S. Bradford and V. Hey tendency of rights discourses to separate and disconnect. Thus, successful schools are required to engage in supporting less effective or developed schools. Third, the critique implies that competitive individualism diminishes the stock of social capital (trust, reciprocity and honesty, for example) and the (often informal) social goods and social control mechanisms that these generate (care and mutual aid, for example). By sharing their resources (experience and expertise), successful schools are expected to generate and contribute to a form of solidarity within a diverse educational community. However, it is clear that competition continues to play a central role in current education policy and in the workings of Leading Edge schools particularly. By being part of an educational elite (determined by their performance against other schools) whilst simultaneously located on the ground of collaboration, these schools signal one of the principal contradictions of New Labour education policy.4 Failure and mediocrity provide the comparators against which successful schools can be judged (Webster, 2001). However, success, like excellence, is a relational and dynamic concept and can only be understood as coming from the shadow of its other: failure. Education policy in England superficially appears to focus on the eradication of failure and mediocrity, but simultaneously entails a perverse need to maintain their visibility against which success can be affirmed (Lucey & Reay, 2002). Bauman (1997), drawing on Mary Douglas, points out that each scheme of purity (and the Beacon school discourse can be seen as such: pure excellence, pure success) generates its own dirt and each order generates its own strangers (p. 13). Seeking to purge or purify the system by expelling failurethe strangerthe ideal of purity itself raises (and requires) the spectre of its counter. Thus, ironically, the existence of elite schools (like Beacon or Leading Edge schools) both confirms and sustains failure in other schools, as one of our interviewees (a young Sikh man in Year 10) suggests in this knowing reference to his own school:
R SB R I think its an excellent school weve got Beacon status and it makes us stand out. Does that make you better than other schools? It gives you something to be proud about, not many schools in the borough have got Beacon status.

Importantly, we think, the binary other of failure not only assumes institutional form as failing school. It is also constructed internally and within the self as the other the stranger withinagainst which some of these young people police their own narratives of success. We do not claim that there is any direct transfer between policy and the views of individuals, but the message that successful schools seek to recruit and legitimate aspiration appears to resonate for this young man.

The pilot study We completed 12 interviews with young people and two interviews with heads of year in two schools in the west London borough of Chelvey. One school was mixed and the other was a single-sex girls school. Both had earlier acquired Beacon status and

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 599 had high reputations amongst parents and students alike. Chelvey is characterised by its location fringing one of the main arterial roads to the airport, a central hub of the local economy and accounting for a significant number of distribution jobs and other low-skill employment opportunities in the borough. The 2001 Census showed that 35% of the population was from an ethnic minority group, the largest of which was Indian (17.33% of residents), followed by Pakistani (4.2%) and Black African (2.6%). However, it is significant that like many local educational markets there is an outflow of white pupils. Fifty-nine per cent of pupils were from an ethnic minority, the largest groups being Indian (21%) and Pakistani (8%). A 2003 survey showed that Chelveys pupils speak, as a first language, an estimated 133 languages, the highest percentage being English (56.5%), then Punjabi (13.9%), Urdu (6.6%), Gujarati (3.9%), Somali (2.2%), Arabic (2.2%) and Hindi (1.7%). Of course, some pupils are bi- and trilingual. We were primarily interested to explore how discourses of aspiration and success work in speaking subjects and decided to interview young people in Year 10. We met with two supportive heads of year, and asked them to arrange opportunities for us to interview successful young people in friendship pairs. This was done in order for the young people to feel supported and we were also interested to gather pair talk data as examples of young people working out their views and understandings of success. Interviews were undertaken in quiet settings in school. We were not prescriptive about success (either with teachers or young people, inviting them to elaborate on their own ideas of what counted as success for them), and encouraged the teachers to choose young people who would be comfortable talking to unknown outsider adults. The interviews, all about an hour long, took the form of focused discussions around the idea of success in school and in life generally. Data analysis Our analysis draws specifically on two of our interviews. These are selected as offering a rich theoretical yield. Given our methodological focus on the entwining of difference and power, any pair of interviewees (or, indeed, individual interviewee) would offer points of contradiction and comparison in tracing through the pressure points of identity work in the context of discursive complexity. Our data presentation offers the chance of holding some focus on the shifts staged in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, traditional, questioning or reflexive identities as these are construed in similar policy, institutional and shared community settings. Stabilising success/ful identifications: the Beacon identity formation Our analysis tracks the social constitution as well as the articulation and intersection of discourses of class, gender and race. We take this to require grounding in the spatial, cultural and material relations of institutions and communities. This allows us to consider how the national preoccupation with success becomes deposited in the ideological DNA of successful schools.5 In order to locate the incorporation of policy

600 S. Bradford and V. Hey in the micro-social we have taken Bourdieus conceptualisation of the social logics of the individual as a starting point. He conceived the individual, contra neo-liberal and some sociological accounts as a thoroughly social subject inscribed by social dispositions that carry the force of the wider social hierarchies of power: Contrary to the common preconception that associates sociology with the collective, it has to be pointed out that the collective is deposited is each individual in the form of durable dispositions such as mental structures (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 18). Bourdieus conceptualisation of sens practique or social logic provides a platform for generating an account of how contrasting locales might shape the institutional culture within which subjects do success. We are not suggesting that all subjects sign up to this position but that discourses of success are, almost by definition, normative and dominant in successful schools. As such they invariably require a response since they make up the dominant discursive noise (Fairclough, 2000) against which subjects are compelled to understand their social and subject position. Hey has argued recently (2002, 2003), in reviewing the trend for reading the contemporary world as reflexive modernity, that feminist work inflects how social logics get put into place at a less abstract level of realisation because it provides for a more embodied (and embedded) reading of class and consciousness as the ideological sedimentation of everyday discourse. Within this more localised but not anti-structuralist framework, social interactions between self and others are conceived as neither arbitrary nor innocent but are positional, positioning and produce discourses of self-positioning (Hey, 2002). Moreover, psychically these occurrences differentiate us through as well as add to, differential types (and amounts?) of capital (Reay, 2004/5; Skeggs, 2004) including psychological capital (Hey, 2003). Psychological capital is conceptualised here as an additional resource related to, but not identical with, cultural or social capital already specified as part of Bourdieus theorisation of class and power (Bourdieu, 1986). Psychological capital inevitably intersects with these other forms and, like them, it is differentially distributed. It is constituted in practices of self-esteem, confidence and self-belief which are generated in a range of settings (the family, communities of various types, friendships and formal institutional settings like schools and youth projects) and can be transformed into resilience and the dispositions needed to cope with the exigencies of contemporary life (Bradford, 1999; Bradford et al., 2004). Social experience produces memories, desires and emotions including rage, shame, resentment and pain as well as power and pleasure. This lived experience of the material, the psychological, and the comprehension of social difference that is so entailed is worked over by success discourses effective interpellation of the young people we interviewed. Yet there is a paradox here. By fostering psychological capital the potential reach of governmental power is also extended by increasing the capacity (and, potentially, desire) of the subject to work on self under the specific tutelage of the authority of success discourses. As we have suggested, these are aimed at keeping sections of the middle class on side and thus with achieving political legitimacy. However, our data also indicate that they represent a new twist on redistribution in the sense that the discursive tactics

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 601 entailed seek to inscribe young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with confidence and resilience in the face of psychological and social pressures. The idea of psychological capital is, inevitably, speculative and we have noted that it is a contradictory resource. It is a way of thinking about what might keep the ambivalent positioning of socially disadvantaged young people viable and safe from modes of self-sabotage. We suggest that is one of the ways in which young people resolve the conflict of living originary loyalties to communities from which their success may alienate them. White working-class ethnicities seem to provide fewer opportunities in which such a resource may proliferate although we think further investigation of this is necessary. We offer the following account of the role of successful schools in the construction of young peoples psychological capital and their understandings of themselves as successful or otherwise. These narratives are, we argue, indicative of a working through of a successful self (a work, necessarily, in process and progress) structured by the entwined discourses of class, ethnicity, faith, gender and generation. Building psychological capital in Sikh masculinities: Gandeep, Sandeep and staying focused After settling in our interviewees (introducing ourselves, finding out something of them, their interests and their lives at school), we asked them about successful people they knew. This extract comes from an in-depth interview with Gandeep and Sandeep, two young Sikh men.
SB Who would you say is really successful? G I think one of the new teachers here, Mr H.hes still under 30 and he drives around in a Lexus. Hes head of the whole science department [hes] young, hes achieved so much at a young age.

When further prompted, the boys referred to members of their households in describing successful people (Gandeep, for example, referred to his brother who had gone to university, and he acknowledged that his mums work was hard but didnt see her as specifically successful). However, the prime models of success for the boys were teachers. Both young men were articulate and aspirational and again cited the Muslim senior staff member as a successful person. The teachers car may well signify as a particularly potent (masculine) symbol here, given that this is not the conventional type of teacher transport! Existing alongside positive aspirations symbolised by teachers were worries on the boys part about their own personal flaws that might deter success:
G SB G SB G Hes quite focused as well. What does that mean? He gets to the point he knows what hes doing. Focus tell me a bit about that? I suppose if you know what you want and lots of things distract you Say girls and drugs and things like can get in your way and putting you off but if you are focused you get to the point.

602 S. Bradford and V. Hey Perhaps what is most interesting here is how the boys construct the discourse of distraction as one major way to destabilise their focus. The injunction against not being focused is a core preoccupation in these young mens school. It appears to amplify, as well as respond to, aspects of the rationale of boys underachievement, a complex construction articulating semi-biologistic and behaviourist notions about the historic male propensity for distraction. This formation has been persuasive in explaining boys comparative lack of success vis--vis girls (Epstein et al., 1998). This discourse resonated in the data and the boys pointed out how a senior male teacher recontextualised this through his own biography:
G One day Mr W. spoke to us about not really being focused at school like he only got one O level but from then on he kept focused and everything look at him now, hes like head of year at L School which I think is quite an achievement.

There is much of interest here in terms of the powerful use of the personal as a pedagogic text. The young men repeat the story, suggesting an appreciation of its force. For Gandeep and Sandeep, the school had confirmed their own community values about respecting education, irrespective of social class (Abbas, 2003), and they also believed it had responded firmly to racism. By virtue of this both boys had a strong sense that the school was a safe learning space (in a sense, extending the capacity of community resources available to them) and they contrasted this with their experiences on the streets of west London. We are reluctant to move to any reductive view implying the existence of direct religious influence or faith crossover, especially as Sikhism is one of the least doctrinal of religious practices. Yet Sikhisms ideal subject is produced by a constellation of moral capacities that do, to some extent, overlap or articulate with those demanded by occupying a successful school subject position. It is such articulations, we suggest, that open up spaces in which these young people become positioned and position themselves. Indeed, the two young men saw no contradiction between their Sikh masculinity and the model of successful professional masculinity with which they identify. Their main responsibility is to pay heed to the injunction of getting focused, governing themselves appropriately through the acquisition of the right kind of psychological capital in order to curb any potential impediment:
G SB G Id have to set my goals now and go for the career I want and like G. said like if I achieved those goals in 1015 years time Id be quite happy Goals? Kind of but I have to focus cos I chat a bit so I just have to work a bit more and produce a good standard of work

Here is the subject position of a well-defended boy (shielded from the temptations of the world) aiming to become the ideal self-regulating pupil. Three other boys in our pilot study shared this view of their task, which was to recognise and then police their unsound formation. They sought to guard against biology (boys being prone to hormonal rushes and the temptation of girls) as well as quasi-sociological notions (their socialisation as disorganised workers). This flaky male subjecttheir inner otherwas the subject some of them had to work on and work over. As we have

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 603 suggested, the boys success is perversely contingent upon the existence of the spectral stranger within, against whom discourses of success are ranged. Without this presence (either on the internal landscape of the self or as some other external representation) it is difficult to know how the boys positioning practices would work out. Future masculinities: cashing in on human capital? In the context of discussing success in the interview with Gandeep and Sandeep, we asked about their imagined futures. As we show above, Sandeep saw that setting goals was central to the process of becoming successful. His vocabulary of goals is consonant with the notion of focus. It constructs a metaphor of a rational and endoriented purposive worker. Interestingly, these young men are not the natural inheritors of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995), a formation that is associated with instrumental rationality and technological competence, but can be seen to be acquiring (perhaps via the success discourses promoted through school as well as other spaces) the right contributory sort of psychological capital as part of their project of the self.
SB S Would you be able to set goals for 1015 years ahead? No I cant really see that far but its like G. said the base of the pyramid, if you complete that well then you can do what ever you want say Ive got all my GCSE and then my A levels, it just gives you a better job I get married and have a couple of kids and stuff and I can say to them Look I done all my GCSEs and A levels

The metaphor of building organises the discourse as Sandeep articulates the ideal future. This is the responsible future subject secured through the acquisition of educational capital; the psychologically focused and robust, goal-oriented masculine self, capable of accumulating other forms of capital as a result which comes to embody for his own children (and, indeed, himself) an account of success.
G I am not sure about the kids and family yet cos its early days but I hope to have a family I can look after and keep running so just try and aim and get good grade, finish school, get a degree, get a good career, stand on your own two feet.

Gandeep too may baulk at the abstract notion of being a family man but he identifies with the project of aiming higher in which the self is able to stand on [its] own two feet. It is interesting that these Sikh boys construct a traditional masculine position, echoing the positions of their fathers as the head of a household. This aspiration holds in place a dynastic ambition offering the aspirant continuity of predestined family forms. As Sandeep says, I see it as a challenge a difficult one if you can get it having grandchildren and seeing my kids grow up. This traditional (patriarchal) role is valorised and viewed as a source of respect as well as difficulty. It is important to stress that we reflect here, not on observable realitiesreal familiesrather, the elicited views from two young Sikh males that project anticipated futures. However, recent work on the aspirations and understandings of South Asian young women in Birmingham (Abbas, 2003) critically contextualises these male-centric comments,

604 S. Bradford and V. Hey suggesting a more contested gendered future. This is so, even amongst young women other than Sikhs who may be subject to higher degrees of control through more restrictive religious practices associated with Islamic orthodoxies (for example, in the form of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim exclusivity). Moreover, from a more abstract viewpoint, these young mens projected identities as respected providers, are at odds with some accounts of radical decentred individualisation, at least at the level of family forms (Giddens, 1993). What the boys speak to is a model that is, of course, structured through an ethnically specific masculine version of power, community values and aspirations. But, significantly, this family and community formation (imagined or ideological) is highly valued by the school and against whose putative stability the white workingclass community is seen as lack. We do not have space here to explore the ways in which lack in embedded white working-class communities is often code for the absence of male authority/figures (see Hey & Bradford, 2006). This remains a theme for future work. However, it is our view that in the context of successful schools extended family forms are equated with stability and worked up as vibrant social capital that has utility for the school since it is claimed as support for educational projects of the male self. It may be that the education extra provided in the form of a network of adults within extended and complex families (see Abbas, 2003) may partly explain the synergies between certain ethnic minority communities and the values and aspirations of successful schools. This is not to argue a romantic, much less a homogenous, view of the non-white family form (Williams, 2004). Indeed, we have found it hard to hold to any notion of South Asian minority ethnic groups since, as recent work shows, there are large variations structured through class, geography, culture and religion that complicate such a designation (Weedon, 2004). Yet, we suggest, there are likely to be some common pro-education positions that can unite South Asian minority students. By way of contrast, we turn to consider the views of two young women from a companion and successful girls school. They share accounts of a similar awareness about being prepared to take up places within their families or within discursively organised educational and career aspirations, but not the uncontested responsibilities discussed by the boys. Building psychological capital in Hindu femininities: Henara and Vita striving Henara was from a lower middle-class background and a marriage between a Sikh and a Hindu. Her family owned a dry cleaning franchise. Her best friend was a middle-class Hindu girl (Vita) whose father was an accountant. For these two South Asian girls, it is perhaps significant that their first nominations as successful people were personal; Vita immediately nominated Henara, her best friend:
V She (Henara) doesnt get upset that if she didnt get the part she keeps trying. I dont think success is all about winning. I think its about trying and being able to do some things She tries out for everything even if she doesnt want to do it. Shes the perfect package. Shes clever as well.

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 605

H VH V Most of the time What does being clever mean? She doesnt slack on her work. If she has something to do she will do it.

This nomination was not about identifying with public symbols of prestige such as material goods (cars, authority) but more local and personal, and may reflect girls powerful emotional and social investments in their intimate friendships. The interview question may have induced a compliant response to signal a best friend, since not to do so may have been experienced as unethical (Hey, 1997). The girls we interviewed routinely cited other girls in their class and, unlike the boys we interviewed, teachers were not mentioned as examples of success. The criteria for success were fortitude and determination, and were subtly different from those mentioned by the two Sikh boys. Trying was valorised even with things you did not want to do and stick-ability was seen as a particular virtue. Even cleverness was seen as the effect of effort and doing the work, rather than natural talent. As other work has noted, effortless flair (Cohen, 1998) is an attribute that is only recognised in the masculine. Moreover, within this discourse of application, there is evidence of a form of psychological capital (resilience) essential to coping with the demands of a competitive world. This allusion to anticipated disappointment is not apparent in the boys narratives with their reference to inner flaws. The theme of fortitude is also continuous in family narratives in which stories of struggle and forbearance emerge very strongly. When prompted further to think beyond their friends, they respectively designated family members: mother (Henara) and grandmother (Vita). Much of the girls talk takes issue with the dominant gender regime of their households in which their fathers are presented as old-fashioned. Henara and Vita offer a modest reflexive rebellion against being positioned as subordinates in paternalistic households which normalise their role as serving their brothers domestically. Our data suggest that daughters and mothers shared in a contestation of patriarchal values, with daughters following on from what they described as their own mothers claims on independence and equality within their household. This sisterhood casts light on the safe assumptions of male gender privilege outlined above. Yet these two girls attach significance to a different tradition that inheres in female tales of fortitude and survival which are reflected in the virtues of striving and never giving up demanded of them by their schooling. If these girls psychological capital is accrued around the need to defend against disappointment, compared to the boys need to avoid the self-sabotage of disruption, the girls see in their female family figures exemplary heroines who have battled and won through and who are deemed worthy of respect and recognition. What is constructed here is a very different model of the family, one that is far less abstract, in some ways more real and immediate, not least because the girls do not consume as much as produce the family through their own emotional and material labour (Reay, 2004/5). Theirs reflects a differently gendered dynastic inheritance, reflecting different discursive resources (closeness or intimacy in some families, for example) from which psychological capital may derive.

606 S. Bradford and V. Hey Strivers and survivors: im/migrant tales It was pertinent that the next nomination of a successful person generated by the girls was in terms of their immediate family:
VH H V If you were to name someone you know as successful who would it be? My mum My grandma.

Henara continues:
H Its not like shes successful as in clever or bright or shes got a great job or anything. Its just that she has managed to look after all four of us. Shes had quite a tough life shes had loads of pregnancies cos in Indian tradition, its like you want a boy and mums having to go through loads of these girls and finally shes got this boy and raising all of us. When my third sister came she had to hear the reactions of everyone saying Oh no! Its a girl again! and try to keep herself and say No, this girls special and try to keep herself and instead of her like being er yes she is a bit of a waste but now my mum supports us in everything we do. My dads a bit more traditional jobs like a doctor but Im a bit whacky the whacky one who wants to be an actress cos like so she says well take you here and there and all that I think my mums successful being a great mother and like being able to faze all of us were like not very easy children to deal with Shes not been very well recently but she gives it her all, tries her best. My mums like Superwoman

This loving account positions Henarassuccessfulmother through a discourse of recognition and respect. Not only is this set against how New Labour discourses routinely privilege paid employment as the primary maternal obligation (Levitas, 1998) but it also resists the over-determination of her mothers role by the biological and patriarchal imperatives of producing a male child. Henara reads her mothers oppression (and success) here through a narrative of resilience, redeeming her fate as the positive capacity to cope to give it her all and, like the value of dedication applied to her by Vita, she notes her own mothers tenacity in that she tries her best. Moreover, her mothers consistent support is set against the comment about her father preferring a more traditional aspiration for his daughter (a doctor), but her mother backs her up in pursuit of her own whacky idea of being an actress. This redescription of her mothers position is instructive. It simultaneously cites feminism (woman as victim) and post-feminism (personal fortitude) as repositioning female figures in the different ethical space of an idiosyncratic preference that celebrates individual psychology and survival. The explicit reference to whacky also suggests the unique individualised self and is perhaps emblematic of how the vocabulary of new times captures the creativity and individuality that is so appealing to some aspirant young women. It is interesting that the figure of the striving survivor resonates as storied narratives (held within particular migrant communities and groups (Breckner, 2002)) and re-emerges so that it might articulate with ideologies of success to be further inflected by girls stories of successful selves. We turn next to another survival story also offered in the same context. Here is Vitas echoing story about her grandmother.

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 607

V Shes born in Uganda and [was] kicked out. She has four children and one of thems a deaf-mute who has two children and her husband left her. My grandma has to look after her. She doesnt get to live her own life. One of her sons doesnt speak to her and so shes got so many problems. Shes just broken her leg and her mums recently died as well. Like shes gone though a lot but shes not giving up like. Shes still she has traditions and she keeps them. She doesnt break them cos itll be too much hassle She doesnt give up, she still makes it she cooks for us and its just great.

Again the themes focus on severe duress but these are not seen as sufficient to daunt the indomitable spirit of this feminine figure, who is rendered as the heart of the family, someone who can be relied upon to centre traditional Hindu values. This is a very different version of living within a dynasty and is associated with the gendering of the private/public dialectic. Female senior roles in families are not seen as much as an inheritance with difficult responsibilities but as a relentless set of demands engendering forms of hard, complex emotional and practical labour (Reay, 2004/5). One way to situate this narrative is to see it echoing as part of the discursive repertoire established by Henara previously. Another possibility is to appreciate its intertextual quality and note how redolent both these stories are of soap opera themes of female survival (Geraghty, 2001). But what is interesting is how these girls present their examples of successful people in terms of survival and relocation stories. This genre recontextualises the family romance of struggle to move beyond the public front-stage account into backstage domestic citations to recognise a specifically feminine version of success. Successful schools are built on the assumption that diversity means a weakened politics of rhetorical recognition as excellence for all. Whilst New Labour values iterate the desired position of self-actualising employee, young women (especially from working-class and some non-Anglo minority ethnic groups), know that there are other contradictory demands placed on them that cannot be so easily set aside but require negotiation and attention since they involve important questions of power and identity that cannot be discounted It might be the case that one way for girls to negotiate their positions within traditional relations expected by their fathers and post-traditional aspirations of their schooling is to valorise both the public aspiration of success and its unacknowledged other (Mann, 1998). This might then also be seen as reflecting the need for the recognition of the psychological resilience required in being the right sort of successful girl living between the dreams of individualised choice and the more complex conditions of familial dramas (Gonick, 2005). It is possible that feminisms political presence, at times residual and at others more marked, may support young womens reflexive capacity for narrating stories of success and identity.

Stars in successful schools In order to focus our questions on schooling more directly, we resorted to asking specific questions about school. The girls mentioned the public prestige markers only

608 S. Bradford and V. Hey after their family accounts and in this there was no equivocation about how the school measured success.
VH V H V What does the school understand as success? A stars! If its not A stars its high grades [emphasis in the recording] The best of your ability its success so that you can have a stable future like trying out for everything and not being afraid of what other people might think

Again the important notion of trying things and persistence, whilst disregarding what others might think emerges in the discussion. This resonates with the language of liberal feminism with its positive interventions of expanding the range of girls options. However, it has a new twist linked to the claim that this success may secure a stable future, a future that does not assume the central role and responsibility of wife. Henara confirms this in the follow-up question:
VH H Tell me what a stable future means You come to school for a reason so that you can get a good job and make a lot of money eventually and then you know you are not out on the streets youre educated education will get you somewhere

She amplifies this in a comment on the need to have good qualifications in the context of her ambitions to be an actress; she needs something to fall back on, sensible qualifications.
VH H How do you see your future? I dream of seeing myself on TV trying to get somewhere

This dreamy comment is quite typical of the girls we interviewed, as is the aspiration of trying to get somewhere. When pressed further about the qualities needed, Vita responded:
VH V What qualities do you need to be successful? Patience tolerance patience with yourself and tolerance of other people

And, perhaps, more interestingly:

V VH V H Strength to keep on going and not giving up Where does that message come from? You get pushed by other people but its in yourself You know yourself you will really get it

Here the intersection of traditional moral feminine qualities (going on, not giving up), previously amplified in the girls stories of female relatives, articulates with the newer imperatives of marketised self-actualisation and enterprise to suggest a new driven subject negotiating the fine lines of self and (competitive) other. This is a story of personal psychological resources (patience, persistence, resilience), and of capacities that lie inside to be activated at appropriate times. Our data suggest that the successful school seeks to engage (with boys and girls, but in different ways) in practices that order, draw out and animate these inner resources which act as important potential capital.

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 609 To explore these ideas in more detail the girls were asked to imagine giving advice to new girls at school:
VH H V V H What advice would you give to girls about success in starting this school? Enjoy themselves. Go for all the extracurricular activities. Go for all the opportunities you can Itll look great on your CV.

Again, the mix is enlightening. It reveals an eclectic vocabulary of liberal clich about enjoyment, the school mantra about maximising opportunities and the bottom-line pragmatism of itll look great on your CV. This combination reproduces the late modern preoccupation of self-surveillance and self-monitoring as Bauman (2001) avers. In this, the girls were also clear about the nature of failure:
VH H V What is failure? Its not trying your best Regret is waste look ahead and get more prepared next time [in the context of illpreparedness for exams].

So the subject here takes on the project of success to herself. Its other is construed as personal lack and the outcome of insufficient preparation and thus has the capacity to animate self. In this way, as Benjamin (2002) notes, the elision of New Labours educational other is secured. There is no place in this account (and its policy imperative) for the inevitable consequences of a competitive exam system or the differential distribution of capitals (educational, symbolic, material and psychological); all can be winners, if not then the fault oft doth lie within.

Conclusions Although we draw on only four interviewees, we argue that these are suggestive of how discourses of success mesh within other discursive fields and sites of identity and belonging. We acknowledge the need for further work here but insist that potential new class/gender/ethnic formations situated on the New Labour policy landscape cannot be read without an appreciation of how private and public affiliations entail relations of power and emotion that entwine one with the other. Our data and discussion suggest the complex articulations between policies that valorise success and status, aspirations mapped by the discourses of success and the lived horizons of possibility realised within the family, community, class, gender and ethnic relations. The actual capacity of these to form support in building the competitive individualism demanded in contemporary times plays out variously for different young people and further work is needed to explore this. Our research interests lie in the ways that political objectivesin this context the unleashing of aspiration in schools where discourses of success are dominant become articulated with subject positions and how social difference mediates subjects lives in such settings. We looked at class, gender and race intersections in discourses of aspiration and success and this entailed exploring young peoples

610 S. Bradford and V. Hey vocabularies of success and the ways in which young people were positioned (and how they positioned themselves) in relation to wider school practices designed to cultivate aspiration and success. Our own starting assumptions indicated that success is socially constructed and mediated through complex social networks: school, family, friendship groups, peer groups and communities of different kinds. Our focus poses a potential critique to aspects of the reflexive modernity thesis if this is taken to signal a displacement of the social in favour of the individual in young peoples lives. We have, for some time, been unhappy with the work of those sociologists who seem to suggest that pathways to adulthood have become increasingly individualised in recent times (Beck et al., 1994; Furlong & Cartmel, 1997; Bye, 2001; Kelly, 2001). We do not accept that life decisions have become relatively less mediated by the social domain in which they are situated and our data suggest the fundamental significance of the social. Our research suggests that this works in different ways for different young people, yet retains great significance through the institutions to which we refer above: friendship, peer groups, families and communities, for example (Hey, 2002). Class, gender and race (themselves constitutive elements of the social) powerfully mediate young peoples lives. To suggest otherwise is to fly in the face of peoples lived experiences. We are adamant that a thoroughgoing sociological accounthence our adoption of Bourdieus position on the nature of the socialis the means to understanding accounts such as those we present here. If individualisation and responsibilisation are not unitary and unidirectional practices, the can do and enterprising young person is inflected through modernising, retraditionalising and detraditionalising discourses. On the one hand, these discourses differentially interpellate young people in symbolising success and, on the other, they shape that which young people recognise as successful (with which they may identify) or which others project onto them. Indeed, the power of ideology (as Althusser showed) lies precisely in its capacity to speak to subjects, who are able to actively invest (or identify with) subject positions. In the case of success discourses, these articulations between ideology and subjects arise from young peoples social locations within the spaces of home and community. In turn, these spaces impact upon how young people are able to locate (imagine) or identify themselves as successful (or otherwise) subjects. Such positional possibilities are socially, and differentially, distributed through religion, faith, class and gender and most convincingly, perhaps, manifested in the localised and mediated forms of family micro-politics in which gender is central. We contend that discoursesdiscourses of success, for exampletravel and, indeed, potentially unravel the border between the public and the private. What happens at the level of public discourse (and policy particularly) reaches into the local and the personal where it is mediated by a range of factors (family, school or community, for example). We have argued this elsewhere (Hey & Bradford, 2004), suggesting that contemporary power modalities can be thought of as forms of compulsory reflexive self-invention that remain within as well as outside traditional gender regimes. For example, Henara and Vita make themselves up (Hacking, 1986) by citing and reciting their traditional values as valorisations of their grand/

The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions 611 mothers through feminist tropes of a heroic grand maternalism. Both girls are mindful of how their domestic rebellion connects to the neo-liberal successful girl celebrated in their schools. Sandeep and Gandeep, on the other hand, reflect alternative practices of self-regulation, assiduously cultivated in their successful school. They display insight into their own capacity for self-distraction (and potentially for self-destruction) girls and drugs and things but the school, in conjunction with other forces, exercises its tutelage in enabling them to get focused and to construct the base of the pyramid. The boys seem to see this as an acceptable route to their dynastic future as potentially successful participants in the labour market as well as effective providers in the domestic sphere. Girls stand differently in relation to the policy-led reconfiguration of the sexual division of labour. This has not so much been dismantled through new ideologies of work as more deeply inscribed for middle-class women as a successful career and, perhaps, for working-class women as a successful job. These are now expected in addition to a performative maternity. However, the point here is that New Labours third way policies, with their centrality of labour market participation, are fundamental to the production of new forms of classed and gendered ethnicities (see Bullen et al., 2000; McRobbie, 2004/5). And what of the status of the successful school? Even if the badge of Beacon or Leading Edge is seen (understandably) as positive, how young people live these discourses of success cannot be simply read off from it in any direct way. We do not claim that it becomes part of these young peoples make-up by some veiled form of osmosis. Our data show that young peoples lived circumstances are crucial in enabling (or, indeed, disabling) their capacity to form successful identities. Young peoples material location continues to shape their radically different futures. However, we are also impressed by the extent to which the two schools in which we collected our data have engaged with young people in ways that encourage some of them (through practices of the self that form psychological capital), at least, to implicitly identify with New Labours aspirational project. What are the messages here for feminism and social justice projects? What does or could this do to gender and class re- and decompositions? And do girls in other Beacon schools get or hear the same message? Do boys receive, let alone hear the same or a differently inflected message in their equivalent Beacon schools? Clearly, we cannot answer this on the basis of this pilot study, but such questions form the basis of ongoing work. Notes
1. Hall argues that identity (successful identity, for example) entails the hailing or positioning of the subject as well as the specific forms in which subjects produce or perform subject positions. This positioning and performing constitutes an attachment, a dual articulation between subject and discourse, always incomplete, partial and contingent. There is a distinction is between a traditional labour redistributionist ideology designed to increase equality (largely rejected by New Labour), and the strong policy commitment to equality of opportunity in the labour market or in education.

2.

612 S. Bradford and V. Hey

3. 4. The words come from Alan Milburn in describing the governments fundamental objectives (Radio 4, Today, 11 November 2004). One of the authors of this paper was Chair of Governors of a Beacon school. On achieving Beacon status, some parents in that school expressed concern that the requirement to work with and support other schools would undermine their own schools capacity to sustain its position in the league tables. This could be called the capital that is institutionalised: the habituated expectation of success.

5.

Notes on contributors Simon Bradford is a sociologist and is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sport and Education at Brunel University, London, and Director of the Centre for Youth Work Studies at Brunel University. His research interests include the history of professional identities in youth work, social policy affecting young people and the development of youth practices and culture, particularly cyber-culture and gaming. Valerie Hey is a sociologist who works in an interdisciplinary way across the fields of cultural, feminist and poststructuralist theory. She has written accounts about education influenced by subcultural theory and ethnography and is currently developing ideas about the structuring of class, gender sociality and identity in late modernity. She is currently a Professor at Brunel University in the School of Sport and Education and will take up a chair in education at the University of Sussex in September 2007 within the Sussex Institute. References
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