Page - (000113) - in Knowledge and Networks

105 Financial Elites, Education, and Socioeconomic Practice in the City As noted in the introduction , the relationship between educational background and entry into elite networks has been extensively studied, led by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1980/ 1990 , 1989/ 1996 ). A central component of this research is Bourdieu’s identifi cation of three interrelated forms of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that form an individual’s habitus ( Bourdieu, 1980/ 1990 ). Work in the soci- ology of education has focused particularly on institutional capital , arguing that it is gained through the acquisition of education credentials, as well as through member- ship in other formal groups (see, for example, Waters, 2007 ). However, although Bourdieu only discusses education explicitly in relation to institutional capital , research, particularly in the sociology of education, has revealed how education also plays an important role in the acquisition of the other forms of cultural and embodied capital as individuals learn accepted ways of being and doing through their educa- tional experiences (Brown, 2000 ; Brown & Hesketh, 2004 ; Waters, 2009 ). This emphasis on the ways in which institutional, cultural, and embodied capital is acquired through education has been particularly evident regarding the relation- ship between education and the fi nancial elites focused on in this chapter. Most notably, in the case of the City of London educational credentials from a small number of fee-paying public schools and elite universities, the University of Oxford and Cambridge in particular, have been identifi ed as key determinants of successful entry into London’s fi nancial labor markets prior to the deregulatory changes of Big Bang in 1986, (Kynaston, 2002 ; McDowell, 1997 ). Educational credentials obtained from these institutions acted as a form of institutionalized cultural capital by indi- cating the possession of the objectifi ed and embodied forms of cultural capital asso- ciated with “gentlemanly” capitalism (Augar, 2001 ). Indeed, as Thrift ( 1994 , p. 342) has argued, gentlemanly capitalism was based “on values of honor, integrity, cour- tesy and so on, and manifested in ideas of how to act, ways to talk [and] suitable clothing” (see also Tickell, 1996 ). These embodied forms of working in the City have been argued to have had important implications for how the City was regulated by dense social networks based on shared educational backgrounds, through which trust based relationships could be formed (Pryke, 1991 ). More recent work has revealed how newer forms of educational credentials continue to reproduce the importance of the relationship between the educational background-based entry into fi nancial elite labor markets and the embodied, institutional, and cultural capi- tal needed to work successfully in these environments. For example, Masters of Business Administration (MBA) alumni networks from leading business schools have been shown to be an important way of securing upward career progression within investment banks, especially those headquartered in the United States where the MBA is more fully integrated into investment banking career pathways (Hall, 2008 ). However, despite the acknowledged importance of educational background in securing entry into these elite labor markets, it is important not to paint a naively 6 (Post)graduate Education Markets and the Formation of Mobile Transnational…