Competition of Different Academic Disciplines in the Academic Field (Comparison of the Cultural Capital of Four Disciplines in the University of Isfahan)

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory about existence of various hierarchies in the academic field, this study attempts to investigate the development of cultural hierarchy in Iran’s academic field around cultural capital, assuming the existence of the social-economic hierarchy. To this end, the ternary dimensions of the cultural capital have been compared in the students of four academic disciplines including: Medicine, Law, Industrial design, and Sociology. Of course, this article specially focuses on the Sociology as the youngest social knowledge and its status within these hierarchies. This focus is due to the fact that, in recent decades, sociology has undergone a significant development, qualitatively and quantitatively, and has changed from a marginal science to one of the main subjects of the arguments. Moreover, another event which has occurred in the Iran academic field is the special tendency among students of other disciplines to enter the majors related to the discipline of social sciences, and particularly, sociology, for their higher education. In recent years most of the students in Master’s degree and PhD levels are from the graduates in such well-positioned disciplines of the social-economic hierarchy as Medicine and Engineering. In recent years, statistics suggest that more than half of the students who have passed the Master’s Degree examinations of sociology are from disciplines other than the social sciences. Accordingly, in the introduction section and the part related to the research problem, while the importance and position of the sociology in general and its merits have been explained, it’s been claimed that this academic discipline has the high capability to respond to most social problems. This study was done by conducting a survey and data were collected by means of a questionnaire. Research population includes all the students who were studying at Isfahan University in one of the four disciplines of Sociology, Industrial Design, Law and Medicine. A sample of 240 students was gathered using Cochran formula for the variance. Indexing of the variable of cultural capital was conducted in the empirical background of the study regarding the availability of Bourdieu’s questionnaire and the intended indices for the variable of cultural capital. These indices were validated in the preliminary questionnaire using face, criterion and construct validity techniques. The reliability of the research questions, also, proved to be at the acceptable level with the Cronbach’sα = 0.78. Finally, the following hypotheses were proposed based on the research problem and theoretical framework: 1. The students in the sociology and industrial design get a cultural capital score higher than the mean of the established theoretical standard. 2-The students in the Law and Medicine get a cultural capital score lower than the mean of the established theoretical standard. 3-The students in the sociology and the industrial design get a higher cultural capital score than the students in the Law and Medicine.Discussion of Results & The findings of the present study show that the stock of the accumulated cultural capital (the sum out of combining the ternary dimensions of the variable of cultural capital) amounts to 2.18 in sociology, 1.99 in Industrial design, 1.77 in Law, and 1.48 in Medicine. The students of the sociology have a head start on other groups owing to the high score in their objectified cultural capital. These results and the related validity tests indicate that the first hypothesis can be rejected, while the second and the third hypotheses can be accepted and the results can be generalized to the population. As the results show, the cultural capital in the disciplines which are located at the top of the cultural hierarchy is more than the cultural capital in the disciplines which represent the social hierarchy. Finally, based on the results obtained, it can be said that the difference between the mean score of the students’ cultural capital is one of the indicators of the appearance of the cultural hierarchy alongside the pre-existing social hierarchy in Iran academic field. For the sociology and art undergraduates and postgraduates, this stock of the cultural capital plays quite the same role in terms of the partial differential functioning as the role which social status of the Law and medicine plays for their agents. The results also show that this stock of cultural capital is not enough for institutionalized the cultural status. The institutionalized of the cultural status requires: a large stock of the capital in general, a large proportion of the cultural capital in the composition of the capital and transferring this stock and capital composition to the next generation with a rising positive slope in the process of capital path.