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Stigma and the Journey of Extreme Social Mobility: Notes on the Management of Discreditable Identities in a High Status University Degree

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Stigmas, Work and Organizations

Part of the book series: Palgrave Explorations in Workplace Stigma ((PAEWS))

Abstract

Despite significant policy efforts to widen participation, non-traditional students continue to be under-represented in high status university degrees such as medicine. Although this issue is both global and intransigent, relatively little is known about the journeys of non-traditional students who do succeed in gaining access to high status degrees and their associated professions. Theirs is a unique story of extreme social mobility, where students move from humble family of origin into university and the elite organisational contexts of medical education and associated clinical settings. This chapter draws on a qualitative study of first-in-family medical students to explore their experience of extreme social mobility and the overt and subtle forms of stigma they face. Using Goffman’s notion of discreditable identity, the chapter provides a fine grained account of how students negotiate and resist stigma to tactically incorporate aspects of their working-class or cultural selves into emerging professional identities.

Thus, whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the finger tips of society have reached bluntly into the contact, even here putting us in our place. (Goffman, 1963, p. 53)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Erica Southgate

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  1. Erica Southgate
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    S. Bruce Thomson

  2. University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Gina Grandy

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Southgate, E. (2018). Stigma and the Journey of Extreme Social Mobility: Notes on the Management of Discreditable Identities in a High Status University Degree. In: Thomson, S., Grandy, G. (eds) Stigmas, Work and Organizations . Palgrave Explorations in Workplace Stigma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56476-4_9

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