‘Entitlement’ and ‘Legitimacy’ as emotional capital: living out class through a critical educational failure by community-college students in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to take advantage of the concept of emotional capital to analyse how class is lived out through a critical educational failure by referring to the experiences of 64 community-college students in Hong Kong from a longitudinal qualitative study. Arguably an analysis of the emotions of middle-class and working-class respondents and their respective parents could enrich our conceptualization of emotional capital and theorization of its roles in class inequality/reproduction through higher education. Their parents’ emotional responses to this educational failure were found to be essentially cultivating middle-class respondents’ sense of entitlement to a university education but mostly challenging working-class respondents’ sense of legitimacy of pursuing a bachelor’s degree. This analysis unpacks processes whereby ‘entitlement’ and (lack of) ‘legitimacy’ could be passed on from parents to their children as classed emotional capital and thus suggests a mechanism of class reproduction though emotion in the field of higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• class feeling
• educational failure
• emotion
• higher education
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to respondents for their generosity to share their stories with me! And, I would also like to thank some former colleagues of mine who referred their graduates to me for this study. At last, but not least, I thank the comments and suggestions made by the two anonymous referees, which are of great help in improving this manuscript!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidade de Macau: [Grant Number Start-up fund 2009-2010].