This study draws on the accounts of 29 middle-class parents of public middle-school children in the Paris suburbs. I interviewed these parents during the fall and spring of 2016 and 2017, a troubled time in France. Shook by repeated, traumatic terrorism, immersed in a racially tinged political campaign, and witness to a massive wave of refugees from Africa and the Near East, the country confronted circumstances in which issues of racism were potentially at the fore. I contend this is an incipient situation that parallels what Swidler (1986) refers to as an unsettled cultural period in which ideology and action becomes more apparent. It was a period, too, in which global risk would appear to be highly salient in France, in line with Beck (1992; 2002), with an impact on schooling decisions in line with Ball (2003). Never originally planned as an element of the study design, this national situation inescapably became part of the study, driving it theoretically, empirically, and analytically.
which qualitative studies cannot do, they are the starting point for the conceptual model, as Figure 8 illustrates. Bertossi (2012a) claims that France is frequently misidentified as having a dense set of values that govern social life, but the reality is that French values do compete discursively in complex ways that outside scholars often ignore. Drawing on Swidler (1986), I hold that the cauldron of events in which France was immersed during the time of this study create a period in which the processes of social and ideological reformation becomes evident.
I contend that the evidence here is that the events are tied to the displacement of
individual dispositions, manifested among these parents as spectrums between the philosophical and the psychological, collectivistic and individualistic, and resolute and uncertain. These dispositions are formed through social and political ideology, as the line indicates between IDEOLOGY and INDIVIDUAL DISPOSITIONS, but events intercede with the individual dispositions, as the line between UNSETTLED PERIOD (the dotted rectangular box) and INDIVIDUAL DISPOSITIONS shows, impelling individuals from the philosophical, collectivistic, and resolute and toward the psychological, individualistic, and uncertain. The evidence of this movement lies in the accounts of the parents who largely claim the effects of events was personal in that they avoid places, dim lights, and sort recyclables, though some are moved toward activism and collective engagement.
I posit that a cultural convention, resilience, intercedes between events and dispositions, as have Evans and Sewell Jr. (2013), Hall and Lamont (2013b), and Hall and Lamont (2013a) on the spread of neoliberalism,. That intercession is neither satisfactorily supported nor contradicted in parental accounts and is shown here as dotted. Though the same diagram could be drawn that aligns with Beck and Ball with changed names (Global Risk rather than Cultural Period), the
The three solid rectangular boxes in Figure 8 represent three societal strata with which parents engage with schooling. The first is INDIVIDUAL DISPOSITIONS and the third is IDEOLOGY, as already described. Between them is SOCIAL STRUCTURE. In this case, the social structure includes how schooling is realized politically, economically, and socially and the processes and criteria by which parents engage in school choice. The conceptual types which emerge from this study are a product of that social structure. Both INDIVIDUAL
DISPOSITIONS and IDEOLOGY interact with SOCIAL STRUCTURE, shaping not only the formation of the institution but also the actions and attitudes of the parents, as evident in the four types. An additional effect that intercedes between INDIVIDUAL DISPOSITIONS and SOCIAL STRUCTURE is a cultural convention, parenting, in which French culture directs the formation and expected outcomes of children, educationally and vocationally. For these middle-class parents that often means preparation for and expectation of a satisfactory life. Proper parenting and socialization are important in preparation for school, too, which then drives the ability of schools to create desired educational outcomes. Ideology also frames the process of schooling in which schooling is about social formation, to be a good citizen or a knowledgeable person, as parental accounts make evident, not an anxious struggle for class closure. This is where the parental accounts fit into the models of Beck and Ball less well.
As a social concept, Race is off to the side. Its effect on the social structure (school) is intervened through Ideology in which race is not a legitimate distinction, limiting its
conceptualization and examination, and through a cultural convention, Language, in which the description and articulation of race are circumscribed and measured. I maintain that the concept of race is largely inoperative among these parents in school choice because ideologically it is a collective fiction and the conventions of language that legitimately describes social distinctions
nearly always default to social class (though sometimes ethnicity). Here and there, it is glimpsed but without much social implication. That is not to say it is without effect, as I later address.