The Role of Cultural Capital in Labour Market Positioning. An Empirical Study

The aim of this paper is to analyse selected conditions of professional achievements of young polish employees with higher education degrees. The number of graduates has raised significantly in the last twenty years and they are employed not only as the professionals, but also on the positions, which do not demand academic qualifications. The author makes the hypothesis that the amount of cultural capital (in Pierre Bourdieu comprehension) has influence on the position on the labour market. On the basis of the qualitative research, there are the premises to acknowledge the influence of cultural capital on professional achievements. The conclusion from the analysis of polish graduates’ biographies is that occupational position of the employees equipped equally in cultural capital in the institutionalized state (diploma) may depend on the competences acquired during socialization process, which refers to the cultural capital in the embodied state. The paper presents a typology of young employed graduates in terms of their work expectations. The typology reveals how the primary socialization and acquired cultural capital influence the young employees’ attitude to their work and career – if they are preservative and focused on safety guarantees, or creative, looking for their professional development and self-fulfillment.

Too little attention has been paid to the school institutions intended to educate and socialize the children of the upper classes. Greece has a significant history of private educational institutions. Yet their history and role within the educational system and society has been consistently neglected. The study of elite private education and its relationship with the social reproduction of the upper and middle classes in Greece has been even more neglected. Through a study of elite private secondary schools, following the theoretical model of Pierre Bourdieu, we explored the relationship that the middle and upper social strata of Greek society maintain with specific private schools. In order to determine the above, we conducted a quantitative field survey at 13 well-known private schools in Athens, using a questionnaire. In these schools we find considerable over-representation of the social categories that are placed at the summit of the social hierarchy. A basic argument of our study was that different sections of the middle and upper classes develop different educational strategies to ensure their social reproduction and to increase their privileges. These different strategies adopted by traditional and more recently emerging social classes are reflected in the differences among the elite private schools as a “field” and they distinguished the very top private schools from the less prestigious one. Also, we have found that sections of the Greek upper and middle class provide their offspring, through certain schools and activities, with an international capital which is a necessary condition for their future participation in international educational and professional markets. The study’s central research methodology included geometrical data analysis such as correspondence analysis.