Conceptualizing and tracing cultural struggles of lower-SES students in Chinese elite universities

Abstract

For low socioeconomic status (SES) students admitted to top-tier universities, access may not mean inclusion. Worldwide, researchers have increasingly shown how their “cultural outsider” position vis-à-vis the dominant culture of the elite academic milieux generates extra socio-psychic hardships and disadvantages—named “cultural struggles” in this thesis. Despite burgeoning scholarly attention to the problem, three knowledge gaps remain: (1) As researchers remain divided on how to conceptualize cultural struggles, a well-articulated conceptual framework is needed to enable systematic quantitative analysis; (2) While the dominant culture at elite universities varies across societies, there is virtually no systematic research about the cultural struggles in non-Western universities; and (3) How some students managed to combat those struggles and achieve success remains largely unknown. Three interrelated studies were conducted to fill these gaps. The first study aims to clarify the conceptualization and operationalization of cultural struggle. It synthesizes social psychologists’ and cultural sociologists’ research in this field with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field. By doing this, I propose an integrative conceptual framework of cultural struggles, comprising two interrelated dimensions—disembeddedness and disorientedness—as a springboard for operationalizing cultural struggles. Disembeddedness denotes the estranged relations between the self and others (i.e., the habitus and the field), while disorientedness incorporates the tensions residing in the self (i.e., the conflicts between one’s old and new habitus). Accordingly, a two-dimensional, eight-item “Cultural Struggle Scale” (CSS) was developed and validated using data collected at two top-ranked universities in East and West China. The second study unpacks the dominant culture at China’s elite universities in order to trace how cultural struggles are produced. A content analysis of the displayed narratives of award-winning students and in-depth interviews of graduating undergraduates at two universities were combined to examine the dominant culture, both formal and informal, in China’s elite universities. Results indicated that the dominant culture should be aptly understood as a hybridity of three cultural ideals: outstanding academic performance, collectivist spirits with patriotism, and dispositions practiced by socially-privileged groups. Correspondingly, three parallel hypotheses about how the three-fold dominant culture generates cultural struggles were induced and attested using CSS. The third study examines how some low-SES students employ available cultural resources to help themselves moderate cultural struggles. Analyzing in-depth interviews with 33 low-SES students, this study combines cultural sociologists’ insights with the orthodox Bourdieuian approach to allow for a more reflexive agency. The “good student” script is an analytical tool used to highlight whether a low-SES habitus is connected to the elite university field, which led to varied intensity of experienced cultural struggles upon entering university. This study then identified three sets of cultural resources—decategorizing frames, valorizing narratives, and bridging scripts—and illustrated how they empower strugglers. This thesis is the first to conceptualize the cultural obstacles plaguing low-SES groups against the backdrop of expanded access to higher education. It also opens up new possibilities to better understand cultural struggles using mixed methods, especially in the non-Western socio-cultural context. It concludes with an acknowledgment of limitations and a future research agenda.