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'to Foster the Spirit or to Secure One's Future': Competing Models of Field of Study Choice Among Middle-Class Students
Abstract
The growing interest in horizontal stratification has led researchers to recognize qualitative differentiation in the choice of academic fields of study (FOS), mainly along the lines of professional and non-professional fields. Still, adopting either rational action theory or Bourdieusian perspective, most researchers still evaluates FOS through their future utility, and accordingly assume a calculative or strategic choice process. This portrayal may reflect the stratifying effect of higher-education, as its ongoing professionalization. Nevertheless, higher-education and choice are associated with autotelic and expressive cultural ideals, such as the ideal of 'pure knowledge', the model of liberal-arts education and models of choice as an expressive action. To date, these ideals and their relationship with FOS choice have been mainly overlooked.
Drawing upon ‘culture as tool-kit’ perspective, I argue that when choosing FOS, students use dominant cultural perception of higher-education, as models through which they make sense and assign value to their choice. Accordingly, I show how the choice of professional or non-professional fields, reflects two distinct cultural models of higher-education and choice.
This paper is based on in-depth interviewssh of middle-class students from professional and non-professional fields. In light of a review of cultural representations of higher-education, two ideal-types of FOS choice are elucidated. The first, draws upon the ideal of acquiring knowledge as a tool for the future; characterized by a calculative FOS choice; and a utilitarian approach towards studying. The second, draws upon the ideal of knowledge for its own sake; characterized by an expressive FOS choice process and an autotelic approach toward studying. Moreover, all students experienced their choice as a tradeoff between the two models - between success and personal authenticity. These findings support recent challenges to current line of explanations, and their implications for present and future research are discussed.
... Ball et al 2002) neglect choosing processes as patterned actions taking place in time and space and anchored in ethics. As Shani (2014) shows, attention to choice processes and their ethics help explain why strong students choose to study the humanities. ...
The article explores different ways to conceptualize the relationship between choice and culture. These two notions are often constructed as opposites: while sociologies of modernization (such as Giddens') portray a shift from cultural traditions to culturally disembedded choice, dispositional sociologies (such as Bourdieu's) uncover cultural determination as the hidden truth behind apparent choice. However, choice may be real and cultural simultaneously. Culture moulds choice not only by inculcating dispositions or shaping repertoires of alternatives, but also by offering culturally specific choice practices, ways of choosing embedded in meaning, normativity, and materiality; and by shaping attributions of choice in everyday life. By bringing together insights from rival schools, I portray an outline for a comparative cultural sociology of choice, and demonstrate its purchase while discussing the digitalization of choice; and cultural logics that shape choice attribution in ways opposing neoliberal trends.
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of 'true' love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of cliches and images she calls the 'Romantic Utopia'. This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliche of romance - from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses - is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
In this paper we seek to provide an explanation of three widely documented empirical phenomena. These are: (i) increasing educational participation rates; (ii) little change in class differentials in these rates; and (iii) a recent and very rapid erosion of gender differentials in educational attainment levels. We develop a formal mathematical model, using a rational action approach and drawing on earlier work that seeks to explain these three trends as the product of individual decisions made in the light of the resources available to, and the constraints facing, individual pupils and their families. The model represents children and their families as acting rationally, i.e. as choosing among the different educational options available to them on the basis of evaluations of their costs and benefits and of the perceived probabilities of more or less successful outcomes. It then accounts for stability, or change, in the educational differentials that ensue by reference to a quite limited range of situational features. So, both class and gender differences in patterns of educational decisions are explained as the consequence of differences in resources and constraints. We do not, therefore, invoke 'cultural' or 'normative' differences between classes or genders to account for why they differ in their typical educational decisions (though we have something to say about the role of norms in such an account). Because the model is presented mathematically, testable corollaries are easy to derive as are other implications of our model for patterns of relevant behaviour.
Through an intensive, participant and longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 6 years, this paper raises the issue of further education’s choices of French highschool pupils in priority education zones (“Zone d’Education Prioritaire”), in the northern outskirts from Paris. Studied pupils statistically concentrate social properties that lead them to be objectively and subjectively placed at the bottom of the social structure as well as being less likely to have academic ‘success’. The study will focus on pupils following the academic track who are about to pass the bacalaurat, hence having to start to select the aspired and expected curriculum in the higher education system they forecast to enter into. Contrary to the official discourse of “free choice” held by the institution, it shows the constitution amongst pupils of a discipline of choice (Truong, 2013) - a set of social rules for considering options and deciding between alternatives (Reay and Ball, 1997), as well as finding relative information to do so. This discipline of choice acts as a common rationale for subaltern students who remain undecided about their future, showing the importance of territorial stigma (Wacquant, 2007) and the rejection of university (Beaud, 2002) - vs. the praise of a more highly supervised type of further studies - in choices. This rationale leads to ambivalent and contradictory attempts to escape or dis-identify (Skeggs, 1997) - from a set of intwined illegitimate categories (working class group, immigrant background and race, residency in housing projects and stigmatised banlieue, ‘muslim community’ etc.) within a society promoting access to higher education for all by offering a complex, heterogeneous and hierarchical system designed for masses. It illustrates how the possible, the probable, the desirable and the acceptable are articulated in changeable patterns which have been produced by and against the school, underlining its very own internal contradictions.
This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culture scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people's after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
The political liberalism of professors—an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics—has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century to account for professors’ liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from 1974–2008. Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors’ politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.
In an era of expanding postsecondary markets and heightened student and institutional competition, students’ field of study decisions may be becoming an increasingly important point of differentiation in the process of social mobility. Drawing on the two most recent cohorts of the Baccalaureate and Beyond and National Graduates Surveys, this paper examines and compares field of study choices among American and Canadian baccalaureate degree-holders. Consistent with existing research, gender remains an important and consistent predictor of field of study choices. In Canada, the analyses show some evidence that the gender gap for business and management is shrinking, but the engineering and mathematics gap remains significant. In the U.S. the situation was reversed, as the engineering gap shrunk and the business and management gap did not change across cohorts. Moderate family background effects, strong and consistent academic ability effects and growing academic aspiration effects were found across most analyses, lending support to theories that predict family background has direct and indirect effects on higher education choices.
This paper examines the relationship between social background, choice of university programme and academic culture among Danish university students. Statistically and sociologically, university students are often treated as a homogeneous group, but the ever-increasing number of students in higher education demands a closer examination of the hidden heterogeneity in the students’ social origin and educational strategies. Using a mixed-method approach (register data and ethnographic observations and interviews) the paper focuses on the students’ class origins and on different cultural practices in three Danish university programmes. It is shown that the Danish university field is characterized by a significant variation in social selectivity from programme to programme, and it is argued that these different social profiles correspond with distinctively different cultural practices in the programmes. Correspondingly, the students have distinctively different strategies towards education and future work life.
Within social psychology, the concept of authenticity of the self has traditionally suffered from lack of definitional clarity. In this article, after conceptualizing authenticity as the phenomenological emotional experience of feeling true to one's self, the author empirically examines the diversity of emotions associated with various degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity. Data for this study are from semi-structured in-depth interviews with forty-six faculty members employed at a public research university in the United States. Professors' experiences of and dispositions toward teaching, and their experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity, are examined against the background of structural and cultural forces and changes in American higher education. Data interpretation shows that teaching is mostly a source of authenticity for professors in the humanities, and less for those professors who identify themselves primarily as researchers.