Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu

Author:Pierre Bourdieu
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780674212770
Publisher: Harvard
Published: 1979-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Although executives and engineers have the monopoly of the means of symbolic appropriation of the cultural capital objectified in the form of instruments, machines and so forth which are essential to the exercise of the power of economic capital over this equipment, and derive from their monopoly a real managerial power and relative privileges within the firm, the profits accruing from their cultural capital are at least partially appropriated by those who have power over this capital, i.e., those who possess the economic capital needed to ensure the concentration and utilization of cultural capital. It follows from this that their position in the dominant class is an ambiguous one which leads them to a highly ambivalent adherence both to the firm and to the ‘social order’. When making demands or rising in protest, they are actuated as much by their concern to maintain the legitimate distance, established by academic verdicts, between themselves and ordinary workers, or by meritocratic indignation at being treated like them, as by the sense of a real solidarity of condition; and, conversely, their anxious search for integration into the dominant class, either for themselves or for their children, always includes (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the current state of their interests) an element of ambivalent resentment towards prizes they can neither completely possess nor completely ignore and refuse.

Model Executives

A rapid analysis of the ‘executive opportunities’ advertised in Le Monde in the course of a single week (in July 1973) is sufficient to identify the set of characteristic features of the new breed of marketing-oriented managers required by the new forms of business organization:

Whether ‘product manager’, ‘sales engineer’ [these two terms are in English in the original text], ‘deputy sales director’, ‘assistant financial manager’ or ‘general sales manager’, he must above all be a ‘negotiator’ and a ‘communicator’, and be

skilled in ‘top-level contacts’: able to act with ‘diplomacy’; adaptable to ‘contacts at all levels’; ‘accustomed to contacts with senior civil servants, excellent negotiator’; ‘capacity for high-level contacts’; ‘top-level contacts and negotiation’; ‘negotiation with banks’; ‘take charge of relations with Government departments, represent the firm on national negotiating bodies’; ‘taste for contacts and motivation’; ‘taste for problem-solving and human relations, highly articulate’;

and in internal negotiations, which means, for a head of sales management: ‘an ongoing co-ordination function between sales division and general management’; for a chief buyer, ‘this position entails full control of liaison between a marketing [English in original] department and a production unit’; for a sales engineer, ‘the negotiations he will have to conduct will require an understanding attitude and the creativity which his competence justifies’; ‘coordinator between clients, sales personnel, senior management, aftersales service and manufacturing’;

a graduate of one of the new business schools, HEC, INSEAD, Ecole Supérieure de Commerce (ESC) or Institut Supérieur des Affaires (ISA), generally listed together—perhaps rounded off by a ‘period of study in an American university’;

endowed with the aptitudes and attitudes implied in working for multinational or strongly export-oriented firms (‘English absolutely indispensable’; English vocabulary: ‘marketing’, ‘merchandising’ [last two terms in English] etc.

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