We hope that over the course of this book we have made our key findings eminently clear: that people from working-class backgrounds earn less in top jobs than their privileged colleagues; that this can only be partially attributed to conventional measures of ‘merit’; and that more powerful drivers are rooted in the misrecognition of classed self-presentation as ‘talent’, work cultures historically shaped by the privileged, the affordances of the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, and sponsored mobility premised on class-cultural homophily.

But we also want to stake out what we think is important and innovative about our approach, not only our findings. We should say from the outset that a discussion of this kind necessitates a sustained engagement with sociological theory and literature, and therefore a somewhat different writing style. While the bulk of this book has been addressed to those who are not specialists in the sociology of class, mobility and work, here we allow ourselves to write more directly for fellow scholars. In this way, we have structured the book so that non-academic readers can easily move from here to the Conclusion (Chapter Eleven) if they wish. However, at the same time, we would urge all readers to stay with us. Academic discussions about class and mobility can be dense but, at root, they address questions that we think everyone invested in this area is interested in: what we mean by class, how we should measure social mobility, and why our class origins appear to matter more in some areas of the labour market than others.

To address these foundational questions, we argue in this chapter that Pierre Bourdieu’s central concepts of habitus, capital and field provide a powerful set of tools to think with. In fact, as we go on to explain, a Bourdieusian lens has flanked this entire book, informing both our research design and the manner in which we analyse our results. Yet (to improve readability!) this framing has been left largely implicit until now. Here, then, we sketch out more explicitly our Bourdieu-inspired ‘class ceiling’ approach to social mobility, and how we believe it offers a way of addressing some of the limitations that currently impair mobility analysis. The chapter is structured in three parts. First, we explain how our class ceiling approach is strongly informed by two research traditions that normally lie outside mainstream mobility analysis.