Abstract
In this chapter, the authors argue that a middle class is not a new phenomenon for Ghana: it has existed since the late nineteenth century. In both the past and today, belonging to the middle class has been based on occupation and education. This chapter looks at the complex historic dynamics of three aspects of middle classness in Ghana: class structure, individual social mobility, and the relative status of two occupational groups, lawyers and teachers. While the size of the middle class has grown considerably in recent years due to a buoyant economy and expanding tertiary education, it was less visible in the 1970s and 1980s: due to the political and economic crises of that era, the entire class structure moved down and up again in economic terms, like an elevator. The key to understanding this process, the authors hold, is Bourdieu’s insight that economic capital does not necessarily constitute the most central dimension of social inequality. In Ghana, access to middle class education and occupations has been consistently mediated through multiple and various forms of capital.
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Notes
- 1.
For historic studies see for example the chapters by Sarre and Heer in this volume.
- 2.
For studies on highly educated men and women from northern Ghana see Behrends (2002); Behrends and Lentz (2012); and Lentz (2008, 2009, 2014). In this article, we also did not take into account transnational migration but focused on internal modes of class formation . For status-related changes through transnational migration, see Nieswand (2011, 2014).
- 3.
While the population has grown from about 6 million at independence in 1957 to about 25 million in 2010, the number of lawyers has risen 20 times, outpacing population growth by a factor of four. The teaching profession and many other occupational groups experienced a similar trend. In relation to population growth, the growth of the middle class has been even larger than four-fold.
- 4.
See Beck (2003 [1986]) on the elevator effect.
- 5.
Similarly, Bochow in this volume describes education as a key way to climb up the social ladder in Botswana.
- 6.
Their income, power, and wealth made them elite according to the rather restricted definition suggested by Lentz (2016, 40).
- 7.
Conspicuous consumption is the purchasing of luxury goods and the publicly displayed spending of money in order to attain or maintain social status (Veblen 2015 [1899]).
- 8.
The emergence of this group was not unique to Ghana. Miescher cites examples from colonial Tanzania and Congo . However, in Ghana—as well as in other locations on the West African coastline—this group had a particular long history reaching back to the nineteenth century (Miescher 2005, 85).
- 9.
Boundaries are established to exclude people one refuses to associate with and towards whom rejection or aggression are shown. All people participate in the production and re-enactment of competing boundaries through the necessary involvement in a wide range of groups. Members in professional groups, social classes, and ethnic groups or residents of a community often engage in boundary work (Lamont 1992, 10) .
- 10.
Report by District Commissioner, Shama, for the quarter ending 31 March 1898, enclosed in Dispatch No. 330 of 4 August 1898, from Hodgson to Chamberlain; CO/69/319; cited after Kimble (1963, 40).
- 11.
Census of the Population, 1911 (Accra, n.d.); cited after Kimble (1963, 40–41).
- 12.
All names are pseudonyms.
- 13.
Standard VII was the middle school leaving certificate.
- 14.
Lincoln’s Inn was one of the four Inns of Court in London where barristers were called to the bar.
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Budniok, J., Noll, A. (2018). The Ghanaian Middle Class, Social Stratification, and Long-Term Dynamics of Upward and Downward Mobility of Lawyers and Teachers. In: Kroeker, L., O'Kane, D., Scharrer, T. (eds) Middle Classes in Africa. Frontiers of Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62148-7_5
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