ABSTRACT
In his illuminating article, ‘Power, glory and the advance of the Old School Tie’ (The Times, 24 April 1997), Jason Cowley provides an account in which he outlines the influence that a citizen’s upbringing and socialisation can have on their ability to participate equally in society. Cowley suggests that the ability to participate equally is compromised by the informal ‘old boy network’. The ‘old boy network’ refers to the combination of family connections, the ‘right’ school and the ‘exclusive’ university that combine to give some citizens ‘cultural capital’. Cultural capital is a concept developed by the contemporary French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and applies to those citizens who are more integrated into the dominant value system and the dominant culture. As a result of this integration, they are more successful, not only in education, but in all life chances; a point made previously by Walter Ellis, in his book The Oxbridge Conspiracy (1994), when he suggested that Oxbridge students ‘are still apprenticed rigorously to the establishment’. Cowley develops the issue of cultural capital in his article, and quotes a ‘City headhunter’ who graphically describes the way in which the process of socialisation within the family can still play a significant part in developing cultural capital, with all its influence on a citizen’s ability to participate equally:
In order to put this argument into context, it is worth trying to establish the extent to which the combination of family, school and university can create citizens who are more able to participate effectively in society. To take two examples, at the start of 2001 in the House of Commons there were more MPs from the same school (43), Eton, than female MPs (42). In numerical terms, a single school for approximately 1,290 boys produced more MPs than a population of approximately 32 million females. This does, however, represent some progress from the days of the Macmillan Government, which managed to achieve a Cabinet consisting of over 90% ‘Old Etonians’.
