Theorizing the professional habitus: operationalizing Bourdieu to explore the role of pedigree in Indonesian higher education

Abstract

Academia today is deeply hierarchical and continues to be centered around perceptions of prestige and symbolic capital. The symbolic capital, or pedigree, associated with the training one receives at the graduate level greatly informs how academics navigate their careers and how they advance professionally. In investigating the formation of the professional habitus of Indonesian academics, we are interested in how their graduate training informs both their career progression and their teaching practices. We theorize graduate training using the terms ‘hybrid’ for the participants who have a mix of overseas and domestic training and ‘homegrown’ for those who were educated solely in Indonesia. The data suggests that hybrid academics in Indonesia are more open to innovating their teaching practice and advance at a quicker pace than homegrown academics.

Keywords:

• Habitus
• academic careers
• pedigree
• higher education
• professional advancement

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs for funding this research, as part of postgraduate scholarship granted to one of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As of 28 April 2021, MoEC becomes Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (MoECRT) but for easy naming it is still called MoEC in this article.

2 Popular global university ranking includes Academic Ranking of World Universities, the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, etc.

3 Agus taught religious studies in Abimanyu Anthropology after gaining his PhD from America in 2012.

4 Budi got his MA (TESOL) in Australia in 2009.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Indonesian MORA 5000 Doktor scholarship.