Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [218]
Overall, Bourdieu’s work provides a dynamic model of structural inequality; it enables researchers to capture “moments” of cultural and social reproduction. To understand the character of these moments, researchers need to look at the contexts in which capital is situated, the efforts by individuals to activate their capital, the skill with which they do so, and the institutional response to the activation of resources. Unfortunately, Bourdieu’s empirical work has not paid sufficient attention to the difference between the possession of capital and the activation of capital.9 Nor has he focused attention on the crucial mediating role of individuals who serve as “gatekeepers” and decision makers in organizations. For example, in this book, in a few instances I have sought to show how parents transmitted different habitus in the home; how this habitus, in specific institutional encounters, functioned as a form of cultural capital; and how (depending on how it was activated) the cultural capital yielded (or didn’t yield) an educational profit. Ms. Marshall taught her daughter a set of dispositions in the home, including a disposition to challenge adults in positions of authority. Ms. Marshall drew on this disposition (habitus) and activated her cultural capital when Stacey was turned down from the gifted program. Through a shrewd activation of cultural capital, Ms. Marshall gained profits for her daughter, including access to the gifted program (which as an enriched curriculum might lead to higher test scores as well as more favorable placement in courses in the future). Ms. Marshall was able to obtain these results as a consequence of her disposition and capacity to intervene in institutional settings in which her daughters’ daily lives unfolded.
Overall, these moments of interaction between parents and key actors in institutions are the life blood of the stratification process and need to be examined more in the future. Bourdieu does not show empirically how individuals draw on class-based cultural resources in their moments of interaction with institutions. Parents appear to have an uneven ability to customize their interactions with such institutions. Similarly, they have an unequal ability to persuade professionals to comply with their wishes.
In sum, we need to understand the individually insignificant but cumulatively important ways in which parents from the dominant classes actually facilitate their children’s progress through key social settings. This book is one effort to do just that.
APPENDIX C
Supporting Tables
TABLE C1. DISTRIBUTION OF CHILDREN IN THE STUDY BY SOCIAL CLASS AND RACE
TABLE C2. SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CATCHMENT AREAS OF SCHOOLS IN THE STUDY
TABLE C3. FAMILY STRUCTURE BY SOCIAL CLASS AND RACE
TABLE C4. AVERAGE NUMBER OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES BY SOCIAL CLASS, RACE, AND CHILD’S GENDER1
TABLE C5. PARTICIPATION IN ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL: BOYS
TABLE C6. PARTICIPATION IN ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL: GIRLS
TABLE C7. PROPORTION WHO HAVE REQUESTED A TEACHER BY SOCIAL CLASS1
TABLE C8. PROPORTION WHO KNOW PROFESSIONALS BY SOCIAL CLASS1
TABLE C9. OVERVIEW OF DATA COLLECTION PROCESS
1989–90
Observation in two third-grade classrooms in Lawrenceville (midwestern town of 25,000); in-depth interviews separately with mothers, fathers, and guardians of 31 children, approximately one-half white and one-half Black; one observation of one white middle-class family one day; interviews with professionals working with children; work done primarily by Lareau with some assistance from an African American graduate student
1992–93
Receive grant from the Spencer Foundation
Study of third-grade class in an integrated public school in large urban school district “Lower Richmond,” which draws mostly white working-class and African American children from a low-income housing project