https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-3259
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ABSTRACT
This paper looks at the phenomenon of upward mobility through education from a comparative and historical perspective. Pierre Bourdieu referred to upwardly mobile individuals in France as the miraculous (les miraculés), oblates (oblats), or, less often, defectors (transfuges). A difficulty with applying a theory created in one specific cultural context to other settings is the recognition of unique structural conditions characteristic of the particular academic field, especially when systematic analyses of academic careers in post-communist and semi-peripheral countries are rare. In this study, based on autobiographical narrative interviews, 24 upwardly mobile Polish professors were asked to tell their life stories and how these led them to an academic career. The findings suggest that the category of les miraculés should not be treated as a universal, one-size-fits-all concept but rather as a general name for many forms of mobility taking place in various higher education systems. Building on the Polish, semi-peripheral, example, I introduce two new concepts (‘Normal Miraculous’ and ‘Non-Miraculous’), which allow us to adequately capture the experience of mobility in a post-communist society. These findings reveal more general mechanisms of non-reproduction within academia.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This study was funded by National Science Centre, Poland (grant no. UMO-2019/35/D/HS6/00169).
2. Although the emigration of highly skilled academics from Poland to the US and Western European countries is a fact, this phenomenon is increasingly conceptualised as a ‘brain gain’ or ‘brain circulation’ because this mobility is not always unambiguously unfavourable (e.g., it enables networking and international cooperation).
3. https://stat.gov.pl/download/gfx/portalinformacyjny/pl/defaultaktualnosci/5496/8/10/1/dzialalnosc_badawcza_i_rozwojowa_w_polsce_w_2020_r.pdf [04 July 2022].
4. https://web.swps.pl/images/2015/dokumenty/zasady-rekrutacji-2021/2021_22_Zalaczniki_do_umowy_PL.pdf [02 June 2022].
5. In 2023, the minimum gross salary per month of a Professor was 7210 PLN and Assistant Professor 5265 PLN, which equals 1606 and 1173 EUR, respectively.
6. Unlike the term ‘working-class’ used in stratification research, this Bourdieusian notion stresses not only the economic position of an individual but also cultural (e.g. diplomas) and social resources (e.g. social connections).
7. In two cases one of the parents had a diploma but had never made use of it in their professional life.
8. One is devoted to the lived life (reconstruction of ‘facts’) and the other to the narration itself (the story told).
9. The Polish equivalent would be ‘cudo’.
10. There is no quantitative data to enable a direct comparison. This assumption is based on numerous studies (e.g., Warnock Citation2016) pointing to the various mechanism of distinction in that system, which are not common in Poland. For instance, while American elite students can often travel around the world and visit elite cultural events, which creates inequalities in cultural capital, this is not the case in Poland, because Polish elites send their children to study abroad, and their economic capital does not create further distinctions in the country where it comes from.
11. In Polish, we can refer to them as ‘Nie-Cuda’, or use a more broad category of the well-known idiomatic term ‘Potemkin village’: a fiction that hides a troublesome truth. The original Potemkin village was a fake village built solely to impress Catherine II but metaphorically it can be related to multiple phenomena related to the decreasing prestige of the academic profession (see, Literature review). In this sense, upward mobility is not full mobility, or, at least, is not perceived as such.
12. The second thesis, to be defended a few years after the PhD thesis. Habilitation is a title present in many German-speaking and Eastern European countries. It is comparable to American tenure, but the holder does not automatically get a lifetime contract.