Os dramas da mobilidade social: mal-estar, moralidade e classe social

Abstract

This thesis investigates the experience of upward social mobility based on the connections between emotions, morality and social class. In this sense, it is part of a set of contemporary works in social sciences that have been engaged in advancing a multidimensional and qualitative approach to social mobility, investigating it from the experiences and subjective representations of actors and the effects of social displacements on different aspects of their everyday lives (BERTAUX; THOMPSON, 1997; PAYNE; LAWLER, 2018). The hypothesis explored throughout the research consists of the idea according to which the experience of social mobility is lived and signified, from the point of view of the actors, as an affective and morally controversial, difficult and crisis experience. Its implications generated internal conflicts and relational tensions that, at the same time, experienced the relationship of individuals with themselves and their adjustment to the social environments of origin and destination and expose their most cherished normative concerns with the meanings, judgments and moral estimates of their life stories, identities, belongings, aspirations and merit. I approach the subjective trajectories of men and women with the aim of understanding not only an affective economy of social mobility and its “hidden injuries of class” (SENNETT; COOB, 1977) but the ways in which socially mobile actors try to appropriate their social ascension, building and mobilizing narratives and repertoires to assign moral meaning and claim value to what they value and admire with respect to themselves and their life stories. As an empirical investigation of the subjective experience of social mobility and its internal and normative tensions, I use the procedure of in-depth interviews with a retrospective and biographical perspective and with emphasis on the methodological strategy of life narratives (BERTAUX, 2005). The field of interlocutors studied is composed of thirty-six individuals, living in the city of Natal/RN and metropolitan region, and who can be felt and self-perceived as having experienced trajectories of social ascension, seen comparatively in relation to schooling, occupation and residential location from their parents. The constructed theoretical-analytical framework adopts, following an effort to complement and mutually criticize the perspectives, the following theoretical coordinates: the praxiology of Pierre Bourdieu, the sociology of critical moments by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot and the sociology of morals and contemporary values in its dialogue with the experience of class and inequalities in current societies, carried out mainly by names such as Michéle Lamont and Andrew Sayer.