Notes on: Bourdieu, P.  (1996) [1989] The State Nobility, with the collaboration of Monique De Saint Martin, translated by Lauretta C.  Clough.  Cambridge: Polity Press.

Dave Harris

[Many of the same themes from the earlier work, but more detailed analysis of the empirical material in the form of correspondence analysis.  Although the empirical data itself is not very gripping, mostly derived from secondary material, or surveys conducted for different purposes, the analysis is more detailed this time and shows a number of axes dividing, say, economic and cultural capital, and within educational institutions themselves, elite from technical institutions.  Some is self-reported, raising the possible problem of having to take people at their word, while they might be dissimulating. or providing what is expected. Considerable commentary is required to make it all interesting though, with the usual problems -- are empirical  differences in institutions seen as leading to complexity or to a subtle form of 'chiasmatic' reproductive structure that produces much misrecognition? 

Both main axes are interesting.  The first one shows the interactions between economic power and cultural interests, including leisure ones, and how they produce particular patterns of recruitment, mostly through dispositions but also cultural and social capital.  We learn that economic elites, for example, are also hostile towards the more intellectual and abstract forms of knowledge, which they see as dangerously corrupting: at the same time, they appreciate the symbolic value of any qualifications, so that overall, they want their offspring to get the qualifications but without the intellectual critical development that might go with them. Luckily, all sorts of business and administrative ecoles have set up and have finally been awarded grande ecole [GE] status, and interesting French variant on the Anglo-US option of providing community colleges for the less privileged to keep them away from the elite universities. 

The other thing that comes out particularly well is the way in which the preparatory classes, the khagne and taupe, take a consistently instrumental approach towards cramming people for the concours.  It is a regime of teaching to the test which is quite blatant, and its pedagogy is authoritarian.  Bourdieu argues that any proletarian candidates for the concours have had to become well accustomed to this approach.  Laissez faire approaches to pedagogy do not benefit those from dominated groups in this respect.

Finally, this is the closest yet to showing how cultural and social capital has a crucial economic role, although it is based on some ingenioulsy assembled but dodgy data. We still lack a clear argument that lesiure interests provide this sort of cultural capital for the relatively underprivilged, however,which is what I have tried to explore. Mostly, leisure pursuits only reflect social and academic background here, which is annoying.]
Wacquant, L.  Foreword

This book is Francocentric and empirical, with a clear theoretical project.  It extends Distinction.  It relates to the two decades after May '68, but it is intended to provide principles that are applicable to other countries and time periods.  A major theme is the relation between material and symbolic power, which can veer from collision to collusion, autonomy to complicity.  As Weber noted, those in power wish to be seen as having a definite right to rule: the church used to justify the right of the lord to rule, but in complex societies, it is the school.  Both material and symbolic capital is required to gain access to power.

Credentials 'help define the contemporary social order' (x) , providing detailed allocations and an overall justification of inequality as 'born of the talents, effort, and desire of individuals'.  Cultural capital is socially distributed, but appears as some personal property, which makes it particularly suitable for legitimation in 'democratic' societies.  In this way, 'a social hierarchy dis-simulates itself', dignifying what is an arbitrary social order, as some sort of 'aristocracy of intelligence'.  Gaining a university degree gives entrance to and sanctifies social position: it is no accident that graduation ceremonies look religious.  The very term credential has the root credere [to believe] so diplomas are the result of 'a long cycle of production of collective faith in the legitimacy of a new form of class rule'.  As credentialism spreads, we have a new consolidated mode of domination, and new forms of class struggle.

It is all much more complex, however, given 'the multiplicity of fields in which the various forms of social power' circulate (xi).  Particular prestigious roles personify these fields of power and their poles—'manager and intellectual' especially, and in between, there is a range of fields dominated by different combinations of economic and cultural capital, appearing in politics, civil service, professions and the university, for example.  Types of cultural capital define specified fields, and vice versa.  Mechanical solidarity gives way to organic, but this is less stable, and there are now different principles of legitimacy of work, and competition between the holders of the various kinds of capital, struggling to affect the exchange rates between 'economic and cultural currencies'. Organizing different HEIs into a system enables conversion of the different sorts of capital into credentials. [In mass systems, just about any kind of capital gets a gong, but some are worthless?]  The very autonomy and internal differentiation of the system reflects these complex relations between the capitals, and also arbitrates between them.

There is a connection between structural opportunities, and subjective dispositions, so that children from one particular group go on to return to it.  We also see social patterns so that the Grandes Ecoles 'are primarily the preserve of students issuing from, and destined for, the economically rich fractions of the French haute bourgeoisie' (xii), while intermediate institutions can combine different kinds of competencies, cultural and economic, benefiting, for example those with 'rare credentials and old wealth'.  Overall, there is a sharing out of privilege, which is widely acceptable to the dominant group.  That is why this book focuses on the uppermost tier of the French system, the field it produces, and the relations it reproduces.  There is a combination of conflict and connivance between the groups in the field of power.  The French system is particularly useful in displaying the possibilities, because its higher education system is heavily stratified and selective [useful diagram below, from page 393].  However, this book could provide systematic research into other national fields as well, as long as we pursue 'homological reasoning', 'transposition' (xiii) to produce similar hypotheses.
French ed syst


The contemporary ruling class is 'chiasmatic', split between those possessing material and symbolic capital [economic and cultural respectively], and projecting this split on to 'the field of elite schools'. This is found in all advanced societies, but there are different phenomenal forms, including historical dimensions, specific developments of state structures and education.  There is also a general trend 'the rise of the "new capital"', which moves from direct reproduction, immediate transmission of power, to 'school mediated reproduction'.  However, both modes coexist, and ruling classes can prefer one rather than the other depending on which instruments are at their disposal, and what the balance looks like more widely [argued first in Bourdieu and Boltanksi] .

This means that there are no easy correspondences with institutions in different nation states, but there is still a set of relations, including oppositions, that produces configurations.  So there are strong divisions horizontally in France between the Grande Ecoles and the universities, and between the schools themselves, which includes variation between those stressing intellectual values, and others preparing people for economic and political positions.  In the American system, however, the same sort of dualities appear differently, in vertical as well as horizontal divisions, in splits between private and public sectors, between types of university, and in the preservation of the Ivy League that dominates both intellectual and political recruitment.  The competition between economic and cultural capital goes on inside elite universities, in the form of competition between the  division of Arts & Sciences on the one hand, and the professional schools on the other, and in different images of knowledge that they appeal to '(research vs. service, or critique vs. expertise, creativity vs. utility, etc.)' (xiv).  Yet these two systems are analogues.  American might deny that they have elite schools in the French style, but graduates of 'the top U.S. boarding schools'overachieve, even where there are scholastic aptitude tests, when it comes to entering college: they are 'super privileged students' from elite backgrounds themselves [data on xiv].  Elite graduates of those schools do well in becoming board members of large American companies and company directors, senior managers and so on.  In the USA as well as in France, 'diplomas sanctioning "generalised bureaucratic culture" [like a top law degree] tend to supersede certificates of technical proficiency [like an MBA]' (xv). So we can compare different states comparing different forms of capital and how they are differentiated and related through different historical processes.  We can also examine in each case how important elite schools or equivalents are.

However, it has become much more difficult to become an inheritor, more costly, requiring more stringent work, austere lifestyles and 'practices of intellectual and social mortification that entail significant personal sacrifice'.  Nor is success guaranteed.  School-mediated reproduction preserves collective interests of class, but not those of individual members.  Another source of change is transversal movement from one field of power to another, from culture to corporate or political responsibility.  This partly explains a number of new social movements that have appeared.

For this reason, we should not just be studying objective patterns of inequality, but rather focus on 'the categories of thought and action through which the participants…  come to perceive and actualize (or not) the potentialities they harbour' (xvi), 'practical cognition' at the individual level.  People pursue social strategies, never completely determined by objective structures or subjective intentions, but by some adjustment of both position and disposition.  This 'socially patterned matrix of preferences and propensities…  constitute habitus'.

This is why the book begins with 'practical taxonomies and activities' found in the everyday life of French schools and which constitute their life world.  In the second part, we see how the 'quasi - magical operations of segregation and aggregation' becomes a kind of collective soul and set of unified beliefs: this is 'how power insinuates itself by shaping minds and moulding desire from within, no less than through the "dull compulsion" of material conditions from without' (xvii).  The fit between individuals and structures is 'im-mediate and infra conscious'.  Personal visions are 'patterned after…  objective divisions'.  There is no 'scholastic alternative between structure and agency'.  Individuals make their own history, but they use categories and cognitive schema that they have not chosen but are themselves 'social constructs'.

The book does not focus on the conventional organs of the state, since it is interested in how the state works around those.  The state does not only monopolize legitimate physical violence, for example but also 'legitimate symbolic violence'.  The state acts as '"the central bank of symbolic credit"', endorsing recruitment and social division as universally valid.  Academic titles are the 'paradigmatic manifestation of this "state magic"' (xviii).  Symbolic violence of this kind affects everyone [not just those described by Foucault], and deeply affect sense whenever we tried to understand the social world: the categories we use are 'instilled in us via our education'.  The state is inside us, not just out there in institutions: the school is the most important organisation, not the army, asylum, hospital or jail.

Durkheim worked with symbolic representations of the community.  Bourdieu insists it is a class divided society, and the categories are imposed rather than spontaneous.  It follows that scholastic forms of classification are 'class ideologies that serve particular interests in the very movement whereby they portray them as universal'.  Instruments of knowledge of forms of symbolic domination.  The credential system provides us with 'so many "acceptance frames" that make us gently down under a yoke we do not even feel' [lots of material here for Rancière's critique]. So the sociology of education is the heart of analyses of power.  The school replaces religion as the major 'opium, moral glue and theodicy' of modern capitalism (xix).  Modern technocrats do not have to choose between birth and merit, or inheritance and effort, 'because they can embrace them all'.

This is not an entirely pessimistic analysis, however, and nor is the only option 'the fake radicalism of the rhetoric of the "politics of culture"'.  Symbolic power must deploy a certain relative autonomy if it is to appear as a plausible legitimation of power, and this means it can always be diverted 'in the service of aims other than reproduction'.  This is particularly so as the system gets more extended and intricate, and the extent to which it claims to be exclusively about reason and universality.  Reason for Bourdieu is not just an effect of the will to power, nor an anthropological invariant as in Habermas.  It is an historical invention, based in various fields in which there are universal values.  Currently, reason is being extended in the interests of domination, but this 'is to play with fire'.  Intellectuals have a collective role in demanding that social patterns reflect the reason that they had aspired to.  As a result, 'science—and social science in particular—[is] at the epicentre of the struggles of our age'.  This is why it's important 'for the dominated to avail themselves of its results and instruments', and this is what this book wants to do, to extend 'this rational knowledge of domination', 'our best weapon against the rationalization of domination'.

Prologue Social Structures and Mental Structures

Sociology uncovers deep structures of the social world, and the mechanisms that reproduce or transform them, but it must also investigate 'cognitive structures' that agents use when applying their practical knowledge.  There is a correspondence between these two structures, so that 'the division into dominant and dominated in the different fields' correspond to 'the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them' (1).  It is only a requirement to present research that we operate with a division between these so-called structuralist and constructivist perspectives.

We can see the education system as 'an immense cognitive machine', which distributes students through examination, and classifies them.  However, this clearly requires 'objectively orchestrated' individual acts: these must be understood as a result of a 'social genesis' (2).  This is quite different from, say ethnomethodology, since actors draw upon principles and categories of vision 'determined by the position they occupy', in making choices and expressing preferences.  We can demonstrate these connections statistically, and when we do we discover regular processes that almost look mechanistic, although there is no 'social physics' here.  It is a matter of classificatory acts and products, 'practices, discourses, or works'.  Agents do not pursue explicit ends intellectually, 'rather, it is the practical operation of habitus, that is, generative schemata of classifications and classifiable practices that function in practice without acceding to explicit representation and that are the product of the embodiment, in the form of dispositions, of a differential position in social space'.  Cognitive schemata are the embodied form of the habitus, and they produce classic distinctions, for example between those at the top or bottom, and practical stances, such as a desire to improve or stay the same.

The habitus preserves itself precisely by asserting its autonomy against external determinations, and this helps 'perpetuate an identity that is [based on] difference' (3).  The actions of the habitus reproduce all the differences in the social order [assuming they're all coordinated and don't contradict?].  We need to pursue this idea rather than say the model of the ISA, because we have to understand that there is a connection between the organization and the disposition of the agents themselves, and that 'the one who submits to it contributes to its efficacy', at least in the predisposition to recognize the requirements.  Without the perception and action of the agents, power does not work, whether we are talking about teachers grading students, or students choosing particular educational careers: everything fits because there is a 'direct conformity' between objective structures and individual preferences. Many people are happy to conform to the every wish of the institution, but only because they have incorporated its necessity.

Social scientific analysis often produces strong responses from such people, or by asserting that organizations show 'arbitrary, unjustifiable, and…  [a] pathological character'.  Conformity arouses strong passions through the notion of 'illusio, the investment in the game'.  Without such commitment, people would suffer from 'guilt and absurdity'.  There is, however no simple spontaneous reproduction of constraint and power.  It is the case that the dispositions that individuals display are an effect of domination, or symbolic violence, which requires 'active complicity' by those who submit to it, although this is not always conscious and voluntary.  Those who submit do not wish to achieve freedom through 'the awakening of consciousness' (4).  [An interesting note on 395 says that this is where Bourdieu agrees with Deleuze, that freedom requires the expansion of consciousness.  The reference is to The Fold.  Bourdieu also says that it is paradoxical to be told off for being a determinist, [as does Rancière] when they are 'working to enlarge the space open to consciousness' and clarification [and] offer those being studied the possibility of liberation (teachers in the present case, for example)']

This is how 'doxic experience of the native world is established'. In universities, it is common to find that agents claim to be exceptions to their own analyses, but rare to find them completely rejecting symbolic domination characteristic of the university.  For example, university hierarchies are accepted, even unconsciously, and the same goes for academic judgments.

The sociology of education is really a contribution to 'the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of power', not just an applied subject 'only suitable for educationalists' (5).  We can see at work the same two fundamental differentiations, economic and cultural capital, discovered elsewhere [Distinction].  The education system is at the heart of a struggle to monopolize dominant positions.  It is not just something that reforms by rewarding achievement over ascription, merit and talent over 'heredity and nepotism', but central to current legitimations.  There is a suspicious enthusiasm among the privileged for education and 'the restoration of Culture', as something independent of social foundations.  Conversely, rational criticism does cause suffering and can produce violent reactions, as when any 'schemata of thought and action' are criticized.  This includes academics squabbles and cultural debates, which can resemble 'a religious war'(6).  For example, there is more resistance to reforming spelling conventions than social security provision! Those with cultural capital 'are defending not only their assets but also something like the mental integrity', a form of 'fanaticism, rooted in a fetishistic blindness'.  However, social science must 'denaturalizes and defatalize', uncovering historical and social determinants of hierarchy and evaluation, say in academic verdicts.  These owe their very 'symbolic efficacy'to appearing as 'absolute, universal and eternal'.

Part 1

Chapter one Dualistic Thinking and the Conciliation of Opposites

One way to understand the effects of social structures and the connection with mental structures is to examine the social backgrounds of academic prizewinners, in this case, those who won prizes at the Concours Général.  This will help us see classificatory schema at work, although these are never made explicit.  The data is pretty old [1966, 67 and 68], although the sample was usefully representative.  The study was repeated in 1986, showing that the principal variables stayed the same.  However, maybe these data are out dated?  The events of 1968 and since, including the dissemination of sociological critiques, changes in the status of academic disciplines [the rise of mathematics] and the changes in the status of teachers, probably means that professorial taxonomies are no longer so innocent.  However, philosophy still remains as a high status form of thought, with its classificatory systems still widely dispersed, but, generally, the point is not to dwell on historical aspects, but rather to pursue some underlying state or event to uncover 'principles of understanding' (10), applicable to other cases, seeing events as '"a particular case of the possible"'[not Deleuze but Bachelard].  The challenge is to see if current systems are different.  We have to work with concrete forms, rather than just do amateur philosophy or just collect empirical data.  We want to see how the social dimensions are suppressed, for example when performance is described in language that looks neutral, even though it is 'laden with social connotations and assumptions'.  Lacking an historical dimension, the categories seem 'tailor-made for converting them into essences' (11).  It's impossible to fully demonstrate empirical relations, so the book works on selections and depends on the reader trusting the analyst.

Competitive examinations [concours] rank individuals but also disciplines; some are seen to require talent and gifts [considerable inherited cultural capital], whereas others require work and study, and still others a mixture.  Examples of the former are philosophy and French, and now maths, the latter geography and science, and the mixed ones history and languages.  Characteristic tasks are also different, with philosophy and French demanding 'nebulous and imprecise' tasks, 'undefinable previous knowledge' and which 'discourage willingness and academic zeal', while disciplines like geography involve a taste for work and pursuing tasks that are safe and profitable.

A large table with the characteristics of prizewinners classified by discipline, parental profession and lots of other demographics, including material on whether students go to the movies, and the kind of student they think they are, appears 12-13.  There are differences in terms of disciplines, with prize winners in Latin and Greek displaying the most elite characteristics—high self esteem, ability in maths, are likely to produce good or excellent work, high expectations, likely to rank highly teachers and researchers, able to name former prizewinners.  Gender has an impact, so does family ambition.  At least half of them are precocious, that is they have skipped a grade.  Subjects requiring inherited cultural capital have the most high status students: these also disdain geography markedly, tend to invoke the concept of talent or gift to explain their success, and value creative [rather than "earnest"] teachers.  They also claim diversity of reading and knowledge of general culture, including painting and music.  They are not bookish or scholastic, but show 'educated dilettantism and eclectic familiarity with culture' (15).  They are more likely to go to the movies and take 'a "cultured stance"' to jazz and film [lovely actual quotes, referring to the 'affective language' of jazz by a philosophy student, as opposed to '"black" sadness' by a natural science one].

Winners in French and philosophy were keen to 'adopt the posture of an apprentice intellectual' (16), and also displayed unorthodox political opinions, often supporting the left or far left [geographers ran more to type].  This arises from choosing an 'adherence to the representations and values that are the most widespread among intellectuals…  The need to conform to a certain image of the intellectual', especially with philosophy students [Rancière would not be happy with this sort of assertion!].  They were able to define themselves and name characteristic journals, and expressed all sorts of intellectual intentions, seeing literature as a voyage, feeling that they must write, and having visionary expectations of the future, which included a classless society, an open society.  Natural scientists talk far more about occupations, and if some do talk about social reform, it is to defend meritocracy [a geography student].

These elite values express 'the entire tradition of the humanities'(17).  Further analyses of two prize winning essays in 1969 also show this close connection between training in the humanities, and 'the humanistic, personalist, and spiritualist ideology'.  Pedagogy in the humanities strongly values personal expression, rather than any other characteristics of school.  Writing is seen as creation and mystery.  The best readings are creative, 'involving the spiritual identification of the "I" of the reader with the "I" of the author', producing 'the pretext for the complacent egoism of self-centred effusions, romantic mysticism, and existential pathos'[!].

The systematic differences between those who believe in talent and those who believe in work can lead to a whole table of categories which are 'deeply inscribed' in the minds of teachers and good students, and which affect all academic reality.  They consist of terms like 'brilliant/dull; effortless/laborious; distinguished/vulgar; cultured/scholastic; inspired/banal; original/common; lively/flat; fine/crude; noteworthy/insignificant; quick/slow; nimble/heavy; the elegant/awkward, etc.'.  We can find these terms used in committee reports from the boards of examination, including those at secondary school level [loads of actual quotes page 18].  Humanities prizewinners themselves use these terms to explain how their own work came to win.  The categories used have clearly affected their perception of themselves and their own qualities.  This is an example of how academic verdicts come to determine chosen vocation, through operating on the dispositions of those who have succeeded.  Further, 'disciplines choose their students as much as students choose their disciplines, imposing upon them categories of perception of subjects and careers as well as of their own skills' (19).  This can appear like a belief in predestination, often confirmed by academic terms like 'gift'or 'vocation'.

Successful students have often been precocious, reinforced by the hierarchy being based on the average age of the student.  Precocity is an indicator of gifts.  The whole system depends on some notion of age-dependent stages in acquiring knowledge, but this is of course arbitrary, as in Aries' study of the medieval period.  The child prodigy or '"the exceptionally gifted child"'can demonstrate natural gifts and avoid slow work, but this is another example of a translation of cultural privilege, shown again by educational qualifications of parents.  Cultural heritage is related to success, and there are also self fulfilling prophecies, where the younger students are already expected to be brilliant or distinguished [in examining would-be teachers: in some cases, these gifts overcame the lack of any actual previous experience].  The praises of these precocious ones are sung with terms like having spirit, being more alert, possessing grace, and being promising even if awkward and naive: mistakes can be explained in terms of youthful transgression, even as proof of talent.

The modality of the relationship between individuals and schools is also crucial, and affected particularly by the distance between the 'family milieu and the academic world' (21).  This can be seen in terms of individual chances of achieving positions they are objectively attached to social groups.  A particular mode of acquisition of culture involves imperceptible effects of family familiarisation.  These people 'have academic culture as their native culture', and it is this that demonstrates the qualities that are valued in 'ease' or having 'natural talent'.  Such students already have a rapport with academic culture.  Families can supply explicit support such as advice or explanations, as the most visible part of the gifts, but there are also things like making early visits to museums as examples of more diffuse support.  Again there are class differences here: upper class children get both kinds of support, middle class ones primarily direct support, and lower class ones hardly any kind of support.

There is a particular 'relay/screen' (22), obscuring the relationship between social origins and grades arising from making judgements of outward behaviour to indicate relations to culture and language.  Teachers claim to offer neutral  academic judgments, but if we look at their metaphors and adjectives, social prejudices appear.  For example, those students described as earnest or serious are victims of a general principle that seems to underpin practices of middle class students, who have to operate with continuous and sustained effort, a 'laborious and strained modality'.  Such students concentrate all their efforts on academic activities, and play little sport, for example.  They are both hardworking and docile.  This does bring disproportionate success in prize winning, however.  Generally, the longer they are subordinated to academic judgment, the more they can demonstrate 'perseverance, tenacity and docility' (23).  Upper class students, by contrast do particularly well with final exams, especially orals, where they can demonstrate those quick insights.

Pedagogy obviously acknowledges effects of culture required outside school, but still has to believe in its own abilities to inculcate.  Upper class kids can be ignored, although they get most favour, while those who seem culturally deprived, can compensate by having a good relations with school itself.  Again, examining committees often stressed the merits of personal involvement, or conviction, courage, enthusiasm, which they like to distinguish from mere cautiousness, skepticism, the pursuit of 'acrobatics exercises', and false manipulations of grammatical terms.  This complex relationship with the petty bourgeois is often mediated by teachers from petty bourgeois origins themselves, who can distinguish themselves from proletarians and independent intelligentsia, and themselves adopt middle of the road stances.  This makes them 'perfectly suited to a bureaucracy of cultural conservation' which has to arbitrate between intellectual avant-garde and conservative bourgeoisie.  These tensions around the notion of brilliance often lead to 'the glorification of the happy medium'(24), or moderation, or 'academica mediocritas'(25).  Students are admired who are well rounded and good rather than dull workers or pretentious dilettantes.  What is required is a 'discreet elegance and restrained enthusiasm…  Which assumes both knowledge and a detached attitude toward it'.

Actual reports frequently deny that there is any one recipe for success, although they still reproduce differences like brilliance and laboriousness, and refer to gifts as opposed to efforts.  They also want to condemn either obedience or systematic disparagement, and distinguish simplicity from a conversational style.  Candidates must not be seen to be giving lectures or offering disdain.  They should be able to show how they have made 'skilfully managed choices'.  Everything involves a conciliation of opposites.  Suitable moderation is seen as reflecting taste and talent, reflection and subtlety.

Contradictions faced by teachers are resolved in 'self deceptive games' (26), as when they expect students to do more than just scholastic exercises, or when they value creativity as opposed to technical mastery, while still punishing 'the merest deviation from scholastic observances'.  They want to deny 'the pedestrian reality' of the recruitment exam, by pretending that these are not examination topics, but appeals to other human beings [to give up their thought].  Students who express the truth of the exam reveal themselves to be good but not excellent [me at my Oxford interview!] .  Students are rewarded if they can display the 'simulated creativity and feigned sincerity of a long prepared improvisation'.  Those who do not know how to or do not want to play this game are not approved.  Students are also expected to provide personal opinions, not those openly attributed to critics.

Scholastic routine is heavily denounced, including any signs of recipes, automatic devices, any tendency to lecture.  Students themselves come to see the difference between scholastic learning and 'noble independent work', and expect brilliant qualities in their teachers.  This still varies according to particular categories and the social origin of the students, but generally 'charismatic values…  always predominate to such a degree that all "scholastic" demands appear shameful and guilty' (27).  Such values are found particularly in philosophy, and it produces devotion to educational institutions.  These roles and their accompanying constraints are really provided by the institution, including charismatic feats which appear to deny any institutional dimensions.  They include 'verbal acrobatics, hermetic allusions, disconcerting references, or unfathomably obscure passages' (28), and these are important symbolically only because the institutions supports them with authority.  By allowing professors to claim some personal advantage from this style, the institution gets an enthusiastic and committed performance of the role, especially by claiming it is the communication itself and its contents that deserve prestige.

If there are only technical modalities, the role of teaching predominates.  Mastery is important, especially as a presupposition, but it is a limited skill, and not always required for masters as opposed to teachers.  Masters require further competence, beyond the routine business of schools, including managing work schedules.  All pedagogic arrangements are only seen as a pretext to bring about 'the furtive chance encounter and the dialogue between master and disciple'.

So even the most personal mental structures are homologous to institutional structures, including hierarchies, the organization of disciplines, classifying outputs and so on.  The categories used in personal constructions of activity, including academic evaluations, involves 'the long, slow, unconscious process of the incorporation of objective structures' (29).  Even university lecturers have let themselves be guided by unconscious structures.

Chapter two. Misrecognition and Symbolic Violence

The previous chapter tried to examine practices of classification by looking at sociodemographic data and this is clearly controversial (Rancière is sceptical, for example, with the Distinction data). This chapter starts with an examination of some unusually full marking records kept by a philosophy teacher in a women's khâgne in Paris, for 4 years in the 1960s [not kept for research purposes so unlikely to have audience effects?]. The data has marks awarded, ages and parental occupation and residence, type of secondary school attended. We can see academic classification at work, the adjectives used and the justifications for marks.  These will act like Durkheim's and Mauss's primitive classifications, 'the product of the incorporation of social structures' (30).

[A lovely density matrix appears on 31 relating inherited cultural capital to adjectives used to describe the work, and final grades.  Here, Bourdieu is using a borrowed method to display the data: first each additive gets its own column, and each line refers to each student according to social class.  The adjectives that appear in the report are marked with a black square on the line, and attached square if the adjective was qualified.  This simple matrix was then ordered by 'dividing the adjectives into 27 classes according to a similarity of meaning and ocurrence'{that is categorising them}.  The data is then diagonalizeddcdxdx by moving around alliance and columns {so the black squares follow the diagonal line top left bottom right}, to produce the clearance linear connection between adjectives and social origins.  This already revealed that the adjectives were roughly arranged from the most pejorative to the most positive, and social classes according to the expected hierarchy according to social origins: the similar one was produced by looking at inherited family cultural capital, using, crudely, parental occupation and place of residence.  The average grade received by each student appears on the right hand column].

So the most positive comments are increasingly frequent as social origins rise and so are grades, with some exceptions.  Coming from Paris confers an additional advantage for those students of the same social standing, even though provincials have been already highly selected.  Students in the middle ranges of social space attract most negative assessments, including '"simple minded," or "slavish," or "common."...  "narrow minded," " mediocre"' (33).  These classically refer to the normal bourgeois view of the petty bourgeois.  Even their virtues are seen in a negative way—they are '"bookish," "painstaking", "methodical".  Even if they do have exceptional qualities such as clarity or skill, the comments are nearly always qualified.  Those from the business bourgeoisie are rarely in receipt of damaging opinions, and even if they get negative comments these are also often qualified.  Students from intellectual backgrounds never get negative assessments and are never seen as possessing petty bourgeois virtues.

What makes the data difficult is that the same adjective can appear in different combinations, and its meaning can be changed, for example into a euphemism.  Euphemisms are less frequent as the social origin of students descend.  The reasons given for judgements are also closely linked to social origin, more so than the grades [table three on 34 gives some examples of written comments together with grades].  Written comments better depict the picture formed of students based on her personal knowledge including that of 'their bodily hexis' (35).  These greatly extend the more technical comments on performance as such.  This shows the difficulties where persons of students are well known.  Comments include adverse ones on ugly or childish handwriting, physical appearance is only rarely mentioned but socially marked, for example in terms of 'excessive negligence and meticulous care'.  Style and breadth of knowledge are qualities.  Specific knowledge affects grades 'to a lesser degree than is normally thought': most of the adjectives refer to personal qualities rather than technical ability, 'overall disposition to conform to an in fact undefinable ideal: a unique combination of clarity, strength of mind, and rigour, of sincerity, ease, and skill, of finesse, subtlety and ingenuity'.  The classifications themselves imply that those reading them will already possess the classification system.

Judgments also refer to 'clothing, accessories, make up, and especially manners and behaviour'.  We can see this also in the obituaries of ENS graduates.  Here, physical descriptions summarize the person, as a 'tangible analogon'.  People claim to be able to grasp this in the first moments of encounter, where it appears as an '"original intuition"'.  Again bodily hexis and accent seem quite important [an account on 36 of an obituary gives the general idea.  There seem to be a lot of bodily metaphors about people's strength of character, distinguished physiognomies and the like].

So social origins and grades are mediated by 'this strange cognitive machine' (36), which never openly or explicitly recognizes social principles, in a 'logic of denial'. The connection between social properties and academic classification extends to the rankings among teachers and their organizations. Academic taxonomies are 'both a relay and a screen'.  Academic classifications look more neutral, often because they are euphemisms, and this enables misrecognition [examples here include the euphemistic oppositions between terms such as brilliant and dull, light and heavy].  Bourdieu notes that these are often attenuated by 'gruff paternalistic benevolence', often on the assumption that this is going to help adolescents develop.  This is a symbolic equivalent of the harsh punishment of earlier places and times, and academics particularly feel complacent about their licence to inflict 'symbolic aggression'.  In turn, this seems to licence an open assertion of professorial values.  Students themselves often look back fondly on these judgments made about them, for example in another obituary: 'his often stinging ruler was wielded out of affection'.  The students seem to agree that brutal frankness is the most appropriate way to communicate with an elite, the result of a 'combination of aristocratism and asceticism' (38): they are not really intended for non elite students.

These beliefs are held collectively, for example linked to the divisions of the academic world itself.  We see here the affects of an [academic] habitus—explaining 'the relation of immediate proximity between objective structures and embodied structures'.  Agents act on their own, but they are not individuals, but 'socialized organisms', with predispositions.  These inform the judgments that both teachers and students make.  The neutralized form of academic language is still based on 'the taxonomies of ordinary language' (39).  Participants have to gain a 'practical mastery' of the principles of classification, and adjust them to the more objective classifications, and then they can classify everything, including themselves, acting in good faith and rather mechanically.  As a result they are dealing with 'recognised - misrecognised social classifications'.  Everything seems to conform to the 'very logic of the structures that have produced them', and this is how taxonomies become self evident, or doxic, experiencing 'never ending confirmation', and leaving alternatives as 'unthought and...  unthinkable'.

So the social functions of classification take place as academic classification, and this helps agents involved to believe in what they're doing, even though they are doing something else—'they are the primary victims of their own actions'.  They would not be doing open social classification 'for all the money in the world', but that's what the system accomplishes, as a deviant meaning of their practice.  Neutrality means that these activities can be consecrated, a matter of judging mind, intelligence, or potential, not social identity.  There has to be some recognition for these euphemisms to be maintained, and this arises through lending academic classifications a certain 'symbolic efficacy' (40), and a neutrality that forestalls revolt [technical veil these days].  Open explicit judgments of social origins are in effect censored by the academic field [and the need to demonstrate commitment to it].  [An example considers how academics actually express criticism rather than praise, commonly by stressing the opposite qualities to the desired one, especially arguing that material is conventional and forced, too close to notes, too hardworking, solid and well documented work].

For academic discourse to work, language has to be underpinned by social conditions of production and use, to conform with other exercises of symbolic power.  Teachers commonly ally themselves to the social selection exercised by the university, for example, by unconsciously reproducing different sorts of speech or discourse by different sorts of students, or appealing to common distinctions [the example has a philosophy teacher using philosophical terms to affirm the distance between thinkers and vulgar people—a major source of the enthusiasm for philosophy in adolescents, Bourdieu suggests, 41.  He likes to have a dig at philosophy for offering a 'heavenly detour' {as Marx does for Hegel}  through which common forms of social distinction are laundered, rendered in philosophical terms like 'authentic', and thus subject to additional misrecognition].

Academic evaluations and classifications continue throughout the teaching profession.  Here the obituaries are analyzed [I'm sure he uses this data in Distinction as well].  Adjectives are still similar to those of evaluations used in marking.  Social origins still have an effect even among graduates of ENS who might be expected to have become equalized.  Again the results are summarized in a density matrix on 43, with adjectives along the top, occupations to assess social origins in the left hand column, and stages in the career on the right.  Bourdieu admits the 'insufficiency of the available data', especially about social origins or the status of the teachers.  He also says that it's possible that the structure of the field has changed, making linear hierarchies difficult.  The difference between living in Paris and in the provinces seems particularly important for this group [obituaries gathered in the early sixty's].  The analysis only refers to those graduates who stayed in academic life, and departures are also euphemised as deciding to devote a career to the service of the state, or finding teaching too limited.  Bourdieu claims to be collecting other celebratory discourses to continue this analysis, to get at the academic ethos, or 'an intentionally coherent system and explicit norms with claims to universality' (44).  Eulogies also praise the entire group, including the author of the eulogy, and this can help to clarify that shared habitus.

Again statistical correlations between social origins and success require a mediation, innumerable acts of evaluation and self evaluation.  Teachers always classify each other and themselves according to academic principles, and they regulate their own ambition in this light.  There is so tight a connection between opportunities and hopes that they cannot be distinguished—'The provincials did not want to have anything to do with the Paris that did not want anything to do with them' (45).  This sometimes appears as the love of fate found in obituaries, 'acts of disvetiture'.  What makes a process look neutral is that different institutions express different principles, which 'produces a scrambling effect' which makes it easy to convert failures into burying vain hopes.  Academics invest in their eventual position and tend not to envy those in other positions.

A connection between personal destiny and objective structures also explains the nonlogical components of academic taxonomies: the obituaries show this in the connection between the display of professorial virtues and the actual careers undertaken, so that it looks like 'each agent were objectively situated by the position of his properties within this universe of hierarchized qualities' (45).  The obituaries rank domestic virtues like being a good parent or spouse or the minimum of professional integrity at the lowest end, and at the highest, academic qualities which deny, in effect, these ordinary virtues [they seem to damn them with faint praise].  We find the same distinction between low ranking intellectual qualities like earnestness, those who have transgressed these conventional notions of excellence, and finally those who have realised the idea of academic excellence [the examples talk about craftsmen-like work, simple home lives, devotion to the profession at the lower level heading into controversy for the ones in the middle, and showing work that puts them in the canon for the very best].  An additional implication is that those who maintain moral rectitude and refuse honours are showing the right kind of acceptance of an inferior position without resentment: the trick is to turn 'obscurity into a virtuous choice, and thus to cast disrepute or suspicion on the necessarily ill-gotten prestige of overly lustrous glory' (48).  Generally, each sub field offers its own compensations, its own particular forms of achievement.  In one example [which I have read before somewhere] an admired teacher managed to combine erudition with posing as a simple farm labourer.  Having been beaten to publication of his research by a rival, he returned to secondary school teaching and led a quiet, modest and simple life although he was highly esteemed.

ENS graduates have their own particular kind of humour [shades of Proust on the Guermantes family]. This helps separate them from the normal bourgeois and the artistic bourgeois, who see them as too artistic and too intellectual respectively in return.  The stance is characterized by domestic virtue and 'aristocratic asceticism'(49), and they often receive awards for public service and devotion.  They are often endogamous in terms of marriage.  It is possible to escape, although escaping into literature runs risk.  There are some other domains which are outside of the university field as such [including admin]: all these are ways of reconciling ambition and opportunity.

The production of academic works also reveals the importance of professorial values.  Such works are sometimes prompted by the search for the middle road described earlier, as when the requirements for higher degrees expect both originality and effective reproduction, with the former gaining credibility as the status of the work increases.  It is not unknown in the obituaries to find people beginning with writing textbooks, before moving on to works of syntheses and then original essays and finally great work [for the very best].  It is also necessary to preserve the canon, to become a qualified interpreter, often appearing as a suitably modest task, not least because philosophers like to compare themselves to provincial gardeners or mountain walkers.

The system reproduces itself because the 'best classified become the best classifiers of those who would next enter the race' (52).  The hierarchical system of classification again looks spontaneous and external.  The system needs 'no explicit instructions', and often operates 'contrary to the intentions both of the agents who assign it its objectives and of most of those who are supposed to realize them'.  The whole thing looks like 'an immense cognitive machine', yet it all depends on perceptions of classification and acts of evaluation of cognitive activities, 'innumerable cognitive acts' that look entirely singular and neutral but are 'objectively orchestrated and objectively subordinated to the imperatives of the reproduction of social structures' (52-53).  There is no automatic dynamic, and no freely acting agents.  Instead, we are examining 'the true logic of practices that are defined in the relationship between habitus (socially structured biological individualities) and objective structures inherited from history'.  We need to approach this logic in the same way that ethnologists proceed to classify kinship systems or diseases.  We should not pursue a structural analysis that just sees how different opposing terms are reconciled: it is not just an internal cognitive activity that we are studying; practical knowledge refers to practical functions.  The schemata that organize practical activities are acquired through practice, implemented in practice, and almost never explicitly represented, and this enables them to be both effective and to be reproduced or transformed.

Appendix two notes that rigorous selection tends to consolidate the effects of social composition.  Social advantage becomes more and more important as you go up the hierarchy, and this is seen in the data on prizewinners, who are heavily selected.  Their social backgrounds are even more privileged than those of university students [NB not Grande Ecoles entrants].  For the small proportion from blue collar backgrounds, there is some compensating factor such as a higher level of education for their families, and Parisian residence.  Girls are usually nominated less frequently for prizes (33% of nominations although they make up 48% of the relevant school classes), but those that win prizes have more favourable social characteristics than the boys do—highly qualified parents, a tradition of access to post secondary education, greater level of precocity.  However, they do tend to cluster in the lower status humanities and languages, and not in natural sciences (14% of prizewinners).  The particular combination of excessive advantages and more restricted choice that girls enjoy should make us wary of generalising from the population of prizewinners as a whole.  Disciplinary choice is also important—choosing maths or physics seems to reduce your chances of winning a prize,unlike those those doing humanities, especially philosophy and applied [social] sciences, and so prize winners in those disciplines are 'exclusively male' (59), markedly younger, very likely to have been educated in particular 'prizewinner - producing schools', and to come from advantaged families (73% from the upper classes).  These and other examples show that age conveys advantages, and that the youngest ones must have a 'greater number of category-exceptional characteristics'—relatively small families, well educated parents, early signs of visits to museums, early educational success in selective schools, and other demonstrations of the value of a 'lasting precocity' interpreted as being on a suitable trajectory.

Appendix three analyses themes from two prize winning essays [the topic itself is astonishing, requiring writers to comment on the relations between reader, text, and writer].  The themes include discussion of 'spontaneous' creativity; the mystery of artistic gifts; spiritual identification; spiritual subjectivism [valuing personal subjectivity and a denial of any objective criteria, ideas that are prominent in training for creative reading, and which figure frequently in the judgments and classifications of the work]; egotism, where a work strengthens our personality; romantic mysticism permitting dreams and escapes and fantasies that defy logic; and existential pathos, the feelings of inadequacy produced by the text.

Part 2

Chapter one The Production of a Nobility

Is a common mistake to see pedagogic action as simply a technical matter.  In fact, the technical professions mostly acquire their skills on the job, while the skills that are actually guaranteed by possession of a diploma are rarely used: in France, the most prestigious titles [polytechnicien] which guarantees technical skills are used less often in professional practices and for a shorter period.  However, the best example involves the work of the public schools in England and France, which selects students already provided with the right dispositions.

Instead of inculcating technical skills, these schools engage in 'the rite of institution aimed at producing a separate, sacred group' (73), offering ritual exclusion and ceremonies of consecration aimed at producing and nobility, while claiming to be technical and rational.  We can study the processes by looking at the preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles [again using old data, justified in the usual way as presenting a dated empirical example of the continuing practice].  This analysis focuses on French elite schools, and it would be good compare them with those of other countries to isolate the invariant elements, and the principle of variation [the example is the cult of team sports in English public schools, which is clearly related not only to anti- intellectualism, but to the needs of empire].  The suspicion more generally is that different types of capital will produce different sorts of educational institutions.

This research focuses on elite grammar schools in Paris, Brest, Claremont-Ferrand, Lille and Toulouse and their preparatory  khâgne classes [Wikipedia has an excellent account of the origin of this name, a phony Greek spelling of the French word cagne, which means 'knock-kneed' and was an original derogatory term used by military cadets to describe humanities students.  Another term, taupe, the French word for mole which refers to the scholarly habits of science students preparing for their Grandes Ecoles, never seeing the light of day].  The sample consisted of 330 responses, and data was weighted to focus particularly on successful students.  Two other studies were also used of science students and humanities students.  40 interviews with preparatory class and university students were then pursued, and 160 teachers from preparatory schools and different faculties in universities were also interviewed.

They can be described as total institutions, with selection and subsequent confinement producing a homogeneous group.  They produce a lasting bond.  Details of taupe students and their backgrounds are given in a table 76-77, 78-9.  Khagne students and their background are described in tables 80-81, and 82-83. Preparatory classes and Grandes Ecoles are preferred to universities especially by 'the upper business bourgeoisie' who want to keep their offspring away from the dangers of student life and the 'corruption of an intellectual milieu'(77). They prefer ascetic education combined with thorough preparation for the concours [public exam deciding entry to Grandes Ecoles]  This includes integrating cultural activities, community service, conferences encouraging different kinds of commitments, and spiritual guidance—no surprise that one of the most popular ones is a Jesuit grammar school.  The point is not to break with parental family, but with 'excluded, common, ordinary students and, a fortiori, with non students' (79).

Monopolizing symbolic capital in this way produces a nobility.  Shared symbolic capital also produces the notion of 'magical shareholding' in the capital and this helps to concentrate it particularly.  Students in those schools become 'rich by proxy', by associating with each other, and meeting those with prestigious family social capital already.  Overall, 'a genuine common culture' is produced.  Sometimes this culture is codified, as in particular publications produced by English public schools, 'containing rules, traditions, songs, and expressions to be learned by heart' [with a reference to Wakeford].  French and American institutions also have these booklets of rules.  Hazing is one way to inculcate them.  The shared culture is also expressed in school slang, particular turns of phrase and jokes, characteristic ways of interacting with others, producing 'immediate complicity among schoolmates (which goes much deeper than a simple solidarity founded on shared interests)' (83).  It is not surprising that graduates experience their time at school as a form of enchantment—one current khagne student even predicted that he would feel that way in the future.  It is all based on the 'ability to love and admire one's self in one's like minded neighbours', and this affect combines with 'the homogeneity of mental structures' (84) to produce esprit de corps.

The preparatory classes in particular exercise a regime based on intensive academic activity which is rigorously controlled.  Again the point is not to teach content, but to produce conditions for particular kinds of teaching and learning.  The rigorous structure of academic work is as important as the effects of boarding itself, and in their sample, boarders were not significantly treated differently, especially in their use of free time: differences were much greater between preparatory school students and university students.

The regime is not explicitly designed for pedagogic purposes, rather to instil a particular definition of education and intellectual work.  This features urgency in particular, and students have to show they are capable of finding sufficient means and resources to address the tasks.  As a result, it is 'sustained, rapid, indeed even rushed work' that is the main requirement, 'the necessary precondition for survival' (85).  It is hard to quantify this, but it seems that students in preparatory classes produce far more work than university students, perhaps as much as two or three times [especially taupe students].  Such students often give themselves extra work, and demand work from teachers.  The khagne students also specialise far more than the equivalent humanities university students.

Teaching similarly intensifies competition and instills discipline, including the need to attend, and to complete homework on time.  The criteria for marking seem to be extremely detailed and rigorous, so that one teacher gives a zero grade if there are more than five spelling errors, another requires really wide margins [apparently, the rules are similar to those actually deployed in the concours].  Assignments are publicly graded.  The concours is constantly invoked until it becomes 'a kind of constant obsession' (87).

Urgency and racing against the clock makes preparatory classes similar to 'the real struggles of ordinary life', but within a particular school universe resembling 'the skhole, that is, of leisure, a freeness, of finality without end'.  There is no need to state underlying principles explicitly.  Dispositions are created instead which do not have to be asserted or professed.  Nor does their instrumental purpose have to be stated—to improve performance in academic competition—although the overall result is to develop 'an instrumental, pragmatic, and indeed, narrowly calculating relationship to education and intellectual work'.  Materials are rigorously selected for relevance to the concours.  Emphasis is placed on being able to 'give an immediate answer to any possible question at all costs', described as 'the use of the recipes and ruses of the art of dissertation, which save a student the trouble of  doing in depth research, while at the same time masking what he does not know and enabling him to hold forth ad infinitum by recycling the most timeworn and predictable topos'[the topos or pécu {PQ} is explained in note 13, 403 as 'an elementary unit of discourse, usually taken from published lectures or textbooks…[sometimes constructed by students themselves]...that can be inserted into the most varied discursive ensembles at the cost of only a few necessary adjustments and alterations…  [with a]... capacity to be reused on different occasions…  khagne students...  create endless discourses by stringing pécus together'] There is a marked will to win just as in sport, and, as in sport, this does not always lead to fair play.  It can also lead to a stance of the pursuit of personal advantage rather than 'teamwork and cooperation'[what an irony!].  The use of anthologies and textbooks are common, as are 'subterfuges and ploys, precocious mastery of which predisposes them neither to intellectual rigour nor to honesty, and to practice study habits that are more akin to a practitioners'"tricks of the trade" than to the methods and techniques of a researcher' (88).

Such students are definitely prepared better for working life than for research or intellectual pursuits, to become executives, to wield power rather than perform research, by displaying a particular 'docile and confident relationship to culture', known as 'culture générale'.  The concours itself also requires instant mobilisation of resources and getting the most out of them, and this is what produces the "leadership qualities" valued by Grand Ecoles, 'the pragmatic, disciplined calculations of decision making' rather than the 'daring and originality' of research.  It is the man of action who is most admired, someone who can keep their cool under pressure, while remaining pleasant to look at, and these are seen as the fundamental qualities of professional life subsequently.  The ability to exert discipline and develop rapid work habits are also seen as vocationally relevant [based on claims made in government reports and in the reports from the elite lycees].

Culture generale is seen as related to specialist knowledge in the same way that science is to technologies and techniques.  Its status explains why so much time and effort is spent in learning 'countless useful facts' and skills that are not actually necessary for a particular job (89).  This is how directors of major firms think of the diplomas that their managerial staff possess which are used in selection.  Such dominant groups can see themselves as cultured, intelligent and refined in comparison to common people, especially when they need to justify themselves, yet they also claim to be on the side of 'power, action, virility, pragmatism, and efficiency' in comparison to artists and intellectuals, especially refuting the intellectual qualities of being critical or erudite.  This ambivalence affects the whole relationship between corporations and the education system.  What corporations want is for the education system to train an elite but not to turn them into intellectuals: that's why they like the preparatory classes and Grandes Ecoles, especially those of focusing on science, which have a compatible purpose.

Again we can see the social contest behind particular oppositions, like those between general and specialized knowledge, general and technical education, conception and execution, theory and empiricism, synthesis and analysis.  The scientific and administrative Grandes Ecoles produces people on the right side, as opposed to the polytechniciens and technicians generally, and the same split is found between upper and mid level managers.  The result is to produce 'a "cadre for the nation" very early on, with a strong sense of superiority and every appearance of legitimacy' (89-90), and even the scientists have a lot in common with the humanities graduates of ENS, 'who are trained, as Durkheim again says, to "produce work prematurely and without genuine thoughtfulness"' (90).  These people are overconfident in books and their own genius, intellectually self sufficient, are 'like big naive schoolboys who have seen it all, so sure of themselves that they smile knowingly at anything that does not bear the inimitable stamp of the school, and…  [later, in their professions]...profess inherited certitudes'.

The form of symbolic confinement is more effective than boarding.  It is difficult for students to imagine any other way of learning, and because the approach is so successful, hey tend to not see that they are being offered a mutilated form of education.  Instead they identify their own interests with what is useful for the concours, ignoring the other options.  [An example from the surveys refers to the wants of students to focus almost exclusively on the concours, even at the expense of keeping up with recent developments in their subject]. The slang that students develop shows 'the self contained nature of this universe' [and examples are given of different slang referring to internal school hierarchies in particular, those relating to seniority, or to school functions.] Students are loyal to their particular institutions.  Docility is also a result of their own social origins and the selection they have undergone.  As a result, people like Sartre and Durkheim have criticized this education as leading to little understanding, or forced precociousness.  Again students themselves value the ability to work fast rather than in depth [taupe students].

Teachers are also confined within this 'magical prison' (91).  They are nearly always recruited from graduates of the same institution in which they teach, confirming their uncritical recognition of its values.  They see themselves as coaches rather than direct and explicit teachers, inculcating 'practical mastery of a certain number of techniques' (92) that help students perform in academic urgency.  They focus on materials useful for the concours.  They grade assiduously and 'develop a total patrimonial - style relationship with their students' (93).  They see themselves as 'a wise old master, or even a spiritual adviser'.  They have often been examiners on the concours.  Unlike university teachers, they never do research which they see as stealing time from their students, although they sometimes published textbooks.  A survey undertaken in 1972 of 3500 secondary teachers show that they were themselves good students, often precocious, more likely to be graduates of Grandes Ecoles.  Women have been even more highly selected and show the greatest number of these characteristics.  The social origins lie in the middle classes and the 'dominated regions of the field of power'.  Most want to stay teaching preparatory classes, and some that teach in universities say that they know their students less well.

They do not need to be explicit about their role.  They see themselves as acting in the 'spirit of the concours'.  They display a particularly homogeneous habitus, regardless of differences in location, time or age, and this produces 'a euphoria of shared certainties, independently of any explicit codification in the form of contracts, rules, or bureaucratic control' (94). 

The teaching offers model answers for homework assignments, and the whole lecture is often structured in advance to conform to the requirements of a concours answer.  Many of the chosen topics come from past concours questions although they might be altered to break up routine.  The point is not to challenge students, but to 'programme minds to fit the curriculum' (95).  Lectures are 'magisterial' and act as a kind of spoken textbook, offering well digested knowledge.  Because of the need to cram, they are often quite repetitive from year to year,  dogmatic and directive.  Students are not likely to object, and rarely interrupt with questions.  In this way, students acquire 'genuine categories of thought that define the universe of the thinkable', and these categories 'produce the illusion of a finite, enclosed, perfect world'.  Students are provided with 'the most traditional rules of scholastic exposition' which have to be displayed in the assignments [an example is a classic three point presentation with hierarchical subdivisions, attributed to Thomas Aquinas!].  The whole approach actually reduces the amount of reading and research the individual must do [in one example, a teacher says there is no need for a bibliography because students 'have to be able to speak on any topic without really knowing anything.  I bring them predigested knowledge', while another writes out answers which students copy]. 

Paradoxically, despite this thorough routine, teachers still somehow acquire 'charisma of office'.  They are able to produce 'theatricalization of pedagogic action' (96), producing the 'appearance of an inspired quest'.  They are also good at demonstrating 'academic enthusiasm', 'on demand'.  This helps sustain the 'subtly maintained bad faith that grounds faith in the institution'.  Philosophy teachers are particularly good at 'games of faith and bad faith', despite the discrepancy between the truth of the job and the representation of it.  This is probably rooted in the paradoxes of church ritual which denounces ritualism [!].  School philosophy is routinized, but appears to be free from routine, often by embracing 'one or another of those anti institutional philosophies that the philosophical institution canonizes', such as the use of the Socratic model, and the 'facile denunciations of professorial routinization (such as the use of text books)'.  It is still the case that the educational institution itself is the source of all this charisma 'by providing them [academics] with the conditions and the instruments' for their denunciations of routine.

Channels for nobility are commonly concealed within dual organizations, such as British public schools and grammar schools, Grande Ecoles and universities in France.  They are linked in a relationship of opposition and distinction, offering two styles of work, two sets of dispositions and two visions of the world.  French universities are inferior and dominated in terms of their 'objective functions' (97), producing teachers and mid level managers, but their faculty members insist on priority being given to research and the teaching of research, although only a few university graduates actually enter research, and most of those even with PhDs end up in school teaching.

University pedagogy does not have institutional support for the kind of intensive and sustained pedagogy in the preparatory schools.  Pedagogic practices are clearly linked to organizational conditions and to student dispositions.  Teaching in science faculties, for example is commonly dispersed between different levels of teacher—professors, lecturers, graduate students and assistant lecturers, each taking on a different task, so that individual lecturers rarely saw the same group of students for more than 4 hours a week.  Pedagogy is often seen as a secondary activity, and a minimal definition of the role.  There is an aversion to teaching the tasks like checking attendance or to any school procedures including 'crude techniques of incitement or control' (98).  It is unusual to award grades publicly, 'one of the most effective techniques of the khagne or taupe teacher'.  There is a notion that students must find their own way, and that quality is more important than any quantity of facts.  Some lecturers never give negative comments, student names are rarely mentioned in discussing assignments, the final exam is minimised, giving lots of homework is rare, and even in maths and physics, written tests are not common.  Routine knowledge is discouraged, as is the copying of notes.

These are systematic differences and they arise in part from different circumstances and location in the structure of educational institutions.  Thus university professors are not expected to prepare students so rigorously, and have to compete for students including those who are not very good at disciplining themselves or preparing for higher education.  Reproducing secondary school techniques would only increase the alienation felt by such students and give professors an extra workload which would threaten their research.  So their liberalism in fact is 'a response adapted to their objective situation' (99).  Tenured professors at the top of the hierarchy particularly exempt themselves from anything pedagogic, which is correspondingly devalued.  There is a need to distinguish their activities from that which goes on in secondary schools to preserve the hierarchy [and rationalize their superiority] .  This is also why the approach to matters such as attendance is so liberal. 

In former days, lecturers were more likely to become professors, and to be more docile, but not these days—hence a certain complicity with students.  That complicity also can help to lessen workloads, and cope with more diverse students.  The trick is to get students to use strategies 'homologous'  to those of their teachers.  The status of the student is no longer as secure as it was.  Learning is now individualized, and students have to balance academic activity with uncertain means and ends, with 'a dilettantism that is expressed in particular in their rejection of scholastic disciplinary measures and grades', and even 'adherence to an exalted image of the intellectual vocation', a stance that negates both 'the objective truth of learning and the occupation to which it objectively leads' (100).

The two types of educational institutions match different social groups.  The preparatory schools produce greater academic output by continuously managing student activity, and are matched well to advantaged students, both socially [largely male] and academically.  Universities that cannot produce such a high academic return are compatible with a much more disparate student population in terms of age, academic capital, intellectual interests and academic and social capital.  Ironically, such students are particularly susceptible to experiencing wasted effort in the absence of institutional regulation [rationalizes failure, cools them out etc?] .

In this way, the dualist structure strengthens disparities, in a 'kind of chiasmatic structure' (101).  This shows clearly the effects of far more than the technical function of instilling skills.  Preparatory students with their advantages should appear to be best prepared for research, but they receive the most scholastic and routine education.  The reason is that that approach is best suited to fulfill the social reproductive function.  What should be a rational division of intellectual and scientific knowledge and labour 'is constantly blurred by the logic of the division of the labour of domination'.

Chapter two A Rite of Institution

The two separate channels determine each other just like the sacred and profane, and this religious analogy can be extended to argue that elite schools consecrate, that they have rites.  Elite schools involve a sense of being elected, being put on trial, and undergoing ascetic training.  They involve isolation and charisma.  Attending an elite school is to undergo a rite of passage, ending with membership of a consecrated elite, accepted by everyone.  Individuals experience this as a purification and sanctification, winnowing out base and trivial elements in their character.

Of course, students are already highly selected to be gifted or docile and to possess many of the required properties.  They are consecrated by being separated from the outside, sometimes literally, and in being further divided between those who pass and those who fail [a note says that failure for the concours is often determined by 1/4 one mark].  Inmates come to recognise themselves as different, and social boundaries are reinforced.  In this way, the social order is instituted and legitimated.  The social standing of elite school graduates remains for life, even if others possess the same technical skills.

The system works well because inmates are persuaded to see themselves as socially distinct, destined for greatness, gifted, having to realize that destiny.  It is important to establish the boundary between these people and the ordinary folk, like the one between the managerial and the 'task oriented petty bourgeoisie' (104).  In exchange, beneficiaries have to recognise the need to accept constraints and sacrifice, and to pursue public service as a duty.  Again, most elite students have already been trained to see themselves in this way, and have practiced long before in a series of educational selections and consecrations in 'an unending process of circular reinforcement'.  Failure also follows a circular process.  As a result, 'the elite school chooses those who have chosen it because it has chosen them', and this guarantees conformity and docility.  There are exceptions, but these schools largely preach to the converted, and include high proportions of teachers' children and early oblates, who can come from the dominated groups.  The latter help to justify the myth that schools are liberating forces. 

Oblates [another religious term, of course -- those who owe everything to the Church] are usually always set apart by their possession of 'secondary advantages that may help to explain their election'(105): working class families which do already have relatively high levels of education and social standing, sometimes bourgeois grandfathers; those who have already achieved at school impressively, and never repeated a grade, won school prizes, enrolled in a lycee early.  Female students similarly are more highly selected, but again possess these compensatory factors, including precociousness and often well educated parents.

It is an illusion that 'the less authoritarian relationship between teachers and students gives more "democratic" results (here, as elsewhere, laissez faire attempts to make the better-off better off)' (106).  Oblates with previous educational success respond particularly well to the scholastic pedagogy in preparatory classes.  In return, oblates adhere completely to the institution. Those selected at the final stage have already begun to embark on different social trajectories, and successful students have already begun to distance themselves from their peers, sometimes pushed by marginal parents, or by other 'slight gaps', like knowing to read before they went to school, skipping grades, receiving prizes and nominations and so on [sounds like me, except for the last bit].  These distinctions have real and psychological consequences, in attending schools with different names, or with different school terms, and in producing 'naively elitist pride' (107).  The latter assuages guilt, and compensates for 'double isolation', although 'nostalgia for reintegration into their community of origin' often remains, sometimes as a refuge for those rejected.

There is a Freudian undertone, in seeing the process as obeying the father who initiated the break, but then going on to have to deny him, in a mixture of 'support and betrayal, solidarity and scorn', made worse where the initial break was not particularly encouraged by the parent.  In these cases, any success achieved subsequently can never be shared with loved ones.  Generally, the past has to be sacrificed to the future, and there are a number of ways to manage this.  Those who become socially mobile might see their fate as a matter of 'world progress' produced by emancipatory schools or societies.  However, they might also see their trajectory as a deviant one [I think this is hinting at imposter syndrome].  The socially mobile 'transplants' rarely say much about themselves and their careers, or their origins, although they often fail to fully assimilate to bourgeois culture as in 'regional novelists' [they don't like ethnographic sociology either which would reveal too much].  Teaching is their most preferred social function as a result, and they can also retain 'the status of dominated among dominants'(108) [and continue to justify the system, I think the argument is, instead of exposing it].

So the academic consecration of preparatory schools is effective because mostly the people concerned have already been converted and prepared.  The trick is to make it surprising or miraculous, leading to outbursts of joy upon selection.  It was the same in mandarin China, an example suggests.

This act of consecration depends, therefore, upon an 'entire universe of belief' in which magic becomes efficacious [citing Mauss], but elite institutions are particularly good at reinforcing central beliefs through operations such as hazing.  Less visible but equally effective, the entire curriculum of elite schools produces 'a charismatic initiation process', relating to social competence particularly—breaking with family ties and communities, developing a new way of life including 'ascesis, physical and mental exercise' (109), with frequent testing of charismatic attributes.  Individuals lose their initial value, and gain new value through the institution [compare with role-stripping in Goffman].  Techniques include dismissing earlier academic attainment to prepare students for the concours, including 'giving lower than average grades to the best students and the class and negative grades to the weakest' (110), or publicly rebuking the audience and their ambitions.  There is also a constant competition, requiring complete investment, an 'academic form of struggle for one's life'.

Asceticism dominates, as a universal form of preparation to encourage 'disinterestedness and endurance' (quoting Durkheim), and showing in a particular milieu of French society, the ability to control one's nature, an important basis of distinction.  There is 'deep and unconscious desire for cultural ascesis', and elite schools see themselves as playing an important cultural role for future leaders.  Hence the importance of studying dead languages, to discipline the mind, and their role in producing marked boundaries between laymen and professionals.  Modern mathematics is justified in the same way, despite its apparent efficacy.  Any activity, including sports, can be justified in this way, and this also validates the notion that the elite are 'real men, who have the capacity to engage in these pure activities', purified of all pragmatic and profitable purpose.  [A quote from an old Etonian is an example—the school taught this person very little, but taught it very well].  Pragmatic purpose is denied, so is simple pleasure, unless it is that of applying rules.  There is no attempt to actually measure pedagogic efficiency, more a matter of 'collective belief', sustained by those who have undergone the education.

The social boundaries are grounded in beliefs, but also have 'some basis in fact', often established by comparing subsequent careers, although this is obviously open to the objection that it only works because people are predisposed to believe it.  It is self fulfilling to the extent that the noble have to constantly act in a noble way [actually citing Elias], showing the real effects of 'social magic'(112): people do live up to these expectations, and do become noble, as well as ambitious and enterprising.  This can be seen among ENS students, especially philosophers, who like to adopt 'the heroic postures or the character roles of the intellectual nobility', or adopt mythical postures as 'characters' [some French examples ensue, and Bourdieu argues these are actually really stereotyped and ritualized, even when they look individual and eccentric].  Students feel bound by the fate which beckons them, acting 'as much for himself as for his peers', who need to have the image of the ENS student maintained.  It also helps conceal the less promising future that many of them will actually occupy.

The chosen ones expect to be high achievers, but only a small fraction of them will become so.  Most of ENS graduates end up in teaching at lycees.  But this is systematically concealed, and the extraordinary trajectories are overemphasized.  Many will have to learn to cut their losses despite overinvestment in the myth, although there are compensations in enjoying the symbolism of the title of graduate [normalien or archicube], and the distance it still produces: it is a share in the symbolic capital owned by the group.  Relatively humble social origins can actually help as well, and choice of discipline: philosophy students dream of becoming charismatic philosophers and are often disappointed, but those subjects that lead to more professions, such as geography and geology, are less attractive to upper class students.  Overall though, 'symbolic dividends' are still important, especially to ENS graduates, and they typically persuade themselves that they are interested in no other kind. 

Chapter three.  The Ambiguities of Competence

[increasingly reads like earlier work]

The educational system imposes 'misrecognition of its true logic' (116).  It appears purely rational, validating competencies and technical qualifications, but it also consecrates social competencies as 'legally recognized capacities for exercising power'.  Schools replace religious institutions in performing magic and consecration.  It operates with ideological 'social "theories" such as the division into castes or orders'.  Its judgments are public, formal and universally recognized.

Students are distributed into academic classes which are in turn matched to social class of origin.  Judgments are 'objectivated into structures and embodied into dispositions' (117).  Students themselves do the work through exercising various choices: these reproduce academic taxonomies just as teachers' evaluations do, and they become unconscious.  Social difference and distinction is what results.  Certificates and credentials gain their power from the collective belief in their authority.

Academic judgments are also crucial in the construction of personal identity.  It is hard to appeal against their authority [except via psychologists he says] .  They seem to be universal in their power to organize expectations and predictions about identity.  Credentials produce the effects that they are claiming just to predict.  Many elite jobs enable incumbents to acquire a technical competence on the job.  The education system provides its certificated products with 'a legitimate monopoly on a social virtue or competence' (118), often with legal support.  It guarantees either general excellence, virility, honour, or general competence depicted in terms of character, leadership, public spirit [the masculine and bourgeois virtues]. Suitable status attracts particular material compensations '(significantly called honoraria)', and symbolic profit.  Unlike technical competence, social competence never declines with age.

However, it is important not to just embrace 'technocratic faith' as an alternative, and nor to see educational credentials in terms of 'radical nominalism' [having no basis in reality].  Educational credentials do refer to some technical skills and competencies, and technical shortages can affect the market value of a title.  It is important to distinguish between technical skill and social dignity.  However, it is impossible to define technical competence without considering their role in founding domination—required skills are always those at which dominant groups excel.  Dominant groups also need to justify their position by claiming it rests on skills, but this is rarely simply a matter of technical competence.  The actual grading of jobs varies itself, with a greater emphasis on what the job involves in terms of skill at the bottom, and the sort of persons it requires the top [with reference to the French occupational dictionary -- job descriptions in management in the UK show this well]

The higher the title, the more it functions as a matter of nobility or dignity, requiring no demonstration of skill, and emphasizing the symbolic.  In practices of social distinction, it helps to regards the titles of others as merely a matter of skill, as when employing social subordinates.  Nevertheless, employers are not prepared to see titles as purely symbolic.  Sometimes a title may also correspond to a particular competence; it may be universally recognized in markets; it may offer a universal competence; it may not have caught up with 'job - internal changes brought on by technological changes' (120) [in the piece written with Boltanski, Bourdieu says that these issues are open to active struggle and renegotiation by people trying to maximize the market value of their credentials, a kind of ongoing class struggle].  Other fractions of the dominated may particularly benefit in their struggles with employers.  Employers themselves are ambivalent here because they are often themselves graduates of the Grandes Ecoles.  They would like to see a new tripartite system, with Grandes Ecoles producing the masters of the economy, technical schools for the qualified workforce, and the university which would focus on research.  They want the profits provided by the educational system in reproducing social structure, without facing any contradictory demands or structural delays—or the educational system's refusal just to focus on the technical.

Credentials play an important role in transactions between employers and employees, because they are components of important strategies.  We need to turn to strategies to explain actual reproductive practices: analysis of structures alone will not do this, although they do set the conditions for strategies, including the relations of power involved.  Academic credentials are crucial in all the detailed negotiations over job descriptions, employment opportunities, remuneration and symbolic remuneration.  Candidates offer a list of skills and titles, and properties related to each.  In some ways, the more imprecise and uncertain are both the job and the title, the more room there is for 'bluffing', and therefore greater opportunities to realise social and symbolic capital.

All interactional discourses require a social context and a consideration of structural constraints.  Sometimes, struggles will be institutionalized in collective negotiations and conventions, or there might be agreed taxonomies of jobs as a result of earlier classification struggles.  There is an interest in establishing a common discourse about jobs and positions, but there is always a strategic element as well.  Sometimes, symbolic satisfaction is offered as compensation for poor material satisfaction. Some jobs are provided with good salaries but lower status, perhaps a less acceptable designation.  There is a struggle over the precise titles for jobs, and sometimes those with academic credentials can develop a more prestigious title [as in the professionalization of everyone].  It is the gap between the symbolic and the technical which provides opportunities for these strategies, and academic titles and job titles are 'weapons and stakes in the struggle' (123).  'Semantic negotiation'plays an important part in the struggles.  Strategic victories are sometimes sanctioned post hoc by bureaucratic taxonomies, but these always contain 'traces of the conflicts and negotiations that have produced them', and academic titles have usually played a crucial role in legitimising claims.

Overall, the educational system has provided a universal standard, with a complex system of categories, and in this way, the job market itself fits 'into the strictly hierarchized universe of academic qualifications'.

The Appendix justifies Bourdieu's views of life in preparatory schools by citing a number of documents including alumni newsletter and various reports and speeches by alumni (four in all).  They do confirm the obsessive workload, with no time to read anything except comics or detective novels, the enchanted memories that the schools provided (strict yet maternal discipline, saintly teachers, the delights of experiencing elegant mathematical proofs, the delightful conversations, the delights of appearing in uniform; eccentric teachers, learning to manage arguments, learning from friends, meeting famous people, friendship and love; high group morale, a love of learning that lasts for life).

Part three

Chapter one A State of the Structure

Most accounts of the life in the Grandes Ecoles are celebratory or polemical, nearly always written by alumni, and linked to the social and occupational status which can still reflects the value of graduation.  Most of them refer to a single case.  Sociology should proceed differently, but we must be aware that the the choice of techniques and methods are closely linked to the way the object is constructed in the first place. 

The concept of the scientific field helps to avoid some of the problems: it says that scientific reason is the product of history that becomes increasingly authoritative as the field grows in autonomy, and this avoids both a reduction to logical absolutism and to historicism or psychologism.  Earlier work on how the fields function and studies of the affects they generate can be applied to understand establishments as showing a series of objective relations producing effects.  Analyzing these effects is one of the best ways to understand the notion of a field and its limits: for example, official forms of organization are not fields because they do not demonstrate particular effects, in France at least, although they might in the USA. 

We might start with student social origins, for example or take a sample of schools [HE institutions] of differing status.  When we do, we find 'a cumulative index of social and academic prestige' (133).  We then select a second dimension based on the amount of academic capital required and its autonomy, and here the poles stretch from academically dominated combined with ideas either economically and socially dominated or dominant.  We can see the main effects of this structured field as producing 'a double structural homology' (136) showing linked oppositions, one which separates the Grandes Ecoles from the petites ecoles and the universities, and one between upper and petty bourgeoisie, or  top level executives and little ones [the connection between them means that there is a large door and a little door to subsequent occupations -- I got fed up with having to tell my voice recognition system how to spell grande porte and petite porte -- and see below].  There is also a division within the field of Grandes Ecoles as we have seen, between the intellectual artistic ones and more establishment economic and political ones.  Overall, these oppositions produce 'systems of academic differences' which structure or give rise to 'systems of social differences'.  [Empirical data on social origins of students are presented PP. 137-9]

In other words, there is some continuity between the dispositions of families and eventual positions in the field of power, but this can look naive, as if social mobility was a matter of inheritance from father to son.  Social reproduction as an effect of the field is more complex, and simple studies of social mobility do not grasp this.  Institutions have their own effects in actively channeling students rich in academic dispositions, 'inherited capital' (139), and these can come from different locations in social space and the field of power.  They should not be seen as a matter of individual choices, of course, because they take place in structural constraints: they arise as a result of reconciliations of 'vision and division' (140).  Statistical correspondences between positions of institutions and the dispositions of occupants need to be explained, as an operation of academic categories, internalized objective structures which become academic classifications.  These also arise in affinities in the habitus between personal qualities and the values of the elite, but again there is no explicit selection involved—the chosen choose their own choosers, while the others exclude themselves from the competition before they are excluded.  Thus 'countless practical operations of subjective and objective selection' (141), produced the channelling: the educational system 'acts as an objectivated classification algorithm', producing groups that are 'as internally homogenous and as externally heterogeneous as possible': the distances that are created reflects subsequent social differences and distances.  The system produces social identities differentiating those in different categories,  as well as a solidarity in the elite overall. Higher education establishes distinct boundaries, although actually abilities are continuously distributed.  The system works through religion-like rituals.  These also help to reduce uncertainty and risk for individuals, and set them early on a series of 'probable trajectories' (142).

The larger sample of HE institutions [84] focused on students' original social classes.  This has recognized limits, failing to pick up specific differences in types of secondary school or subjects studied and so on.  Nor is it possible to find 'a single index of academic success'(143).  Official data from the ministry of education were used, and in some cases, the files from individual schools.  The idea was to try and get one institution to represent each region of the field which correspond to regions of the field of power—'art and architecture, teaching and research, the higher civil service, the magistrature, medicine, heads of industrial firms, heads of commercial firms, and the military' (144).  The results are shown in a classic Bourdieu diagram 145, with the poles as positive and negative autonomy and small and large doors, and institutions located on the grid according to the social origins of their students [correspondence analysis?] .  Another one on page 146 has the categories as also showing 'supplementary variables' based on occupational status.  Greater specialism among the institution seems important—these attract students who are already committed to particular careers, which are often less noble.  Generally, the institutions are distributed in a way which is similar to the distribution of occupations in social space, the general social hierarchy.  This shows that HE institutions are far from autonomous from social hierarchies, and there is a close relation between ranking in the academic hierarchy, and ranking according to the social origins of students.

This pattern is found within all the major sub spaces of the university field, which also correspond to 'broad sectors of the field of power' (147) [with the rank order of institutions corresponding to access to particular sectors of teaching or public administration].  There are additional variables, however which include provincial residence , and particular type of concours [a secondary one offers a form of internal promotion for those who've already got jobs as civil servants].  The pattern extends to technical occupations, the training of military officers, and professional life, with vocational training 'the most open to students from the working and middle classes'.

In the second smaller sample [21 Grandes Ecoles], a wider range of data is available, provided by direct survey, and mostly relating to scholastic achievement.  There are records of 'student academic capital', including precociousness and baccalaureate results; cultural and social capital of families, including occupation, levels of education, numbers of siblings, family members in post-secondary work, and place of residence.  Surveys took place  in the middle to late 60s.  Schools were chosen to reflect the principal regions of the fields of power again, although they could not research military or art schools.  More diagrams, like the one on 149, structured again according to autonomy and to little or large doors.  Again we find corresponding social gradients and, with prestigious institutions generally attracting children from professional or commercial backgrounds living in Paris, with prestigious grandparents.  Social differences become academic differences in that school careers before entry to Grandes Ecoles have also varied—some from elite social backgrounds have been to private school or occupied more academic tracks in school [often with classics].

The differences between large and small doors [increasingly looking like chances to enter prestigious organizations] appear as as a division between educational institutions and even in 'representations of school work, the act of learning, and intellectual activity itself' (150).  There are genuinely cultural barriers between specialists and generalists, technicians and executives, just as marked as in the old days between high prestige secondary schools [which taught Latin] and those who only had a primary or secondary modern education.  The differences are constantly reinforced in educational institutions, and finally appear as something objectively measurable, as grades.  The cultural nobility is channeled towards educational activities which reward a broader outlook, well roundedness, cultivation, and so on, and these will also dominate their future occupations.  The 'commoners' are offered no symbolic value, remain as specialists and technicians, and have to demonstrate constant achievement if they are to succeed: their value is defined simply in opposition to dominant ones—'earnestness, painstaking care, rigour, and efficiency' (151).  This reproduces the common division in the social order between agents of conception and agents of execution, non manual and manual, theory and practice.  These are sanctified as differences of aptitude or intelligence. It is really the same logic as in the ancien regime, the same justification of nobility of birth dominating over achievement.  It serves to limit the ambition of those in intermediate positions.

Education does struggle to justify its categories and differences, and it faces challenge, for example in separating out primary and secondary school teachers, where there are rival claims to expertise.  The same goes with differences between direct entrants and those seeking qualifications who are already in post.  Any break is only imposed after the 'long series of bureaucratic and pedagogic devices' (152) culminating in the award of two sorts of diplomas.

So we have seen that HEIs are divided according to the degree of their autonomy, whether they stress academic selection criteria, vs. the extent to which they prepare students for labour markets which relate most directly to economic power.  In turn, the amount and type of student capital, whether economic or cultural have an effect.  Even Grandes Ecoles are structured according to these two principles.  Details of the correspondence analysis then ensue.  For HEIs as a whole, the second dimension in the first analysis sees schools of management, public admin, architecture and art at one end and schools of engineering, agronomy and education and research at the other.  The poles have other differences, according to whether they are private or public, and whether they require good academic records or long preparation periods or not.  [We have some quantification here, so that the second factor or axis 'represents 16.7% of the total inertia' (152).  I think this is the equivalent for correspondence analysis of explaining variation, except that this time it explains the lack of variation away from the axes].  Law and medical faculties and science faculties are distributed in a similar way.  Those institutions that have strong ties to industrial and commercial firms emphasize qualities such as ways of behaving or speaking, or displaying general culture [the latter is 'poorly defined, leaving ample room for every day journalistic - style trivia'(153)].  The polar opposites stress scientific disciplines or erudite knowledge, the more measurable qualities which are relatively independent of the demands of the economic system.  Students for these institutions tend to depend exclusively on academic and cultural capital, rather than economic and cultural capital [indicated by the professions of their parents].

In the second analysis, the second dimension arranges schools according to students' own academic capital, especially the level of success on the bacc as the most important.  There is a close connection with both relations of inherited cultural capital and the structure of family capital more generally, so that those with more cultural than economic capital are opposed to those with the other sort of balance.  Again occupational destinations seem important—teaching and research for the schools with the most autonomous selection process, as opposed to those leading to public sector or engineering employment, economic and administrative fields: for those latter students, the external concours is relevant, especially for the ENA [school of administration].  When it comes to preparing people for large or small doors, the composition of parental capital seems particularly important.  There are also '"sanctuary schools"'(154), where well placed socially but weak academically students are found, almost the polar opposite of places like ENS: one example is the School of Mines.

These second dimensions in both analyses [that is the balance of academic and cultural capital in families] become important in sorting out the Grandes Ecoles [I got fed up typing this, I will call them GEs], as an indication of the power relations in the field.  This is shown in the subsequent third specific analysis, comparing GEs with similarly arranged second rank schools as 'supplementary variables'[together, these will show the importance of the second dimension across the whole sector?] The analysis examined the affects of 'parent's occupation and education, grandfather's occupation, size of family, place of residence', compared to the students' own trajectory and academic capital.  We also get a distinction between positions and 'stances', the latter relating to 'involvement in sports and cultural activities (attending theatre or concerts, daily or weekly newspapers and magazines read) and intellectual, religious, and political practices and opinions'[the equivalent to the British studies of leisure on the differences between tastes and participation?].  Gender was also examined separately, for analytic purposes, even though it has a major effect overall.  Some problems arose with asking students about their political opinions, and some institutions did not have many opportunities, for example to attend cinema.

From this third analysis, [diagram 156-7] the first factor, 37.3% of the total inertia, shows oppositions between establishments according to whether students were richer in cultural or economic capital.  Isolated cases were explained in more detail, for example the specific factors affecting entry to Agro.  In the process, the analysis picked out certain '"wonder children"' (155), rare GE students originating in farming, blue collar and subordinate clerical families.  These people are survivors, with atypical families of origin, usually better educated best qualified, often with middle class mothers. We can call this a chiasmatic structure as well, with opposition between economic and cultural capital.

The value of the diplomas in different labour markets, especially in economic activity 'is almost the exact opposite of the strictly academic and intellectual hierarchy' which provides students with their own academic capital.  This is seen by looking at salary differences.  Social capital also becomes more important with distance from the university field, where it is already pretty important.  There is some relation between prestigious schools and higher salaries.  Sanctuary schools are an exception, as the analysis might indicate, so that the Ecole most closely tied to management receives students that are not well qualified but well connected, and can thus use social capital to acquire their diplomas.  The gap in incomes between those with different diplomas increases with age.  Nevertheless, changes in market value are also possible, as when graduates in economic statistics suddenly find themselves employable by banks.

Stances correspond to positions.  At the intellectual pole, there are lots of people who go to theatres and concerts, do not engage in sport, and tend to read intellectual and left wing periodicals and newspapers.  Those at the intellectual pole 'more often declare themselves to be on the left or the far left' (159) and to support militant unions.  There is a second axis which relates to the distinction between technical and administrative corps.  Administrative entrants come from classic bourgeois homes, follow humanities courses and have often attended private establishments, and these compare with those who enter technical positions, who have more often come from scientific backgrounds, socially mobile families, and have succeeded in the second concours.  They are split particularly by whether or not they read Le Monde [centre left says the translator], and there is a difference in self classification in political terms as well: admin students particularly classify themselves as centre left or centre right. 

A memoir of life in technical institutions (160) indicates a lack of interest in literature and politics, low participation in public life and in politics.  This indicates that cultural differences like this show 'the most crucial principle of division' for the agents themselves involved, an example of how a sociology of perception is required, particularly indicating how principles of classification construct the social world, and how they differ from more objective classifications.  So for example the crucial difference between the different GE students and graduates turns on the differences in access to professions [the doors], as well as the differences between academic and technical subjects themselves.  The education system as with other ideological operators, help 'foster or determine such collective illusions of perspective', by obscuring for example the difference between those who attend GE science and those who attend polytechnics, despite their a similar course of studies and the entry exam.  These perceived differences are greater than those between science and humanities GE students, although the latter is more commonly seen as fundamental.  For practical purposes, illusions can take on an objective role.  Social science however focuses on the real oppositions rather than the visible ones and this can 'weaken the social effects related to misrecognition' (161).  Correspondence analysis, for example, can illuminate the whole structure.

The structure can seem self evident, but this can prevent further research.  It is important to investigate how exactly distributions of students arise, or how their social backgrounds produce academic properties, or how positions are related to stances.  It is the distribution of practices, including the demonstration of interests and the adoption of political views, that are tied to the different sorts of inherited capital, but we still need to examine in more detail how choices are made, how the habitus works.

Economic and cultural patrimony consists of the resources held by the family group in the form of material goods (including books, musical instruments, and personal computers) or as 'an embodied state, in the very person of the members of the family group' (162).  Both favour the development of dispositions 'adjusted to the social position they characterize', through lifestyles, but also by being simply available.  Individuals and groups evaluate their resources and social value, and then 'more or less consciously strive to institute objective conditions likely to ensure that their properties…  will be the grounds for recognised advantages…  that their patrimony will function as capital'.  [This is the basis of Rancière's critique that underneath all the subtlety of practice, Bourdieu assumes that we are all basic economic rational actors]. 

However this is a general principle, found in socialisation generally [and thus pretty obvious]. It is sometimes hard to trace initial positions to detailed interests, for example in academic achievement, or in culture, sports, religion and politics.  Dispositions [especially ethical ones, it seems] are structured generally by the relative weight of economic or cultural capital, and by the priority subsequently given to culture or economics, art or money.  This 'fundamental ratio' generates practical preferences [so we are just asserting this connection?].  'Everything leads us to assume' this.  However, effects are different at different poles.  At the academic pole, there are ethical dispositions to use cultural capital intensively, especially as it increases.  At the other pole of economic power, there are other dispositions competing with academic ascesis—luxurious lifestyle, more leisure, and anti intellectualism, reinforced by bourgeois families and Catholic tradition [there are examples of Catholics being particularly skeptical of scientific world views and choosing academic institutions accordingly, although even here there is an exception with the Jesuit GE mentioned before].

People located at these poles have their perceptions structured so they see the social world as offering objective 'inevitable alternatives, such as involved or disinterested, gratuitous or useful, temporal or spiritual, political or aesthetic' and others associated with right or left wing positions.  Priority for these alternatives depends on the positions occupied in the structure, another example of how social structures become mental structures.  Another example is given concerning the topics which structure ordinary language and their links with social structure [the source is an unreferenced Oswald Ducrot, 163].

Actual distributions of students are produced by two 'partially independent' principles.  Academic capital is already tied to initial position and inherited cultural capital, and it becomes objectivated in terms of qualifications and nominations: this subsequently determines chances of entering a particular GE, mostly because it affects chances of entering effective preparatory classes and gaining success in concours.  However, even with equal amounts of cultural capital, students are still separated according to whether they are attracted towards 'temporal power or intellectual prestige'—  a '"tropism"', arising from  'infraconscious experiences', early sensing of the relation between economic and cultural portions of family capital and vocational choice.

As examples, admin students tend to choose options related to economic power, such as their own occupations, or choosing the polytechnic rather than ENS even when both are open to them, if they come from families with economic power themselves.  By contrast, those from the dominated regions of the field of power are more vulnerable to 'the lure of academic consecration', and further exclusion from that field.  This is also the case for those from stigmatised spaces—wonder children, religious and sexual minorities.  Even those who go to the Polytechnic feel more strongly drawn to the economic field.

The influence of the GEs extend downwards into schooling, for example the intellectual ones legitimize a disinterested intellectual education in public schools.  Families in economic fields perceive this as 'a necessary evil', and want to minimise the effects, often choosing private establishments.  Their anxieties are behind the frequent attempts to make education line up with business [and Bourdieu gives some historical examples.  One interesting alliance arose between an advocate of English public schools {Demolins} to develop 'will, courage and leadership qualities', which were the same as those values claimed by his friend de Courbetin for sports.  The doctrine of self reliance and private initiative was also important, combined with disdain for mere effort, instruction, or erudition.  A more recent example arose in response to 1968 when a panicky proposal to reform the GE stressed management training, economic leadership, the recruitment of businessmen, and undertoo9kvarious lobbying activities—again endorsed more enthusiastically by the less intellectual GE].

This clash of ultimate values is really a matter of social reproduction of different sorts of domination.  Support for the School of Administration arises from the business bourgeoisie, and they also have the interest of finding a place for their less qualified offspring, providing the atmosphere of a sanctuary school.  By contrast, there is a constant struggle by the academics to insist that the technical demands of the economy should be supplemented with an emphasis on social competence and values.  This struggle is sometimes represented innocently in academic activity, for example in structuring essay topics for the concours, where opposing terms are contrasted, and students are expected to justify the 'high' ones—which include consciousness, culture, judgment, ideas, truth, justice, duty, the self and freedom (167), and the modality remains one of ' "autonomous reflection"...the illusion of neutrality and universality'. 

Processes like this explains the non random distributions, and the lack of 'crossed trajectories' that we find between both social origin and attendance, and between the poles among the GE themselves.  We are reminded that academic criteria are better explained as 'professorial schemata of perception and appreciation...  [which]…  are never all and entirely technical…  never indifferent to social characteristics', even for the most technical.  Even if there is flexibility in the institution, students themselves operate with dispositions that cancel it out, as when students from economic backgrounds manage to reject the appeal of educational and intellectual activity, even when they get into a GE.  Any misplaced individuals drop out or go to another institution, often at the crucial stage of selection.  Those GEs which recruit from both academic and economic families [at HEC, a business school] often have highly academic standards for entrance which can attract intellectuals [sons of teachers], who then drop out in higher numbers.  This is one reason why success as a business professional is heavily affected by social origin rather than the student's own academic capital.  Social capital is also important in business schools and also sanctuary  schools [some interesting data shows that subsequent salaries are higher for those who have got the job through social connections].  Bourdieu thinks that this sort of contradiction [status inconsistency or Mertonian strain] explains the surprising number of leftwing students at HEC.

Overall, managing crossed trajectories and other errors reduces the cost of RE conversion, and also consolidates belief and interest in the game—the illusio—that will produce success.  For individuals, it minimizes status inconsistency and the threats of any entryists.  It also regulates ambition especially via 'struggles over succession' (170).

Positions are linked to cultural or religious and political stances, in the form of 'ethical, aesthetic and political "choices"'.  These reflect preestablished preferences.  Unsurprisingly, attending cultural events like theatre and concerts are associated with academically dominant but socially dominated poles, while participation in sport shows the opposite tendency, as do all indicators of politically conservative dispositions.  The hierarchy between economic and cultural capital guides these choices and produces 'a complete vision of the world' (171).  This is the underlying process that explains familiar associations between ENS students and the occupation of their parents, mostly teachers.  There is a noticeable correspondence between individual choices and objective aspects of school career, so that students show they have converted 'inherited cultural capital into academic capital, a conversion that is nothing less than automatic'.

There is a disparity between the academic values and the economic and social values of their diplomas, however, producing 'meritocratic indignation that is perhaps not unrelated to their "anti capitalist" inclinations'.  This is shown in political choices, both belonging to leftwing groups, and reading leftwing journals [which effectively discriminate ENS from other graduates].  They attend the cinema frequently, they like classical or avant-garde theatre.  By contrast, HEC graduates tend to be privately educated, living in Paris, less academic in terms of qualifications, more interested in sport and other activities, including 'forms of professional preparation' (174) like organizing equestrian shows.  They are more diverse politically, but more right wing.  [To supplement 'abstract and incomplete statistics', an example looks at interviews and texts produced by the institution itself, claiming to develop, for example, American models that integrates academic and athletic activities, in the form of '"the scholar - athlete"'.  They also produce a cultural lecture programme].  The specific differences probably represent an underlying antithesis between 'the values of virility and responsibility' as a prelude to economic life, as compared to 'introverted and extra worldly dispositions…  At once individual and autonomous', and including 'hallucinatory and lyrical political alignments' (175), 'inspired more by a rejection of the realities of the present world than by a real will to wield power over it'.

Other GE fall in between, again showing a correspondence between cultural stances and a combination of inherited cultural and economic power.  One methodological problem is that all ENA students read the centre left Le Monde as part of their professional training.  Another exercise asked students to name the five people they would like to see invited to give a talk, beefed up as 'a test in which each school projects its own image of excellence' (176).  They also had to rank occupations.  As predicted, intellectuals and social sciences figure well with humanities students, while polytechnicians name more mainstream figures.  There's also a sexual difference, in that women prefer the cultural to the political, naming theatre directors or actors, filmmakers or musicians [massive detail, 177 -80].

An alternative approach would involve the ethnographic study of particular singular institutions, but this is 'the ideographic illusion', a variant of positivism.  Instead, we need to construct the space in which objects are located and which provides distinct properties, relational ones.  Only then can we see the location of the different GE in an 'insular' universe (180), sharing a single lifestyle, including 'bodily hexis, clothing, ways of speaking and even sexual habits' within which apparently 'individual monographs' are legitimated.  Schools selects those with compatible classes of habitus, isolating and consecrating a subclass within the elite.  This is inevitably a relational identity, based on difference, but it requires substantial reality to be adjusted to conform to it.  Details may change, but the principles of differentiation remain, 'within the same logic as the past differences'(181).

It is important to grasp relations and see them as not substantial [that is the properties having empirical value of their own, such as playing particular kinds of sports].  Only the relations have meaning and value, nothing is ever seen as noble or common in itself.  This is why studies of nobility show the effects of different 'even opposing properties practices and discourses'.  Distinction is essentially relational, although it is commonly misunderstood as having 'a substantial essential meaning': it can be shown as a display of luxury rather than poverty, but also 'through a more or less ostentatious rejection of ostentation', a rejection of conspicuous consumption [Proust's examples of democratic nobility spring to mind].  [Brief examples include sexual morality and television culture, as an example of structural limits that can be set on this 'relativist reduction' -- Bourdieu has never encountered Queers, evidently].

Overall, those who enter GE quickly recognize likeminded persons, people socially similar, permitting students to 'love himself in [his neighbour]' (182) [Proust again].  This paradise explains the nostalgia by graduates.  It lends confidence and certainty, as well as a sense of distinction.  This solidarity resembles family ties, fraternity.  We can see its effects on 'the social structuring of affects', where people remain friends with school acquaintances, even marry them.  The habitus is responsible for bodily and romantic 'attractions and repulsions'(183), which are simply embodied relationships between positions.  GE are the best ways to produce socially homogeneous classmates, foster togetherness, exclude undesirables, with the threat of unsuitable marriages: introducing more girls to the system 'will only strengthen this homogamy'.  This explains esprit de corps, which seems so mystical and miraculous.  It helps produce collective cultural capital, which each member of the group can take as a resource.

However, deviant trajectories can arise.  There is never a perfect fit between the properties of the school and the properties of students, and this can be one of  the major forces for change in GE and the field of power.  Some students have ended up at the wrong pole, and others have had their trajectories interrupted, and these people often have an important role in changing the field of power or in specific sectors such as literary or artistic fields.  Unorthodox trajectories can produce 'reactional stances', especially in politics (184). Another response can be 'hyperidentification' [excessive identification with the group] , especially with those entering dominant fields  Unsteady and unstable trajectories produce corresponding unstable stances 'often doomed to constant shifts or, in time, to reversals'.  This is another example of how an objective exclusion, or destiny, can be transformed into a choice.  Sometimes, misplaced upwardly mobile students might identify themselves with leftwing groups or even with '"brothers in origin"' at other GE, like Science.  Others, including the very small number of working class students at GE Commercial hold right wing positions.

These displacements appear as 'an elective conversion', although they may be 'felt deep down to be a descent', especially if they move from power to intellect.  These are often the most radical as a result of 'overidentification'[relentlessly cynical about left wing positions].  [The empirical data shows how misplaced individuals express preferences for Marxism, for example].  It is easier to identify with a group  where 'the legitimate intellectual posture is more clearly established', and commitments/postures can be minimized in practices where there is no need to conform 'such as sports or parlor games' (185).  These examples can show that the gap between individual and modal trajectories have an effect.  Again this is misunderstood by non sociologists.  It is the habitus that produces these propensities or inclinations, expectations and subsequent satisfaction and disappointment.  Gaps are reinforced by the reactions from the group, however resulting in feeling out of place, experiencing practical differences with the mainstream dispositions.

There is a 'socially constituted tendency to persevere in one's social being' (186).  As a result, any downwardly mobile students, even when they achieve what would seem a successful job, such as teacher, need to compensate for failure.  They do this in the form of 'excess... extremes…  bold ostentation' it shows they have rejected the normal certainties.  Manifestations in the past have included 'symbolic revolutions and religious heresies', as well as 'artistic breaks'.  The same goes for those who have only achieved moderate success in a normal trajectory.  Again, this position cannot simply be accepted, even the others would see it as a great success.  Here, we have examples of science or engineering graduates, sons of industrial and commercial heads, who adopt right or far right opinions.  Again, we need to see what looks like the political characteristics of individual schools, related to the composition of students, as an effect of the whole space of GE, which distribute particular meanings to particular trajectories and places in social space. [Social and political attitudes are dynamically reproduced].

Overall, the space of the GE should be seen as 'a complex network of objective structures whose structural constraint is imposed upon the strategies' of production and reproduction of domination.  Related objective differences and distances are 'retranslated into subjective distances' and legitimated.  We need to examine the whole ensemble and how it functions, and therefore we require a methodology that grasps it as a whole, and understands 'the complex diversity of the structural and functional oppositions that form it [so we are far from the usual British stuff that sees mere complexity as a refutation of social structuring, as in the Bennett study].  In particular, differences are introduced between 'conception and management professionals', who have entered through the large door of the top concours, and those technicians and administrators who have only gone to second rank schools.  We also can see the differences based on function within the members of the elite.  The way this works is by providing 'a number of partially independent principles of hierarchization' (187) and these limit individual struggles as well as solidifying the field as a whole, producing 'a genuine organic solidarity in the division of the labour of domination'.  Antagonism, say between spiritual and temporal power holders, does not prevent a functional solidarity.  We can see this particularly in the face of the recent fundamental challenge to educational institutions [presumably 1968, which links to the notion of dynamic re-equilibrium in Homo Academicus].

The whole thing is founded 'on a hierarchy of partially autonomous hierarchies'.  This also produces some contradictions, which require constant management, especially to legitimate results.  For example, it must always regulate 'the hopes that it must plant in all and the satisfactions that it can only grant to a few' [sounds more like Merton than ever].

Chapter two A Structural History

[Drenched with data and detail as usual, this one looks at the changes that have occurred between the original studies in the 60s and fresh data emerging in the 80s.  Overall, the claim is that the system of relations has been preserved, even if modified, and this despite the upheavals of 1968.  The offspring of dominant groups continue to dominate in the GE, perhaps even more so than they did.  There have been some changes though, including a shift in the balance of power between the various GE, notable for the rise of the ENA (Administration), which Bourdieu interprets as the result of the successful strategy by those with economic power to compensate for their lack of intellectual qualifications.  I have summarised ruthlessly.]

[It is also interesting to compare the French and the UK systems. For us, the State has supported the challnge to traditonal academic institutions and legitimized the new approachs, even conferring the title of university on the organizations,certainly recognizing the diplomas and degree with no problems. Support from the business corps is present strongly on occasion., and alliances have had effects on pushing 'skills agendas' and vocationalism for most State institutions -- the EU Bologna Declaration did a lot of damage there. Yet elite institutions have also been favoured in various way, notoriously through the quinquennial 'competition' for research funding. Those institutions did once develop the intellectual morale of duty Bourdieu sees in places like the ENS, shown in their role of officering the Empire, and they have produced some dangerous intellectuals including pro-Communist spies. Yet all that was in  the old days: while they still prioritise 'character' and social capital, maybe they are still acceptable to our own business corps for their own kids?]

Some changes are visible, including the disappearance of the left,, balanced by a slight tendency for graduates of ENA to seem more critical, but we need to look at structures rather than anecdotes.  In particular, there is some doubt about whether the system shows 'democratization' in the sense of more middle class students getting into the GE to read humanities: these institutions were also suffering a decline of the same time.  It is true that the numbers of working class students have slightly increased as well, but only moving 'from nothing to next to nothing' (189).

Data from an an official survey, 1984-5, show the picture, although it is not generally comparable with the earlier sample.  There are more business and management schools and they should really be given greater weight if we are interested in the market value of diplomas as well as their academic values.  Even so, the elite or business schools still attract more students from higher social backgrounds than ENS and the Polytechnique.  Generally, the distributions seen similar to the ones found in 1968, showing correspondence between the occupations of students' families, and their standing in social space, indicating a dimension running between inherited cultural capital and economic power as before.  However, the new business and management schools now 'offer a [bigger]  refuge to students from the dominant regions of the field of power who have been unsuccessful in the entrance concours'(190), and this  means that they do not have to choose the universities or other second rate institutions.  Academically selective institutions are still opposed to schools of management business and public administration, so the 'principal oppositions were maintained', the 'sudden jolt of 1968...seems to have encouraged individual and collective reactions tending to reinforce [the conventional structure - this confirms his views in Homo Academicus].

However, there are some 'deformations in the field'.  The gap between those at the top of the academic hierarchy and the others has widened in terms of the percentage of students from the dominant classes, and other GE have been reducing the proportion of children of clerical workers and minor civil servants to admit more sons of executives.  This indicates a number of ways of 'getting around the purely academic obstacles' (193), which include a highly beneficial 'sense of placement'[which I think means knowledge of the inner workings of the system].  So keen are the sons of the bourgeois to avoid having to go to universities, that they are even patronizing schools with slightly inferior reputations and reducing the social disparities.

There has also been a widening in the difference between the large and small doors [royal and less royal routes to academic and occupational success].  There has been change in the distances between the GE, and even between the faculties.  'Social recruitment' seems to have been falling in some of them, as the proportion of women increases.  There have been changes in overall numbers as well, with the more selective institutions able to resist large increases in their student body.  Universities have also increased in size, 'especially the humanities and law faculties' (194), while science faculties have grown far less. Preparatory classes have also enjoyed a boom, especially those focusing on the more middle ranked schools.  There has been greater growth in those taking their technical baccalaureate.  Business schools have enjoyed spectacular growth, doubling in size between 1977 and 80.  The GEs at the top of the system have remained more or less the same, with a slight increase in the proportion of female students, who are younger, and who seem to have been particularly successful academically.  [Loads of data 195, 196].

Overall, the most academically prestigious lycees are even more separated from the others than before, because they are increasingly patronised by the 'offspring of the business bourgeoisie to get around the obstacle of academic demands' (197).  The new management schools have been struggling to offer a suitable 'form of consecration' in the competition with the intellectually superior GE.  Overall, these shifts have led to considerable growth and to 'reinforcing the homogeneity, and the self enclosed nature, of the different schools'.

The rise of the ENA is particularly important, and it now competes more effectively for students with the GEs.  This competition has also produced new institutions such as schools of management, marketing, advertising, journalism [!] and communications, precisely to cater for those trying to get past the demands for academic rigour.  Again we do not notice this unless we look at structures and relations, and the competitive struggles going on.  We see that institutions can benefit as long as they have the right combinations of social and academic capital.  Although the details differ, struggles like this have occurred before, especially in an attempt to capture the offspring of business and management, while competing effectively with the GE. 

[A quick history of HEC {Commercial} ensues, 198.  The main competitor here was Saint Cyr, and HEC finally managed to insist on ' obligatory military preparation', which made them entitled to various military awards, to compete more effectively.  They also added 'traditional' events such as reviews, public hazing and the rest, and set up their own bodies to promote themselves and offer their students expertise in marketing and professional training.  They also engaged in sporting events with the other prestigious schools in France and abroad {including LSE}.  They developed 'a system of job placement' (199), bureaucratically consolidating connections with various companies controlled by alumni, and with various other prestigious organizations including charity gala.  There is an in house magazine.  However, the problem has been to struggle to gain its own awarding powers, rather than to rely on certificates from a university: it began by trying to validate its own baccalaureate, and it also recruited 'renowned teachers'. Other actors included various associations and GE, or the state itself, all engaging in 'the game [which] consists in setting up distances either by excluding others or excluding one's self', by claiming to be unique, for example, and thus entitled to a national profile and  national recruitment, or by refusing to join associations with other low status institutions. HEC even brokered a deal with other prestigious business schools to permit their students direct entry in the second year.  Then it established its own examination and concours, and managed to lengthen its course of studies 'much more a result of competition within the field than of any intrinsic educational need'.]

Successful strategies require potential students and families to recognize these claimed differences, hence the considerable effort to publicize differences and get them recognized, sometimes legally.  ENA launched a competition against GE, especially ENS, in a similar way.  It began with a modest claim to 'rationalize and democratize recruitment of higher public servants' (200), by doing away with nepotism, but now it too consecrates those children of dominant groups with an academic guarantee, where other institutions had denied them one.  This constructed another royal route, in effect, despite the original reformist intentions.  Again this is the product of 'countless individual and collective strategies', including one which insisted that the ENS and the Polytechnique stick to their original purposes, training teachers and engineers; struggles by the those who had been rejected; what looked like academic elitism on the part of the GE in raising standards even higher [which were then rejected by the government, Bourdieu tells us]; and increased 'symbolic investments' by the upstarts. 

This shows us that symbolic capital is what increases prestige and recognition, just as with society marriages, or 'the logic of the salons of which Proust was the self appointed ethnographer' (201).  Symbolic capital requires the same sort of prudence in investment as any kind of capital management.  The ENA had an early advantage in explicitly claiming that it would prepare students for the highest government jobs [instead of having to boast about accidental alumni].  Its existence would replace the special concours that was supposed to lead to these positions, once controlled by the Polytechnique.  It would concentrate symbolic capital in its unique name, which would be identified with 'a known and recognized group', with shared symbolic capital, and with proximity to the political field already [assisted by the technocratic turn in politics, says Bourdieu], with its associated prestige.

We can see the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy by looking at the sorts of students who competed in its own concours, and the effects on the recruitment for other GE.  [comparative data on 202].  [It is common for students to take a number of specific concours].  Those ending up in other institutions had different success rates with the ENA concours, so that, for example ENS students were initially quite interested, but their success rates declined [I don't think the graph shows this at all].  The ENA initially attracted students who were otherwise destined for HEC, for example - even they tended to rate their own school below ENA [and others], especially those from higher social origins.  In response, HEC administers tried to discourage moving to other institutions, partly by chopping one of their options in '"industrial economics"'(203). 

Overall, ENA clearly seems to have benefited from the higher prestige of business, and its success in locating alumni in dominant positions, and symbolic capital only works up to a point anyway, and only becomes important if competition causes serious difficulties in recruitment.  Nevertheless, there was some reaction to the success of ENA, especially from the Polytechnique, setting up an association of their own alumni [who are called X for some reason] to commission a report on careers, and lobbying to prevent their graduates being seen as mere technocrats.  Engineering was seen as a more fitting preparation for administration, especially if there were technical requirements, as in the military.  This was a mobilized fraction of 'the [academic] corps'(204), aiming at reestablishing a code, formulae, 'a professional ideology based on a small number of themes and key words', including those which apparently describe the characteristics of different graduates [the ability to synthesize, work with the others, act responsibly and so on, in the case of the Polytechnique -- just about everybody these days].  This is 'symbolic promotion'.  There is some knocking copy aimed at the new institutions, including some sneering at the preparation ENA graduates undergo ['tinted with qualitative economics' in one case, producing mere technocrats, civil servants with no background in science or engineering]..  There is even a proposal to establish a new '"Institute for Advanced Studies in Public Affairs"', confined only to students from the Polytechnique and ENA. There are also curricular and organizational reforms designed to improve market position, for example by offering language skills to engineers, or including more about management techniques and computer science.  These are 'obvious counters to ENA competition' (203)

These are interesting struggles and that they are about changes in 'the division of labour of domination', but they also operate within the constraints of academic field as well.  ENA does well on the first criterion but less well on the second one, and the strategy has been successful in gaining symbolic recognition, in that graduates do seem to agree with the division of labour proposed by ENA, that relegates the other schools to more specialist and inferior areas.  [It seems, meanwhile that 'positions in personnel {are} rejected by everyone'(207)].  These differences are symbolic in that they do not always conform to actual careers, and ambitious organizations run the risk of being seen as pretentious.  Dubious academic credentials add to this: nevertheless, academic credentials themselves are increasingly being questioned as tests of competence, so there is now a certain 'sense of arbitrariness'.

ENS responded to competition fairly late, following some disillusionment, which turned into 'a deep transformation and dispositions and hopes', after the significant transformation of teaching positions which have been 'globally devalued', not least by increasing numbers of students and teachers.  Jobs in secondary schools were taken up less often, and ENS graduates often had to experience a certain delay in their careers.  [The resulting diversion into high schools and junior high schools apparently led to 'particularly dramatic' career debuts, 'likely at any rate to dash people's spirits'(208)].

One response to the increasing uneasiness of students faced with uncertainty has been to attempt to get students 'to realistically adjust their aspirations to available job openings', as the old harmony between aspirations and occupations weakened in the 1960s.  The crisis was deepened by the rising social status of ENS entrants, who in turn experienced a downward turn in their subsequent careers, partly due to the overproduction of graduates.  Social support for ENS also weakens with the emergence of the new administrative elite.  There is also a slowing down in professorial careers. 'Symbolic devaluation' is the result (209).  The rewards of professors diminish compared to those of civil servants and administrators of equal rank, leading some professors to seek additional income through consultancy or arbitration, especially lawyers.  Others took up extra teaching abroad, or went into journalism and publishing, both of which helped introduce an 'American model' (210), as well as increasing the influence of journalist - intellectuals.  The whole intellectual life style underwent a transformation, as a combination of the specific changes, and a general 'deterioration in the economic and social foundations of university autonomy'[and we know that radicalism and protest was one result, as in Homo Academicus].

Ironically, open competition, like that with ENA, produces a self fulfilling prophecy in exacerbating 'the "decline" rhetoric', which is been sometimes exploited by school administrators.  It is an escalation of bluffing behaviour into 'defeatist behaviour', which affects everybody and reinforces pessimism.  This weakens the 'beliefs, self confidence, self assurance, and self certainty' with which institutions formerly played the game.

Again we learn that we must take care in interpreting particular indices about particular institutions, and take into account relations with other institutions.  Thus changes in the number of students taking a particular concours might well reflect the numbers available, but it also has a symbolic importance, and takes part in discussions of 'the professorial myth of "level"'.  The common practice of taking different sorts of concours and undertaking different forms of preparation for them is ignored, and participation measures become absolute measures: however, 'conscious and unconscious representations of the relative values of the different institutions play a significant role in the evaluation of student performances' (211).  Success rates also reflects self assurance of the recruiters.

At first, ENS students [I think this means those who passed the concours] were widely accepted in other institutions, although this declined over time.  This is partly because ENA claims about the reputation of its graduates which attracted such students were eroded; the rates of those leaving ENA increased as well.  It is not just a simple matter of ENS losing out to the more modern ENA.  The high confidence of ENS graduates was based on their success in the past, and included their acceptance of a moral code that reconciled them to 'unpleasant aspects of their promised future'(212), even while retaining idealized expectations of eventual greatness.  Personal moral commitments were supported by a collective morale.  It is this morale that has been in decline, partly because more privileged students simply expected privileged occupations, seeing ENS as 'a genuine establishment school'(212), and partly because the rise of the journalistic and political fields has led to a decline of intellectual values, including disinterestedness and freedom, and a general slide 'toward a conservative disenchantment' in favour of secular success such as '"media" glory'.  This new conception of intellectual life seemed to match ENA better.  [The struggle is symbolized in the competing statuses of Sartre and Raymond Aron, the latter  'a beacon author for Sciences-po and the ENA'.  Apparently, they symbolised various 'political conversions and reconversions'of the seventies and eighties. A methodological aside quotes articles written by an ENA director, claiming to offer a better deal for those excluded from other schools, and in the process, attacking out of touch intellectuals, especially left wing ones].

Thus this particular confrontation between ENS and ENA shows the underlying struggle in the field of cultural production, with economic power trying to increasingly alter the notion of an intellectual in the name of economic realism and 'vague reference to the American model of the government-involved expert' (214)

We need to understand the whole structure of 'objective relations'.  The split between channels that lead to GE and those that lead to the universities is wider than ever, deepened by widening educational opportunity and the growth of the system.  Given that nearly all of students from the dominant categories have good access, they have come to dominate, even if they lack the right sort of cultural capital or dispositions based on it.  In turn, the students do not identify with this system and its values, and are less likely to participate in the rituals of consecration and recognition.  Because they focus on occupational aspirations, they feel more disappointed with the results of graduation, producing 'latent anomie or full-fledged crisis'.  Institutions are less able to manage so many students, despite recruiting more teachers 'especially at subordinate levels'.  Other remedies included adopting preparatory class methods at the lower levels of all the best lycees [cf.  the active teaching and study skills lobbies in the new mass UK universities].  Competition has produced more of a codified hierarchy extended down to secondary education as well.  The link between the old sectors and ability has been weakened, and converted into 'ranks in a unilinear hierarchy' (215), producing 'nearly perfect unification of the market': the title of your qualification is what counts, 'whatever the nature of the skills they guarantee or the import of the studies they sanction'.  The hierarchy also means earlier tracking, more crossroads, which makes particularly valuable the sense of placement [the translator says this can also be rendered as investment] which involves identifying the best track, and evaluating chances for admission.

This has also meant more ambivalence by the dominant groups to the educational system and its autonomy [it seems less certain that their kids will benefit], and there is no longer this tie between dominant lifestyle and elite schools as once with the English public schools.  There is too much competition, which threatened those with power but low levels of cultural capital.  But at the same time, academic titles seemed to be more important for reproducing social advantage, even in those that seem to value economic capital.  Competition increased and this raised additional barriers to entry, such as requiring more preparatory work, demanding higher grades, needing to undergo preparatory training, say, in the legal profession.  For those from business bourgeois backgrounds who want to get round these obstacles, there is the choice of various sanctuary schools, the least autonomous and the least academically dominated, and this explains the rise of schools of management within universities, the plethora of new diplomas, the increasing training programmes and specialisms in management, some of them operating at the masters level to offer a second chance, often conspicuously dressed with 'the external trappings of modernity' [a survey of attitudes is cited 216-7].  Humble origins will be forgotten as the social capital of graduates increases, Bourdieu thinks.

The growth of management does correspond to some transformations and the economic field as well, like the growth in international trade, and the greater technical nature of work via computers [data on 218].  It looks as if these transformations have come along by magic just at the right time to deal with the increased number of suitable students, but it is really a matter of strategy, building on an opportunity.  These are produced by the 'logic of individual strategies'(218), rather than deliberate state planning, showing how particular bourgeois kids can take rapid advantage of opportunities because their family and other networks supply them with information.  This is the 'sense of placement, and intuition about the structure and the dynamics of the field' (219).  The changes also 'favour errors in perception', but suitably nimble and well informed people can overcome past errors.  [Evidence from an interview shows that personal knowledge has led to applications at a particular business school, and that some had deliberately tried other careers, or had failed with elite education]. 

Again, the 'categories of perception' employed arise from earlier structures.  Changes in structure produce the errors of perception and allodoxia, where the old categories do not fit, and appropriate information becomes particularly crucial.  Some will actually drop out because they have been disoriented, usually 'the least well off': these people speak of 'a kind of state of indifference', and adopted 'various forms of strategies of despair', including very diverse applications to minimize risk.  Disparities of information often operate at crucial points such as the move into higher education.  The desperate might turn to guidance counselors, 'who for the most part only reinforce their (socially constituted) inclination to choose the path they see as the safest, in other words, that is, the shortest, most scholastic paths'(220).

Overall, objective relations are responsible for the growth of the new schools and management, just as they are for the structure of the field in general.  We see in the strategies of the newcomers and need to refer to the older institutions, even when they see themselves as rivals, producing a contradictory desire for assimilation 'that can go as far as plagiarism' [of what? policies on websites?] , with the desire for distinction'.  From the outside, all these differences seem slight anyway.  [some history of the great schools ensues]

The GE have changed over the last 30 years, for example trying to find new and modern spacious campuses, diversifying activities to respond to competition, especially from management programmes.  Sometimes, innovative teaching methods have been adopted, for example 'the introduction of the case history as a teaching method' (221), and more clarification including more of an emphasis on training and [applied?] research.  The schools of management in particular, are more dependent on demand, and so they 'tend to operate like small businesses'(222), seemingly rejecting the logic of the educational system, while trying to smuggle in new values.  They claim to have chosen a non academic route, although often their directors themselves have 'relatively poor academic capital' , and see themselves as trainers rather than teachers.  They claim more involvement in the working world unlike remote academics, and often include work placement.  They are not funded by the state, and nor are their diplomas recognized, so they depend on fees, and operate like corporations.  This includes developing public relations policies to impress parents, which also helps with work placement.  This builds on social capital especially, and is helpful in developing support if there is a crisis.  As usual, the trick is to 'make a virtue of necessity' (223) by reversing the ordinary criteria [even admissions criteria - one business school uses a graphologist!], and developing 'imaginative new ways' of assessing people, including assessing ways of behaving, even 'posing or imposing themselves'[Bourdieu says this was always important, but denied by the more legitimate institutions].  Most ambitiously, they attempt to produce a new kind of educational legitimacy, testing particular virtues such as 'a sense of connections, the art of conversation, and style in self presentation', requiring students to do not just a presentation but an oral '"video - taped press review' as part of their own concours, or simulated interviews by corporate executives, or a deliberate attempt to put candidates at ease, and not ask trick or stupid questions: the whole emphasis is on the ability and personality not qualifications, which measure only 'previous learning'.

All this helps 'conceal (from themselves)' the academic failure there is at the basis of the candidacy, or even to convert this failure into capital' (224).  Students get the chance to wipe the slate clean, and have a normal career, to avoid the stigma of a poor academic record, claiming to be 'counter it...with pedagogic action'.  Thus in order to encourage people to study, they have to 'foster anti academic dispositions', while offering at the same time 'fallacious academic titles'.  Sometimes they deny that they are schools, engaging in 'this self destructive educational project' (224 - 5), asking students to run companies and simulate businesses.  They claim to be able to break with the scholastic system and open up 'personal development', yet they still need integration into the university field, accumulating academic capital, although sometimes this can take the form of 'educational avant-gardism'(225) -language labs, computers, interactive teaching, international links.  There are still vulnerable to the educational system because they have to offer diplomas which requires them to show a minimum of autonomy, and this in turn has led to a common response - longer periods of study, their own concours, lobbying for government support and recognition.  Marketing also means they must claim to be different, and in the process they 'transform deprivation into rejection and destiny into choice' (226).  They claim to be driven by economic realities, but they also try their hardest to adopt the 'outward signs of academic dignity'.  [Sometimes this means they must employ prestigious academics, and maybe retain traditional pedagogy? Traditional research for the UK? ] Sometimes the government helps, as when it granted HEC diplomas the same status as university ones [in the UK, we make all institutions into universities].

These oscillations between academic and economic poles show the changing relationship between the academic and economic fields.  What we see is a series of reactions to transformations in these fields.  These are sometimes described in terms of structural decline of the GE, especially as the newer institutions are better attracting the offspring of the great businessmen.  They have had an effect in monopolizing dominant jobs, especially in the new and growing sectors of finance and commerce.  This shows the type connections between economic and educational value: the new institutions get supported because they legitimize the new business corps.  There is no natural or inevitable process at work, only the 'logic of social mechanisms and their effects', no functionalism, no individual or conspiratorial collective will.  The field is structured by 'logical necessity', just as an ethnologist realises that kinship patterns are in other societies.  The structure and operation had the field is subtle.  What looks like preestablished harmony is actually the homology between spaces of institutions and spaces of positions, driven by reproduction.  There is no underlying plan or Reason, but it is not all down to chance either.

We can deploy the metaphor of an old house being constantly changed by successive occupants, following their own wishes but also constrained by former choices.  Individual choices in this case past also limited by constraints of 'embodied structures', that orient perceptions and understandings, and limit innovations.  The new institutions, for example have had to defer to some of the principles of the educational field, and its innovations have been selected by the structure.  The field wants to retain aspects that ensure its own perpetuation and its structure of dominance.  However, those who understand the structure and dynamics of the field are in a better position to innovate as a form of 'practical mastery of or knack for the game' (228).  This understanding itself follows an agreement between embodied structures like categories of perception, and objective structures, best expressed in an habitus: we control own actions best when we are fully inhabited by structural forces.

Overall, the social composition of the student body is still pattern to according to the sorts and amounts of capital held by their families, although academic achievement also has an effect.  There is a notable correspondents to the distribution of professional positions.  Thus education system claims to [scatter the paths between origins and destinations] offer a random mix, but in fact it perpetuates at least the 'space of the differences'between students already.  There have been some minor adjustments, but there have been counter developments such as 'the 'logic of the "vocation" that leads the "wonder children"' (228 - 9) to resist positions of power [and turn instead to education?], While others have been able to develop strategies both within the education system and without to overcome academic obstacles.  Sanctuary institutions have been particularly boosted.

More generally, [credentialism] has increased, but this has also lead to a much more diversified academic market, and lots more opportunities for the offspring of the business bourgeoisie enabling them to compete with traditional diploma holders.  This has become that particularly important in the struggle between middle class groups with prestigious academic titles, and economic leaders with their 'academically impoverished heirs' (229).  It is been particularly successful for those groups, providing them with a minimum of technical training, and avoiding academic disqualification.

Appendix two on method

It was a mixture of chance, opportunity and 'theoretical intuition' rather than explicit following of a methodology.  In particular, the 'regulating principle of scientific practice was condensed into the notion of a field', defined as 'the space, that is an ensemble of positions in a relationship of mutual exclusion' (232).  Constructing the space also means constructing the system of criteria that might explain the differences which are particularly relevant.  The point then was to get enough establishments that would indicate the system of oppositions: the most obvious ones are not necessarily the most relevant, as with the common opposition between humanities and sciences.  The most significant oppositions appeared to be gender, the split between schools that produced research as opposed to the universities and schools that provided access to elite occupations, then the opposition between grand and petty schools.  Much was improvised, much was designed to take advantage of opportunities.  Considerations including balancing the research team, training coders, categorizing populations and documents as well as choosing methods of data collection and codification.  It is another example of a team having to 'make a scientific virtue of social necessity by adopting choices that are always more or less imposed by social logic to the demands of scientific logic'. 

This study arose out of a positive response after the publication of The Inheritors and an offer of further research on the GE by ENS students.  They were eventually able to extend the numbers to be studied, then to access data that displayed differences in terms of student composition.  They realized there were many different categories of schools, such as different engineering schools.  They became aware of differences according to location in Paris or the provinces.  They encountered various 'administrative and practical obstacles' (233), requiring a particular case study of business schools which were undergoing particularly rapid change.  They could not survey the military schools, but they did influence a subsequent study. 

The survey of schools of agronomy reveals the logic.  At one school, the student union administered the questionnaires, while at another, the whole student body could be approached.  They tested the influence of the provinces by focusing on four particular provincial schools with different forms of organization.  They also looked at specialist and less specialized schools of agronomy, and considered the affects of advanced schools, including one for women [it looks as if they got some secondary data from the Ministry].

The aim was to grasp the structure of the field rather than generalize about GE students.  This rules out random sampling which might miss the crucial elements in the objective structure.  The goal is to produce an accurate picture, 'that is, a structurally homologous representation' (234), and it can be awkward if particular positions are represented only by small numbers of individuals.  Nevertheless, they claim that the sample was representative of the structure, despite certain gaps like the ones above.

The questionnaire aimed at gathering 'objective indicators of the position occupied by the various agents in the space' (235), as a guide to the position of the institution.  They were not concerned with specific subfields such as subject specialisms, nor particular institutions.  This led them to constantly reject 'idiographic questions, likely to indulge homegrown curiosity' on the part of the staff or the team, and to focus instead on 'questions common to all'.  Specific questions were included sometimes on a separate sheet

They invited cooperation, as a form of training, with ENS personnel.  They wanted to remain independent from bureaucracy and official finance.  Collaboration with researchers who were also graduates or who knew the schools was crucial [and several are named].  Everything turned on the issue of comparability, though and this turned out to be a good way to highlight specific characteristics, although there was no particular research for these.  Thus a comparative study of [literary] monographs about specialist institutions would be better than examining more 'scientifically based [specific] studies that, given their failure to systematically include comparison, are really no different from studies done for apologetic or practical purposes by alumni associations and clubs' (236).  Institutional allegiances are often concealed behind 'the false distances of objectivism', or 'the shattering inversions of an initial relationship of enchantment'.  Questionnaires devised by students often focused on differences between internal groups rather than resemblances, or specific issues like the recruitment for a particular subject discipline.

Going for generality and comparison did risk 'the danger of creating a false picture of reality', based on not acknowledging local differences in interpretation or context.  This is why they developed 'more probing ethnographic - style surveys' and guided observation and interviewing.  At each school they conducted wide ranging interviews individual and collective, with staff, teachers, research directors and students, asking each group about the views they had of the field of GE, and the location of their school within it.  They also studied practices such as preparing for particular concours, or spokespersons competing with rival institutions, which they took to be 'real indices of the effects that this position and its future development' had produced.  Further analyses of actual practices were undertaken, including rites of consecration and obituaries.  They also gathered some historical data, bearing in mind misleading themes such as decline, and then had to face the 'formidable task' of showing the connections with changes in the field of power as a whole.  Data was only partial.  Overall, though, they think they have developed an instrument which is powerful enough to make the usual kind of specific data seem 'redundant or anecdotal' (237).

'Social facts' are more easily studied if we take them at face value, since dominant institutions offer a preconstructed image based on deliberate representations but also data, such as documents in particular revealing strategies of self presentation.  Any sociological study will encounter resistance if it departs from the point of view held by the agents or institutions themselves.  Sociologists are required to engage in negotiation '(which includes a variable share of seduction, dissimulation, blackmail, ruse, etc.)', and other professional secrets, especially when hoping to acquire documents that are confidential.  These are often the most informative, as with strategy documents, or surveys for administrative purposes of the social origins of students.  Moves like this show that the objective truth of science is often resisted, censored and repressed, and it explains the 'cry of scandal' which often accompanies sociological reports, because they can destroy the beliefs that 'binds initiates to their institutions'.  Such beliefs are founded on misrecognition and denial, often collectively sustained 'in a dual consciousness of realism and denial' (238).  However, this can actually help research, because respondents are not always sure what they should be hiding or what they are betraying, and they can sometimes unavoidably reveal useful data, especially in the objective relationships between different sorts of information that they or others have disclosed. It was tempting to challenge 'positivist propriety', by talking about the political positions of various people.  They could be deduced [even if explicitly tabooed] partly because student attitudes can be studied, and there are other revealing lifestyle choices including preferences for newspapers. 

They did find support in 'public relations work' devoted to puffing up official survey results and covering matters such as non response rates which can actually mean that 'the samples obtained are not far from being spontaneous samples'.  However, official support did not always assist compliance, and sometimes student support made a difference.  Administrators often saw the surveys as intrusive, and had to be convinced or reassured with the offer of guarantees.  This also affected the quality of data as well as response rate.  For example, with military schools, it was essential to get the permission of the general in command, and in exchange, a very high response rate.  Other forms of administration 'favoured more or less subtle forms of passive resistance'.  Students could also be skeptical, if the survey was associated too closely with the administration.  Nevertheless, a reasonable job was done within the diverse conditions in which questionnaires are administered.

Even where students took the initiative, there was a risk of a distorting factor, of differential student union membership having an effect on responses, for example.  When students were in charge, resistance was often neutralized, and this is very useful in the most academic GE.  The best students were also good at checking and reducing non response by inspiring confidence. 

The team also noted a link to social origin, with the upper class students responding less often, place of residence, subject discipline, and religious and political beliefs.  Any students hostile toward student unions tended to be hostile to the survey, perhaps from a worry about sociologism.  The physical concentration of students helped. The team did develop standardised distribution and collection procedures, often with student advice.  They wrote detailed reports about the actual running of the questionnaire, the resistance they have encountered and so on.  They gathered whatever other data was involved from other sources.

The less academic GE responded less with resistance than with indifference.  Sometimes the authorities forbade certain questions, like the ones about political opinions.  Again response rates varied, and one factor was how the survey was administered.  Preliminary discussions with students sometimes helped.  Student cooperation again seemed important, especially in chasing up non responders.  One institution had an ongoing dispute between students and administration at the time, while another had a small group of hostile Marxist students.

It is tempting to rely on official data, even if they do have non response rates at, say,  20%.  However, some have come up with unreliable findings, such as unusual proportions of families from particular origins against the sector average.  Nor does their presentation assist the development of sociological classifications.  Their own questionnaire showed the problem of relying on father's occupation as an index of social class.  It provided detailed occupational descriptions rather than vague ones, and this helped show important differences within classes that were formally identical—say between architects and physicians or pharmacists, who turn out to have different rates of attendance for their offspring in different schools: one factor might be connection to the private or the public sector.

Given all the doubts and uncertainties, they were not sure that they should publish this work at all.  They experienced  'a genuine positivist crisis' about gaps in the data or other imperfections and weaknesses.  This could be seen as a good 'measure of the power of censorship wielded by the scientific field' (243).  The growing doubts also, ironically, showed they were getting to know the object better [the complexity of the academic field.  They must have been delighted when Bourdieu tied it all together by talking about a hierarchy of autonomous hierarchies and so on]

The data are located in a particular period, so there could be problems of comparing different institutions.  For example asking about leisure pursuits was affected by the time of year in which the survey was undertaken, making interschool comparisons difficult.  However, it was possible to engage in 'neutralising variations in the length of time measured' [it is not at all clear how] to establish 'indisputable tendencies'.  However, categories like going to the theatre or participating in sport may be too general and ignore specifics like the particular popularity of a play.  Nevertheless, variations between schools still appeared, including finding that working class students are more often involved in collective sports, while middle class students fenced, as an anticipation of being able to cash in their particular  capitals [were they as rational as that?] .  There was also the usual hierarchy between schools corresponding to the hierarchy of sports.

Overall, the team are well aware of imperfections, but these are inevitable in the attempt to grasp the entire field.  They did attempt to correct some of the problems with the sample through a 'mathematical programme' (244), although this seemed to involve reliance on official data [so [presumably some sort of normalisation?] .  This, and the emergence of some new monographs which might help collaborate the findings, eventually did help them overcome their 'positivist anxiety' and get to publish.

Part four: The Field of Power and its Transformation

Chapter one: Forms of Power and their Reproduction

It is obviously a massive project to connect the educational field to the structure of the field of power itself and to demonstrate any structural homology or 'a very particular relation of causal interdependence'(263).  Empirical data are drawn largely from earlier studies [including Distinction], and is obviously confined to France.  We anticipate that we will discover a complex series of relations of interdependence, connecting subfields that are both autonomous and 'bound together by the organic solidarity of a genuine division of the labour of domination'. 

Data are still largely gathered in terms of populations, and correspondence analysis is required to understand the logic underneath relations between these populations.  Such an approach is 'inaccessible to the unarmed intuition of ordinary experience' (264), but the space of the relations 'is more real than even the most obvious of the immediate facts that constitute commonsense knowledge', which is still based on categories like individuals, groups and the characteristics, or, in slightly more theoretical variations, in types or classes.  It is the space that should be the focus of our attention, and how it describes and predicts these populations and properties, which are always relational.  We have to think of agents as relational entities, both individuals and groups.  This is not just a matter of constructing the usual spaces with ordinary statistical analysis: we have to focus on 'objective relations among individuals and among properties that have been brought together or opposed in all relevant respects'.  This will produced logical and coherent sets of properties that are statistically linked and 'practically interchangeable' [handy if you are trying to show structural homologies].  We should see the properties involved as forms of capital, themselves seen as power relations, both 'stakes and instruments of struggle'.  The alternative is meaningless description [as in the Bennett study].  These relations produce different effects in different fields.

In the field of power, relations exist between 'forms of power or different forms of capital', and these are subject to struggle, in 'a gaming space'.  What is at stake is the ability to occupy dominant positions, and this in turn depends on the exchange rate or conversion rate between different forms of capital, so capital itself is being preserved and transformed.  However, 'different forms of capital function as both trumps and stakes'(265), and the objective is not only to accumulate particular forms of capital, but affect the relative value and magnitude of the different forms, which affect the power that can be extracted from them.  It is a struggle 'to dictate the dominant principle of domination', which implies a division of labour in domination and struggles over legitimacy.  The struggle can appear as real encounters or armed struggles, or symbolic confrontations [the latter include the current struggle, 'the preeminence of merit over heredity or gifts'].  Power must be legitimated if it is not to appear as brute force.  This involves trying to get the arbitrary foundation for it misrecognised, justified.  Justifications can contradict each other, leading to the symbolic struggle to effect forms of reproduction, which themselves will advantage particular forms of capital. There are competing sociodicies rather than one dominant ideology.  There are many points of view on the social world, based on value systems as well as opportunities to profit, so that landed aristocrats appeal to 'land and blood', while new bourgeois elites 'name merit or natural gifts' instead.  The field of power probably has displayed some constants, like the ones between temporal and spiritual forms of power, or other divisions like those between warriors, businessmen and intellectuals.

We must do what we can with the available data to approximate the structure, having to work with existing statistical definitions of constructed populations.  We can show how the social space is structured, as in Distinction, between those with much or little capital on the vertical dimension, and those with low economic capital but lots of cultural capital on the left of the horizontal dimension, and those with lots of economic capital but no cultural capital on the right [diagram 267, showing the location of various occupational groups, and drawing a box around those who exercise particular power].  There is a 'nearly perfect' correspondence with the distribution of establishment schools ranked according to the social origin of the student [diagram, 268].  We now need to investigate the subfields, for each particular form of power, again trying to use whatever data are available to locate different positions, and allowing for inter- and intra- generational change [we have to remember that Bourdieu is skeptical about the usual definitions of social mobility, since these assume that the status and power of occupational positions remains the same].

This will refer to an earlier study and correspondence analysis based on it, described on 269.  The diagram shows a similar distribution, with the amount of inherited capital accounting for '31.5% of the total inertia' on the vertical axis.  The horizontal axis seems quite skewed and includes power for groups such as bishops and corporate heads, with industrialists over on the right hand side.  This study is inadequate, but it does corroborate earlier results, showing how forms of capital seem to structure fields of power, and also showing the oppositions between compositions of capital, the 'chiasmatic structure' (270) between the two principles of hierarchy, both amount and type of capital: the amount of cultural capital produces 'an inverse hierarchy, that is, from the artistic field to the economic field', with public service in an intermediate position [although that sector tends to feature intragenerational mobility, showing movement of personnel towards dominant hierarchies, shifting from administration to the economic field, but rarely vice versa].

So subfields have a structure of homology with the overall field of power.  We find it with universities as well, in the struggle between economically dominant and cultural dominant positions.  And in the artistic field, where establishment support is notable for one group, but who seem to lack artistic prestige, and vice versa [apparently, the fashion for the avant-garde has not broken this structure].  And of course in the economic field itself, with technocrats lined up against members of economically dominant families.  Again we would not see these effects if we only look at surface properties and not those based on positions or relations themselves.  The relations tend to be superposed any way, in the form of occasionally 'ambiguous and unstable alliances' (271), like those between particular groups of the dominated in different fields.  Objective relations produce 'principles of vision and division', while even ordinary language with its common oppositions between high and low, or civilised and crude, hints at this origin.

Strategies can act as 'double plays', operating in several fields at once, with the apparent sincerity of the moves helping 'symbolic efficacy'[although Bourdieu says we should not see these as simply duplicitous].  For example, certain magistrates [in the past] opposed royal power by claiming to stand for the public good, and thus argued that they were protecting their own interests and the interests of the people or the public.  Such double plays are clearly possible because of 'the polysemy of a discourse' which makes actual strategies look 'spontaneously polyphonic'.  Subsequent analysis can expose their ambiguity, however, especially when choices have to be made between loyalties, or symbolic power relations change, making earlier alliances less effective and more doubtful.  This flexibility and ambiguity means that particular distinctions can have 'different connotations'(272), and this makes social discrimination particularly flexible, even invisible [so this is a rebuke to those who think that misrecognition arises simply from a basic mistake made by dim people: the whole area is ambiguous and difficult to analyze, and we often only see what's happening post hoc].

What are the dynamics of the field of power?  The situation has been changed considerably in the emergence of a new competitive struggle between holders of different forms of capital, especially within administration or the economic field: academic titles are now more important, but technical titles have suffered in comparison to 'titles guaranteeing general bureaucratic training' (272) [because the economically dominant have found a way to manage the challenge from academics by creating their own diplomas].  We need to understand this in terms of a connection between particular reproduction strategies and modes of reproduction themselves.  This is not to say that strategies are always rational or calculating: they objectively contribute to the reproduction of capital without being explicitly designed to do so, because they are 'founded in habitus', and that reproduces the conditions of its own production 'by producing the objectively coherent and systematically characteristic strategies of a particular mode of reproduction'.  [The homely example shows how handwriting produces characteristic styles or family resemblances among those 'endowed with similar habitus', which provides them with 'the same schemata of perception, thoughts, and action' (273)].  Seeing these unified practices in terms of a reproduction strategy permits scientific analysis, even though people themselves do not see their practices as unified [the example here is a long-term fertility strategy which appears in numbers of particular techniques or methods for limiting birth rate, or postponing marriage - incidentally, the latter was the unconscious reason for steering sons towards the priesthood among aristos and bourgeois. These can all be called 'prophylactic, designed to maintain the biological heritage of the group'.  Then there are inheritance strategies or even education and economic strategies, or various forms of social investment to build up obligations seen as investment for particular families and children, or 'sociodicy strategies' (274), designed to naturalize and legitimise domination.].  We have worked back from the specific strategies and opus operatum to the modus operandi and uncovered 'the generating and unifying habitus that produces objectively systematic strategies'.

Now to examine practical relations and their 'strange solidarity', which can seize an opportunity to remedy a failed strategy.  Again the example is fertility strategies, with more practical strategies being 'chronologically articulated' to cope with the results of earlier strategies [an anthropological example ensues].  Today, academic and fertility strategies are linked in this way, explaining their relation between a lower fertility rate and the chance of getting an education: it is not just that larger families have fewer resources, but also because academic ambition is different in large families which lack 'the predisposition toward self denial'[really controversial and tenuous stuff here].  Marriage strategies can also overcome earlier strategies which have failed: business bourgeois marriages can clearly relate to 'objective relations with the educational system' (275).  The gender 'homogamy' in educational institutions acts rather like the old strategy of arranged marriages, and laissez faire can now be risked [ie you only meet nice bourgeois girls in elite unis?]  [apparently, the old criteria of value of women in marriage were based on economic capital, in the form of a dowry, or symbolic capital in the form of respectability, and this have also been 'completely redefined'.  Changes in family law to replace paternal authority with parental, and increase equality between the spouses are also connected, this time, offering a legal formulation of a set of practices which had already appeared among the bourgeoisie.]

Educational investment offers the best example, although it is easily masked by changes between the academic disciplines.  Economists have tried to discuss the issue of the return to educational investment, but have pursued only crude measures based on monetary units: what is as important is the production of 'differential chances for profit' in different markets, more to do with reproduction than simple economic return.  It is cultural capital that is transferred in such educational investment, not narrow forms of ability or skills, conceived as somehow independent of cultural capital.  Economists classically are forced to study only individual monetary yield, or general data about society as a whole and the effects of education on national productivity, as in various forms of human capital theory.

Different reproduction strategies are available to different groups at different times, and their choice depends on 'the structure of their patrimony' (276) [composition of parental capital again].  Different forms of capital are invested according to different chances for profit in different social markets.  For example, investing in scholastic work depends on the amount of cultural capital available, but also the relative weight of it.  Those who have no other kind invest everything in academic work.  This is an important but often neglected background for the role of 'interest' in education: it is not just a matter of what might be expected in return, but whether there are any alternatives that might lead to social success.  The return on academic capital is also connected to returns on social capital.

Any changes in patrimony, in terms of either amount or composition, or any changes in markets and opportunities will produce new investment strategies.  Capital will be reconverted into more profitable or more legitimate forms, and this can be experienced subjectively 'as changes of taste or vocation' (277), subjective conversions.  The whole debate about trying to democratize education or increase social mobility depends on structural shifts like these.  This also explains why social mobility must be carefully analyzed, since structural shifts can produce apparently upward mobility, even though the relative status of positions have not changed.  Nor is there any simple social ladder: reproduction can be quite rigid even if there is little occupational heredity, since agents can keep their position in the social structure by reconverting their capital [for example, shifting to a more prestigious occupation].  Displacements within fields are not the same as displacements between fields, which such reconversion can provide, although everything will depend on the conversion rates which are themselves the subject of struggle 'among the holders of the different forms of capital'.

With changing forms of domination, there is a necessary social division, especially if modes of reproduction of transforming, and reconverting.  Some forms of capital give more access to the new instruments, and are resisted by those with more threatened forms.   Struggles still persist today, based on the distribution of the different forms and sub forms, yet they still show the basic division between family-controlled transfers, and power based on the possession of an academic title.

With to the family mode of reproduction, the integration of the family as well as its reproduction is required.  If a family already controls are business or company, it pursues 'marriage Saturdays, fertility strategies, education strategies, succession strategies' (279), but above all economic strategies to reproduce its capital.  These often overlap hence 'an obsessive fear of mismarriage', skepticism towards education in favour of the family spirit.  This often requires concerted efforts over generations, for example to manage marriage [with an example of the Gillet family of Lyon in textiles, who acquired other businesses and also took care to marry into the daughters of other economic families.  The Michelin family offers the best example, following a deliberate policy of cutting marriage to keep the dowry in the family and preserve endogamy, which even takes the form of brothers marrying sisters building amazingly complex kinship nets which sustained a 'generative and unifying habitus' (280), which in this case paid off and make them more open to radical developments in the tyre business].  Family companies tend to have 7 or more children, partly produced by catholic ethics, but also because family businesses welcome procreation, especially when expanding.  However, they are in danger of division and break up, hence the need for a succession strategy: in some cases, this led to disinheriting daughters.  Careful engagement of education is inspired by the same wish not to challenge 'the ethical dispositions regarded as the prerequisite to the economic success of the business'(281).  The careful selection of suitable women to marry is exactly like sending children to exclusive private schools - both inculcate a suitable work ethic, prudence, and family spirit.  [A quick case study of a mixed boarding school for bourgeois follows.  It was based on the English public school system, and claim to Foster what would be called entrepreneurship these days as opposed to mediocrity.  It was based on a country campus in Normandy.  Tradition was encouraged and physical activity, 'in a spirit illustrated by Coubertin' (282), sneering at those who are only good at tests].

Stress on the family means stress on the private realm, or rejection of anything public including public education, which was seen as bureaucratic.  The public is reduced to the private, the social to the personal, 'the political to the ethical, and the economic to the psychological'.  Actual personal experience is dominant, and this helps detach people from any suggestion that they belong to a class.

Family reproduction is a personal form of power, requiring no reliance on institutions like schools, although there function as conferring legitimation is welcomed, especially if it helps sons claim authority over mere technicians.  Academic bookish values are not.  It is common to deplore the lack of skills in graduates [an example follows on 283], and they swapped tales of creative and energetic people working their way up from the shopfloor.  The refrain is taken up by those who claim to be able to foster and develop talent irrespective of qualifications, although in fact, those with qualifications do much better in gaining promoted positions, partly because chief executives like to surround themselves with people with the same sort of diplomas as themselves.

Given all these available strategies, resorting to schools comes last.  However, academic capital, especially law degrees, becomes important in preserving or enlarging businesses.  Family connections are also possibly responsible for the decline in family - run businesses, simply because more heirs have to be provided for: one result is increasing conversions especially into academic capital.

In the schools - mediated mode of reproduction, the academic title becomes 'a genuine entry pass' (285) and takes the place of family ties.  Here, educational background provides solidarity of the corps.  This happens especially with the large bureaucratic, or joint stock, companies as the table on 285 shows.  This is still a form of social support for reproduction, a matter of mobilizing capital and maintaining solidarity, and we have seen that all members of prestigious institutions enjoy a share of its social and symbolic capital.  It's still the case that heads of national corporations are seen as worth more than ministers or administrators, which means that the capital of the grand corps is valuable, and needs 'constant attention and rational management' (286).  An elite within each core manages particular choices from elite institutions [I think by keeping an eye on trends and making sure that the best graduates come into business]. 

Reproduction strategies therefore imply a kind of numerus clausus [policy of restriction of entry], to maintain the corps, to manage new recruits, and also exclude unsuitable family members, or rather divert them into 'other universes', just as when aristocratic families shunted off younger sons or daughters into celibacy and the church.  Thus schools mediated modes deploy a 'strictly statistical logic' (287), working on aggregates of individuals which are then assigned particular properties, at the expense of particular individuals.  This sets up a contradiction between the interests of the class as a whole, and the interests of members of the class who do not succeed, not only failures, but those who hold titles which are not 'honoured on the market, usually because they do not originate in the class'.  Those with normal bourgeois rights can be overproduced, and this can become constant as the opportunity to gain academic titles are made more widely available, to girls as well as boys, for example, to younger as well as older offspring, and to newcomers outside the class.  The response has been to develop 'a gentle style of elimination' which is costlier and takes more time [prolonged contest mobility' for the UK and US].  One response was to subvert the whole order, as in May 1968.  The growth of 'sanctuary occupations' has helped the system survive, however—these value 'social dispositions' more than academically guaranteed competences.  These are in effect 'semi-bourgeois positions' which can involve new occupations', or the increase in status of the old ones [presumably as in the professionalization of every one, or credentialist closure of semi-professions] Other strategies involve demanding adequate compensation for diplomas. 

School based reproduction seems more acceptable compared to family privilege, and its mechanisms 'are doubly hidden', first because it relates to aggregates, then because it looks meritocratic instead of involving 'the direct transfer of cultural capital' (288).  The hidden mechanisms compensate for complications in reproduction.  The education system looks as if it is impartial but it is 'actually systematically biased, innocently producing effects that are infinitely closer, at any rate, to those produced by the system of direct hereditary transfer than to chance redistribution'.  However, it is the focus of struggle, with critics showing its arbitrary nature and the self interest of its defenders [and social science has 'greatly contributed' to this], and increasing institutional regulation [meaning increasing university autonomy?].  These have the effects of benefitting strategies, which help dissimulate and misrecognise the transfers of capital that are going on.  The system is more inefficient, but more legitimate.

Those nobles of the profession and the higher civil service are in a better position to benefit and the business bourgeoisie, because they can transfer cultural capital effectively, and they have also produced a range of 'tailor made educational institutions' that happened to accredit to the dispositions that they are able to pass on, including those that are not particularly helpful in purely academic competition.  At the same time, diplomas are still not actually necessary for entry, and are by themselves seldom able to guarantee access to dominant positions.  [The example, on 289, shows that family connections are still crucial in the business world, allowing for the confusion between the occupation of the executives themselves, and the family that they come from] [We are starting to call these privileged bourgeois families the 'Parisian bourgeoisie de robe', for example 290].  The business bourgeoisie tend to invest in private schools, but the top bourgeoisie still send children to the top lycees, although there is a particularly fortunate position for catholic lycees that can appeal to both.  As we saw, opportunities were greatly extended by the development of places like the ENA postwar.

There is some overlap between the two kinds of reproduction, because some families make use of schools in particular ways, not only by transferring cultural capital, but by combining capital held by members.  This increases new forms of solidarity, and can heal over the divisions among those divided by the diffusion of economic capital over the generations.  Cultural capital provides a certain unity, and permits people to combine economic and academic inheritance and integrate families [one example of a prestigious family shows solidarity emerging through marriage, economic inheritance, and acquiring members of the GE, producing an incredibly powerful network covering economics, business, academic life, politics, and so on.  It seems to have been a deliberate strategy to keep everyone together despite the varied paths they chose].  There might be some division of labour, whereby particular individuals  manage the family portfolio, while others specialise in social or cultural capital - everyone else benefit by proxy.  Also, affective ties become more important to bind together the generations, especially as the age of inheriting economic capital increases.  In turn, this diminishes patriarchal authority in favour of more sentimental ties.

There is also a division of labour in terms of schools and institutions: some need a title from the most prestigious GE, while others choose less academic and less selective institutions 'which strengthen inherited dispositions more than they inculcate new skills' (294).  For the second, knowledge is not seen as autonomous, but as something that appears to be at best socially neutral, especially as far as 'worldly demands' are concerned.  This acquires academic consecration without risk of challenge [as we have already seen].  The contrast shows up in terms of differences between 'the bodily hexis, make up, and clothes of the adolescents who have chosen one or the other' (295), or the architectural style of the buildings, or the different sorts of oral exam they require

[In an example, 30 oral examinations were observed in 1971, requiring candidates to comment on particular texts referring to the positive and negative effects of city development - acknowledging complexity seem to be the suggested required answer, but candidates varied.  In the conversation that followed the candidate's presentation, it seems that most candidates were referring largely to personal knowledge to reply to specific questions; only one examiner asked fairly abstract and open questions.  It is all very detailed and lengthy and goes on for several pages, 295--98.  Bourdieu comments that the exchanges show classic academic jousting and interchanges, but in fact what's going on is that the candidate is revealing information about themselves directly, and through their attitudes.  These are personal questions, often aimed at personal or political positions, which are rendered as artificially unreal, required only by the academic situation, otherwise they would be seen as too personal.  They do seem to be quite extraordinarily wide ranging, about people's tastes in films, or the stances towards particular events like strikes, disguised under the fiction that they are simply explicating texts.  It is also an exercise in deportment.  It is designed to judge the individual, which is really a matter of judging social dispositions' 'such as the self assurance needed in dodging uncomfortable questions or admitting ignorance, or the "relaxed yet respectful" attitude that allows a candidate to send a question back…  or to respectfully interrupt [the examiner]'(299).  It is even possible to reject requests to be pedantic or bookish, by asking to be spared having to define terms, for example.  The official guidance to examiners of the ENA concours says that the purpose is to weed out those who have only studied hard but not reflected or read widely, who have insufficient 'humour and wit', who have 'stepped back from their intellectual ingurgitations', who threaten to produce depression and seriousness, who were mere excellent test takers.  The concourse does not test technical knowledge, but tries 'to get a feel for the candidate's human qualities'.  Examiners have to imagine whether they'd like working with the candidate.  They are looking for 'the gift of repartee, and a curious mind', and often use trick questions to tease out those who are too bound up with their own work or too conceited, 'falsely refined'.]

Chapter two.  Establishment Schools and Power over the Economy

Academic consecration has become more widespread, but we should not see this as a matter of evolution towards some new form of management rather than ownership: it is still a matter of struggle, and it could all be reversed.  A diagram follows plotting the chief executives of large companies (301-03), showing how state bosses occupied different spaces from private boxes [using some external system of ranking of importance—the vertical axis here charts the differences between old-established companies and newer ones, and demographic data is also provided, such as paternal occupation, nature of secondary schooling and family size].  State bosses have more academic and social capital, the latter acquired from their career, constantly refreshed in various meetings and lunches, and consecrated by official decorations, with less inherited economic capital: classically, the whole career has taken place with public institutions.  Private bosses tend to be heirs or 'parvenus from the petty business or trade practicing bourgeoisie' (303), with only modest education.  There is a small number of self made men (about 3% of the sample), enough to 'fuel the meritocratic legend of the entrepreneur'.  Foreign firms based in France show a higher percentage of these.  Almost none are self taught.  Private bosses often operate with private political networks such as charitable institutions, and oppose state and public assistance, to which they are quite hostile, and see them as challenging management, driven by trade unions.  Some companies like Michelin have their own daycare centres, clinics and so on, and many private companies have sponsored stadiums and sports teams, even housing projects.  Public bosses tend to go for quangos, or more general bodies supporting the arts, for example, or various philanthropic activities - and employer organisations, which are quite active in France.  Private bosses are rooted in regions, and do not stray outside the economic field.  Public bosses are crucial in linking up with other institutions developing 'de jure and de facto relationships between the field of economic power and the other fields' (305).  Private bosses stay private, but the public ones appear on TV, write articles or books, and this helps them develop good public relations.  [Lots of detailed examples 305-6].

However, these are statistical distinctions not real boundaries, and there are many overlaps and transfers between the two sectors [mostly into the public sphere, as we saw].  Academic credentials are becoming important for both sorts of bosses, especially for their heirs; sometimes, succession is managed by employing a highly qualified manager, although these are often from the same sort of business class, despite posing as someone neutral and technical [examples ensue 307].  Inherited social capital seems to be particularly important in selecting top executives who are 'armed with criteria that are never completely reducible to academic qualifications, and still less to what the latter are supposed to officially measure' (307), so bureaucratization never replaces hereditary transfer, despite looking as if technical merit is confined to individuals and not transferable: excellent diplomas still also require 'rare and nearly indefinable properties that define belonging because they are the product of belonging' (308).  So the bourgeoisie remains triumphant, even if individual descendants do not.

Genetic heredity still forms 'a genuine "elite's elite"'[compare this with Scott on how the top stratum in the ruling class in the UK consolidate their links with overlapping share ownership, often in merchant banks, and in cross-marriages].  The diagrams earlier did show that length of time in the business world is also an important stratifying factor, and this distinguishes latecomers or parvenu.  That factor also distinguishes particular sectors of the economic sphere, especially bankers, who are, in Stendhal's terms '"the nobility of the bourgeois class"'.

We can measure the extent of power over the economic field by looking at overlapping board memberships.  Diplomas have an effect here, with GE diplomats, Polytechnique and Sciences-Po, dominating the 25 top ranked companies.  Lower down, the chances of a seat on the board are also affected by  social origin, so we find few chief executives from 'the lower and middle ranges of the social scale', whatever diplomas they possess.  The elite, 'members of the bourgeoisie de robe'(310) merely need a good diploma, while those from the very top bourgeoisie have a good chance irrespective of whether they have a diploma.  Whether their fathers were businessmen seems less important.  Social capital is also important, covering 'membership in fashionable clubs', itself dependent on social origin [interesting to see that the Jockey Club is still important].  Possession of the Legion d'Honneur,  another index of social nobility, is also tied to social origin, and those from the bourgeoisie de robe dominate, especially if they are found in 'liaison positions between the public and private sectors' (311) [details follow]

The business elite therefore 'always possesses several titles to nobility'.  They have an excellent reputation and suitably '"distinguished" manners and behaviour', shown by their acquisition of works of art or membership of fashionable clubs.  Venerability of the business is also important, and more recently established ones show more chief executives from the dominated regions or the petty bourgeoisie that could be due to chance [tables 312-13].  Generally, the older the company, the more it is likely to be run by a CEO with lots of claims to nobility, an aristocratic name, membership of the oldest clubs, and of public committees.  Academic titles help the business nobility 'impose the recognition of its own lifestyle, and thus the misrecognised and recognized domination of its own norms' in personal relations, which often turn on 'manners, tastes, accent, and deportment' (314).  Their privileged position 'owes as much to the gentle violence of symbolic domination as to the harsh constraints of economic power'. 

This is an example of how social oppositions get personalized, seen as a matter of lifestyle of persons, or oppositions between families, code for clashes between private and public, or between finance capital and industry, matters of personal quality of authority and management, or communication.  It shows how the structure and agency relate [so plotting the positions of individuals is not simply a vote for personal agency, but the way of understanding the workings of institutions].  Prominent individuals 'are essentially the personification of requirements actually or potentially inscribed in the structure of the field, or, more precisely, in the position they occupy within this field' (315).  This is how we can work back from our understanding of the qualities of top managers or public officials to get to the requirements of positions in fields, engaged in struggles to maximize their capital: individuals bring and add personal credit, including their honours and distinctions, their '"breeding" and "good manners", noble titles and academic titles'.  It is pointless to try to establish whether any of these are functional, strictly technical, because symbolic actions are crucial in realizing the value of particular forms of capital in legitimating domination.  The personal qualities of CEOs are demonstrated in office, but these qualities indicate the properties required, even if they had seen 'apparently most foreign to the strictly technical description of the job, such as the possession of a racing stable, an apartment on Avenue Foch, or a collection of paintings'.

Nobility is a difficult matter, however, because officially, France has rejected nobility.  This is why no single title will suffice.  The mere possession of wealth is not sufficient either and people have been rejected by French society because they lacked manners, lacked refinement, or had not lost their local accent.  To be really successful, you have to join the establishment, work in the most prestigious and noble sectors of industry public service (not the hotel restaurant business, for example, cosmetics or real estate).  Elites are seen as statistical composites, partly because none of them actually possess all the qualities required: boundaries are therefore always controversial.  This quality is useful in legitimatizing the existence of elites, for example by pointing to a small number of exemplary individuals, while rendering everyone else as having only some of the qualities, yet still enjoying top positions, as a kind of justification of the notion of openness and equality of chances.  Difficulties of definition, and the existence of exceptions can also produce 'the subjective illusion of the mystery of the undefinable "person" and the subjective illusion of the group, which…  is nothing more than the sum of "exceptional" individuals' (316).

'All aristocracies define themselves as being beyond all definition' and see social solidarity as a matter of instinctive opinion.  They are inclined to defend the operations of individuals with social concerns.  They deny any right wing agenda and prefer '"spontaneous and instinctive cooptation"' (317).  They are right to say that there is no legal basis for their collective actions.  There is also a tendency to ignore these 'affinities of lifestyle' in economist accounts but they are essential to explain activities that escape purely economic logic: they explain credit, for example [I think this means social credit, but it seems possible explanation for economic credit as well, as in the ghastly world of banking].  Aristocratic groups seem mysterious and charming because of their lack of apparent logic, but what is going on is reproduction.

Defenders say that privilege will diminish with time, but what time really does is provide the opportunity to acquire manners, and to demonstrate that one has time to do so.  Nasty short term speculation is particularly condemned in contrast to 'slow, sure accumulation'.  So are wheelers and dealers, who lack the 'highly euphemised techniques of influence afforded by personal ties among honorable persons' (318).  Those who operate bluntly with economic relations have insufficient bad faith.  The same goes with ostentatious spending, lacking discretion or reserve.  It is necessary to preserve honour, and display 'austerity of dress': all these can be seen as 'expressions of the collective bad faith through which the group conceals from itself the very foundation of its existence and its power'.  Parvenus only remind aristocrats of the 'arbitrary violence at the source of the initial accumulation'.  Symbolic capital is not as easily acquired as economic capital, and it must be preserved through constant processes of reconversion over time.  Eventually, economic capital gets misrecognised as cultural capital, and the ensuing generations can abandon 'the brutality of economic power relations' in favour of 'the detachment of inherited ease'. This is why the value and effectiveness of a diploma has to be worked on to become affective, and complemented with other titles and qualities.

[Data ensues, showing how those with different sorts of diplomas tend to come from different sorts of family background with different 'traditional attributes of nobility', 319, which explains the difference in status between Polytechnique and Sciences-Po diplomas.  Polytechnique students rely almost entirely on the academic title, but Sciences-Po graduates are able to add other sources of prestige to the lower academic prestige of their diplomas.  There is still a contest between family and school modes.

Nevertheless, some senior positions are grounded more in academic titles, and this new nobility tend to regard their rivals from family businesses as illegitimate, survivors from another age.  In contrast, they see themselves as a new business avant-garde based on intelligence and competence.  They particularly like those social theories that project the inevitable triumph of the technocratic and bureaucratic, but of course their arguments are a factor in the struggle over legitimacy [Bourdieu argues that apparent generational struggle is a common way of seeing this sort of dispute.  In the UK, this is the sort of thing that graduates of the new universities often argue, or even the new groups entering lecturing].  The claims are sometimes phrased in terms of evolution and decline, a fatal process not a political one.  The dispute between owners and managers is one example [and some remarks are quoted from various businessmen, including those from traditional groups who want to fight back by challenging technocratic claims: these include arguing that the technocrats rarely actually produce anything.  Their opponents often assert that family businesses 'mistake the company till for the family till' (321)].  The dispute is apparent in every historical study, which usually tacitly suggests that the technocrats will triumph, but the struggle is not over.  Many discussions about how to run modern industry feature the same implicit claims to legitimacy of one party or the other.

Simple statistics about the background of company executives mislead: for example, the apparent disappearance of many traditional chief executives and the triumph of the diplomates can conceal the real pattern of agglomeration, and the combinations already discussed.  Nor is it always clear what chief executives actually do, whether they are only nominal, or act as proxies.  Nor is the company always effectively or consistently defined in terms of size or effective units of power.  The issue of real power remains unexamined, and not well described by looking at the selection of particular candidates: these and other definitions used in statistics are only the official ones, and elite groups are good at projecting a particular image of themselves.  Behind apparent change is 'the unbroken fabric of the innumerable and varied ties that bind companies together' (324): such solidarity is hard to measure. All these difficulties are paramount when considering changes over time.  Units might be deliberately manipulated as a strategy of 'officialization'(325).  Comparisons really need to be done between structures and fields, not individual companies or individuals.  We also need to remember that the value and social role of a diploma also varies, for example affected by 'its rarity at a given moment'[and a particular survey is critically analysed].


Overall, although the importance of academic titles is clear, it is still the case that 'chief executives tied into the family mode of reproduction have nonetheless found ways of getting around the academic obstacle' (326), primarily by acquiring titles of a different kind.  One executive is cited as having felt initially quite humiliated at having to go to Sciences-po, and he remained skeptical, even though all his friends were there.  He describes it as semi education '"Give me a <close up> on Proust, you've got 10 minutes"'[so that is where Monty Python got the idea!].

Underneath this development was a change in the balance between finance and industrial capital, favouring the former.  Industrial companies lost financial autonomy, and banker dominance gave priority to management, and judgments of companies based on finance and accountancy, even when industrialists and technicians were modernizing.  This obviously gave an advantage to graduates with those apparent skills over technicians.  In larger companies, the struggle was apparent, and turned on 'principles of hierarchization' (327) and precedence.  The struggle also involved trying to acquire suitable graduates with family ties, an example of an individual and collective struggle.  Agglomeration and other developments also strengthened those who were good at forming relations between companies and across the field.  'A new type of moral person' emerged, sometimes taking the collective form of a common interest group.  Competitive relations were accompanied by administrative relations between companies in the same group, and even personal ties linking companies in different groups.  This is similar to the replacement of mechanical solidarity among business by organic solidarity, based on complex networks of domination and interest. 

Family reproduction is threatened by official discourses and challenges from technicians, but finance managers seem to have emerged in the best position, and this situation has added value to graduates from Sciences-po and the ENA.  Those schools also placed emphasis on abilities to network, to master foreign languages, to adopt a more guarded style rather than 'energetic and bully-like brutality': new forms of sociability are 'called for by the changes in the structure of the economic field'.  (328) [Supported by data about which sort of company heads appeared on the most public service committees]

It is almost as if the bourgeoisie de robe and their descendants 'were "predestined," as it were, to occupy positions located at the intersection between the public and private sectors' (329), and especially to relate banking, industry and the state.  These are men of connections, well able to operate 'in an atmosphere of both complicity and conflict'.  They have also had an eclectic education, combining, say, science and the law; they are more often Parisians, having attended cosmopolitan lycees and GE; even those who specialize in the state were still connected to the business world through families, and others soon crossed over from the private sector [such changes,mid-career, are apparently called pantouflage].  They often had considerable social capital by belonging to an old or long established family, and experience in increasing and converting this capital, through marriage or friendship.  Sometimes they had 'overt placement strategies' (331), joining the right sort of groups and avoiding others, and taking a deliberate part in social life, maintaining social relations [the examples given are social calls and New Year's greetings], memorizing genealogies, taking advantage of the centralization of Paris and its opportunities for social life, and enjoying the prestige of a fashionable address in the first seven arrondisements.

They hold lots of social capital from academic titles, symbolic capital, including public honours and private memberships, and social capital, inherited and extended.  The new state oligarchs personify changes in the structure of the field of economic power.  They can bring out the potential of these changes, including having acquired titles to give them access and confirm their legitimacy.  Again, the 'most worldly educational institutions' also encourage people to claim competence, although the possession of capital is really what is responsible in the first place, leaving only 'the facade of pure technical rationality' (333), as a management and state [ideology].  Competence becomes the most important criterion, and this 'effectively masks the true preconditions for access to dominant positions'.  There is a rational modernist image, but the actual criteria are 'diametrically opposed' to it.  [In this sense, we are not talking about an elite, understood as someone possessing particular highest scorers on some agreed criterion, as in a sporting elite].  The criteria belong to the past not the future.  The newer GE, like the ENA, have been able to market themselves as being able to consecrate these 'very particular dispositions...  an entire set of social categories formally on the margins of industrial development and scientific progress'.  It is those who possess these very particular diplomas who now find themselves very well represented in the state and in business.

The length of time a person has been in power is the hidden principle behind current hierarchies.  Again, this can be rationalized as the time needed for parvenu to assimilate properly, a way of 'policing latecomers', but this also imposes an 'insurmountable obstacle in the way of the impatience of the newcomers'. [ It was at hte heart of the old system of academic promotions too, we are told in Homo Academicus, hence the ludicrously long time to acquire a doctorate]   This barrier cannot be overcome.  It provides 'an order of succession', which can claim to be 'constitutive of the social order' more generally, separating fathers from sons, masters and disciples, and so on, all ranks based just on time.  This notion still underpins the reality of the apparent tussle between owners and managers [owners have time on their side, and this gives them an advantage over those who claim economic prestige alone]. Data shows that pure managers hold more or less the same number of shares as family heads anyway, and often come from powerful families themselves: [Bourdieu also suggests that qualifying for substantial bonuses or other expenses is no different from dipping into the company till as if it were a family till].

Enthusiasts for managers have confused an undoubted transformation of the mode of reproduction with a transformation of power based on capital.  This produces a democratic myth, like the myth that schools democratize.  Behind the scenes, reproduction is going on, displaying 'the inertia of the taxonomies' (334), which include old confusions like separating private income from public salary, or mixing up the forms of capital, ignoring non economic ones, or separating public service out as something neutral, like schooling, [or understanding diplomas as credited ways of demonstrating functional qualities].  Company heads do not appear to be simply the heirs of a fortune, but rather as 'the most exemplary of self-made men, appointed by their "gifts" and their "merits" to wield power over economic production in the name of "competence" and "intelligence"'.  Some apologists will claim that there is some objective basis for the continued importance of inheritance, like some tradition of public service, for example, which often sees an eventual private career as something reluctantly undertaken, only after a spell in public service or education [and a biography of an entrepreneur is cited as evidence].

The modern French ruling group is new in having 'brought together so many principles of legitimation of such diversity' (335).  They all look contradictory, as if aristocracy contradicts meritocracy, or public service contradicts the profit motive, but they combine, and lent a particular legitimacy.  The bourgeois de robe have dominated a number of positions of economic and political power, and this can look discontinuous, where, say, professors become state executives, or bankers' sons become professors.  But it is the same kind of power, equivalent to economic capital [which may be a claim that social capital also helps you 'mobilize financial capital', or it might just be an analogy, based on the ability of economic power to mobilize finance capital].  The sectors are interpenetrated, and so are family and school modes of reproduction.  One result is to make 'bourgeois culture and art de vivre rather widely recognized as realizations of human excellence', itself a precondition for economic and political domination.  Overall, we can see 'thus realized a highly euphemized and sublimated form of power, which ordinary denunciations leave untouched, failing as they do to challenge the foundations of people's beliefs in it'[note 68, 447, takes as an example of a lot of ethical indignation directed at fat cats or exploiters, emanating from the 'petty bourgeois political tradition, both of the far right and the far left', which remains 'dominated, at its very foundation, by what it is denouncing'.  Those who express such indignation, include the rebels of 1968, and Bourdieu suspects that that was really fuelled by 'the anger felt by disappointed peers towards an educational institution unable to recognize them or to the meritocratic indignation of the holders of titles convinced that they have not received just recompense for their bourgeois certificates'].

Chapter three.  Transformations in the Structure of the Field of Power

[NB very short.  The whole thing is getting pretty repetitive by now]

The rise of the dominance of academic titles, even dodgy ones, has modified the relations of power.  There is a new group, 'bourgeois employees' (336), which concentrate both the means of economic production and the means of cultural production.  They face a struggle with corporate bureaucratization, and they can no longer guarantee economic profits except by joining organizations with economic capital, being organized rationally, and accepting salaries.  They include 'engineers, researchers, teachers', and they are distinguished from self employed professionals.  Some of them are known as cardres.  However their positions are ambiguous, close to the dominant pole in possessing cultural capital, distant from the social space of the dominated, yet subordinate to those with economic capital.

The effects have been felt in intellectual establishments, because they are 'governed by the change in industrial establishments', and there is also a new complex technology.  Academics now find themselves integrated into research teams with expensive equipment, involved in long-term projects, relatively dispossessed, just as scientists were first: the human sciences are now affected as well.  Corporate research has driven traditional academics back towards the traditional disciplines of philosophy and the arts.  There is also been  'the development of vast collective units of cultural production (research organisations, think tanks etc.) and distribution (radio, television, film, journalism etc.)' (337).  These feature bureaucratic hierarchies and rationalised careers.  Intellectual work no longer has a 'charismatic aura', seemingly based on gifts.  'Creative' activity has been demystifyed.  Bureaucratic employees 'cannot fail to sense the contradiction between the aesthetic and political attitudes called for'.

The market has also changed, so the traditional humanities, whose value was based on rarity, have diminished in value in favour of more scientific and technical cultural capital which is economically profitable.  There is also a demand for 'symbolic services', managers and advertising, for example which now has a market to rival that of doctors and lawyers.  The old form of cultural capital is no longer able to monopolize academic titles. 

Economic capital has penetrated the field of cultural production, by generating its own '"organic intellectuals"' (338) to wage the struggle over the legitimacy of types of cultural capital and intellectual work.  It also now mounts a challenge to the universities' monopoly on establishing rank, with the new kinds of institutions staffed by the new kinds of teachers who often have held positions in the economic field.  Finally, it has established controls on cultural production, including scientific research, so that even scientists are now accompanied by specially trained science administrators, who impose 'constraints and hierarchies that of foreign to the specific logic of the scientific field'.  State patronage has assisted this process.

Cultural production shows increased tensions, not only the old split between production for its own sake versus production for some outside goal, which at least got stabilised in some agreed specialism.  Now there is a more 'radical antagonism between two categories of producers each of which refuses to recognize or acknowledge the existence of the other'.  The old style intellectuals claimed autonomy by renouncing compromise with the economic world, while announcing their own indispensability.  Now, however we see 'managerial intellectuals, or the intellectual managers' willing to become bourgeois employees, and satisfy the new market.  Particular institutions have felt these tensions acutely, especially if they promote disciplines such as economics or sociology, which already intersect different fields.  Now there is a need to choose between two social functions, becoming either an expert, assisting management, or the professor 'locked away in erudite debate on academic questions' (339).  There is another alternative, 'enter  the political arena in the name of the values and truths acquired in and through autonomy'.

Appendix one

[Discussion of the data used].  Analysis of the top 200 industrial and commercial companies, with demographic information on their chief executives, together with other sources like data recorded about them in a business magazine Expansion, details of their directorships and responsibilities, as listed in business magazines, their decorations, and, for a smaller sample whether or not they were shareholders as well as managers, what their religion was, the sort of sporting activities and club memberships they engaged in, any information about political opinions or attitudes, including memberships of employers' organizations, whether or not they had aristocratic names, with 'the particle de in the father's, mother's and wife's names' (341).  Some of this data could be used for illustrative purposes only.  The team recognized that some of this information might not be willingly granted, so they used whatever was available, and tried to control this data 'by collating sources and, whenever possible, including direct questioning or informant interviews'.  The team admits that it would be ideal to survey all the directors of a properly selected sample, but got what they could, including analysis of company reports and official statistics.  A particular difficulty was offered by companies 'with several variables' (342), such as mixed public and private activity, different sorts of control, and agglomerations.  The French Who's Who was also analysed, although there are known ' gaps and imprecisions'.  Other business publications were consulted for biographical information, including press releases.  Suitable year books provided some information, as well as biographical dictionaries, obituaries and other booklets written in homage to deceased CEOs.  Publications of various organizations were also used, including reports of various employers' organisations.  There were some documents referring to religious affiliation, but only Protestant or Jewish.  Alumni publications were consulted for details of diplomas, and there are lists of memberships in various clubs.  Some of these publications also suggested networks.  They attempted to get data of their own by asking press and public relations departments for résumes, and sometimes these are quite different from official entries {for example, one chief executive revealed a considerable military career which had not appeared in other publications}.  They had dug out interviews with the press, and autobiographies.

The main axis between public and private represented 5% of the total inertia, and the second and third axis represented 3.2% and 3% respectively.  There is a larger difference between those who have not transferred between the sectors.  Academic capital 'makes a significant contribution to the constitution of the first factor' both in quantitative terms and also the nature of the diploma, with a Sciences-po diploma being found more frequently.  The other main contribution is provided by paternal occupation.  The number of relations with other fields and with other institutions is also 'more fully explained by the first factor'(346).  Those clustering towards the private pole tended to show a greater number of shareholding in their own company, 'participation in stylish and worldly sports [later defined as golf, riding, yachting], and membership in clubs'.  It is likely that the great public servants included less information about their private activities generally. For individuals, 'the most striking opposition' exists between commercial corporate heads, who are likely to have spent their entire career in the family business and not gone beyond secondary school, and top business leaders and the public sector, who are more likely to come from petty bourgeois families or other dominated areas, and to 'owe their position more to the academic and social capital they have acquired', especially those who 'occupy an intermediate position between CEOs and higher public servants'.

The second axis splits the CEOs according to whether or not they are bourgeoisie de robe, at one pole, and how they have actually acquired their power, whether industrial or financial.  The length of time in a bourgeois de robe family accounts for 9.4% of the variance.  Other factors seem to involve service on the boards of directors of top industrial companies or banks, and the age at which someone moves into the private sector, which seems to be an indicator of social origin.  We find properties such as having gone to provincial high school, gaining an occupation first in 'the second ranked corps', and having been in the military, mostly in the second pole: the factor here might be social visibility.  More recently developed businesses tend to be less noble {and again, some examples of individuals are given}.

The third factor shows an opposition between those who have been successful through the academic route, especially the Polytechnique, who are usually from the petty bourgeoisie and other dominated regions, and those who have acquired diplomas which mostly legitimate their existing position, as in Science-po diplomates, who have largely come from a about Parisian bourgeois.  Again age of entry into the Polytechnique is an important sign of academic success.  There also are differences in lifestyles between these two groups, with more athletic pursuits, like skiing and tennis at one end, and more worldly ones at the other, and similarly different sorts of membership of high status clubs.

Appendix two

There is no direct data on political stances or on policies for handling social conflicts, so again a survey in Expansion was relied upon.  Factors such as union representation or permission to organize, better rights and worker access to company data tends to be found more frequently at the state pole, and the private sector also features lower salaries, more resignations and work related accidents, later retirements, and less money spent on employee development.  Another division turns on the kind of reward that is offered by the companies, whether symbolic or material: banks and insurance companies tend to spend more on employee education, and their leaders have often gained diplomas themselves: this is 'the neopaternalistic pole', and positions seem more open to trained workers and women.  However, the same companies show a greater number of firings, more unequal salaries, and less corporation with unions.  Symbolic rewards are offered instead of 'real advantages (which seems to constitute a good objective definition of the management of social conflicts)' (351).  However, much will depend on the actual form of struggle in companies, whether for example, they still feature traditional dominant unions.  Background factors here also include the nature of personnel, 'the weight of its cultural capital', whether or not there is severe economic competition, and employers' 'own individual dispositions' (352), related in turn to their particular social and academic trajectory.

Management domination takes three particular forms: 'the gentle, that is to say highly euphemised, method of management', which uses all the modern techniques imported from America, including job enrichment, flexi time, employee advisory committees and open channels of communication; the 'blunt method, in the old style' involving the imposition of patriarchal and paternalistic authority, shown best in military authority.  These two options defined different notions for managers, with the former being effective communicators and public relations people, or displaying 'aristocratic laxness...  That is both distant and easy going', and the latter displaying a version of divine right.  The latter is best demonstrated by private bosses, who think they are right to govern both through property titles and meritocratic confidence {all having displayed some version of being a self made man or working their way up,sometimes only as a kind of rite de passage}.  You do find some state bosses also showing this kind of 'the elitist self certainty' from having been winners in the best concourses: rankers are often the worst examples.  [What happened to the third form?  Is it a subdivision of the other two, like the one between moderns and aristocrats?]

The two styles of management show up in the affiliations formed by employers {described 353}.  Catholic membership also seems to be a factor—Bourdieu suggest that this is provides managers with a 'clear "guilty conscience"'{a religious rationalization for their blunt methods?}. We also find in their manifestos management ideologies such as 'the somewhat rough inflections of the military or boy scout version of Christianity', and 'modernist proofs adduced for an enlightened science of management' (354).  The former talks about necessary even beneficial inequalities, especially when delivered with 'meritocratic good faith', while the latter think that the inevitable tensions of inequality can be eased by concern or dialogue.  The latter also are likely to adopt a more overtly political stance, to denounce totalitarianism, for example, and often see themselves as reformers, movers and shakers, bridge builders, innovators.  The options simply represent different forms of domination, or rather 'the forms that must be used in asserting this domination' (355).

Appendix three

[This is an account of the daily in the life of a top state boss].  A distinctive lifestyle includes breakfast in bed served by a uniformed  maid, a rather nice apartment with some famous paintings, an 'affectedly simple car', (356) a sense of the value of time and punctuality [including some multi tasking like listening to English cassettes in the car].  The self described job is actually rather rigorous, but seems to involve knowing how to listen or read reports, and being available to colleagues despite being busy.  The social network is extensive and is mobilized during a single day.  There is an 'extraordinarily homogenous space of relations: everyone, barring the maid and the Secretary, comes from the same milieu, the same schools'.  The other chief executives contacted during the day are all from the same group, the public bosses identified in the earlier survey.  [And some intriguing detail follows 356-9, including the banal items discussed during the 'informational' meetings, the ways in which 'questions and answers are often expressed in half sentences, and refer to proceeding conversations', the time spent in meetings, including 'an hour and a half of attentive silence' before the issue is not resolved exactly but dealt with, greeting visitors, and socialising with executives with very similar backgrounds, the very long days -- more than 15 hours in this case].

Appendix four

Social capital can be seen as 'a portfolio of connections' (360): it is productive, and also often hidden, '[]connections are] effective because people are not aware of them; many are even clandestine'.  Distant family relations are an example, especially those established through women, hidden by name changes on marriage.  Only a few are aware of these family ties, but they often 'link higher civil servants and politicians to the top business bourgeoisie', and are often supplemented with financial ties.  In some cases, kinship appears as friendship or attraction 'based on the affinity of tastes and lifestyle', which is much more legitimate.

It would be nice to show this by drawing up a diagram of the 'ensemble of acquaintances', or to  diagram the network of institutionalised relations that exist between boards of directors, and other groups, but this is likely to be 'impossible'.  Instead, we can study local configurations through the personal connections of individual heads or CEOs, for example, one of the Rothschilds [spelled out 360-61].  Those in the 'state financial oligarchy' are usually the best connected, and their cross appointments on other boards, are often the most dominant ones [more examples 361, and tables 362-3, and 364-5, the latter showing social origins and educational background as well as board memberships].  Those in the second order private companies usually have their board memberships confined to their own quadrant, and the same goes with those in foreign companies, and those on nationalised company boards.

One case study of a French company shows that family relations connected the senior executives in a particular corporation, including marriages, and this outweighed diplomas.  This compares with Kodak - Pathe whose board members are often graduates of GE or prestigious engineering schools, and show a particularly similar [but 'achieved']  lifestyle, even living in the same 'relatively marginal neighbourhoods'(367). 

Examples like this show that there is 'an affinity of origins, training and lifestyle' [although these differ in detail] and this must have 'consequences at the level of political choices and opinions'.  The examples are particular initiatives to regulate the incomes, formed by a particular coalition of directors at a company [and an employers' organisation?] and supported by others who were friends or relatives or from similar educational backgrounds.  The same goes with those appointed to undertake planning or industrial development: they show 'the same logic' [and are an example of a particularly coherent group is given 367-68]. 

Collective actions like this are developed by personal connections, not just produced by common economic interests.  Access to information 'is a source of power in and of itself', so that cultural or informational capital plays a crucial role, especially in the activities of banks, who can draw on economic information, scientific knowledge provided by various think tanks, economic experience 'provided by contact with borrowers who are required to furnish guarantees' (368), and information from personal contacts and joint memberships.  To some extent, such cultural capital can 'also be a form of power over capital', exceeding actual financial investment.  The domination by banks is 'the gentlest, most unobtrusive, at least visible, yet most economical way imaginable', and can lead to even to things like choosing directors or controlling managers [another author is being quoted here, a certain Jaccques de Fouchier, who seems to have been a banker and general Big Fish].  The bank exerts its influence because the value of shares or whatever cannot always be accurately measured in financial terms.  It can pay a bank to maintain only moderate levels of financial investment, sometimes reduced to only what is necessary, and sometimes with a board membership, but to gain considerable influence through networking, even though bankers might only be in a minority.  Cultural credit is also connected with financial credit, and may be even more important.  The connection between academic and social capital can explain the opposition between family banking and others.

Part five

State Power and Power over the State

[Bourdieu is denying simple functionalism here and even flirts with a theory of crisis or 'antinomy' and also purses issues of unintended consquences]

Defenders of the schools, for different reasons, were upset by the kind of scientific analysis just described, usually because most people work with the comparison between the old regime and a commitment to academic meritocracy.  Sociological findings seem irresponsible and ultraradical, especially to committed teachers.  Everyone has a personal example of someone who has made it from peasant to professor through competitive examinations.  This sort of belief is not dissimilar from the one supporting nobility, although it is 'restored beneath the democratic facade of an ideology of natural gifts and individual merit'(373).  The belief is deeply institutionalized, and appears in 'the convictions and dispositions of teachers, with variations according to scholastic level'.  Meritocratic nobility is preferred to blood nobility, although it is actually the same people who benefit, from displaying an early precocity, from seeming to possess gifts, and from benefiting from 'human hothousing'.  Academics themselves are intimately bound with the institution and its myths, also encouraged to see contrasts between the two types of aristocracy [especially if they themselves are oblates].  To develop academic analysis requires breaking with the whole universe of unconscious representations which seem fashionably progressive.  They have to grasp that 'the transmission of sometimes universal and emancipatory knowledge, such as scientific knowledge also accomplishes a magical (or religious, in the Durkheimian sense) act' (374).  Schools 'institute [social] orders'just as the old nobility did.

Academic corps do have specific characteristics, though: their academic titles binds them to the state, since they enjoy a legal monopoly, prerequisites to access to public service positions.  There is a difference though, in that academic titles are not transferable, and nor do they provide a total monopoly [sometimes, a technical competence trumps them].  There is a loss in generational transfer, despite the best efforts of the participants, and individuals can fail, although the group as a whole does not.  Failures could turn into rebels, so failure has to be covered by 'the dissimulation of the processes of transfer, thus in the misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the established order and its perpetuation'.  The myth of the school is partly due to this misrecognition, which can only be dispelled by 'statistics and scientific analysis'.  However, there also some personal benefits, in offering a genuine route out of exploitation to the dominated, and in closing off occupations against other claimants.

However, this is conservative, although this is misrecognised by the top academic nobility themselves, who protest about wider privileges given to the less academic nobility.  However, the top academic nobility 'is in league with the state', (375) claiming to be devoted to public service 'insofar as in so doing it serves its own interests'.  However, this is not just a matter of spreading bureaucracy and rationalization, as Weber thought, in the growth of the specialist.  Even Weber notices some other properties or effects of academic qualifications, although the full ambiguity is not mentioned.  For Weber, modern democratic states are ambivalent towards examinations, favouring the qualified from all social classes, but also posing the development of a privileged caste of meritocrats.  He never developed these asides, however, and seemed close to Hegel in claiming that a new universal class had emerged. 

We need to fully break with 'the unilateral representation of the academic title' (376).  The new institutions are ambiguous, with only 'a mask of modernity and rationality'.  Old archaisms remain, rationalization and 'state magic' to certify or validate authority, and, more deeply, guarantee 'a certain state of affairs', a relationship of conformity between words and things, between discourse and reality', an imprimatur.  This provides particular social relations with 'genuine ontological promotion', unlike 'bureaucratic maneuvers' such as licences, which are temporary: it is the 'collectively attributed meaning' and public recognition of the value of the act which has real consequences.  'The academic title is a public and official warranty', attesting to a general competence, with both technical and social properties mixed, with an objective status.  It has real effects, including some on the diplomates themselves.  It is a sign of how the state 'exercises its monopoly on legitimate symbolic violence' (377), and people are consecrated or condemned.  However, it is not definitive, and it permits contest.

The modern state has emerged by monopolizing particular privileges [not just military violence as Weber has argued].  This guarantees all the forms of capital and private appropriations.  As the state is developed, so a whole array of new kinds of educational institutions have developed, consolidating the state nobility: the symbolic constructions involved are also practical, establishing positions that are relatively autonomous of the established forms of temporal and spiritual power, and offering chances to establish an hereditary body.  University populations certainly increased in early modernity as state bureaucracies did.  Nobleman were the first groups outside clergyman given access to book learning.  Early selective lycees catered for them, including those still prestigious today.  Only the relatively wealthy could attend and board, including a gradual extension of the privilege to the sons of office holders and professionals.  The new state corps tied themselves to education quite early, and education gradually appeared as a strategy as important as marriage.  Its symbolic value was soon realized in justifying privilege or a peculiar connection to the state, who extended education in return [apparently especially elite university education in France].  There was, therefore, an early role for education in the competition between clerical, military, and newer kinds of noblemen.  Particular occupational fields became more autonomous.  The value of different sorts of capital became apparent, and the new order were particularly well placed to combine them.  Even in France, the nobility were never eliminated in favour of parliamentary democracy, but were integrated into it, through the notion of public service especially.

The new noblesse de robe owes its existence to the state and its own efforts [it helped create the state].  It developed the first ideas of disinterested public service, not personal allegiance to the King.  It maintained the view that this attitude was 'incumbent upon it by birth'(379), but developed the idea into the notion of a deliberate vocation, requiring both talent and disposition.  Others had to be converted to this view, however, and this produced considerable efforts in jurisprudence [some French examples on 380].  Gradually, the parties lined up under the banner of civic humanism vs. individualism, but both parties advocated a public role rather than merely retreating into libraries, or affecting value neutrality.  There was also an argument for the growing autonomy and independence of the public sphere.  Eventually, the argument was that 'merit and glory are inseparable' (381).  In the new professions, 'virtue creates its nobility', in the glory awarded by the People.  [A particularly influential writer is being quoted here].  These ideas are still current.  Nevertheless, it required early claimants to delay the returns to their investment in merits and education.  Nevertheless, it has been successful in requiring those dominated to associate 'perfectly innocently, with causes that appear to them to be universal, such as emancipatory science, or, in other times, the liberating school'(382).  Of course this simply shows that no parties act without realizing their interests, even if they appear to be 'the disinterested defenders of universal causes'.

The state nobility has 'accumulated more insurance', including academic titles, than any other group.  They are able to defend their privileges only by invoking the universal, but this means they also have 'to subject their practice to norms with claims to universality' (383).  They see what they do is necessary, and embrace views of the future such as the managerial revolution.  They have to see themselves as agents of the state as well, and appear to advocate neutral expertise and ethical public service.  This obligation however forces a recognition of cultural power, and it is also complex since there are many 'principles of vision and division of the social world'.  Thus the question of legitimacy is always raised.  It is never enough just to dominate, and 'symbolic power, the basis of which is, paradoxically, denial' is also required.  This demand for recognition depends on misrecognition, by an independent power if it is to be seen as legitimate.  It appears to be more authentic or sincere if it can claim not to be determined by 'physical, economic, political or affective constraints'.  They can appear to be 'exclusively inspired by the specific grounds of an elective submission'.

Thus legitimation involves a ratio between the independence of the consecrator, and his statutory authority.  Self consecration or self praise is weak, so is consecration practiced by mercenaries, or if it is clearly the result of exchanges of various kinds.  Consecration is strongest when all material interest seems to disappear, and when those awarding consecration seem to be socially valued.  This is so in all important areas of the social world, including literary and academic criticism which often turns on mutual obligations, although this is not obvious given a delay in the exchange, or in the substitution of proxies, or the substitution of rewards.  This sort of thing describes the influence of power holders more generally (384).  Any one wishing to provide symbolic promotion must maximize the celebratory content and also the '(visible) autonomy of the celebrator' (385) [This really is an example of the reduction of symbolic actions to those of economic man, as in Rancière's critique].

Similar strategies are at work when dominant groups produce theodicies of their privilege.  Some of them distrust intellectualising, however and produce characteristic discourses that are weak on information but 'strong in dissimulation, hence in symbolic efficacy'.  They often hide behind spokespersons who appear independent [this discussion turns on supposed interests in maximizing the energy expended].  Individuals or groups cannot not just do their own legitimation, but have to delegate symbolic work: princes used to employ painters and poets or jurists.  However there is always a risk that such agents will become genuinely autonomous for their own benefit [an historical example of the emerging independence of jurists which ended with challenging the arbitrary decisions of the prince].

Mechanical solidarity gives way as autonomous fields develop, and social conflict emerges.  A 'genuine'(386) organic solidarity develops instead, and this requires new forms of power, invisible, anonymous and interdependent, 'increasingly long and complex circuits of legitimating exchanges' rather than simple oppositions between contending groups.  This is how 'highly dissimulated reproduction mechanisms [arise], founded on operations of classification', and this is how reproduction carries on, in the interests of those who dominates, while at the same time 'rejecting all forms of hereditary transfer'. 

Clearly, general terms like democratization or modernization are too simple.  It is true that symbolic power and violence becomes more important as opposed to the police and prison system [with a possible dig at Foucault here], hence the importance of the schools and other agents of cultural production.  Rationalization also depends on efforts to rationalize particular practices and 'conceal their arbitrariness' (387).  The efforts to legitimate increase, but so do the threats of crisis.  Nothing shows this better than the educational institution which features 'legitimation antinomy' [not quite Habermas's legitimation crisis], since there is always tension between those who hold economic power, and those who possess cultural capital: the latter are always likely to exploit the apparent licence  given to them to be independent.

Nor is there simply overall progress, but rather 'complexity of the circuits of legitimation'.  Again, there are possibilities 'for subversive misappropriation' of educational capital.  Those with different forms of capital have different interests, and these can sometimes complicate or even counterbalance conventional  class interests.  It is possible that these shared interests among the dominated could 'lead to subversive alliances, capable of threatening the social order', and these could spill over into 'cognitive struggles', which leads to desertion from the dominant camp, and the abandonment of symbolic legitimation.

These tensions are risky, and this is what gives importance to other forms of solidarity, like those of family ties, or 'networks of exchanges and alliances', or the perpetuation of bourgeois dynasties.  They have been very successful in surviving changes of legitimacy and putting themselves into new networks of connection.  Social connections in salons and clubs or meeting in public committees also help.  So does the 'denial of calculation and instrumentality' in these exchanges [a part of this involves denying that the different forms of capital are capital and can be reconverted].

As with all organic solidarity, we find both unification and division, the need for exchanges to develop 'two way relations of obligation and recognition', as well as struggles over the principle of domination.  There are explicit political struggles, sometimes, but also 'subterranean struggles constantly being played out in the apparent anarchy of reproduction strategies' (388).  We can see these in struggles over education.  The struggles, however also help to spread the appeal of 'reason, disinterested, civic mindedness, etc.' (389), and this has helped progress away from simple 'tyranny'[defined as in Pascal, 'the infringement of one order upon the rights of another, or more precisely, as the intrusion of the forms of power associated with one field in the functioning of another'].  An unintended consequence of the struggles is that the dominated do get chances to benefit from conflicts among the powerful, and also that even 'the symbolic universalization of particular interests' still 'inevitably leads to the advancement of the universal'.

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