Education, the new politics of differentiation and ordinal citizenship

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a ‘low intensity civil war’ against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of ordinal citizenship. These measures: elevate individual agency, erasing the idea of social class as a nominal identity; assert the importance of classification in a myriad number of instruments of imagination, including rankings, intended to spur individual self-improvement; and replaces social fairness with statistical fairness. These actuarial and quantitative measures, on the one hand reposition us as striving individuals in a new economy of worth and value, through the ways in which ordinal instruments govern a new politics of differentiation and legitimize the rise of ordinal citizenship.

Keywords:

• Ordinal society
• ordinal citizenship
• differentiation
• social class
• class war

Introduction

‘How do we know what we know?’ asks Fourcade (2016, p. 175) in her Lewis A Coser Memorial Award lecture. ‘Quite simply, we learned it. As children, we absorbed the world and made it our own. We acquired words, concepts and behaviours readily supplied by our social environment sometimes forcibly, sometimes imperceptibly’. (ibid.). Such processes, where we learn to ‘split, lump together, and assign things and people, including ourselves, to categorical schemas’ (Fourcade, 2016, p. 175) are in turn passed on to us as ‘commonsense’. (Gramsci et al., 1971, p. 685)

To those of us in the business of studying education as a science, and ‘schooling’ as a key institution in the making of contemporary social orders, what and how we learn is an extremely complicated process. It not only involves formal curricular knowledge, or, as Michael Apple (2000) calls it—‘official knowledge’ - but also latent attitudes and values that contributors to this journal (a quick search showed some 570 papers) have called ‘the hidden curriculum’. This latent and manifest knowledge is what Basil Bernstein (1975, p. 85) is referring to when he talks about the three ‘message systems’ of formal education: that of curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. As Bernstein observes: ‘…how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’ (ibid.). Viewed in this way, any shift in the organization, transmission and evaluation of knowledge as a result of recalibrations in this distribution of power, is a matter of important sociological interest.

None of what I have said so far is especially new to sociologists of education. Yet for some time now I have been arguing that whilst considerable effort has gone into understanding the rise of data governance in education (cf. Grek, 2009) and the complexities of data evangelism (Davies, 2018), what we have fallen short on is Bernstein’s challenge to sociologist: to ask larger questions about what this means for changes in the structure of cultural transmission and the regulation of the structure of experience, identity and relations, including social class (Robertson, 2018; Sorensen & Robertson, 2020). In short, what do these new politics of differentiation mean for social class as both an identity and a relation, mediated through education?

In posing a similar question: what happened to class? critical geographer, Neil Smith (2000) is not implying that somehow class as social relation has become redundant. Far from it. Piketty (2014), amongst others, has shown the extraordinary concentration of wealth in a very small elite, while Sennett (2006) and Davies (2018) have written on the erosion of decent work and incomes, in turn fuelling a turn to authoritarian populism (Cohen, 2019).

This Special Issue, given over to revisiting the concept of ‘differentiation’ in social theory, has provided me with an opportunity to re-engage with Bernstein’s invocation regarding educational knowledge, identity making and consciousness. In short, the emergence of a new politics of differentiation has sought to bury social class as an identity and social force, at precisely the moment when what is under way is a class war. Drawing inspiration from the seminal work of Fourcade (2016, 2021) and Fourcade and Healy (2013, 2017) on classificatory judgements for comparing people and things, I want to argue that a new politics of differentiation in the governance of education has emerged based on ‘ordinal’ rather than ‘nominal’ classificatory judgements, articulated around data, statistical profiling and algorithmic bias.

Nominal judgements are orientated to the essence of a category, that defines what things are (such as, being working versus middle class; male versus female), producing a horizontal map of differences. Ordinal judgements, by way of contrast, operate on a vertical polarity of relative positions: of an up and down scale. Put another way, nominal differentiation generates heterogeneity (from one identity to the possibility of two or more identities) whilst ordinal differentiation creates inequalities of status, whose differences in this case are legitimated as the result of individual willingness to engage in a process of bettering oneself. Most importantly, the use of data driven ordinal instruments, whose ‘levelling’ practices (euphemistically called ‘flat earth’ by advocates such as Thomas Friedman, 2005) appear to adopt a morally agnostic ideology with a pervasive sense of universal inclusion, make invisible categories, like social class, in turn dissolving nominality into behaviour, and structural forces into individual success or failure fuelled by individual effort. Furthermore, as Fourcade (2016, p. 188) reminds us; ‘ … the institutions and technologies of ordinality are harder to make visible (and politically accountable) than the institutions of nominal difference, because they were designed to hide these differences in the first place’.

In this paper, I argue this new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments of governing aim to make invisible a ‘low intensity civil war’ against the labouring classes (Gueguen et al., 2021), through the elevation and the ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures of a new form of belonging; ordinal citizenship. These measures: (i) elevate individual agency (seeking to erase the idea of class as an identity, though class as a social relation remains); (ii) assert the importance of classification in a myriad number of rankings intended to spur individual self-improvement; and (iii) replace social fairness with statistical fairness (Fourcade, 2021). These actuarial and quantitative measures separately and collectively reposition us as striving individuals in a new economy of worth and value (Robertson, 2018, 2022; Sorensen & Robertson, 2020), whose ordinal politics are aimed at ‘ … creating a world in its own image through its power to integrate all dimensions of human existence’ (Dardot & Laval, 2009, p. 3). And whilst I recognize similar arguments are made around class war and neoliberalism (c.f. Giroux, 2020), this paper brings to the fore the role of ordinal instruments of governing, and the rise of ordinal citizenship, in advancing '‘made invisible'’ class war.

Seeing like a (neoliberal) state

What strategies are involved in advancing this new politics? I begin with Scott’s famous observation on states and governing, and posit that this involves the rise of a new regime of sight (Jasanoff, 2017) directed by neoliberalism. Governing is relational, and involves the governor being able to indicate to, and thus make visible, those populations it wishes to rule. It was James C Scott (1998) who coined the term ‘seeing like a state’ in the title of his now famous book. Scott’s contribution was to argue that the power to see and make visible entities in the landscape which it claimed as its territory was key to modern statecraft. For the state, this meant bringing into view the subjects of the state using simplifying devices, such as standardization and rationalizing. Visible subjects are then made legible and the object of governing. However, these simplifications are like ‘abridged maps’; they do not represent actual activity in settings but, rather, the activities which interest the official observer (Scott, 1998, p. 3). In the case of the state, the subject is likely to be a potential taxpayer, a defender of the state’s territory, or an enforcer of the state’s rules (see also Bartl et al., 2019, p. 15). We can add here those it deems its ‘citizens’ with rights, versus those who might be taxpayers but who have fewer rights and claims (Sassen, 2006).

It follows that seeing like a state means flattening the topography of absolute space, along with the specificities of place as the state engages in territorial governing. Now difference is imposed, depending on the object and purpose of governing. Schools or universities might, on the one hand, be ‘dots’ on a map or a numbered ‘entry’ in a ledger. On the other hand, they might be sorted and assigned a value by being lumped into a category, as an archetypal kind. For example, in England for much of the 20^th Century there were important differences between universities, broadly based on whether they educated the elite upper echelons of society (Oxbridge, Russell Group) versus the less selective universities who educated the aspiring working classes.).

What, then, does ‘seeing like a (neoliberal) state’ entail? Ideally, it views its ‘subjects’ in different ways as well as the nature of the state-citizen contract. Broadly, ‘seeing like a neoliberal state’ (Peck, 2013) means: (i) prioritizing market mechanisms as the most efficient way to allocate resources and solve economic problems; (ii) promoting the privatization of public services, such as healthcare, education, transportation, and utilities; (iii) advocating for limited government intervention in the economy; (iv) placing strong emphasis on individual responsibility and self-reliance; (v) prioritizing financial markets and global economic integration; and (vi) placing a high value on economic growth to achieve societal progress. In sum, the neoliberal state sees a choosing, competitive, entrepreneurial individual who engages in market exchanges to satisfy needs and wants (Peck, 2013). In this moment a new politics of differentiation is set in motion.

Given our interest in neoliberalism as a strategy to place limits on organised class power and interests from below, it is important to ask about how the neoliberal state views social class, in turn aiding in the prosecution of a class war (Sayer, 2015)? It can be seen to, (i) place strong emphasis on individual responsibility and reward based upon a neoliberal parsing of merit; (ii) promote the idea of upward movement, wherein individuals can improve their social and economic status through their own efforts; (iii) use market mechanisms to address economic and social issues; and (iv) emphasize individual rights and freedoms over collective action or societal structures, and as a result pay no attention to systemic factors that contribute to social class disparities (Mijs, 2021). In sum, the neoliberal state and its preference for ordinal citizenship views individuals in ‘classification’ terms; their location on a vertical scale arising from individual effort, productivity, and responsible decisions (Fourcade, 2016, 2017; Robertson, 2022).

How does a neoliberal state view education, and what are the class selectivities of its governance regime in the making of ordinal citizenship? A neoliberal state regards market coordinated provision and competition in education as more efficient, in that it is presumed to be indifferent to class identities. It also (i) brings in private (including for profit) actors into the sector to provide a range of outsourced services; (ii) promotes the idea of informed choice as an individual’s responsibility; and (iii) rewards individual aspirations and effort. Meritocracy in this framing is broadly neoliberal meritocracy in that it assumes a level playing field for its subjects (Martini & Robertson, 2022). In this regime of sight, social class differences are presented as the outcome of a lack of individual effort and not structural (Mijs 2029). I elaborate on the detail of this new politics of inclusion and difference below.

Regimes of sight and ordinal instruments of governing

How has the state moved from one regime of sight to the other, and in doing so reworked difference, in turn constituting a new class politics? In this section I show how ordinal instruments for governing—such as indicators and rankings—help materialize new forms of experience, identity, and sets of relations because of the recalibration in the ideational content, and particular form given to the ordinal principles structuring education’s three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy, and most of all evaluation (Bernstein, 1975, p. 85). This involves the state and its agents in imagining and colonizing the future to bring into being a very different regime of citizenship; one aimed at setting up a new form of ordinal difference whilst managing its effects.

Vision has two meanings; the ability to see, and the ability to think about, or plan for, the future in an imaginative way. Visibility refers to the state of being able to be seen, the conditions for seeing, and by attracting attention, to standing out (OED, 2019). Indicators are involving in seeing, for as Bartl et al. (2019) note, etymologically, indicators mean pointing. That is, an indicator points to something, which exists out there, which needs to be made more visible. And as Jasanoff notes; ‘ … any act of data collection involves, to begin with, an act of seeing and recording something that was previously hidden and possibly nameless’ (2017, p. 2). In the case of neoliberal statecraft and its governance tools, this means evidence of superior qualities. Yet ‘ … disputes about the significance or importance of an issue tend to cluster around the legitimacy of the processes of making the invisible visible’ (Jasanoff, 2017, p. 2). In essence, this means asking about ‘practices of authorised seeing’. Jasanoff (2017, p. 3) develops an account of legitimatory discourses arising out of what she calls ‘regimes of sight’; the ‘view from nowhere’, the ‘view from everywhere’, and the ‘view from somewhere’. Each of these standpoints has a particular kind of institutional locus (respectively science, expert advice, witness), a political claim being able to see (e.g. outside politics, inclusive of all affected, personal injury), a legitimating discourse (e.g. objectivity, reason, authenticity), and set of legitimating practices (e.g. peer review, representation, first person narrative).

The contemporary use of large-scale assessments which report on, and represent, comparative assessments of individuals, institutions and nations use ordinal practices and represent them vertically (Robertson, 2018, 2022). Their form is important. In other words, representations of data have their own distinct politics tied to a regime of sight so that what is projected also shapes ways of seeing, whilst at the same time obscuring how the rules of the game are being orchestrated and by whom. A powerful example can be found in Slobodian’s work (2018). He shows how the idea of a world economy came into focus as a response to the Great Depression in the 1930s and the search for a global economic solution (Slobodian, 2018, p. 56). The economists began to play with ideas regarding how to ‘see’ the global. Economists and statisticians also began to think about how to represent the world economy and its activity to manage it (Slobodian, 2018, pp. 57–59).

One of the more infamous statistical representations was called the Kindleberger Spiral—a circular graph to track the decline in volume of world trade. Slobodian describes this as ‘barometer vision’; a means of measuring the pulse of the world and in doing so, making visible the laws related to the sequence of economic fluctuations. If one could ‘see’ the economy correctly, then it was argued future depressions could be prevented. Over time we have come to take for granted that such representations are a way of ‘seeing’ economic activity. In short, we have come to see, as legitimate, a particular mode of representation, as if the data and the object were one in the same thing, in this case the economy and the representations of the business cycle. Equally importantly, those who might benefit from these representations, in particular—those capitalists who ‘naturalize’ the capitalist economy as if it were an actor in its own right, seem to disappear from view. Only the technology remains in view, seeming disinterested in power and politics.

As outlined in the introduction to this paper, our representations emerge out of classificatory judgements, nominal, ordinal and cardinal (aggregative counts), which gain their identity and authority because of being ‘ … collectively crafted, sustained, and enforced’ (ibid) in ways that take on meaning and stamps of approval. Nominal scales of measurement are oriented to essence because of lumping things together (e.g. the number of universities less than 50 years old, or the total number of BRIC universities). Cardinal scales of measurement and judgements are tied to practices of collecting and accumulating (Fourcade, 2016, p. 177), for example the increasing number of international students studying at university over time (leading to analyses such as from elite to a massified system), or the increasing numbers of countries participating in the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessments (PISA). Ordinal instruments of governing derive their power from deploying a regime of sight that fosters ‘learning how to improve’ via apparently neutrally gathered, and objectively presented, data on performances, where a level playing field is assumed.

These ‘engines of anxiety’, to quote Epseland and Sauder (2017), depend upon fear and fretfulness as the energy to propel inclusion, on the one hand, and effort into the future, on the other. Being included provides those institutional leaders who are attempting to optimize institutional performance with a means of power (to shame, to praise, to legitimately redirect resources). As anticipatory strategies, they also suggest what kind of performance, both now and into the future, is desirable. These instruments undergo changes over time to ensure that the rules of the game continue to keep those participating in the competition in a state of anxious guessing about knowing exactly how to play the game (Robertson, 2022).

What is powerful about ordinal judgements is that they typically operate according to a vertically organized polarity; of up and down positions (1 to 100) of relative ranks (no matter the size of difference either between or across ranks) and imply different judgements and valuations (‘best’, to ‘least best’) (Fourcade, 2016). Modern ordinal judgements also tend towards numerical commensuration. In doing so, they present themselves as an objective process of quantification, for example, the top 10 schools, or top 100 universities in the world, again obscuring class relations and interests. Taking a cue from Slobodian’s (2018) barometer vision, we can call ordinal strategies a form of ‘vertical vision’ (Robertson, 2018, 2022) aimed at advancing individualised winners and losers through this new mode of classification with its distinct differentiation politics.

Ordinal systems also have their own spatial dynamics in that small differences between entities are amplified. This is because only one entity can occupy one space at a time, despite in some cases very marginal differences between entities. In other cases, the differences are huge (including vastly different levels of wealth of universities), but an ordinal scale does not measure absolutes. Small differences are amplified, and large differences are scaled back. The vertical organization of space, of top and bottom, winners and losers, sets up relations between nations, institutions and individuals, which reinforces the new hidden curriculum; that of individual competition. ‘Seeing the world as vertically organised means to seeing the world as globally stratified—of those who are great and those who would wish to be great’ (Robertson, 2022, p. 430). And whilst class appears to be absent, we can see that this new matrix of power not only reinforces old social class differences (elite schools and universities at the top), but a proliferation of rankings emerges to enable all entities to be included in ways which reinforce competition in relation to recognition claims (best liberal arts university in Asia; top university less than 50 years old, and so on). We have now both inclusion AND difference centred on recognition of a new kind of identity, the striving, choosing individual in an inclusive education market as the basis of ordinal citizenship.

This is, then, both a classification and class strategy of producing a world of winners and losers in a range of games created through the prism of the instrument—or device. The device sets in motion a race to the top, kept in place by annual cycles of representing and presenting the winners and would-be winners, the mobilization of affect, and an economy of worth and value which follows. The magic of vertical vision is that it directs an inevitable forward momentum to that which is to be valued and actioned into the future. And whilst difference is the name of the game (1,2,3…), differences are standardized, imposing a new kind of rationality on education where it is ‘ … standardization not as simple equivalence, but as inequality structured through the form of equivalence’ (Mongia, 2007, p. 410). Standardisation reduces the ‘volume’ of inequality between institutions, suggesting that the race is broadly one amongst equals, with social class differences now erased.

A moral economy accompanies this way of seeing, and shapes what is considered of worth and of value (Fourcade, 2017). However, it would be wrong to think that only those at the top have value. As Fourcade (2017, p. 672) states: ‘ … let us not forget that the finality of market devices is to make money—not to produce calculative agencies’. Seen through the eyes of rankers with products and services to sell, those ranked at the bottom are valuable precisely because they become a new market. In short, those at the top (aligned with the criteria) and those at the bottom (‘not-aligned’) are sources of profitability for commercial rankers. Those aligned are encouraged to keep on investing (more research active academics, potential Nobel award winners etc.) to remain in place, whilst those ‘not-aligned’ are the target of specialized services aimed at repair (Robertson, 2022).

Neoliberalism’s market society and ordinal citizenship

The justification for neoliberal policies is that the market is neutral, whilst the state is constructed as ideological (Slobodian, 2019). In relation to higher education, Slobodian (2019, p. 374) also points out that early neoliberals like Hayek viewed the publicly-funded university as offering perverse incentive structures that not only fuelled anarchy (referring to the 1960s civil rights and students’ movements), but that their rebellions ‘ … sprang from the fact that students at public institutions were parasitical on the public purse that subsidized the institutions’ (Slobodian, 2019, p. 374). Only market rate tuition (promoted as the right to choose) would cultivate the right relationship to education. The elevation of individual choice and the consumer pays logics, coupled with the erosion of the state’s capacity to tax and redistribute (Streeck, 2014), has redistribution consequences for those with few resources in a society. Yet as I have been arguing, ordinal differentiation as a basis for citizenship obscures the class-based nature of neoliberalism, whilst instruments like ordinal rankings as mechanisms of power hide the unequal distribution of power and its principles of social control (Bernstein, 1975).

To engage critically with this project and make its politics visible, Gueguen et al. (2021) argue it is important to home in on, not the neoliberal production of norms and subjectivities (Foucault’s governmentality), but the overall purpose (strategy) and outcomes (conflict) of contemporary neoliberal governing, of a class war. To them, governmentality theorists’ focus on making the new kind of neoliberal subject results in an occlusion of the wider and deeper purpose and stakes of neoliberalism. Foucault once argued that ‘ … the apparatuses of the state are the manner, the instruments and the weapons, that the bourgeoisie gives itself in class struggle, whose aspects constitute power relations imminent to the social body, which allow it to hold together. In other words, the idea is that the social body does not hold together by effect of a contract, nor of consensus, but by effect of something else which is precisely war, struggle … the relation of forces’ (quoted in Toscano, 2023, p. 185). In short, we see here how society holds together, and how it comes apart; an aggressive Darwinian approach that is premised on a link between competitive individualism and productivity (see Dorling, 2014).

And it is this obscured class war which shores up the powers and privileges of a capitalist oligarchy who share common traits (Gueguen et al., 2021. First, they are social aimed at curtailing the acquired socio-economic rights of the labouring classes. Second, they operate through ethnic or racial exclusions from the prerogatives of citizenship whilst suggesting a level playing field. Third, resistance is criminalized (for example in the UK case we see programmes aimed at security, such as Prevent, ‘stop and search’ orders that are overwhelmingly aimed at persons of colour, and most recently free speech legislation). In relation to education, parents are punished for not sending their child to school and in some cases, incarcerated. These polyvalent low intensity capitalist civil wars do not cohere into one covering strategy; rather they function through a plurality of opportunities, and contradictions. Neoliberalism is thus to be grasped as a political project for the neutralization of socialism in all its forms, and beyond this, of all demands for equality (Slobodian, 2018). Similar lines of argument are presented by Brown (2015) who note an intensification of social conflict in ways that whilst attempting to normalize competition and getting ahead, nevertheless pit an individual, a group, a set of institutions, or sets of countries, against the other. These conflicts flare up, but rarely in ways that make visible the underlying dynamics that have enabled concentrations of wealth (Piketty, 2014), the causes of deepening social inequalities (Streeck, 2014), or new oligarchies (Slobodian, 2019). Rather we see a tendency to pathologize one group in relation to another, such as when Bovens and Wille (2018) describe the opposition between the well-educated ‘cosmopolitans’ versus the ‘uneducated nativists’; when Piketty (2018) described that ‘Braham Left’ versus the ‘Merchant Right’, or when the ‘Remainers’ (the assumed well off educated are presented as opposed to the ‘Brexiters’ (as white working class) (Dorling, 2016). Yet as Dorling and Tomlinson (2019) show in their very detailed analysis of the Brexit vote and social class, the leavers included both the white working class and a well-off middle and upper class whose common ‘enemy’ was those who were different; the foreign other with few aspirations aside from taking resources from the authentic native.

The new politics of ordinality have been central to reshaping higher education in England over the past 30 years, which I sketch out to illustrate my argument. The Dearing Report (1997) had as its premier task the expansion of higher education to produce human capital for the economy, on the one hand, and the inclusion of many students in this expansion, on the other. Yet this was problematic as higher education was state funded and it was argued that the public purse was not able to fund more places. What was needed was the creation of a new fee-paying economy and students as consumers. In doing so, it sought to justify a shift from higher education as a decommodified sector (no fees) aimed at elite formation to one where it argued all students would benefit into the future because of significantly increased earnings as a graduate. This practice of ‘levelling’ (Fourcade, 2016, p. 182) (according to the rhetoric everyone is now included and has an equal chance” to get on), in turn puts into place a new evaluative message system that prioritizes a new kind of knowledge; of viewing oneself as something to be invested in, as human capital, and a competition given over to getting on and winning, over and above acquiring discipline-based curriculum knowledge. Over time, a new economy of student fees has evolved to activate ordinal citizenship; one that is inclusive of all lubricated by a system of credit (the Student Loan Company) to ensure all citizens can access higher education, though increasingly very different kinds of institutions HE and sets of experiences. In Bernstein's terms this new cultural transmission system carries different messages aimed at shaping new identities (Bernstein, 1975)

At the same time, the ‘reputational value’ to be derived by ‘choosing’ one kind of university over another is guided by ordinal processes, such as ranking systems, that are valorized by the university as part of its marketing strategies to secure enrolments. These included a range of global rankings, including the Times Higher World University Rankings, the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, and Quacquarelli Symond QS World Rankings (Hazelkorn, 2017). These rankings’ modus operandi are based on inclusion (level playing field/all in it together) and difference (vertical ranking) making performance visible. Nationally, a Research Excellence Framework (REF) operated on a seven-year cycle representing disciplines and fields (units of assessment) in a set of league tables which in turn became the basis of allocating research funding. The elite institutions were the clear winners in this ordinal regime, securing for themselves a greater share of research funding. Higher education underwent a process of expansion, inclusion, and further differentiation. These differences and their politics ran also along class lines.

Throughout this period, the rise of finance capital sought opportunities to invest in higher education, whether in the form of student loans, as venture capital backed investments in new providers, or as one of a growing number of services (as platforms, e-books, applications, training) rented to universities, academics, administrators, or students. A double pronged approach then emerged; one advancing the idea of a knowledge economy with universities as its engine, and the other advancing choice and access to higher education as a means of feeding the knowledge economy machine. Yet these discourses conceal the underpinning social relations of a transformed higher education system imbricated with the social relations of contemporary capitalism.

If it was the Dearing Report (1997) that raised the question of how best to fund universities into the future, it was the Browne Review some 10 years later (in 2010) who put into place de-risking strategies for finance capital (Gabor, 2021); that the English State would underwrite the Student Loan Book so that any defaulting by students on student loans, or the failure to pay back the loan as a result of not securing a sufficiently well-paid job, was not put at the door of the finance company. Rather it was to be directed at the taxpayer. The Browne Review, too, proposed in policy terms the entry into the sector of what were called ‘alternative providers’; these were in many cases venture-backed firms seeking access to what was perceived to be income flows that had been underwritten by the state (for the time being to help materialize market relations) via underwriting the Student Loan Book. A new ordinal instrument was developed to guide the student regarding the quality of teaching; the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) oversighted by the newly formed regulator of higher education, the Office for Students (OfS).

At this point we should note that the architects of neoliberalism, like Hayek and Von Mises, ‘ … focused on designing institutions—not just to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behaviour, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfil a necessary function’ (Slobodian, 2018, p. 2). In other words, the project was to institute markets in such a way that the interests of capital, and capitalist market-making, were placed beyond politics, thus protecting them from interfering political interests that might nationalize industries, or put into place regulations (e.g. minimum wages, climate change tariffs) that would limit profit margins or put in place policies that would make it difficult for the capitalist to enter a sector.

These different modalities, of inserting the logic of capitalist development into English higher education were made less visible by a series of institutions to constitute the ordinal society (e.g. Office of Students; the Times Higher university rankings), were consolidated in the BIS (2016) Report (Success as a Knowledge Economy) and its accompanying legislation in 2017. That said, there is nothing inevitable about the class project; of making, shaping, and consolidating, of a higher education capitalist market. There have been ongoing conflicts in the sector since 2010, with multiple strike actions involving faculty, and in many cases, students. In short, the English higher education has been riven with conflict, whilst the state has sought to direct these outbreaks by setting students as consumers against academics as unreliable providers of a service that the student has paid for. Currently there are cases on the courts advanced by students who have argued to the regulator, the Office for Students, that the terms of their purchase (higher education) overseen by the Competition and Market’s Authority, have been breached. The turn to consumer activism might be understood in relation to how it now replaces student activism.

What now of social class, and the new forms of differentiation and higher education in England arising from the alignment of neoliberalism and the politics of ordinal governance? Access to elite universities and advantage in the UK is profoundly shaped by what kind of school a student has attended, hence what kind of university they might enter, and the stakes of this matter more and more in a competitive society. Montacute and Cullinane (2018, p. 11) show that in 2015, 80% of the students who attend Oxbridge were in the two highest social classes, with Oxford and Cambridge having the smallest numbers of students from state schools of all UK universities. Furthermore, those who come from higher income versus lower-income households, even if both attend an elite university, fare differently in the wider labour market after graduating from university (up to 60% more for males; 45% more for females) (Britton et al., 2016). Britton et al. (2016) suggest students from wealthier households are likely to have financial support to relocate to cities like London or to the South-East, where incomes are considerably higher. This matters, as it is this group who are the elite in society and who shape social life. Oxbridge graduates from high-income families also dominate the top professions as journalists, barristers, Members of Parliament, and Cabinet Ministers.

In 2015, the OECD report The Broken Elevator examined the collapse of social mobility, whilst a similar OECD (2015) report called Under Pressure (2019) showed the squeezed middle class face a shrinking in the capacity to consume. Taken together it is these patterns of deepening social inequality that Dorling (2016), and Dorling and Tomlinson (2019), argue has sown the seeds of resentment in the UK, and the rise of the populist vote. The ethics of competitive individualism in the new market society has also transformed the idea of meritocracy, such that those who land at the top come to believe not only do they deserve their success, but also it is their efforts that are being rewarded (Mijs, 2021). In this view of the world, if opportunities are truly equal, it means those who are left behind deserve their fate as well. This transformation in meritocracy represents an important shift in how social inequalities tied to education are now legitimated in the ordinal society; as a failure of individual aspiration and effort (Wintour, 2012). To neoliberals, these individuals deserve their fate, as their different capacities to be productive (rooted in biology and race) make them a drag on ongoing capitalist development and should be weeded out (Slobodian, 2019).

Conclusions

I began this paper by reflecting on the absence of social class in contemporary social theory, with the result that social class itself tends to be viewed as no longer a useful category. I also argued that in more recent years, sociologists of education have tended to turn their attention to governance technologies, like large scale assessments and probabilistic calculations without taking the next step proposed by Bernstein (1975); to ask about what this means for larger questions of structure, and changes in the structure of cultural transmission. Yet this project and set of processes of categorizing and ordinal differentiation can also be understood as deployed to wage what Gueguen et al. (2021) have described as a low intensity class war that has, as its project, the transformation in the basis of social citizenship; from that of 20^th Century social citizenship, to one of 21^st Century ordinal citizenship. In doing so, ideas like meritocracy, inclusion, and individualization are all reworked and recalibrated via neoliberal tenets to justify a new form of differentiation constitutive of the ordinal society, organized through class/ification relations. What is at stake in this new politics of differentiation aimed at normalizing generalized competition is the deepening of social inequalities made invisible through installing neoliberal meritocracy (Martini & Robertson, 2022), legitimizing significant wealth inequalities as the outcome of unproductive selves (Piketty, 2014), and promoting the idea of freedom and recognition politics as individual choices (Dardot & Laval, 2009).

Paradoxically, it is social conflict and not social solidarity that holds this ordinal social order together; one that normalizes difference and naturalizes as ‘deserving’ what is parsed as individual ‘effort’ (despite substantial financial, social, political, and economic resources) the gains from being at the top (Mijs, 2021; Piketty, 2014). At the same time, those ‘feeling currents’ normalized by the cultural turn of recognition politics (Fraser, 2017), now include anxiety and nervousness (Davies, 2018), viewed by neoliberals as the necessary emotions to spur us into action. Its pathological effects are to be cured by grit, resilience, emotional intelligence and mindfulness, all services to be purchased in the marketplace. Here neoliberalism saturates the ideological space with options which, whatever their advertised incompatibility, sets up new products to be purchased while leaving capitalism and its reproduction untouched.

This class strategy, of an obscured and made less visible low intensity civil war, is aimed at advancing and embedding a new matrix of power and this social control that, when installed, produces its own winners and losers. It is also a class war in that aggressive forms of competition are viewed as crucial to selecting out those survival traits that are the markers of productivity and capitalist innovation and development. With class relations disguised as differences, and differences reduced to and represented as individual abilities, aspirations, and effort, this new ‘hidden curriculum’ of the ordinal society turns to statistical fairness (Fourcade, 2021) as a mode of legitimation. Analysing ordinal governance through the lenses of class war (Gueguen et al., 2021) aims to make visible the ordinal society’s moral economy, its politics of holding social order together through social conflict, and a soulless solitary solidarity based on acts of consumption and consumer activism.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/T015519/1].