The aim of this chapter is to refl ect on the use of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework for understanding and theorising students’ perceptions of parental infl uence on their educational choices for future studies in HE. It also questions whether Bourdieu’s conceptual tool of capital is adequate as an analytic tool in educational research. This study highlighted how familial capital in its different forms is used in various ways by middle-class families to enhance their children’s educational choices. A common pattern in the data was utilising the economic capital of the family for buying private tutorials, cultural goods and overseas studies. The enactment of social capital of the family was mediated by visits to the parents’ workplace for seeking crucial information. As far as parents’ cultural capital is concerned, most parents in the sample had not been to university themselves, but they had high aspirations for their children to study at university, thus their offsprings’ habitus was inculcated in a way that predisposed students for studies in HE. But is this an in-depth analysis and interpretation of the data or is capital just a descriptive tool? How can sociological knowledge be challenged and Bourdieu’s framework be developed and extended if capital is dominating in educational research projects about parental infl uence?
I argue that symbolic violence as a theoretical tool can help us investigate power relations in the family fi eld, and in conjunction with familial capital it can help us understand how parental infl uence operates in adolescence. Beyond exploring symbolic violence’s analytic potential, this chapter attempts to make connections between ‘familial habitus’ (Reay 2010) as a conceptual tool and ‘familial doxa’ (Atkinson 2011) for contributing to new theorisations of parental infl uence. If we go back to the original writings of Bourdieu, and some of his classic books such as the Logic of Practice (1980) and Practical Reason (1998), we can see that there is no reference to either of these terms, which researchers working within a Bourdieusian framework have coined. Bourdieu has never used the term ‘familial habitus’ or ‘familial doxa’ in his writings; on the contrary he writes about the family as a fi eld (Bourdieu 1998) which inculcates students’ habitus as part of the pedagogic work of the family (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990).
This is not to say that we cannot extend Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and develop it, but any new conceptual terms researchers coin should be consistent and coherent with Bourdieu’s theory. I argue that symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1980) can help us theorise how parents inculcate students’ habitus in the family fi eld, even when adolescent students misrecognise their parents’ infl uence and ‘deny’ it in their interviews, because parental infl uence is largely unconscious and this is consistent with Bourdieu’s view on the family (Bourdieu 1996).
The concept of symbolic violence comes with theoretical scepticism and meth- odological challenges. One major concern is how can we theorise unconscious phenomena and publish our fi ndings without strong empirical data supporting our argument. The concept of symbolic violence provides a helpful lens through which to view power relations in the family fi eld and especially in adolescence, when students are in the threshold of adulthood and ‘deny’ their parents’ infl u- ence to assert their autonomy and identity. I found that symbolic violence is extremely useful as a conceptual tool, as long as we ensure that our empirical data lead the analysis rather than imposing the conceptual framework on the empirical data. Undoubtedly, it is hard to theorise unconscious phenomena such as parental infl uence in adolescence and it is even more diffi cult to convince the research com- munity of the usefulness of this theorisation without strong empirical evidence.
Since symbolic violence cannot be directly observed in empirical research and has to be understood interpretively, much of this section is devoted to the resist- ance this idea received from reviewers. Although for the wider study (Kleanthous 2012) both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, in this chapter I pre- sented only some of the qualitative data. The quantitative data of the study showed that parental infl uence was not statistically signifi cant for predicting students’ dis- positions towards studying mathematically demanding courses in HE. A paper that reported the statistical analysis of the quantitative data and the use of symbolic violence to interpret the non-statistically signifi cant effect of parental infl uence as ‘misrecognition’ received strong critique from reviewers before it was accepted for publication (Kleanthous and Williams, in press). Although the mathematics education research community has embraced Bourdieu’s theoretical framework in recent years (e.g., Zevenbergen 2005; Williams 2012), it is still diffi cult for this research community to accept theorisations of unconscious phenomena without statistical evidence.
Apparently, the concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘misrecognition’ are still received with scepticism from other researchers working within a Bourdieusian framework, but what I tried to demonstrate in this chapter is how crucial these theoretical tools are for understanding ‘unspoken’ parental infl uence and that they are consistent with Bourdieu’s original writings.
Conclusion
In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984, 101) maps out a formula for his theoretical framework (Habitus x Capital) + Field = Practice. With this algebraic representation
of his theory he highlights the importance of the interaction between these theoretical concepts. The habitus is structured by engagement in practice with the fi eld but at the same time it is thereby structuring the fi eld. This reciprocal relationship should always be taken into consideration as ‘the theoretical concepts of his theory cannot be isolated from one another’ (Lareau and Weininger 2004, 127). Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue that ‘such notions as habitus, fi eld, and capital can be defi ned, but only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation’ (p. 96). This formula is a way of reminding researchers of the interrelation between Bourdieu’s theoretical tools and a call for using all his tools when analysing data in any educational research project. Although symbolic violence does not appear in this equation, it is very central to Bourdieu’s theory, thus it is legitimate to use it to theorise parental infl uence but only in relation to the rest of his theoretical toolkit. We need to put symbolic violence next to habitus, practice and capital in relation to a fi eld in order to understand its potential as an analytic tool.
Notes
1 In order to measure the socio-economic status (SES) of the family for the quantitative aspect of this study, I used a scale of occupations which is the standardised scale used in Cyprus for measuring SES by the government and the Pedagogical Institute (Ministry of Education). There is no equivalent allowance such as free school meals (FSM) or education maintenance allowance (EMA) in the Greek-Cypriot educational system as a proxy indicator of SES.
2 All names are pseudonyms.
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