Accumulation of advantage and the distribution of social and cultural resources through organizational parent networks

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 15. Social Networks and Social Capital

Abstract

Based on interviews with families participating in a free and inclusive music education program, this paper explores the relationship between families’ engagement in the organization, cross-class boundaries, culture and social mobility. The Nucleo Project, a branch of the global Sistema movement, offers a unique platform by which families can build their resources of social and cultural capital without the input of economic capital. I explore how form, content and context of the organization shape social processes such as network building and resource exchange among its participating families. Building upon the classic Bourdieusian delineation of the forms of capital, this study engages with theory from sociology of parenting, education, arts and culture, and integrates into the sociological tradition of inquiry into class stratification and inequality. The empirical findings of this investigation demonstrate that families increase their reserves of social and cultural capital by engaging with the organization, both through its formal structure and informal relationships. Despite including students from a range of class backgrounds, the program still disproportionately advantages a self-selecting subset of the population who share similar parenting values, and already predisposed to help their children succeed within the dominant structures of society. The distribution of such cultural norms in this case subverts the prevailing literature, which suggests that parenting values bisect the population by class position, providing a more complex picture of how inequality is operating that is linked more closely with beliefs and experiences around social mobility.

Author

• Rachel Keynton, University of Notre Dame