EMOTIONAL CAPITAL AND EDUCATION: THEORETICAL INSIGHTS FROM BOURDIEU

ABSTRACT:

This article seeks to explore existing conceptualisations of emotional capital in educational research, and to undertake a critical analysis of these conceptualisations, including a reflection on my own explorations of teachers’ and students’ emotional practices. Drawing from Bourdieu's work, I offer a theoretical discussion of how emotional capital as a conceptual tool suggests a historically situated analysis of the often unrecognised mechanisms and emotion norms serving to maintain certain ‘affective economies’. This point is made in reference to a brief discussion of my ongoing ethnographic work over the last ten years. I conclude the article with outlining some new possibilities of theorising the potentiality and usefulness of the concept of emotional capital in the field of educational research.

Keywords:

• emotional capital
• Bourdieu
• habitus
• emotion norms
• educational research

Notes

¹ As Wouters (1986, 1987, 1991) and Stearns (1994; Stearns and Stearns, 1986) demonstrate, there has been a definite shift in the emotion norms of Western societies from an implicit emphasis on individual control toward a greater concern with group conformity and attunement to peers’ reactions. This amounts to what Wouters (1986, 1987, 1992) has called ‘a controlled decontrolling of emotions’, a key description of ‘informalisation’ in individual and collective habitus in which emotion norms diminish in favour of a more complex, mutually negotiated series of emotional self-restraints. Thus, emotional self-restraint must be seen as an important force that reshapes various interactions in contemporary relationships.