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Drawing on empirical data regarding educational strategies among internationally mobile families in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, this study questions the notion of a global middle class. First, a quantitative analysis shows that immigrating middle class professionals and their children are few, having marginal impact on the demand for international education. Furthermore, they far from constitute a homogeneous class, instead comprising of fractions opting for different types of schools. A second, qualitative study on capital conversion among mobile families illustrates that even well-educated international movers face serious challenges converting their existing knowledge, skills and contacts into well-informed social, professional and educational strategies in their new context. This suggests the limitations of concepts such as international capital. It is argued that the GMC concept overshadows the fact that social groups within the middle classes have varying degrees of international mobility that constitutes just one dimension of what separates them from each other.

International audience

The German sociologist Michael Hartmann is a leading researcher in the field of elite studies who during four decades have published extensively on especially professional and corporate elites, in his later work in the form of comparative international studies. In this interview, Hartmann gives an account of how his research developed, his relationship to other research traditions in the area of elite research and of his methodological approaches.

After more than 30 years of research and some 20 books on the upper class, Monique Pincon-Charlot and Michel Pincon in this interview look back on their personal and sociological trajectories, their conceptualisation of the dominant class, their interest for geographical space as social space, and their methodological choices as ethnographers of the grande bourgeoisie.

In the last three decades, Swedish education has undergone profound transformations, including a gradually increasing degree of privatization and marketization. These transformations offer an oppor ...

The idea of a strong tie between culture and education, advocated by Bourdieu and his colleagues from the 1960s, is in this article explored in detail by investigating cultural capital in both its embodied state, expressed in tastes and cultural practices among students in the elite subfield of Swedish higher education, and its institutionalised state, through an analysis of the same students’ enrolment patterns. By applying Specific MCA to a questionnaire answered by 1152 students at 20 socially and scholarly selective programmes we identify three main dimensions in the space of lifestyles. The first dimension separates advanced and legitimate cultural practices and tastes from mainstream ones. In a second dimension, elaborate and often costly body-oriented practices in training or clothing are distinguished from a more ascetic lifestyle. The third dimension opposes a pole of establishment from a pole of non-establishment. The study programmes are well dispersed in the space of lifestyles, which suggests a close relation between embodied and institutionalised states of cultural capital. We finally argue that the pursuit of field-specific capital best explains this dispersion: the future trajectories into specific regions of the field of power tend to correspond to distinct lifestyles of various categories of elite students. The Struggle for Students. The Swedish Field of Higher Education and the Recruitment Strategies of the Institutions

L’article analyse les effets de la transformation du système d’enseignement secondaire suédois liée à la marchandisation initiée par l’introduction des chèques éducation dans les années 1990 et par l’abandon, dans la région de Stockholm, de la carte scolaire. L’expansion rapide des lycées dits « libres » (privés) et la double compétition entre lycées cherchant à attirer des élèves et entre élèves cherchant à être admis dans les lycées a entraîné la création de centaines de filières d’études « profilées » qui offrent une gamme unique de cours. Le libre choix combiné avec des frontières institutionnelles floues rend les stratégies éducatives encore plus dépendantes de la capacité des familles à interpréter et « construire » ces frontières. Une analyse statistique du recrutement à l’échelon de l’enseignement secondaire dans la région de Stockholm fait apparaître un espace à deux dimensions. Dans une première dimension, les lycées et les filières au recrutement social et scolaire favorisé s’opposent à ceux qui possèdent un recrutement défavorisé. Dans une seconde dimension, les lycées et filières recevant surtout des élèves issus de familles riches en capital culturel s’opposent à ceux qui recrutent en premier lieu les étudiants venant de familles dotées de capital économique. Dans cet espace de plus en plus hiérarchisé et diversifié, les lycées tendent à appartenir à une niche particulière. Cette structure se reflète dans les oppositions d’univers de valeurs liées au projet d’établissement figurant sur les pages Internet des lycées. The article analyzes the effects of the current transformations of Swedish upper secondary education emerging from the marketization brought about by the introduction of school vouchers in the 90s and, in the Stockholm region, of a free competition for admission. The rapid expansion of private or “independent” schools and the double competition between schools trying to attract students and students competing to enter into schools have resulted in the creation of numerous “profiled” study programs offering a unique mix of courses. Interviews show that the free choice of education in combination with blurred institutional frontiers make families’ educational strategies increasingly dependant on their culturally framed capacity to interpret and “construct” educational differences. A statistical analysis of student recruitment in the Stockholm region shows that the space of upper secondary education comprises two dimensions. A first one that opposes socially and scholarly highly ranked schools and study programs to those with a low recruitment profile, and a second one separates schools recruiting students from families with a strong cultural capital to those receiving most of their students from families with strong economic capital. In this increasingly hierarchic and structured universe, individual schools tend to occupy positions pertaining to specific niches. An analysis of the Internet home pages of 39 upper secondary schools show that these oppositions are mirrored by the ones that structure the universe of symbolic values put forward at these pages.