Breaking or reinforcing the vicious circles of class inequality? Exploring the micro-mechanisms of early interventions in preventive educational, social and health policies.

Policies fighting class inequalities by early interventions in day care and schools are prominent in both Europe and USA. However, such interventions may not always be successful. By focusing on street-level implementation, this paper explores why. Drawing on the literature on street-level bureaucracy (e.g. Lipsky, Maynard-Moody and Musheno) as well as the literature on class, inequality and mechanisms within stratification (e.g. Bourdieu, Lamont), the paper discusses micro-mechanisms at work in the implementation of preventive social, education and health policies. Especially it is explored, how social class background and lifestyles of professionals may be decisive for policy interventions. Based on a qualitative research project from Denmark, with 58 interviews and vignette-experiments among schoolteachers, day-care professionals and health nurses, the paper show how there is an effect of social class background and lifestyles, and a tendency for stereotyped reasoning and class-biased conceptions of normality to influence professional intervention, thus tending to reinforce rather than break patterns of inequality. Further, it is explored, how social composition of local administrative units (i.e. social homogeneity or heterogeneity) may impact the relationship between professional social background
and policy intervention. In other words it is explored, whether the tendency of
reinforcing inequality is smaller in heterogeneous neighborhoods than
homogeneous in neighborhoods.