In this article, I examine a case involving an equity-minded parent caught in a quandary about which school to select for her child, knowing that her decision may have consequences for others. To do so, I heuristically construct a fictional portrait and explore the deliberative process a parent might have through a dialogue taking place among ‘friends’, where each friend personifies a different set of ethical considerations. I then briefly consider two competing philosophical assessments but argue that neither position helpfully (...) assists in resolving the quandary. To conclude, I ask the provocative question whether parental motives – but also their school choices – actually matter if the inequitable outcomes seem to remain unchanged. (shrink)

Discussions in sociological theory often focus on ontological questions on the nature of social reality. Against the underlying epistemological realism, I argue for a constructivist notion of theory: Theories are webs of concepts that we use to guide empirical observations and to make sense of them. We cannot know the real features of the social world, only what our theoretical perspectives make us see. Theories therefore represent social phenomena by highlighting certain features and relating them in a logical system. In (...) this system, theoretical sentences can be considered true if they meet two conditions: They are consistent with the theory at hand and adequately map empirically observable relations between objects denoted by theoretical constructs. Truth is therefore relative to a perspective; it is not objectively determinable. Theories should be assessed not for their ontologies but for what they allow us to see and how they connect to empirical observations. (shrink)

Dada continues to attract a small following among scholars, but has perhaps not yet been recognized as providing invaluable insight into the underlying functions and potentials of culture generally. This article explores the nature and theoretical import of Dada, and two radically different visions of culture as they might try to accommodate and explain Dada. Models of culture taken from Bourdieu and Nietzsche are brought to bear, first on Dada, and then on each other, with the aim of developing a (...) theoretically informed understanding of Dada, and also demonstrating the practical, political and philosophical difficulties involved in choosing between a conflict model of culture and an `existential' model. Ultimately, both models are found to be helpful but insufficient at providing an adequate account of Dada, and it is suggested that present models of cultural analysis can benefit by revisiting both Dada and Nietzsche, trying to incorporate their insights and critically evaluate their visions of culture. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

Theorizing a sociology of emotion that links micro-level resources to macro-level forces, this article extends previous work on emotional capital in relation to emotional experiences and management. Emerging from Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, emotional capital is a form of cultural capital that includes the emotion-specific, trans-situational resources that individuals activate and embody in distinct fields. Contrary to prior conceptualizations, I argue that emotional capital is neither wholly gender-neutral nor exclusively feminine. Men may lay claim to emotional capital as a (...) valued resource within particular fields. The concept of emotional capital should be seen as distinct from emotion management and felt emotional experience and distinctions between primary and secondary sources of capital clarify the simultaneously durable and evolving nature of capital and the habitus. To illustrate these conceptual refinements, I use interview and diary data from male nurses. Men bring primary emotional capital, developed during primary socialization, to the nursing profession while also developing secondary capital through occupational socialization centered on empathy and compassion. The construct of emotional capital is refined as a structured yet dynamic resource developed through primary and secondary socialization and activated and embodied in everyday emotion practice. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical framework of cultural reproduction theory and ecosystem theory, this paper explores the impact of migrant children's identification with the college entrance examination policy on their educational expectations and the associated underlying mechanisms from the micro, meso, and macro levels. In total, 1,770 questionnaires were collected from students, and 436 people were interviewed, including students, their teachers, and their parents. They are all from China. Through multidimensional analysis, the results indicated that both individual academic achievement and family (...) social capital have positive impacts on migrant children's educational expectations and that social class segregation in school and perceived social discrimination have negative impacts on their educational expectations. Migrant children's identification with the policy has a significant positive impact on these children's educational expectations. Their identification with the policy enhances the positive impact of individual academic achievement and family social capital on their educational expectations and partially weakens the negative impact of social class segregation in school and perceived social discrimination on their educational expectations. The analysis suggests that college matriculation policy for migrant children drives a compensation mechanism that involves the “principle of justice”, a cultural mechanism that involves “promoting learning through examinations”, and an institutional mechanism involving “urban-rural integration” to increase educational expectations. This study enriches and develops the expectation theory of migrant children and provides a policy reference for local governments to improve their policies for college entrance examinations for migrant children and to promote household registration system reform. (shrink)

The present qualitative study analyzes how cultural capital, gender, class, and family involvement impact Chinese female students’ aspirations of studying in the United Kingdom. We investigated how these factors facilitate or limit female students’ choice of study destination, as well as choices of subject and program. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. A total of 25 young Chinese female students from different subject areas took part in the semi-structured interviews. Out of those, five (...) students are undergraduates, 11 are taught master’s students, and the other nine students are doctoral candidates. Most of the undergraduates and postgraduates are from middle-class families, while some of the Ph.D. students are from working-class families. The results of the content analysis were examined in light of gender and cultural capital theory. It was found that although there exist differences within the middle-class families regarding the possession of cultural capital, many female students from middle-class families obtained high levels of cultural capital, and these students usually internalized the idea of pursuing a place in the United Kingdom’s tertiary education system as a way of enhancing women’s competency in future job markets. Furthermore, compared with working-class students, many respondents’ choice of subject and program was highly gendered, as their families expect them to live a feminine life by choosing “appropriate” feminine subjects. Therefore, despite having the privilege to study abroad, female middle-class students’ educational choices are still constrained by gender and class. (shrink)

In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic (...) rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before. (shrink)

Shadow education, or supplementary private tutoring, has expanded to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, capitalising on the desires of parents and their children to succeed and excel in education. In doing so, shadow education draws upon and reproduces cultural capital represented by knowledge, skills and educational credentials and symbolic capital constituted in the prestige, privilege and legitimacy of educational achievement. The study on which this article is based adopts a critical discourse analytic approach to examine the websites of five leading (...) private tuition centres in Singapore as seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The aim is to identify specific forms of cultural capital, examine how they are harnessed for promotional purposes, and show how this reflects and reproduces the forms and representations of educational achievement and success valued in Singapore. Findings offer a deeper understanding of the marketing discourse of shadow education that pivots on the quality of private tutors, success beyond examinations and school, and concrete representations of social distinction and achievement. More significantly, the study contributes to research situated at the nexus of shadow education and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to shed light on how shadow education reflects and magnifies broader socio-cultural orientations and socio-economic structures. (shrink)

The concepts of habitus and capital are crucial in the research tradition of social and cultural reproduction. This article applies both terms to an analysis of aspects of the life histories of low-income African American men. In exploring how their past experiences relate to their present-day statuses as nonmobile individuals, this article also revisits and redefines the utility of habitus and capital as conceptual devices for the study of social inequality. It expands the empirical terrain covered by the concept of (...) capital to include that which allows low-income individuals to manage their existence in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities while also hindering their mobility in the broader social world. One implication of this approach is an improved cultural analysis of low-income individuals. The improvement lies in that their behavior can be better understood as reflections of their readings of social reality, which are based upon the material and ideational resources that they have accumulated throughout their lives, and not simply as manifestations of flawed value-systems or normative orientations. (shrink)

Emirbayer and Johnson critique the failure to engage fully Bourdieu’s relational analysis in empirical work, but are weak in giving direction for rectifying the problem. Following their recommendation for studying organizations-in-fields and organizations-as-fields, I argue for the benefits of analogical comparison using case studies of organizations as the units of analysis. Doing so maximizes the number of Bourdieusian concepts that can be deployed in an explanation. Further, it maximizes discovery of the oft-neglected links among history, competition, resources, sites of contestation (...) and struggle, relations of dominance and domination, and reproduction of inequality. Perhaps most important, case studies can identify the connection between macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors in the formation and shaping of habitus. To support my claims empirically, I draw from case study research (Vaughan The challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA, 1996; Signals and interpretive work: The role of culture in a theory of practical action. pp. 28–56, 2002) that verifies Bourdieu’s as the “Theory of Practical Action” that supplies the micro-level component to the new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, Introduction. pp. 1–41, 1991). (shrink)

Our article addresses the question how to assess and measure the value or price of knowledge, and probes the issue from a variety of social scientific and practical perspectives. Against the background of a sociological concept of knowledge, economic, political, social, and juridical perspectives that may lead to a price of knowledge are discussed. We observe that knowledge is seen to play an ever greater role within as well as across economies and politics; that its embodiment makes it difficult to (...) divorce it from its carriers; and that knowledge is deeply entrenched in questions of social relations and stratification. As such, it is cannot be captured in a straightforward manner, especially given the persistent stand-off between its individual, economic, and public relevancies and benefits. A simple arithmetic of the price of knowledge fails. (shrink)