Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital

In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital. As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective journals to recycle and monetize them in lower impact or open access derivative journals of their lists.

Effect of Capital Conversion in the Form of a Reverse Mortgage on Benefits for Senior Citizens in Major Cities of Poland

The aging of population is a common problem in the modern economy and finance. Reverse mortgage is one of alternative ways of raising citizens’ standard of living after retiring by obtaining financial benefits accumulated in a residential property. The aim of the study is to evaluate a role of equity release service in providing additional household income for senior citizens illustrated by the case of a reverse mortgage. This type of service consists in transformation of non-liquid, tied-up in property capital into liquid financial resources. Thanks to capital conversion, senior citizens can supplement retirement benefits without a need to leave their property. The research hypothesis verified in the study stated that benefits paid as equity release in the form of a reverse mortgage provided greater support for women than for men. That hypothesis was rejected.

Social Mobility in the Global Order

World politics is characterized by a multiplicity of competition over valued goods. We explore how and to what degree states are able to convert gains in one field of competition into gains in another. Drawing loosely on Bourdieu's theory of capital, we conceptualize the 'rise' of states as social mobility within a multi-dimensional stratification and zoom in on the degree of convertibility of capital across these dimensions. We argue that this degree is shaped by politics of capital conversion that set and institutionalize certain conversion rates. Using the BRICS states as empirical example, we highlight the centrality of institutions as both sites and means in the political struggles over the adaptation of global order to social mobility.

‘This Is What We Share’

This chapter focuses on the joint guests of honour at the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair, Flanders and the Netherlands – a rare case of two government organisations representing separate national groupings (Flanders and the Netherlands) coming together to present the literature of a single language (Dutch) on the international stage. It recounts how the two delegations’ shared status as guests of honour for 2016 came about through a collaboration between the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund (now known as Flanders Literature) and analyses the branding decisions made by the 2016 organizers. Conceptually, the chapter engages with perspectives from field theory and the sociology of translation to elaborate branding as a form of position-taking and guest of honour presentations as important mechanisms of transnational capital conversion.

Mapping the Food Festivals and Sustainable Capitals: Evidence from Poland

This study is one of the first attempts to identify and explain the location of food festivals in the context of locally embedded capitals. A multidimensional spatial model was developed and a typology using the k-means method was carried out to evaluate the mapping of 64 food festivals organized in various locations in Poland. With reference to Bourdieu’s concept, the economic, social, cultural, symbolic, and tourism capitals rooted in the local environment were examined and compared with the location of festivals. From the theoretical point of view, this study extends the theory of capital to include the new category of tourism capital, which allows better understanding of the economic effects of festivals. It is the missing element of the circular mechanism of capital conversion. Our study shows that food festivals in Poland are held mainly in large cities and their neighboring municipalities rather than in peripheral rural areas. We indicate that the urban areas have a higher level of capitals and sustainability of capitals for food festivals than rural areas. The conducted research shows that the economic effect of food festivals is stronger in locations with high tourism capital. The proposed model is universal and can be used to analyze the impact of various festivals on capital conversion and local development.

Paid Work alongside Higher Education Studies as an Investment in Human Capital

In this study, using a database of higher education student surveys, we analyse the motivations behind paid work through cluster analysis and reveal which variables influence them. We hypothesise that working while studying is also an investment in human capital. We research to what extent students are motivated to work alongside their studies by the possibility of acquiring work experience and future financial return. Furthermore, we examine whether Bourdieuan capital conversion is characteristic of students. We found that acquiring work experience was a more important motive behind paid work than acquiring cultural and social capital and the possibility of capital conversion. We also found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are primarily motivated to seek employment by the prospect of short-term income. It is a significant finding that even if the students’ jobs are not related to their studies, they still have the goal of gaining professional experience and increasing their capital, which implies that they consider many of these jobs to be an investment in human capital (even if it does not yield a return in the future; see the theoretical section). According to our policy recommendation, higher education institutions should offer students more study-related employment opportunities in the examined Central European region, while employers should also attribute a greater value to the professional experience acquired alongside higher education studies.

THE SOCIAL STRUGGLE OF PRACTICES CONTEMPORARY RAJAH PANYENGKER IN BALI

This study aims to analyze why there are practitioners today who still interpret Rajah Panyengker (mystical script) as a means of obtaining understanding, safety. Yet in reality they also practice Hindu religious rituals with the same purpose. The answers to these questions are sought in the arena of social struggle of practitioners Rajah Panyengker. In relation to their desire to emerge victorious in the arena of social and social struggle, they felt the need to convert capital so that they would not lose against their colleagues, fellow practitioners. The size of a practitioner's cultural capital is very dependent on his habitus. Therefore the answers to the research questions will be sought in the formation of the habitus of Rajah Panyengker practitioners. How the habitus forms the mystical cultural capital of practitioners regarding Rajah Panyengker, then places it in the arena of social struggle of the Balinese people today. Thus the focus of this study is directed at the meeting between the arenas of practitioners' internal social struggle with the users of Rajah Penyengker. Generative structural theory is used as a basis for thinking to understand and explain these problems. The conclusion of this study, that to emerge victorious in the arena of social struggle, practitioners fulfill the wishes of patients who want to get Rajah Penyengker. In the arena of social struggle like that, practitioners Rajah Panyengker do capital conversion. Thus this phenomenon illustrates the increasing arena of social struggle for practitioners of Rajah Penyenker today, not to search for positivistic origins or their backgrounds to interpret Rajah Penyengker. Keywords: Rajah Panyengker, social struggle, practitioners

Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon

Viewing capitalism as emerging primarily from within the framework of empire rather than the nation state, this essay considers the relationship between capital, conversion, and settler colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). It looks, first, at the novel’s critique of Wakefieldian organized settlement schemes as systems sustained by various forms of capital accumulation and free/unfree labour; and second, at its over-arching evangelical conversion narrative, which both frames and structures the main body of the text. The essay argues that, far from directing its satire wholly or even primarily towards metropolitan Britain, the novel enacts two circulating mid-nineteenth-century settler colonial anxieties: concerns about a perceived crisis of diminishing industriousness and economic exhaustion in colonial Australia and New Zealand, and concerns about the efficacy of British humanitarianism and missionary conversion. It considers the former in the context of the disruptions to settlement caused by the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the latter in the context of missionary and humanitarian efforts to ameliorate conditions for Indigenous peoples from the 1830s onwards. The essay’s larger claim is that Erewhon presents capital and conversion as structurally interconnected mechanisms of an evolving Anglo-settler state in New Zealand. Radicalizing a tradition of economic critique of empire beginning with Adam Smith, Butler satirizes the idea of colonialism as an essentially liberal system by showing how much it is intertwined with exploitative practices of territorial expansion, dispossession, capital accumulation, unfree labour, missionary conversion, and racial assimilation.

Effect of capital conversion in the form of a reverse mortgage on benefits for senior citizens in major cities of Poland

The aging of population is a common problem in the modern economy and finance. Reverse mortgage is one of alternative ways of raising citizens’ standard of living after retiring by obtaining financial benefits accumulated in a residential property. The aim of the study is to evaluate a role of equity release service in providing additional household income for senior citizens illustrated by the case of a reverse mortgage. This type of service consists in transformation of non-liquid, tied-up in property capital into liquid financial resources. Thanks to capital conversion, senior citizens can supplement retirement benefits without a need to leave their property. The research hypothesis verified in the study stated that benefits paid as equity release in the form of a reverse mortgage provided greater support for women than for men. That hypothesis was rejected.

CIRCULATION AT THE TOP: ELITES, SOCIAL MOBILITY AND INTERGENERATIONAL CAPITAL CONVERSION

Despite calls for bridging the gap between the sociology of social class and the sociology of elites, there are few examples where this actually has been done. This article seeks to do so by applying approachesand statistical techniques commonly used in studies of social mobility in an analysis of circulation mobility in elite formations. Based on register data on the whole Norwegian population born 1955-1975, we analyze the educational and professional intergenerational mobility among “the successful inheritors”. In this way, and by focusing on mobility barriers and trajectories, we seek to uncover patterns of stability and change in family dynastic relations, i.e. relations that primarily are based on inheritedforms of capital. These patterns can also reveal what forms of intergenerational capital conversion have been the most common,and therefore also the most acceptable, in the upper and upper middle classes in postwar Norway, and what conversions have been less common. The results indicate that even in the supposedly egalitarian Norwegian elites, some inheritors prove to be “more equal than others”.Keywords: Elite. Intergerational capital conversion. Mobility. Circulation an the top.CIRCULAÇÃO NO TOPO: ELITES, MOBILIDADE SOCIAL E CONVERSÃO INTERGERACIONAL DE CAPITALResumoApesar dos apelos para suprir a lacuna entre a sociologia das classes sociais e a sociologia das elites, há poucos exemplos em que issotenha sido feito. Este artigo busca fazer isso aplicando abordagens e técnicas estatísticas comumente utilizadas em estudos de mobilidadesocial em nas análise da mobilidade de circulação em formações de elite. Com base em dados de registro de toda a população norueguesa nascida entre 1955 e 1975, analisamos a mobilidade educacional e profissionalintergeracional entre "os herdeiros bem-sucedidos". Desta forma, e focalizando as barreiras e as trajetórias de mobilidade, buscamos descobrir os padrões de estabilidade e de mudança nas relações dinásticas familiares, ou seja, relações que se baseiam principalmente em formas hereditárias de capital. Além disso, esses padrões podemrevelar quais formas de conversão intergeracional de capital têm sido as mais comuns e, portanto, também, as mais aceitáveis nas classes média-alta e na classe alta da Noruega do pós-guerra, e quais conversões têmsido menos comuns. Os resultados indicam que, mesmo nas elites norueguesas supostamente igualitárias, alguns herdeiros provamser "mais iguais do que outros".Palavras-chave: Elites. Conversão intergeracional de capital. Mobilidade. Circulação no topo.