Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.     

Youth,Mobility, and the Emotional Burdens of youxue (Travel and Study): A Case Study of Chinese Students in Italy

Based on fieldwork in China and Italy, this article examines the affective dimension of middle-class Chinese students’ youxue (travel and study) practices in Italy. With the liberalization of state policy in China’s self-funded study abroad market and the proliferation of educational intermediaries, youxue has become a special type of educational consumption that caters to the middle-class Chinese family’s desire for transnational mobility and cosmopolitan life styles. The blurring of the line between travel and study points to the open-ended and multi-linear nature of transnational student mobility. However, due to the limitations and pitfalls in international education policies in both the sending and the receiving countries, Chinese students’ youxue experiences in Italy are marked by notable contradictions between mobility and immobility, hopes and frustrations, self-appreciation and self-reproach.     

The relational costs of crossing class lines

How do low socioeconomic status students navigate cross-class interactions in extremely unequal contexts? Previous research has described the high costs of college integration for underprivileged students, which in turn, negatively impact academic performance and general wellbeing. These studies tend to concentrate on cultural capital costs, such as catching up with assumed middle-class or elite capital and dealing with two worlds. Less has been said about social capital costs, the costs of making friends, especially more privileged friends. Through 61 in-depth interviews with various types of students as part of a broader ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the experiences of low-income scholarship holders in an elite institution in a very unequal society, Colombia. Rather than isolating themselves or resorting to safe homophilic relations, they faced their new elite environment engaging with the hidden relational cost of making friends with more affluent students. In so doing, they had to overcome fears and experiences of discrimination and micro-aggressions, as well as cultural and economic capital barriers, and employed either camouflaging or disclosure strategies, sometimes becoming culturally and socially omnivorous. Symbolic belonging to the institution and the acquisition of middle-class cultural capital were among the benefits that made overcoming the costs worthy. Our results shed light on what institutions can do to reduce the costs for underprivileged students and, theoretically, unveil an important mechanism and barrier for social mobility: building cross-class ties.     

Unequally Adrift: How Social Class and College Context Shape Students’ Mentorship Experiences

Faculty mentorship is a highly advantageous yet under-explored form of social capital which can grant access to co-curriculars (e.g., research assistantships), ensure strong letters of recommendation, and more. It is also typically informal and dependent on student initiative, requiring that students be skilled at engaging educational authority figures. Privileged students are most likely to have such skills as part of their dominant cultural capital, making faculty mentorship a site of social reproduction. To explore variations in this process, I compare two institution types: a small, teaching/undergraduate-focused regional university and a large, research-intensive flagship. In interviews with 68 working- and upper-middle-class students, I find that college context mediates the relationship of class background and faculty mentorship. Upper-middle-class students fostered advantageous faculty relationships at both universities, but working-class students diverged: at the flagship, they rarely approached professors in search of mentorship, while those at the regional university described close, beneficial connections with professors. I discuss working-class students’ dissimilar experiences in terms of each university’s structural and cultural characteristics (organizational habitus), particularly their institutional focus and size. I argue that through their particular organizational features, colleges can both reproduce and reduce inequalities, challenging the determinacy of precollege socialization in education.     

Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements

This paper examines the relationship between social class and social mobilization through reviewing the case of new social movements. The middle-class membership of new social movements is well documented but poorly explained by current New Class, New Social Movement, and Cultural Shift theories. These theories fail to recognize the interdependence between interests, values, and expressed ideas. Class culture provides an alternative framework for interpreting the complex relationships between class interests and consciousness in these movements. Through a comparison of working- and middle-class cultures, it is proposed that social class orders consciousness and shapes the interpretation of interests. Class cultures produce distinct class forms of political and organizational behavior while not defining any particular content of movement issues or politics. In particular, the middle-class membership of new social movements is explained by the cultural form of these movements which is distinctly middle class.     

Capitalizing on Culture: How Cultural Capital Shapes Educational Experiences and Outcomes

Social reproduction theory suggests that the educational system perpetuates inequality by rewarding the cultural capital of students from privileged social classes. This article reviews the empirical evidence for this view of education, highlighting debates in the field and directions for future research. Questions of exactly what cultural attributes constitute cultural capital, why cultural capital is linked to improved educational outcomes, and what kinds of students benefit from cultural capital are addressed.     

Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not.     

Immigrant socioeconomic mobility in the United States: Mechanisms of inequality and the role of ethnic capital

We review recent social science research on the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants to the United States by focusing on the educational, occupational, and income attainments among immigrant adults, the first‐generation, and the educational attainment of their children, the New Second‐Generation. Existing research has identified significant inequalities in educational attainment between second‐generation Asian and Latinx immigrant groups. Researchers have also highlighted the importance of ethnic capital for mobility, but we find that they have largely proceeded with the assumption that co‐ethnic ties are easily available as a benefit for immigrants upon resettlement. We propose that future research on immigrant socioeconomic mobility should incorporate conceptual insights from economic and cultural sociology as well as use comparative ethnographic research designs to directly observe how ethnic capital operates to challenge or reinforce patterns of socioeconomic inequality.     

Zentrum und Peripherie im globalen Wissenschaftssystem

We use an experimental design to analyse the effect of symbolic capital of a nation’s higher education system and of single universities on students’ opportunities for international mobility. Fake applications of international doctoral students were sent to German sociology professors, who were asked to serve as supervisors during a research visit in Germany. Our fake applicants come from four different universities: Yale, Pennsylvania State University, National University Singapore, and Vietnam National University Hanoi. The results show that applicants from both US institutions get more positive, more informative and more personal feedback than applicants from Singapore and Vietnam. Moreover, the symbolic capital of a university seems more important than the quality of a specific department, which is problematic in normative terms.     

WHY DOES CULTURAL CAPITAL MATTER FOR HIGH SCHOOL ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE? An Empirical Assessment of Teacher‐Selection and Self‐Selection Mechanisms as Explanations of the Cultural Capital Effect

Many scholars have argued that students' cultural capital has a positive effect on academic performance because students with cultural capital have better relationships with their teachers (the "teacher-selection" effect). However, theory also points to the importance of a "self-selection" effect, whereby students' cultural capital has a positive effect on academic performance by enhancing students' expectations for future educational attainment. Using National Education Longitudinal Study data, I estimate structural equation models to empirically assess the extent to which teachers' perceptions of students and educational expectations act as mechanisms of the cultural capital effect on grades and standardized test scores. The results show that, contrary to theoretical expectations, teachers' perceptions do not mediate the effect of cultural capital on academic performance. However, educational expectations account for portions of the cultural capital effect on grades and test scores.     

Cultural transmission,educational attainment and social mobility

This paper examines the relationship between cultural socialisation, educational attainment and intergenerational social mobility. Picking up on debates about the transmission of cultural capital and social advantage, we use data from the Taking Part Survey of England to analyse how far socialisation into cultural activities and encouragement play a role in educational attainment, intergenerational mobility and in the reproduction of class. This survey has unprecedented data on whether respondents had been taken to museums/art galleries, theatre/dance/classical music performances, sites of historic interest, and libraries when they were growing up. This is buttressed by information on how much parents or other adults encouraged the respondents to read books or to be creatively active in different domains of the arts, literature and music. Using these rich measures of childhood socialisation, we can show that part of the effect of parental class on educational attainment is due to the transmission of this kind of cultural capital. Moreover, this transmission also has a direct effect on the level of educational attainment. In a similar fashion, respondents who have experienced a higher intensity of cultural socialisation are more likely to be upwardly mobile, and likewise, cultural transmission has a positive effect on the prevention of downward mobility among service class children. These results are discussed in the light of current issues in British mobility research and its treatment of cultural aspects of class and mobility.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

Cultural capital or relative risk aversion? Two mechanisms for educational inequality compared1

In this paper we empirically examined two explanatory mechanisms for educational inequality: cultural reproduction and relative risk aversion, using survey data taken from secondary school pupils in Amsterdam. Cultural reproduction theory seeks to explain class variations in schooling by cultural differences between social classes. Relative risk aversion theory argues that educational inequalities can be understood by between-class variation in the necessity of pursuing education at branching points in order to avoid downward mobility. We showed that class variations in early demonstrated ability are for a substantial part cultural: cultural capital - measured by parental involvement in highbrow culture - affected school performance at the primary and secondary level. However, relative risk aversion - operationalized by being concerned with downward mobility - strongly affects schooling ambitions, whereas cultural capital had no effect. Thus, we conclude that 'primary effects' of social origin on schooling outcomes are manifested through cultural capital and not through relative risk aversion (in addition to other potential sources of class variations such as genetics). Relative risk aversion, and not cultural capital, affects schooling ambitions, which is relevant for our understanding of secondary effects.     

Contesting racism: how do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with thirty-two black British professionals, and ethnographic work in middle-class cultural spaces across London, this paper asks ‘How do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?’ I argue that the black middle-class contest the racial hierarchy at three levels through their cultural consumption: the material, the ideological, and the symbolic. At the material level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms they decode as ‘white’ in order to establish an equity with whites in levels of cultural capital. At the ideological level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms that uplift meanings and representations of blackness, thus challenging controlling images of blackness. Lastly, at the symbolic level, black middle-class folks create and sustain cultural spaces where black people’s cultural and symbolic knowledge is given proper recognition and authority.     

Cultural capital and perception of teacher-student relationships: Uncovering inequalities at schools in China

A long tradition in stratification research argues students with higher cultural capital are likely to be treated by their teachers as possessing the “right culture,” which positively affects their academic performance. Nevertheless, the literature has paid little attention to the role of students' perception in this process. Using two waves of the China Educational Panel Survey, we investigate how students' cultural capital affects their own understanding of teacher-student interactions, including its gender difference. Fixed effects regressions show a substantially positive effect of cultural capital on the perceived frequency of teachers praising and calling on students to answer questions across subjects. Nonetheless, we also find the lack of cultural capital is not punished and that the cultural capital's effect varies across its specific components and gender. These findings pave the way for elucidating the entire causal chain of intergenerational social inequality via cultural capital, teacher bias, students’ perception, and their educational outcomes.     

Conquering with capital: social,cultural, and economic capital’s role in combating socioeconomic disadvantage and contributing to educational attainment

While socioeconomic barriers to learning have been well-documented by education, sociology, and social policy scholars, further research is needed to understand how students with low-socioeconomic status excel in high-performing schools. The collection and analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with female college students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds provide rich insights into the stark differences between the educational practices of low and high-SES students. Building on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how habitus and capital influence practices in the field of education exposes unique, strategic practices that low-SES students use to attain educational success within a system of reproduction and power. While entering a high-performing school is often perceived as a definitive step for accessing high-quality educational resources, my findings illustrate how it is actually an important intermediary step within a more complex process. Increasing educational opportunity and attainment for low-SES students requires improving their access to social, cultural, and economic capital through knowledgeable mentors who contribute to a habitus and portfolio of capital which enable practices to successfully navigate and challenge the educational system.     

Translating Bourdieu: cultural capital and the English middle class in historical perspective

This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.     

Navigating the First Year of College: Siblings,Parents, and First-Generation Students’ Experiences

Although college education is a key to upward mobility, students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to enter and complete college than their more advantaged peers. Prior literature has illuminated how cultural capital contributes to these disparities. An alternative conceptualization of cultural capital, however, suggests that it can also play a role in social mobility. In this study, we build on and extend the literature on cultural mobility by proposing that exposure to education can benefit not only individuals but also families. We examine the influence of older siblings who attended college on the experiences of younger college-going siblings in families where neither parent has completed college (i.e., first-generation families). We find that students rarely rely on their older siblings as sources of information and advice, except in a few instances where older siblings attended the same institution. However, both the topics and nature of conversations between parents and students differ between families with and without older college-educated siblings. The primary benefit of having college-educated siblings is thus related to students’ engagement with and support received from parents. These findings have important implications for cultural capital research and understanding experiences of first-generation college students.     

Academic Undermatch: How General and Specific Cultural Capital Structure Inequality

Recent literature has added another dimension to the well‐documented patterns of social class inequality in education: academic undermatch. Undermatch (which occurs when students attend institutions of lower selectivity than they are academically qualified to attend) is both widespread and unequal, with students from less advantaged families more likely to undermatch. Although proliferating, the research on undermatch has focused primarily on documenting the extent of, and less on exploring the mechanisms underlying, undermatch. Moreover, this literature has developed largely independent of the sociological research on cultural capital. Therefore, when scholars consider underlying mechanisms, they often focus narrowly on college‐specific information, without considering the broader cultural context in which students are embedded. Drawing on the literature on undermatch, as well as the sociological research on cultural capital, I differentiate between general and specific cultural capital. Moreover, instead of simply estimating whether students undermatch or not, I consider different types of undermatch. Results from the Educational Longitudinal Survey reveal that the effects of cultural capital are indeed heterogeneous, both with respect to its relationship to undermatch and its contribution to social class inequality. Findings have important implications for understanding undermatch and the role of cultural capital in reducing and reproducing social inequality.