Evolución de la población laboral y de los sectores económicos

Sociologists define socialization as the wide process by which an infant becomes a ‘self- aware knowledgeable person’ (Giddens, 2009) within a specific cultural context. Therefore, sociologists believe that during socialization, which starts in the early years of life, children learn to distinguish their own identity from the identities of others

45 (Ibid). Amongst others, George Herbert Mead (1934) gave a crucial contribution to the study of socialization as the achievement of self awareness by discerning ‘the unsocialised I’ from ‘the socialised me’ (Mead, 1934, 1992).

This study presents the process of intergenerational transmission from parents to young people, as a specific aspect of the wider socialisation. In this sense intergenerational transmission is the process used by parents to transmit their body of knowledge, values and notions to their children. Even though Bourdieu did not investigate directly internal family dynamics, some of the concepts he developed in the wider context of his analysis about social class and inequality, are particularly relevant to the understanding of intergenerational transmission. As the American sociologist Annette Lareau (2011, second edition) pointed out, the sociology of Bourdieu is particularly relevant to understand how parents strive to maintain or improve their social position and that of their children (Lareau, 2011). More specifically, in this study the idea of habitus and social fields and the concept of cultural capital are used to understand intergenerational transmission both in terms of content of transmission and process of transmitting.

The content and process of intergenerational transmission and

cultural capital

Cultural capital: the content of transmission

Cultural capital is a key concept in Bourdieu’s theory and concerns with the investment in education, measured by its quality and duration, which can then provide outcomes on other spheres including the economic one. In this sense cultural capital can be transformed into economic capital. More specifically, Bourdieu defined cultural capital as a resource with multiple (triple) dimensions:

‘Cultural capital can exit in three forms: in the embodied state i.e. in the form of long lasting disposition of the mind and the body; in the objectified state, in the forms of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries (...)) which are the trace realization of theories o critiques of these theories etc; and in the institutionalised state (...) as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p.243).

46 As any other form of capital, cultural capital involves the ‘capacity to reproduce itself, produce profits expand and contains the tendency to persist’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 241- 243). This is to say that that culture is a convertible resource that can produce and lead to specific outcomes. In this study, the concept of cultural capital will be applied as the overarching framework which describes the content of intergenerational transmission. In this sense cultural capital includes the body of knowledge and competencies but also the values, beliefs and resources that parents directly or indirectly transmit to their children (Geert, 2001).

Transmitting: the process of intergenerational transmission

Together with looking at the content of intergenerational transmission, it is important to address the question of how cultural capital is transmitted from parents to children and thus how transmitting takes place. Intergenerational transmission is the mechanism, or process, by which cultural capital passes from parents to their children. Bourdieu incorporated the process of transmission into his analysis of social structure and class distinction, and particularly the idea that habitus indicates the unconscious acquisition from the social world of ways of doing and being (Silva, 2005). Therefore the conceptualisation of intergenerational transmission, within Bourdieu’s sociological theory, consists of the role of family in the development of young people’s habitus, and it involves bringing together elements of its logic of practice (1980- French Edition, 1990 English Edition), like habitus and field, with his work about social class and culture exemplified by Distinction (1984). In The Logic of Practice (1990), Bourdieu described how habitus informs individual small and larger actions and how it is a source of practices which reproduce and reinforce the social structure by embodying social, cultural and class relations determined during upbringing. In this context, the transmission and acquisition of cultural capital are unconscious processes reflected by the metaphor of the social world as a game: participants enter and adapt to the rules of the game which are already in place; these rules reflect and perpetuate social class inequalities (Silva, 2005). Bourdieu explained that early familiarization with the rules of the game eases the adaptation and leads to reinforcing these rules:

‘The earlier the player enters the game the less he is aware of the associated

47

the game are perpetuated by the player’s adaptation to it (Bourdieu, 1990,

p.68).

In Distinction, which was firstly published in French in 1979 (and was then translated in English in 1984), Bourdieu addressed the issue of the transmission of cultural capital into more depth. Drawing upon two surveys undertaken in 1963 and 1968 in Paris and Lille, in Distinction Bourdieu investigated the relationship between taste and social class. Bourdieu focused on identifying how the consumption of cultural goods including clothing, furniture, food etc. related to cultural capital (measured by educational qualification) and social origin (measured by father’s occupation). Therefore, Distinction set out the role of family and social origin for individual development and social class position (Silva, 2005). Bourdieu argued that cultural capital is imprinted and encoded in habitus starting from childhood through learning (Bourdieu, 1984). In line with the logic of practice, habitus acts as an unconscious orientation that shapes individual taste according to class position and to the cultural capital associated to that. Bourdieu dedicated two articles, ‘On the Family as realized category’ (1996) and ‘The family Spirit’ (1998) to the discussion of how the notion of family specifically fits with the rest of his theory about the circularity of habitus and field. Bourdieu defines family as:

‘A principle of construction that is both immanent in individuals (as an internalized collective) and transcendent to them, since they encounter it in the form of objectivity in all other individuals’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p.21).

This is to say that family is both ‘an objective social category’ (a structuring structure)’ and ‘a subjective mental category (a structured structure)’ used by the individual to bring together representations and actions coming from the social world (Bourdieu, 1996 p.21; Bourdieu, 1998). Family therefore generates individuals’ habitus as well as is being generated by the habitus of individuals. This dual nature of the family involves the existence of a family habitus, which includes the body of common dispositions within the family, as well as family as a social field, or the body of external conditions at the origin of dispositions. The idea of family as a field is concerned with these power relationships and exchange processes within family members. In this sense, family has for Bourdieu a decisive role in the maintenance and reproduction of a certain social

48 order (Bourdieu, 1996) through the accumulation and then the transmission amongst members of different forms of capital.

Bourdieu argued that the structural objective dimension, including institutions such as the State, determine ‘social obligations’ amongst family members, which are maintained and reinforced through a process of institutionalising the family. On the other hand, Bourdieu pointed out that these norms regulating individual behaviours are internalised by family members and reflected in their habitus in the form of affective bonds which transform the social obligation toward family’s members into a ‘loving disposition’ (Bourdieu, 1998). This loving disposition serves to bond each member of the family with what Bourdieu called ‘family feeling’ which is made of devotion, generosity and solidarity as well as ‘exchange services, assistance, visits, attention and kindness’ (Ibid, p.22). In this context the border between private/domestic and the public field is blurred. Therefore, family is a field which provides the social context where the process of intergenerational transmission takes place. However as a social field, family is not culturally neutral, rather it is influenced by specific historical and socio-economic conditions which determine both strategies and content of transmission. Therefore, family exists as part of the social structure, which creates the social expectations and the social understanding of family itself in terms of the reciprocal obligations bonding the members. However, family also contains subjective dimensions which consist of the individual dispositions of the single family members as well as the body of these dispositions as family habitus.

As Brannen (2006) pointed out in her study of cultures of intergenerational transmission in four generational families, the strategies adopted by parents to transfer cultural capital vary according to ‘the contexts where people speak and in which people’s lives are lived’ (Brannen, 2006, p.151). In Brannen’s study the family members interviewed were born in three different historical periods2, which impacted on the availability of resources, the economic cycle, employment rates and on the systems of social stratification (Ibid). Similarly, in the present study, which only focuses on two generations of British Muslim of South Asians origin (young people aged 14-18 years old and their parents), the historical context which includes parental migration

2 _{Great grandparents 1911-1921; grandparents 1940-1948; parents born 1965-1975 in (Brannen,}

49 histories and processes of settlement in the UK, is particularly influential as described in the following chapter.

In conclusion, family is one the key social fields where habitus originated; the process of intergenerational transfer occurs in the context of social fields, including the family, to ultimately affect and shape individual dispositions or habitus.

2.6 Strategy: the synthesis between habitus and the