Post-Bourdieu: Ontologically Distinct Forms of Class in Contemporary Society

A University of Melbourne Essay Assignment

Under the 3rd-Year Sociology subject "Contemporary Social Theory"

Passed with High Distinction (H1)

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By Benjamin L., written during Semester 1, 2013

Tutor's comments (E. Sayes):

This is an ambitious essay, that is wide ranging. You have a clear argument that you attempt to advance. I'm not convinced by it in the end, I must say. You seem to be quick to discard Bourdieu, for reasons that I'm not sure I understand. The note you finish on would seem to be the best place to start: what role does cultural capital/habitus play in those contexts. I would have liked a greater engagement at the level of theory. It's fine being very critical, but you need to clearly explain why. Overall a good essay.

Introduction

         Bourdieu’s writings concerns the conceptualization and (re)production of class. Class is a form of distinction, a relational property between actors based on their location in a hierarchical social space (Bourdieu, 1991). One’s location is determined by one’s relative abundance of ‘capital’, a generic term for assets that enable the cumulative acquisition of other assets (Wildhagen, 2009). Economic capital refers to assets with a monetary value, while cultural capital is the conventional "high-status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods, and credentials) used for social exclusion" (Lamont & Lareau, 1988 in Wildhagen, 2009). Economic capital can be converted into cultural capital through cultivation, and cultural capital can provide opportunities for acquiring more economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Cultural capital is partially embodied as a habitus – the attitudes, knowledge, personalities, dispositions, or skills that makes one comfortable and familiar with a given social milieu (Xu & Hampden-Thompson, 2012).

         However, class is not a unitary phenomenon. In Bourdieu’s (1991) account, class is a product of hierarchical differentiation where the upper classes are only ‘upper’ in relation to the lower classes – it suggests that various types of class can exist wherever social stratification and inequality is present. This essay argues that there are multiple contemporary and ontologically distinct forms of class besides those based on capital. Differences within each type of class are produced through qualitatively distinct processes that are associated with globalization and cannot be attributed to one’s cultural capital or habitus. We will examine the merits of Bourdieu’s account before discussing more contemporary forms of class.

Cultural Capital as Class Differentiator

         Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and class reproduction is called the ‘cultural reproduction model’ (Xu & Hampden-Thompson, 2012). It holds that children initially acquire their cultural capital and habitus from their families. Depending on their class background, students’ habitus resemble the scholastic, upper class habitus desired by the education system to varying extents (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Schools transmit knowledge in codes that are better understood by children with greater linguistic and cultural capital, thus making it easier for upper-class children to succeed academically while alienating lower-class students who must invest more effort to achieve the same results. This determines the schools or streams that children are likely to qualify for at each stage of their education and ultimately affects their career options and chances in life. In this fashion, “social origin predetermines educational destiny” (p.80, ibid.).

         This prediction is internationally substantiated by regression analyses where economic and/or cultural capital predicts educational attainment on standardized tests (Xu & Hampden, 2012; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). This is especially strong in countries with liberal welfare regimes that place less emphasis on equalizing disparities in wealth, thus allowing inequalities in economic and cultural capital to create different academic trajectories for children (Xu & Hampden, 2012). According to Redford et al. (2009), affluent families actively cultivate cultural capital in their children and imbue them with a habitus that is compatible with the school environment. Such a habitus is well received by teachers from similar white-collar classes and provides these children with a sense of place in school. This sense of place encourages the pursuit of academic excellence and explains how the concerted cultivation of cultural capital is predictive of greater academic achievement. In contrast, children from capital-poor families have an incompatible habitus and feel culturally out of place in educational institutions staffed by white-collar professionals.

         While the cultural reproduction model accounts for the reproduction of class through cultural capital and education, the processes associated with globalization have created newer, ontologically distinct types of ‘class’ that require a different approach. Bourdieu’s (1991) generic definition of class as a relational difference in a hierarchical social space can still apply, but not the notion cultural capital.

Ethnicity as Class Differentiator

         Hage (1988) adapts Bourdieu’s concepts to describe how an ethnic group exercises cultural dominance over a territory. Within it, they have managerial rights over other ethnic groups and have the power to construct them as objects of spatial exclusion. This rests on their ‘practical nationality’ in a national social space, a concept analogous to cultural capital (ibid.). It is the quantitative accumulation of valued social and physical cultural styles, dispositions, and characteristics that are used to claim national belonging in everyday life. A subset of those making these claims also possess ‘governmental belonging’, a form of cultural capital that confers cultural dominance and the power to position others within the nation.

         Using these concepts, Hage (1988) argues that Australia is ‘multiculturally’ racist with an Anglo/white apex. Contemporary racism focuses on cultural difference and (un)desirability (Dunn et al., 2007). Under the ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, Anglo-centric whiteness became the definitive marker of institutional citizenship and cultural belonging (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). However, the large influx of non-European immigrants made the Whitlam government replace the White Australia policy with multiculturalism in the 1970s. Multiculturalism recognized individuals’ right to practice their own culture within legal boundaries while respecting others’ rights to do the same (Carter, 2006). It implied a plurality of legitimate Australian identities where Anglo culture was merely one-of-many, not in-itself constitutive of national identity. A conservative backlash followed in the 1990s where the Howard government disavowed cultural equality and held that Australia had a distinctively Anglo-Saxon culture that other migrants and cultures had to adapt to (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006).

         Hage (1988) argued that Australian multicultural tolerance is not antithetical to contemporary racism, but is itself a manifestation of racial dominance. Tolerance is an exhortation to refrain from intolerant behaviour like telling minorities to ‘go home’ and that this is ‘our country’ (hence not yours or less so). It is a function of cultural power and governmental belonging, one that is exposed if we make a culturally ‘absurd’ statement like asking minorities to tolerate white Australians. However, multiculturalism does not interrogate why white Australians have the cultural privilege to be intolerant, nor does it question how those with the most governmental belonging – elected officials – can declare with cultural legitimacy when Australia can be tolerant or Anglo-centric. Instead, minorities are still positioned as ‘beings of questionable status’ and Multiculturalism becomes a concession from a domineering white national ‘aristocracy’ (sic!) in a national space where governmental belonging is largely a “field of whiteness” (p.59), a whiteness invariably transmitted within families through genetic and cultural heritage. This is similar to Bourdieu’s intergenerational transmission of class via the cultural reproduction model, except that class position and status now depend on practical nationality and governmental belonging within a national social space. Hage has thus adapted Bourdieu’s relational concept of class and cultural capital to explain how Australia is ‘multiculturally’ racist with an Anglo/white apex.

Global City Relationship as Class Differentiator

            In a complete departure from Bourdieu, Sassen (2003) argues that contemporary class differentiation also depends on one’s relationship to global cities where the key functions and resources of the global economy are concentrated. Global cities require large pools of white-collar experts to manage and coordinate various aspects of the global economy, and this professional class in turn produces a demand for blue-collar workers in shops, homes, restaurants, and other service locations to serve their hectic and affluent lifestyle.

            This blue-collar “serving class” (p.262, Sassen 2003) largely consists of migrant workers who, impoverished in their home countries, are driven them to find work in global cities. Their poverty is the product of ill-fated macroeconomic policies that increased national debt and reduced local business activity, male employment, and government income. Working in global cities provides much needed personal income, profit for the placement companies that act as middlemen, and foreign exchange for governments struggling to service their debts. The serving class thus results from two dynamics: (i) the lifestyle demands of affluent professionals in global cities, and (ii) the poverty, desperation, and dearth of opportunity in struggling economies.

            This is evident in the practice of employing stay-in, female Filipino domestic workers (‘maids’) in Singapore. Consistent with Sassen’s (2003) global city, Singapore strives to be a hub for regional business ventures (Yeoh et al., 2000). This involves drawing both men and women into waged work, whose demanding careers created a market for unskilled maids to maintain their households. Maids have a “use and discard” immigration status (p.151, ibid.) that leaves them completely subjected to employers who are typically authoritarian and demand ‘spatial deference’, where the maid must know her place in the household as well as where and when she is needed (Yeoh & Huang, 2010). Because the same household doubles as maids’ workplace and resting place, there is no clear demarcation of time ‘off-the-clock’ and maids are effectively on 24-hr standby.

            However, Sassen (2002) points out that the income earned by the serving class becomes empowering in their home countries. According to Arnado (2010), the GDP per capita in the Philippines is 6% of Singapore’s and even women with graduate qualifications became maids in various global cities due to a dearth of employment opportunities at home. These women demonstrated a ‘pakikipagsapalaran’ mentality, a Tagalog term for ‘finding one’s destiny overseas’ as they ‘grasp the knife’ (kapit sa patalim) as a “final recourse in the face of extreme desperation” in search of better prospects (p.142-143). Some eventually earn enough to become their family’s primary breadwinner and purchase, homes, small businesses, or a college education for their children. A few even ‘punish’ unfaithful husbands by withholding remittances. Through great tenacity, these women have converted their serving class status in global cities into upward social mobility at home. It is a form of class distinction based on their relationship to global cities and cannot be explained by cultural capital.

Connectivity as Class Differentiator

            Another aspect of globalization that (re)produces class differentiations is the increasing importance of information communication technologies (ICTs) in the global economy. According to Castells (1997), we live in a network society where society’s primary social, political, and economic functions and processes are structured around networks of money, goods, people, technologies, and information. The network society is an informational economy where the productivity and competitiveness of state and corporate actors depend on their ability to harness ICTs for various tasks. The basic unit in this economy is a network enterprise, where multiple arms of an organisation are simultaneously coordinated across space using ICTs and the overall structure of production depends more on “the space of flows” (ibid, p.13) – the ICT connections between various parties – rather than geographical proximity. If this description of a networked economic landscape is correct, individuals who are proficient in ICTs should gain an economic advantage over those less so. This is consistent with Castell’s network society where productivity and competitiveness hinge on harnessing the potential of ICTs.

            The extant literature suggests that economic advantage is both a cause of ICT access as well as an effect of its use. ICTs have lost their ‘supplementary’ status and are becoming increasingly essential tools for the modern economy (Sassi, 2005). The ability to access and appropriately use the Internet confers a competitive advantage in employment and education, but those who can do so are already affluent and educated to begin with (Warf, 2001). This suggests that ICTs presently serve to polarise class differences. Pre-existing inequalities in wealth provide unequal access to ICTs, and ICTs then confer advantages that further exacerbate class differences at work and school (Robles & Torres-Albero, 2012). In some countries, this has created concerns that the disadvantaged may form a new underclass without the ICT skills to participate in the informational economy (Warf, 2001). Indeed, since affluence is essentially economic capital and education is related to cultural capital, it is possible that a ‘technological reproduction model’ exists where ICT proficiency exacerbates and perpetuates class inequality on top of that produced by Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction model.

Conclusion

            To conclude, it has been argued that there are at least three ontologically distinct forms of class in our contemporary world besides the one Bourdieu described. Differences within these newer types of class are produced through qualitatively distinct processes that cannot be sufficiently described using the concepts of cultural capital and habitus. These new types of class are closely tied to globalization: in the case of ethnicity described by Hage (1988), class differences involves immigration; for Sassen’s (2003) serving class, class difference involves macroeconomic factors and transnational labour movements; in Castells’ (1997) network society, there may be a new underclass that lacks the ICT proficiency to participate in a networked economy structured around the space of flows.

            The cultural reproduction model (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) can still account for the intergenerational transmission of class through the education system in contemporary society (Xu & Hampden, 2012; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010) although it is yet unclear if the cultural reproduction model interacts with newer forms of class to perpetuate existing class inequalities. As a hypothetical example, blue-collar workers in the serving class may migrate to a global city, but their children may lack ‘practical nationality’ as well as the cultural capital to succeed at school. Their relatively impoverished financial and educational position may then compromise their ability to harness ICTs effectively and adversely affect their prospects in a networked economy. If they subsequently have children, the cycle repeats itself. Future research should explore if disadvantage in each ontologically distinct form of class may interact to compound social inequalities.

References

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