Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization,Education and Stratification

Unequal Access to Cosmopolitanism

For cosmopolitanism thus legitimated to operate as cultural capital, however, its access has to be unequal. Cultural capital becomes a locus of stratification because of its ‘unequal distribution’ among people in a given field (Bourdieu, 1983: 246). Based on available evidence, we suggest that a global field of education is indeed emerging that is structured hierarchically to render access to cosmopolitanism unequal among different groups of actors. First and foremost, higher education – a key institution that confers academic qualifications as cultural capital – plays a decisive role in constituting a hierarchically structured global field against a backdrop of the emergence of worldwide university rankings in the early 2000s. The most famous ones include QS World University Rankings (by Quacquarelli Symonds, a London-based education company), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (by Times Higher Education, a London-based publisher, in collaboration with the Canadian company Thomson Reuters), and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (by Shanghai Jiaotong University). By hierarchically ordering universities around the world according to the same set of criteria and thereby unequally distributing prestige, these rankings legitimate the global as a proper scale of competition among higher-education organizations.

In addition, ‘position-taking’ by universities in response to the worldwide rankings seems to reinforce the hierarchical nature of the global field. University administrators take into consideration these rankings when formulating strategies to improve the prestige of their universities as well as to carve out unique niches for their universities in a global field of higher education. The more university administrators refer to the worldwide rankings when making decisions, the more the global field of higher education becomes institutionalized. In other words, the worldwide university rankings and responses from university administrators progressively institutionalize global competition among higher-education organizations for ‘symbolic capital’, a source of power to define certain evaluative standards as legitimate (Bourdieu, 1991). Indeed, top universities in the worldwide rankings, which are concentrated in North America and Western Europe, are seen as embodying the highest standards of academic excellence, whether or not lower-ranked universities can actually emulate them.

Furthermore, students who pursue higher education outside their home countries help structurate the hierarchically organized global field. Specifically, a growing number of students from non-European countries, such as China, India, and South Korea, move to North America and Western Europe to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees (Chen and Barnett, 2000; Institute of International Education, 2012; Marginson, 2006). Far more students flow from the ‘non-West’ to the ‘West’ than the other way around because students in non-Western countries regard higher education in the West as not only superior but also more cosmopolitan and thereby helpful in securing jobs in the increasingly globalized economy (Kim, 2011, 2012). Put in Bourdieusian language, students in the non-West participate in the institutionalization of the global field of higher education by internalizing the doxa, a set of ‘evaluative presuppositions whose acceptance is implied in membership’ in the field (Bourdieu, 2000: 100).

Thus, the emergence of worldwide university rankings vis-à-vis organizational and individual responses seems to institutionalize university degrees in North America and Western Europe as proxies of cosmopolitan dispositions and competencies to excel in a global world. University degrees in North America and Western Europe enjoy such prestige because countries in these regions were once imperial powers and now serve as centers of the global economy, politics, and culture (Carroll and Carson, 2003; Harvey, 2009). Languages and cultural practices in the West therefore continue to define ‘global standards’. This means that it is easier for people who were born and grew up in the West to acquire cosmopolitanism as cultural capital because academic qualifications that are only local or national for them are simultaneously regarded as global by people in the non-West. Indeed, ‘[c]ultural capital can be acquired, to a varying extent, depending on the period, the society, and the social class, in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore quite unconsciously’ (Bourdieu, 1983: 245). Thus, due to the hierarchical structure of the global field, people in the West can begin to accrue their advantages over people in the non-West already at the levels of primary and secondary education, prior to their entry into higher education.

This unequal access to cosmopolitanism at the global level seems to be reproduced at the national level. Here it is useful to map a vast number of possible educational tracks, generated by different combinations of school and curricular types, onto a single continuum where one end is national and the other international: educational tracks on the international end offer larger volumes of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital than on the national end. For example, students enrolled in national education systems in their home countries are likely to be situated near the national end. This is because while national education systems around the world have institutionalized cosmopolitanism into school curricula, most students acquire cosmopolitanism by taking courses in foreign languages, world history, and civics with their co-nationals, not with foreigners. Since their educational trajectories are embedded firmly in their home countries, these students are likely to occupy domestic positions that do not require extensive interaction with people of multiple nationalities.

In contrast, students who attend international schools are likely to select educational tracks that help them acquire large volumes of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital. These students tend to have parents who work for embassies, multinational corporations, and intergovernmental organizations. They are called ‘third culture kids’ who are comfortable and competent within multicultural settings (Hayden and Thompson, 1995; Useem and Downie, 1976). Importantly, the majority of these international schools adopt North American and Western European curricula. In non-Western countries, American schools and other international schools that adopt the International General Certificate of Secondary Education or the International Baccalaureate programs are regarded as stepping stones to enter universities in the West and eventually succeed in a globalized world (Cambridge, 2002; Resnik, 2012). Students who attend international schools are likely later to occupy positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities because their academic qualifications serve as proxies of their cosmopolitan dispositions and competencies. Thus, at the national level, different combinations of school and curricular types create different tracks that determine different volumes of cosmopolitanism that students can acquire as cultural capital, while reproducing the hierarchy between the Western and non-Western countries that exists in the global field of education.

Although we have focused on cosmopolitanism in the institutionalized state of academic qualifications, this does not mean that other states of this cultural capital are irrelevant or that education is the only means to acquire cosmopolitanism. The embodied state of cosmopolitanism, for example, could propel some people to actively seek international educational tracks and thereby accumulate cosmopolitanism in the institutionalized state. The embodied state of cosmopolitanism in turn can be acquired through non-educational channels, such as forced or voluntary immigration (Werbner, 1999) and lived experiences of everyday life (Lamont and Aksartova, 2002). In the next section, we address these issues – how dispositional and non-educational factors feed into attainment of cosmopolitanism in the institutionalized state of academic qualifications – by exploring how children’s educational tracks are mediated by different volumes of cultural, economic, and social capital that their families possess.

Mediation of Parental Cultural, Economic and Social Capital

First of all, parents transmit cultural capital to their children in an embodied state, and this cultural transmission of habitus at the earliest stage of socialization decisively shapes subsequent trajectories of acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983: 245–6). Children of families whose parents work for embassies and multinational corporations, for example, are likely to choose international educational tracks (Goodman, 1990) because they feel more comfortable in international schools. Moreover, existing studies indicate that children of families with higher socioeconomic statuses (SES) are more disposed to pursue cosmopolitanism as cultural capital because their parents are more likely to possess cosmopolitanism in the first place: levels of education are correlated with levels of openness to foreign others and cultures (Mau et al., 2008; Olofosson and Öhman, 2007; Pichler, 2009). Since education systems now promote cosmopolitanism, those who acquire more education seem to become more cosmopolitan. Accordingly, children from higher SES families are expected to acquire openness toward foreign others and cultures from an early age.

Second, different families possess different volumes of economic capital, which delimit educational tracks available to their children. For example, only the families with sufficient volumes of economic capital can afford to send their children to international schools and universities outside of their home countries because these types of education are costly. Volumes of economic capital available to families, however, do not automatically determine children’s educational trajectories. One mediating factor is the family’s class trajectory. In the Netherlands, Weenink (2007, 2008) found that old middle-class families tend to send their children to traditionally elite educational tracks that are more nationally oriented, such as gymnasiums. In contrast, new middle-class families tend to send their children to newly established international tracks. Weenink suggests that these two different parental educational practices are coterminous with emerging competition between old and new middle classes: the latter adopted international education as a way to overtake the former by better positioning their children to exploit increasing transnational economic opportunities created by the European integration. Thus two class fractions with similar volumes of economic capital can adopt different educational practices because of their different class trajectories.

In addition, children’s own academic performance can mediate the relationship between parental economic capital and children’s educational trajectories. Johanna Waters (2005, 2007) studied Chinese middle-class families who migrated from Hong Kong to Vancouver and found that they decided to migrate because their children’s academic performance was not good enough to warrant entrance to the extremely competitive higher education system in Hong Kong. Children of these families unexpectedly entered international educational tracks when their parents decided to ‘buy out’ their academic failures from the national education system. To be sure, these Chinese parents could not have adopted the buyout strategy without sufficient volumes of economic capital that could be used to help their children acquire cosmopolitanism in the form of North American university degrees. But Waters’ studies show that unequal access to cosmopolitanism is not automatically determined by parental economic capital.

Third, different families possess different numbers of transnational connections that can be used as social capital to help their children’s acquisition of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital. The more foreign friends, colleagues, and relatives that parents have, the more likely they can use these connections to familiarize their children with foreign others and cultures as well as to prepare their children for international educational tracks (Weenink, 2007). In other words, the volume of social capital that the family can deploy for children’s acquisition of cosmopolitanism ‘depends on the size of the network of connections’ the family can effectively mobilize and ‘on the volume of the capital’ possessed by each of those to whom they are connected (Bourdieu, 1983: 249).

Here parents can be grouped into three types of cosmopolitans commonly found in the existing literature, according to the number of transnational connections that they possess as social capital for their children’s acquisition of cosmopolitanism. First, ‘elite cosmopolitans’, who are also called ‘transnational elites’ (Sassen, 2007) or the ‘global cosmopolitan class’ (Calhoun, 2008b), possess the largest number of transnational connections: they typically occupy high-ranking positions in multinational corporations and international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Second, ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ (Appiah, 2006) possess the second largest number of transnational connections. These cosmopolitans are usually fluent in at least two languages and have lived or worked outside of their home countries. Third, there are ‘banal cosmopolitans’ (Skrbis et al., 2004; Tomlinson, 2002) who consume foreign cultural products and media representations of foreign others but lack regular and direct contact with foreigners. Banal cosmopolitans therefore have the smallest number of transnational connections that they can mobilize for educational practices to help their children acquire cosmopolitanism.

At first glance, these three types of cosmopolitans seem to be correlated with different social classes (elite = upper, rooted = middle, and banal = lower), but immigrants complicate this correlation (Werbner, 1999). In Western countries, for example, lower-class immigrant families can become rooted cosmopolitans, if they maintain contacts with people in their home countries. Then, their children can acquire extra cosmopolitanism in an embodied form (e.g. familiarity with foreign languages and cultures outside of the West) better than do their lower- and even middle-class non-immigrant peers whose parents are banal cosmopolitans with fewer transnational connections. Such early acquisition of cosmopolitan habitus may prime lower-class immigrant students to later pursue international educational tracks and academic qualifications that serve as proxies of cosmopolitan dispositions and competencies. But, to specify precisely how transnational connections as social capital may compensate small volumes of economic capital deployable for the acquisition of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital, more longitudinal research on immigrant students in the West is needed to illuminate the mechanisms through which transnational connections shape educational and career trajectories (cf. Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008).

In sum, to theorize how cosmopolitanism gets institutionalized as cultural capital, both the production and consumption sides of education in a global world need to be considered. First, globalization of education helps institutionalize Western academic qualifications as proxies of cosmopolitanism as globally-circulable cultural capital while making access to this cultural capital unequal. That is, on the production side, volumes of cosmopolitanism available to students are unequally distributed across different educational tracks. On this consumption side, too, access to cosmopolitanism is unequal: students from different families, endowed with different volumes of cultural, economic, and social capital, have unequal abilities to pursue the kinds of educational tracks associated with large volumes of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital. Thus, cosmopolitanism begins to acquire the character of cultural capital – its universal legitimacy and unequal access – through education systems.

Geographically Uneven Profits of Cosmopolitanism

For cosmopolitanism to fully operate as cultural capital, however, it has to become convertible into ‘profits’ on labor markets since the institutionalized state of cultural capital is conceptualized as ‘the condition for legitimate access to a growing number of positions, particularly dominant ones’ (Bourdieu, 1983: 254). Since education systems have institutionalized academic qualifications (an institutionalized state of cultural capital) as prerequisites for access to positions within modern society (Breen and Jonsson, 2005; Kerckhoff, 1995; Meyer, 1994), we can conjecture that cosmopolitanism, which education systems around the world increasingly define as cultural capital, also yields profits on labor markets, allowing its owners to gain access to the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities.

But few studies have actually examined this conjecture because the Bourdieusian research on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and stratification is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, available evidence indicates, first of all, that almost all types of stakeholders – students, parents, university administrators, and employers – believe that academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitanism lead to better job opportunities in the increasingly global economy (Brown and Tannock, 2009; Resnik, 2012; Weenink, 2008). To be sure, whether cosmopolitanism indeed yields profits is another empirical question; however, if stakeholders act according to this belief, their interactions can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein cosmopolitanism will be progressively institutionalized to yield profits on labor markets. In light of the growing movement of students from non-Western to Western countries to seek higher education, cosmopolitanism may well be on course to turn into profits in the near future.

Available evidence also suggests that cosmopolitanism in the form of university degrees from North America and Western Europe advantages its holders in competition for positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities, though this advantage is mediated by specific regional and national contexts. Jonathan Jarvis’ interview study (2013), for example, found that multinational corporations in South Korea tend to value job applicants more highly if their qualifications indicate their abilities to function in both transnational and national arenas rather than in either of the two. In addition, Johanna Waters (2009) and Remi Iijima (2009) showed that how cosmopolitanism turns into profits on labor markets in Hong Kong and Japan, respectively, depends on transnational social networks of employees and employers traversing the Asia-Pacific region: profits of cosmopolitanism are lower outside of these transnational networks. At present, then, cosmopolitanism does not circulate perfectly at the global level. Instead, its profit rate varies across regions, countries, and different segments of labor markets.

These findings are consistent with existing studies of transnational professionals. Generally speaking, movements of transnational professionals are regionally bound because the competencies and qualifications they acquire are embedded in cultural specificities of certain regions and are difficult to transfer to other regions of the world. For example, transnational professionals who started their careers in a particular region (e.g. Southeast Asia) are likely to continue to work in the same region (Beaverstock, 2002). Moreover, profits of cosmopolitanism are often mediated by histories of imperial expansion and colonial domination. A case in point is the tendency that circulation of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital retraces transnational connections between former metropoles and colonies (Beaverstock, 2005; Yeoh and Willis, 2005).

Indeed, not only profits but also the very definitions of cosmopolitanism tend to be embedded in regional and national contexts. In Europe, for example, cosmopolitanism is defined primarily in terms of pan-European dispositions and competencies: the European Union instituted student exchange programs (e.g. the Socrates and Erasmus Programs), as well as the Bologna Process that aims to standardize higher education across EU member countries, to make Euro-specific cosmopolitanism a locus of struggles for positions at the European level. Similar variations in what counts as cosmopolitanism can be found across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, depending on their colonial and postcolonial relations with powerful countries in the West (e.g. the United States, Britain, France). Thus it seems inevitable that the emerging global field of struggles for cosmopolitanism as cultural capital is geographically heterogeneous.

Moreover, we believe that this geographical unevenness in profits and definitions of cosmopolitanism is magnified by the persistence of nationalism in a globalized world. Even though nationalism has lost its primordial character, it continues to enjoy legitimacy as an institutional logic to constitute and regulate organizations, practices, and schemas based on the idea of the nation (Meyer, 2000; Schissler and Soysal, 2005). While governments around the world promote human rights and facilitate transnational economic activities, they continue to legitimate national citizenship. This coexistence of cosmopolitanism and nationalism as institutional logics indicates that a larger volume of cosmopolitanism does not automatically translate into a better chance of success on labor markets and in other arenas of social life. What maximizes the chance of success seems to be the ‘right’ combination of cosmopolitan and national academic qualifications that signal their holders’ dispositions and competencies to function effectively in both global and national arenas (Jarvis, 2013; Nukaga, 2013). But again, the right combination of the two types of academic qualifications is likely to vary according to how education systems vis-à-vis labor markets in a given country institutionally combine cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Indeed, how cosmopolitanism and nationalism are articulated is a crucial but unresolved question in the sociology of cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2006; Calhoun, 2008b).