Creative Commons Legal Code AttributionNonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International Official translations of this license are available in other languages. Creative Commons Corporation ("Creative Commons") is not a law firm and does not provide legal services or legal advice. Distribution of Creative Commons public licenses does not create a lawyer client or other relationship. Creative Commons makes its licenses and related information available on an "asis" basis. Creative Commons gives no warranties regarding its licenses, any material licensed under their terms and conditions, or any related information. Creative Commons disclaims all liability for damages resulting from their use to the fullest extent possible. Using Creative Commons Public Licenses Creative Commons public licenses provide a standard set of terms and conditions that creators and other rights holders may use to share original works of authorship and other material subject to copyright and certain other rights specified in the public license below. The following considerations are for informational purposes only, are not exhaustive, and do not form part of our licenses.
This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu's account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately account for comparative differences in the social structure of competition and ideological shifts in class (re)production in different national contexts. This analysis is based on an empirical investigation of elite students at Oxford University and Sciences Po in Paris. We investigated how they understand the competition for a livelihood and whether they see themselves as more 'talented' than students from non-elite universities. This investigation revealed important similarities and differences between British and French students that have significant sociological implications for the (re)production and legitimation of educational and labour market inequalities.Keywords: credential inflation; talent; cultural capital; elites; elite employability; positional competition; effortless achievement; class (re)production Introduction The discourse on 'talent' in the British context raises sociological questions about the competition for a livelihood and the legitimation of elite (re)production in education and the labour market (Brown and Hesketh 2004). This discourse also raises comparative questions concerning the conceptual relationship between merit, talent and credential competition, given the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy (Halsey, Heath, and Ridge 1980;Goldthorpe 2007a) where credentials are viewed as a currency of opportunity. Within liberal theory, 'meritocratic' competition based on credential competition is seen to play a major role in minimising social bias and
Heavily influenced by Putnam's particular variant of social capital theory, the New Labour government in the UK has introduced several initiatives designed to raise educational achievement by building the social capital of families identified as socially excluded. One such initiative was the Education Action Zones (EAZ) policy. Whilst this policy has recently been eclipsed by other initiatives designed to enhance education in areas of disadvantage, many of the social capital‐building components of EAZs have now become relatively widespread in schools in disadvantaged areas. In this article the authors use qualitative data from a study of EAZs to explore how parents experience initiatives designed to build their social capital and to examine the interactions between parents' values and the values implicit in these initiatives. In doing so, they identify and elucidate some key limitations of current attempts to operationalise social capital theory. The analysis offered in the article thus has significant implications for policy and policy scholarship. In particular, it draws attention to the need for policy makers and practitioners concerned with challenging social exclusion to pay closer attention to the real, as opposed to imagined, local sociocultural environments within which policies are implemented and to the voices, choices and values of the people these policies are designed to help. In so doing, the article also underlines the importance of policy analysts attending to these same complexities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.