Class Diplomacy: Cross-Class Friendship and Social Mobility

Class Diplomacy: Cross-Class Friendship and Social Mobility

A range of influential studies in the US and UK have recently suggested that cross-class friendships are a pivotal driver of upward social mobility. Drawing on large-scale friendship data from Facebook, this work shows that people from low-income backgrounds who hold friendships with those from more advantaged backgrounds tend to go on to obtain higher incomes themselves. What is presumed in this strongly quantitative literature is that connections to class-privileged individuals produce tangible forms of social capital; imparting valuable educational or labour market information, providing mentorship or job referrals, and boosting aspiration. However, these findings sit in tension with a broader sociological field indicating that friendship relies on ties of reciprocity and the associated expectation that friends treat one another as equals. In this talk we interrogate this tension by drawing on 42 in-depth interviews with people in cross-class friendships in the UK. Our preliminary results indicate that while friendships formed across class do routinely produce social capital for those from less advantaged backgrounds, this inter-class dimension of the friendship also generates feelings of inequality or indebtedness. In some instances, this is the source of ongoing distance or distress, or cited as a key reason for a friendship’s eventual breakdown. In other cases, these class-based tensions are negotiated successfully with both parties taking part in a delicate process of what we call ‘class diplomacy’. Here we discuss three expressions of this diplomacy among friends: using humour to recognise and diffuse class tensions; prioritising emotional intimacy over discussions of class to protect the friendship; and openly confronting class differences to build empathy and shared understanding. Finally, our findings suggest that when these inequalities are negotiated successfully, the ensuing friendship has a mutually socialising effect that is associated less with social mobility and individual advantage, and more a heightened political sensitivity to class inequality.

Bios

Sam Friedman is Professor of Sociology at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is a sociologist of class and inequality, and his research focuses in particular on the cultural dimensions of contemporary class division. He is the author of The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged, Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour, and co-author of Social Class in the 21st Century. His new book (with Professor Aaron Reeves) Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite was named as a ‘2024 Book of the Year’ by The Economist and The Times, and won the 2025 Mary Douglas Book Prize from the American Sociological Association. He is also the co-editor of The British Journal of Sociology.

Rose Butler is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University who specialises in class, migration and inequality through the lens of relationships and family life. She is the author of Love Across Class with Eve Vincent; Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods; and co-editor of Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglosphere. Her most recent special issue, Class and Migration: Interrogating Class Across Borders, is forthcoming with Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies with Sylvia Ang and Christina Ho.