Adherence, resistance, negotiation: how working-class students perceive and navigate the ‘rules of the game’

This paper examines how working-class students understand and navigate the implicit rules of the game in UK universities. Although higher education is shaped by middle-class norms, research often frames working-class students through deficit based accounts. This study instead foregrounds their agency and the ways they interpret and respond to institutional expectations. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field, it explores how classed identities shape experiences of belonging, participation and recognition. The research is based on twenty nine semi-structured interviews with students who identified as working-class, interpreted through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Analysis identified three patterned orientations towards the implicit ‘rules’ of the university field. Adherence involves aligning with dominant norms, Negotiation involves selective engagement, and Resistance involves questioning their legitimacy. These typologies show how class is lived and negotiated within higher education and contribute to sociological work on classed experience, agency and inequality.