bourdieu vs. heckman, friend or foe?
There’s a potentially huge intellectual confrontation coming up between two schools of strat/inequality researchers, if it’s not already happening. It’s about rival explanations of family effects on achievement. Here’s the skinny:
- According to the Bourdieu/cultural capital crowd, family affects lifecourse by either (a) providing young people with knowledge and behaviors that give them an advantage in school (e.g., taking your kid to the museum) and (b) using class privilige to protect/guide your kids in school. See Annette Lareau’s famous work on this second point.
- The Heckman/psychometric crowd is starting to congeal around the idea that families affect how people concentrate. The main claim is that socio-emotional skills are a big predictor of how kids do in school. Basically, achievement is IQ + concentration. Then they conjecture that families are a big input into socio-emotional skills. If your family is disruptive, then it undermines your performance because you simply can’t/won’t concentrate.
Now, the question is how to relate these explanations. Personally, my guess is that #2 is probably a stronger explanation of macro trends in acheivement, but #1 is a better explanation of microvariation. For example, position #1 is not able to explain the fact that some low status groups (e.g., Asian immigrants) were able to acheive much with little insider knowledge of American schools. The concentration thesis easily explains how Asian immigrants - through just forcing their kids to just pay attention – can get pretty far in the system. It also explains variation in Asian performance – they do well in math, not language. Math ed research indicates that repitition and concentration are the big factors in math skill acquisition, while language and reading is much more culturally based.
In contrast, #2 doesn’t explain differences among groups that put out equal levels of concentration. For example, why are Asians over represented in technical elite education, but not in other areas of the academy, such as the humanities? If they can wing nuclear engineering, why aren’t they over represented in English departments? Part of the reason is that they probably lack the social capital to navigate non-technical areas. There’s more to be said here and I’d be interested in other takes on this issue.
I don’t see how the two explanations can be competing, other than in a standard “partitioning the variance explained” sense. The reason for that is that all of the factors that are mentioned come as a syndrome. The box in which children are given the socio-cultural experiences that cultural capital researchers used to index cultural advantage but in which they are not given the socio-emotional skills required to do well in modern educational systems is simply empirically empty. This applies even for parents of Asian descent who tend to be as likely to “invest” in traditional cultural capital forming experiences (i.e. art appreciation classes for their children) at the same rate as (and sometimes exceeding) whites at similar levels of educational attainment.
Omar
June 30, 2008 at 2:40 pm
The box is not empty – cultural capital descriptions explain why, say all the writers on the Simpsons or Monty Python went to Harvard or Oxbridge respectively – ‘the most indeterminate sectors of the social structure offer the most favourable ground for the operations which by … creating ‘ex nihilo’ the perfomance of which requires no more than a rationalised form of competence in a class culture’ p153 Distinction
Asians with study oriented households may improve the chances of climbing a well established ladder like engineering, but they are ill equipped to create new and lucrative cultural categories out of nothing – blogging is a good new example.
So the two types of explanation do not conflict, but describe different stages.
gabe
June 30, 2008 at 5:03 pm
That quote (or rather paraphrase) should read
he most indeterminate sectors of the social structure offer the most favourable ground for the operations which by … creating ‘ex nihilo’ new areas of expertise the perfomance of which requires no more than a rationalised form of competence in a class culture’
gabe
June 30, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Omar: I agree they are a syndrome, but I could imagine a skeptic saying that once you control for emotional/cognitive factors, cultural capital doesn’t matter. “It’s all attention” is the motto of these folks.
Gabe: Good point – cultural capital leads to clustering of careers, which isn’t predicted by the heckman theory.
fabiorojas
June 30, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Gabe, I don’t disagree with that particular take (Bourdieu uses a similar mechanism to explain the differential likelihood of creating a position out of nothing in emerging fields in the “Men and Machines” essay).
But for the sake of conceptual clarity that is not the outcome under discussion here. The outcome is simply “success in the educational system broadly defined” (Fabio seems to have brought up the humanities/engineering issue more as an “anomaly” that the Heckman folk can’t account for, but that’s not what they want to account for) not the choice of specific careers patterns by persons endowed with differential asset structures. Furthermore the “box” that I was talking about refers to a cluster of family practices not to a cluster of individual choices. The box of “pure scholastic asceticism” without cultural capital investments that is. I would submit that that box is (close to) empirically empty, because those likely to practice scholastic asceticism will also invest in cultural capital for their children (although that of course is an empirical and not a conceptual question; so quotes from Distinction however enlightening won’t settle the issue).
Omar
July 1, 2008 at 12:20 am
What about the Judith Harris “Nurture Assumption” theory?
TGGP
July 1, 2008 at 6:45 am
Harris argues that genetics & peer groups are the most important factors, so I guess that like #2 she’d argue for the importance of IQ, but but unlike both she’d argue that family is important more as a vehicle for situating kids in particular socioeconomic peer groups than for direct (non-genetic) effects on achievements.
Jon
July 7, 2008 at 1:09 pm
[...] the theory-dropping Brooks does on human/cultural capital, he isn’t really approaching the tension Bourdieu would inject with what is being transfered from child to parent. It is important to note [...]
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