Investments, symbolic disputes and financialization of social relations in the field of academic entities: the case study of the junior enterprise

Abstract

The association to student academic entities such as junior enterprises, financial market leagues, Enactus, athletic centers, AIESEC, etc. has been experienced by higher education students as opportunities to undertake symbolic investments and create value not only over their trajectories, but also about themselves. The subjection of students subjectivity to this logic of value creation over themselves is not limited to the tangible investments of the participation in such entities, but also includes the everlasting incorporation of mental and body schemes of perception, understanding and action (Wacquant, 2007) inscribed in an internalized market logic in such a way that they are not even aware that it is influencing them, and as such, little by little they have equated their social relations with market relations. Grün (2007) discusses how the positivity attributed to the notion of market would have been associated with the logic of the financial market and, in this sense, this project aims to explore student performance through these entities as circumscription spaces of a growing influence of the finance sphere. In order to do so this research will employed contribution of the Economic Sociology to portray this social dynamic according to the Bourdieusian notion of relational fields as arenas where symbolic disputes develop in search of the best positions in the hierarchy of a field structured according to the sources of capital of the actors present there. The empirical space mobilized will be the campus of a national public university where, through interviews, conducting focus groups and participant observation, a dynamics of financialization of hitherto non-economic spaces or the financialization of social relations stands out.