ABSTRACT
This chapter presents contemporary variations of Bourdieu’s thought alongside the research participants’ narratives to explore whether class habitus guides people’s viewpoints and actions across social fields, or, rather, both clients and practitioners of different class belonging might relate in some realms and agree on certain aspects but not others. It shows that habitus is also shaped by factors beyond the family’s socioeconomic background anad can be fragmented across realms as well as rationally regulated, rather than functioning merely subconsciously. The chapter uses these findings to disentangle whether the class-conditioned discrepancies and/or commonalities in individuals’ cognitive and affective dispositions impact how young people’s offending behaviour and their parents’ childrearing difficulties are negotiated and responded to in professional interactions. Drawing on Sayer’s moral understanding of class, the last part of the chapter indicates that people of different classes evaluate what matters for their wellbeing rather uniformly, so they are not only instinctually led by their practical sense, but also react according to their common understandings of fairness. Nevertheless, individuals, including professionals, can still assess people’s behaviour based on class stereotypes and markers of class despite their propensity to be reflexive, which can result in unjustified differentiation.
