# 54: “Thinking Class” in University and Business
By: Silke Schmidt
Tags: Industry, University, Business, Class, Literature

Kadi, Jo(anna) (1996). Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker, 146–147.

Story behind the Passage

Hardly ever before have so many of my contacts in businesses talked about larger social, political, and education issues. There is something wrong with this. I mean, not with the talk but with the reasons. The fragmentation of the social spheres is rapidly progressing. And Covid-19 is only making this more visible, at least partly. The people who have safe jobs somewhere or a lot of money do not care — as usually. They do not even notice how much others are struggling. And by “others” I do not even mean artists or the so-called ‘solo-entrepreneurs’ that are mentioned on the news every day. I mean business leaders and entrepreneurs who are struggling to keep large businesses going.

One common argument I hear is about the stupidity of politicians and the high level of abstraction offered by scientists. Both together lead to the fact that business people, especially entrepreneurs, give a shit about what either of the above-mentioned groups say. Consequently, they hardly ever talk to each other. I do think they would benefit from talking more to exchange valuable knowledge. But that is an issue that I am going to take care of in a different setting.

This polarized discourse or rather non-discourse between theorists and practitioners surely is rooted in institutional and disciplinary socialization processes. There is hardly any doubt about this. How could scholars, on the one hand, who have never worked in business for a single day have any idea about the reality out there? This is aggravated by the fact that they tend to be surrounded by academics in their entire life — starting at birth, by the way. On the other hand, how could practitioners ever understand that those theorists actually do have deep insights into the bigger picture of their business and their future? How could they appreciate the value of reading books and thinking if they ‘only’ studied for a few years to complete their credits and never ever set foot on a university campus again?

The situation is not easy.

And politicians are somewhere in the middle, leaning towards the academic side.

And where am I?

I have chosen Joe Kadi’s book today because these thoughts immediately made me think of Thinking Class. I read the book for my dissertation many years ago because Kadi is Arab American and also addresses this ‘hybrid’ identity struggle in the book. In spite of these inter-cultural issues, his thoughts on class have mostly resonated with me up to the present day. I do think that the lack of communication between business and academia is also very much rooted in socio-demographic differences. These are hardly ever discussed in this context. But the book Factfulness, which I discussed on Sunday, really brought the crucial importance of income differences as the main reason for several positive and negative social developments to my attention again.

The passages above are my favorite ones from the book. This is also why I am not going to defragment them. I cannot do that to products of flow. They always form a whole. I simply wanted to share the text, even though I am not going to explicitly talk about all the parts. My goal today is simply to draw attention to the fact that money is also driving academic cultures and these cultures in turn socialize students and scholars. And this certainly has an effect on the way that people do their jobs afterwards.

My Learnings

“Working-class people receive little or none of this particular brand of socialization.” Kadi talks about general socialization processes in the final paragraph. I want to transfer this statement to the situation of working-class people in the academy, i.e., kids from non-academic family backgrounds. As we know from all the studies out there, kids from working-class families are significantly less likely to study in the first place, they are less likely to finish, they are less likely to get a Master’s degree, they are less likely to get a Ph.D., and they are significantly less likely to become professors (Hochschulreport, et al.). All these figures are about the German situation, of course. In other countries, the situation is slightly different/better.

We have known about this for a long time and the reasons are more complicated than one might suspect at first. Still, I want to focus on an even more complicated relationship: the one between the low representation of working-class students/graduates and their choice of academic subjects. We also know from studies that subjects like law and medicine are the ones that continue to be popular among students from upper-class academic families. And the technical and economic fields are chosen by those from lower-class/non-academic families (Studienfachwahl). In cultural studies and the humanities, the situation is a little more mixed.

As I said earlier, this issue about working class kids in the academy itself is just the background for my topic today and this is also why I am not going into detail about the numbers here. You can find plenty of studies about this online. And these studies also talk about the complex reasons behind the situation. Partly, these are intuitive, e.g., people from families with lower incomes want to study in order to make money in the future, improve their social status, and they choose subjects in which they think they have a chance to fulfil the performance criteria. People who grew up with a lot of money study stuff such as high culture or philosophy which other people label as quite irrelevant or useless. Of course, there are always exceptions.

“Well, what’s the news?” you might ask now.

Let me take this one step further. What I want to talk about now is disciplinary culture. We know that the different disciplines and fields in academia have different cultures, i.e., norms, values, rituals, habits, language, etc. Partly, these cultures are influenced by the subject matter and methods. So, in a very technical field in which everything is about numbers and analytical thinking, people interact differently than in a field in which there are a lot of discussions and readings about the nature of human beings. In addition, in some fields there is more group work, in others more individual and quiet study. Clearly, some of these subjects are also more hands-on than others. Just think of electrical engineers. They do not just calculate stuff, they build it. In contrast, people in the humanities read and write. That is as far as their practical engagement goes.

Now, obviously, this leads to a different socialization when it comes to pragmatism, as I would just generally label it. But here is the thing: Most studies usually talk about how students and young scholars from non-academic backgrounds tend to struggle due to the language of the academy and other difficulties related to the context and support mechanisms. What I miss in these studies is the partly conscious, partly unconscious notion that the culture of the respective field simply sucks. And since we know that socio-demographics shape the culture of the field from the start because members from different social classes enter it, that makes things even more complicated.

But complicated is bad, right?

Complicated is not in fashion.

Complicated is so not simple that it can only be academic!

So, let me make it simpler. What I am saying is that disciplinary culture is an aspect that deserves more attention when it comes to the discussion about who rises in academia and who does not; who talks to people outside the academy and who does not. And the latter decisions can also be referred to as “self-selection” in a negative way. If you simply cannot associate with the particular culture of your academic field, this says nothing about the university in general. In other words: If you are from a working-class background and you end up studying a subject that is quite overpopulated with kids from upper-level classes, you are a lot more likely to get pissed off than in the field with people from your background, e.g., business or IT.

This long explanation makes me return to Kadi’s quote about “socialization” — or rather the resistance to enforced socialization. Maybe working class kids remain stronger in their neglect of ‘hostile cultural takeover’ by academic communities. For sure, by the time when you have literally mastered to gain a Master’s or even a Ph.D. degree, you have little to no trouble with writing and speaking the language of your scholarly field. That means, the technical skills and the knowledge are not the point anymore. But the problem might remain that you just do not want to adopt the other cultural bullshit that goes along with this among your so-called ‘peers’ and senior scholars who altogether shape the culture of your field.

In result: You might self-select to say goodbye to the brainy folks behind university walls who cannot and often do not want to engage with practitioners and the public.

Let me emphasize that I am not saying all this to blame anybody for anything. On the contrary, writing is about consciousness raising. This is a all a blog can do — at best. I am talking about decisions here that the students and graduates themselves make. So, instead of the argument that working-class people are somehow forced to leave because of some (unconscious) disadvantages, I am bringing up the argument that those decisions are also autonomous and conscious because the people do not want to give up their identity in exchange for some scholarly title or position. That does not change the fact, however, that it might be nice to have different academic cultures altogether that allow for more theory-practice collaboration.

Especially the latter is, from my perspective, something that people from non-academic families care a lot about.

The latter aspect brings up the link to business again, especially entrepreneurship. We see in the data that the vast majority, 84% of startup founders, have academic degrees (DSM). Based on what we know about the general student population, we can conclude that most of them come from academic families (since the startup community is highly international, however, this is a very vague generalization). What you need to know in addition is that startups in the pre-seed phase heavily rely on family/private investor money. Hence, there is another social/class imbalance when it comes to the next entrepreneurship generation which is immanently intertwined with the ‘class’ distribution in the academy.

The latter aspect is something that needs to be kept in mind, I think, when we talk about entrepreneurship, the conversation between university and practice, and getting things done in general. The traditional entrepreneurs of SMEs, this is my personal impression, are a lot more hands-on and come from a parent generation that was a lot less wealthy. Consequently, the cultural clashes that we observe between scholars and practitioners are not just a consequence of age, they are, again, as most other things in life, related to money — family money, and social upbringing.



I know, I have gone in many loops today but the connections are not easy and even the most detailed studies about the socio-demographics behind student numbers and the choice of subjects cannot fully explain the reasons behind the status quo. What I simply want to stress again is something that people dealing with culture in business know very well:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Peter Drucker

And this also plays an important role in the communication that we observe between the different social actors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Doctors, including virologists, based on the figures, tend to be people who did not grow up in the poorest neighborhoods. Business people and partly entrepreneurs come from a different socio-economic sphere. And politicians are somewhere in-between. When these groups talk to each other and to the public, culture is driving their thinking and their choice of words.

In line with Hans Rosling, the author of Factfulness, we need to keep in mind that social class divisions are continuously changing due to technological and economic advancements. So, I do not want to sound like someone who is pessimistic about everything and whose passion it is to mourn the state of society here. This is not my intention. This is not what I stand for. I know that many of these issues will probably be a thing of the past in the not so distant future — if we decide to turn our insights into ACTION. Even then, however, in line with Kadi’s overarching topic, we need to remember:

Culture is driven by money.

Reflection Questions

1) Do you think/know that your family background influenced your career decision? In how far?

2) Did you ever think about “culture” in relation to the language and habits of your colleagues?

3) If there is one thing you could change in contemporary politics (in your country) — what is it?