1. Learning Capitalist Culture (Part 2)
Deep in the heart of Tejas
Douglas Foley
Presenter: Maryam Salahshoor

2. Overview Learning Capitalist Culture:
An ethnographic study of the popular culture practices that reproduce social inequality in a small town South of Texas high-school with a large Mexican-American population in 1970.
This study examines the student’s interactional styles and ritualized performances for information about class, race, and sexual inequalities.

3. Overview Oral histories Observations Interviews
Three Central Chapters:
Football, dating, and classroom play support the book’s underlying theme:
The socioeconomic class that an adult ends up with is related to the interactional competencies she or he develops in school.

4. Class Analysis of Schooling
Marx
Class Analysis of Schooling
Connection between social class and schools
The role of mass public education in a capitalist society
Does public education help level status and economic class differences, or does it reproduce or promote existing status and economic inequalities?

5. Bourdieu Cultural Capital
Bourgeois culture practices are a form of “linguistic”, “cultural” and “social” capital.
Individual who posses cultural capital often convert their cultural capital into economic capital.
Taste in manners, dress, language, preferences, in dance, music, literature, and sports to get them ahead in life.

6. Cultural Capital
Football, dating, an classroom scenes as aspects of popular culture are presented as stages of for learning and displaying the interactional skills and communicative styles that reproduce inequality.
Youth learned the self-expectations, values, and communicative competence needed for different future civic, political, and economic roles as leaders and followers.

7. Erving Goffman Impression Management
"All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify”
Impression management
Refers to the activity of controlling information in order to steer others’ opinions in the service of personal or social goals. e.g., a clothing brand, a political position, etc.)
(Self monitoring, self verification

8. Cultural reproduction in North Town High
Middle-class males, both Mexican-American and Anglo, were better at “impression management” than their working-class peers (hiding drinking and smoking from parents)
Working-class males, in contrast were rough, crude, and “too open” about their drinking and dope smoking.

9. Cultural reproduction in North Town High
Students from better social class had good “communicative competence” linguistic and cultural capital” “good students”
Students from “low-income” status lacked these skills and were labeled as “ bad students” “troublemakers”, “losers”. “social nobodies”.

10. Bourdieu Middle class: “New professional-managerial class”
No means of production, no cultural and linguistic capital of bourgeoisie, rely on accumulating cultural and linguistic capital through good educational credentials. .
Controlling: school boards, PTA organizations, and informal culture of schools

11. Results Graduate School Two Year No College Upper middle class 49% 19%
33%
High white collar
50%
25%
Low white collar
21%
27%
52%
Blue collar 5%
11%
85%
A 10- year follow-up study (attended a ten-year reunion of the class) interviewed 40 students who had graduated in 1970.
Mexican (72%), Anglo (28%)
The results sugets that students from socially prominent families, who had occupied leadership positions in school, developed the interactional skills that prepared them for leadership roles in the adult community.

12. Results Upper middle class High white collar Low white collar
Blue collar
26%
40%
16% 7% 0%
64%
17% 3% 1%
24%
48%
12% 5%
25%
46%
Students from socially prominent families, who had occupied leadership positions in school, developed the interactional skills that prepared them for leadership roles in the adult community

13. Social Immobility
These numbers suggest a continuing pattern of cultural traditionalism in the Mexican community
Pre-civil rights generation
Post-civil rights generation
Upper middle class 2% 1%
High white collar 3%
14%
Low white collar
36%
31%
Blue collar
58%
54%