Classement, déclassement, reclassement
Authors: Bourdieu Pierre 
Published: October 2008

Classification, De-classification, Re-classification.

The strategies of reproduction and in particular the strategies of re-conversion depend on the objective profit-risks offered to investments in a given state of the institutional instruments of reproduction and of the capital they are to reproduce ; it follows that the recent transformations of the relationship between the different classes and the educational System —which have resulted in the massive increase in schooling and all the corresponding changes in the educational System itself, and all the transformations of the social structure which, at least in part, are due to the transformation of the relationships holding between qualifications and job-openings— are the result of an intensification of competition for educational qualifications. Thus, those fractions of the ruling and middle classes which are richest in economc capital have had, in order to ensure their reproduction, to greatly intensify the use they made of the educational System, constraining the fractions whose reproduction was hitherto ensured chiefly by schooling to intensify their investments in schooling. Hence the inflation of qualifications and their devaluation. As a consequence of devaluation, the broadening of the monopoly of the holders of educational qualifications over positions which were until then open to non degree-holders means that the chief victims of this process are those who go onto the job-market without qualifications. Hence a reinforcement of the way in which schooling predetermines professional career opportunities and of the interdependence of qualification and job-opening. The re-conversion of the economic capital into cultural capital permits the middle classes to maintain the position of its heirs and explains the morphological changes within the middle classes and, in particular, the emergeance of a new type of craftsmen and trade with a high cultural investment.

The hysteresis of the habitus tends to conceal the devaluation of qualifications from the classes which are furthest from the educational System. The other classes can, in order to escape loss of position, either produce new professions more adapted to their social claims, or else modify in accordance with these claims, by a redefinition implying a re-evaluation, those professions to which their qualifications give access. This creative redefinition effect can be observed in professions of sparse distribution and low degree of professionalisation, such as the new sectors of cultural and artistic production and all those professions which ensure the best return on the cultural capital transmitted by the family; consultative occupations, and those of presentation and representation. One can only understand the emergeance of that new petty-bourgeoisie which harnesses to its function as intermediary between the classes new instruments of manipulation by reference to the transformations in the methods of ruling which, since they are concerned to ensure the symbolic integration of the ruled classes, grant more importance to the prescribing of needs rather than the instilling of norms.

The increase in school-attendance underlies a whole group of transformations in the educational System itself; the well-defined boundaries of the old system are supplanted by the vague classifications of a system which sanctions vagueness of aspirations. It is as if the new logic of the educational system and the economic system promoted the maximum postponement of the moment when, by a series of imperceptible degrees, the final balance-sheet of the semi-bourgeois abortive careers is settled at last. Hence the type of structural instability we find in the representation of social identity and aspirations.

The outcome of all the opposing effects of re-conversion and re-classification, is a global movement upwards of the structure of the distribution, between classes and segments of classes, of the wealth which is the stake of competitiveness, the maintenance of order, that is to say of relational property, being therefore ensured by the ceaseless changes in substantial properties.