Capital Conversion Research Articles

Urban political economy of elite education: international programs in Chinese elite public high schools

ABSTRACT This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by ‘key’ public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey’s work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China’s development model, and Bourdieu’s theory of capital conversion, this article reveals that the construction of an international program is deeply implicated in the school’s social relationships with the state, real estate developers, and urban middle classes. While the program provides wealthy Chinese families with access to international higher education for accumulating desirable capitals at ‘world-class’ universities, the Chinese elite school generates its own capital. Through theorizing how the creation of the fee-charging international program draws together multiple forms of neoliberal profit-making and multi-scalar capital accumulation, this study adds novel conceptual and empirical insights to the emergent scholarship of elite and international education.

Отношение студентов к конвертации биологического капитала в экономический в условиях цифровизации общества на примере онлайн-платформы OnlyFans

This article examines the phenomenon of biological capital conversion as a way of commercialization of ap-pearance in the conditions of digitalization of society on the example of the online platform OnlyFans. Despite the fact that one of the main factors of economic development is cultural capital, biological capital plays a very important role nowadays. Moreover, the possibilities of commercialization of biological capital have expanded due to the high rates of digitalization. To confirm the relevance of the topic, a content analysis of news publica-tions was carried out and an author’s pilot study was conducted aimed at clarifying the attitude of Financial Uni-versity students to the conversion of biological capital in the conditions of digitalization of society using the ex-ample of the OnlyFans online platform. Content publication on OnlyFans platform is considered both in terms of objectification and growth of subjectivity. Possible research perspectives related to content users and content creators on the OnlyFans platform were described.

Capital Structure Models and Contingent Convertible Securities

We implemented a methodology to calibrate capital structure models for banks that have issued contingent convertible securities (CoCos). Typical studies involving capital structure model calibration focus on non-financial firms as they have lower leverage and no contingent convertible securities. From a theoretical perspective, we found that jumps in the asset value process were necessary to obtain a satisfactory fit to the market data. In practice, contingent capital conversion triggers are discretionary, and there is considerable uncertainty around when regulators are likely to enforce conversion. The market-implied conversion triggers we obtain indicate that the market expects regulators to enforce conversion while the issuing bank is a going concern, as opposed to a gone concern. This fact is presumably of interest to potential dealers, regulators, issuers, and investors.

‘Go away and make a big thing of yourself somewhere else’: precarious mobilities and the uses of international capital in Irish academia

AbstractThe article interrogates the ‘mobility imperative’ and its impact on precarious academics. Drawing on 40 biographic interviews with academics with experience of long-term precarity in Irish higher education, and using a Bourdieusian framework, we identify the specific conditions, uses and impacts of international mobility for these workers. This method offers a unique retrospective advantage for an analysis of the utility of international capital for a cohort of workers typically excluded from studies of international mobility. Among the specific obstacles we identify which are faced by precarious academics in the accumulation and conversion of international capital are the lack of or compromised initial social capital; the dubious value of international capital in Irish academia, especially when associated with precarity; and the difficulty for workers to construct acceptable career scripts when both precarity and mobility have led them off-script. We suggest that the ability to accumulate and convert usable forms of international capital while working abroad is in part predetermined by prior struggles in the national field.

Does Efficiency in Working Capital Management Impact the Overall Performance of Firms? Evidence from India

Using 514 Indian-listed firms for 11 years (2012–2022), this study provides evidence that efficiency in working capital management (WCM) positively influences the overall financial performance (proxied by return on equity [ROE]). WCM impacts each decomposed component as per DuPont analysis, such as profit margin (PM), asset turn (AT), and equity multiplier (EMR). Efficient WCM enhances PM and AT. Sample firms with longer working capital (WC) conversion cycles have higher EMR, indicating that inefficiency in WCM pushes the firms towards more dependence on debt financing. The shorter inventory days, speedy receivable collections, and prompt payment terms augment ROE, PM, and AT. Longer inventory storage days and generous credit terms extended to the customers increase EMR of the sample firms. The firms with higher EMR delay payment to their suppliers. Furthermore, among the relationship of each DuPont performance lever with ROE, we find that the relationship of PM with ROE is most influenced by efficient WCM for the Indian sample firms compared to the relationship of AT with ROE and the relationship of EMR with ROE.

Evaluating ecological sustainability of mechanized and traditional systems of damaskrose production using extended exergy analysis

Environmental resource efficiency is a major challenge in the management of agroecosystems and their sustainability. The Extended Exergy Analysis (EEA) is a novel approach that assesses the total amount of resources extracted from the environment to produce agroecosystem products. This study applied the EEA to compare the sustainable development of Damask rose flower production in two mechanized and traditional systems in Nehbandan County, South Khorasan province, using the data of 2021–2022. The EEA calculated the flows of labor, capital, and environmental costs in the systems based on the first and second thermodynamic laws. The results showed that the traditional system had lower cumulative exergy consumption (CExC) and environmental modification cost than the mechanized system, indicating higher ecological sustainability. The extended exergy indices, such as the special capital conversion of energy and material input (kcap), the special capital conversion of product sale (KCAPEEA), extended exergy cost (eec) and the cumulative degree of perfection (CDP), also revealed that the traditional system was more cost-effective, economical, technologically efficient, and closer to the optimal conditions than the mechanized system. To achieve a sustainable agricultural crop production system, new patterns and models for selecting inputs and reducing environmental costs are recommended.

The Tension Between Chinese Peasants’ Family Capital Reproduction Strategies and Massification in Higher Education

This paper is focused on the tension between Chinese peasants' family capital reproduction strategies and the existing higher education system. Under an institutionalised urban-rural segregation, most rural residents are not entitled to some of the basic social welfare guarantees available to urban residents, such as pensions. As a preparation for the future of their children as well as for themselves, peasants have a strong urge to invest in their children's higher education as their family capital reproduction strategy. However, higher education institutions, without sufficient funding from the government, have to increase enrolment size and charge high tuition fees. Increase in the cost of higher education has strongly impacted on the family economy of rural residents, and the rapid expansion of the system has resulted in an employment crisis for college graduates. Bourdieu's theory of capital reproduction will be applied in the analysis of several cases of rural parents and their children who have participated in higher education. The research eventually leads to the conclusion that, under urban-rural segregation, Chinese peasants are compelled to convert their limited economic capital into academic capital, while the reversibility of this capital conversion is hardly objectively guaranteed.

The hypermobile and the rest: capital conversion and inclusion/exclusion in an emerging student migration in China

The rise of transnational and transcity education consumption suggests the increasingly important role of the capability to move in order to access quality schooling. Studies have examined the multidimensional inequalities underlying translocal education consumption. However, the role of mobility itself is not sufficiently understood. Two questions are rarely asked: (1) How is the capability to move acquired and practised to bring about translocal schooling consumption? and (2) How does the disparity in the capability to move restructure the established intergenerational capital transmission mechanism conceptualized by Bourdieu? This paper answers by theorizing a mobility-mediated, education-based intergenerational capital transmission mechanism. This framework is built upon a theoretical engagement among John Urry, Pierre Bourdieu, and Neil Smith. We substantiate this framework by examining a student migration regime in Sichuan, China. Attention is paid to the inclusion/exclusion of hypermobility-based schooling consumption regime. Empirical analysis is performed by the comparison of two social groups: (a) the middle-class households who employ mobility to chase after the footloose prime schooling resources and thus materialize their class reproduction strategy and (b) the immobile remainder who are stuck in a location deprived of quality schooling resources.

Towards the ‘rationality–emotion nexus’ for approaching international student mobility: An ethnography of African student migrants at a Chinese university

AbstractThis paper examines how student motivations to study abroad are shaped by what might be called the ‘rationality–emotion nexus’. Drawing from 15 months of ethnographic engagement at a Chinese university, we show how rational factors (e.g., pursuit of financial resources) interact with emotional forces (e.g., love for family members) in dynamic and diverse ways to shape the pathways of African student migrants to higher education overseas. More specifically, we identify three distinct dynamics in the nexus: (i) rationality is entangled with emotions; (ii) rationality parallels emotions; and (iii) rationality and emotions transform each other. By foregrounding this nexus, the present study offers a critical intervention into international student mobility/migration studies as it develops ‘an integrative approach’ that transcends either a widely established rational framework of capital conversion or the emerging emotional geographies of transnational education migration.

Contingent capital conversion under dual asset and equity jump–diffusions

We model contingent capital with market trigger under dual jump–diffusion processes in asset values and equity prices. Under the dual jump–diffusions, we show that the conversion ratio is no longer deterministic under the jump–diffusion. The conversion ratio becomes a stochastic process related to the jump process of the underlying equity and the conditional expectation of the contingent capital at the conversion time. Thus, making the implementation of contingent capital impossible. The best we can hope to practically implement this conversion design, is to give the minimal conversion ratio (at least the portion required to convert) to conform with Basel III.

Digital transformation and strategic agility during the COVID-19 crisis: the role of the intangible capital conversion

PurposeThe purpose of the current study is to illustrate the importance of strategic agility (SA), the capacity to respond agilely to a rapidly changing environment, for digitally transforming firms during the COVID-19 crisis. A secondary purpose of the study is to conceptually frame SA as a function of the creative to realized intangible capital (IC) ratio.Design/methodology/approachTo inferentially corroborate the hypothesis, this study exploits the results of a recent firm-level survey, conducted under the H2020 project GlobalInto (2021). Via OLS and ordered logistic regressions, the relationship among SA, economic performance and IC was tested.FindingsThe exploratory findings implied that the more strategically agile companies were those that responded more effectively to the pandemic crisis, but only if they were ahead in terms of digital transformation. Moreover, the results implied that firms that were able to efficiently convert their creative IC into realized IC were the most strategically agile.Originality/valueThis study developed a new conceptual framework for digitally transforming firms that included the role of SA and the IC conversion ratio in the context of extreme threats to the survival of firms. Some preliminary practical recommendations were offered to management about how to measure the IC conversion ratio as well as how to stimulate and reward greater creativity among employees, filling a notable gap in the SA literature that provides less than precise guidance about how this concept can be measured.

Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion: Inequality among International Degree Holders in Hong Kong

Sociological research richly documents the many ways through which education becomes a form of convertible capital, but focuses less on the cultural schemas that graduates possess and use to respond to disruptions of capital conversion processes. Using the case of international degree holders in Hong Kong, this article draws upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice to interrogate the cultural schemas that valorize international degrees when their conversion pathways to economic capital are subjectively perceived to weaken. This article unearths the role of social networks in embedding cultural schemas and their effects on relations within the field: when faced with diminishing economic returns, international degree holders hold fast to their schemas vis-à-vis fellow international graduates and reconceptualize their degrees as symbolic capital to cope with the loss by enacting symbolic violence against domestic degree holders. Class boundaries are ultimately entrenched when international degree graduates valorize their cultural capital gains and legitimate their economic capital losses. Doing so compromises their class interests by forcing themselves into an interstitial position between different fields: though they occupy dominating homologous positions in the cultural field, they choose to overlook their dominated homologous positions in the economic field.

Alumni Capital: University Alumni Relations strategy

The purpose of this study is to describe the strategies of interaction with alumni and suggest directions for their inclusion in the managerial arsenal of the central administration of the university. The Far Eastern Federal University, relatively recently created on the basis of four independent universities, three of which were strongly industry-oriented, provides rich material for research on strategies of interaction with alumni that have developed in its various structural divisions. At the same time, most of these strategies are not initiated by the central administration, and the biggest part of them even is out of its view. Strategies for interaction with alumni arise as forms of reproduction, increment and conversion of the social capital of alumni, leaders of the academic community and several departments of the university. The university appears to researchers as a kind of “exchange office”, in which there is a constant movement of different types of capital, the main of which is social and its subspecies – alumni capital.

Schools as Drivers of Capitalist Accumulation Conditional Socialized Reproduction in Shenzhen

Based on fieldwork in an urbanized village of Shenzhen, this paper analyzes the place of schools in the reproduction of Chinese state capitalism. It retraces the circuit of socialized capital that allows for the social reproduction of the native elite and the exclusion of many migrant workers in the context of Shenzhen’s development as a special economic zone and its efforts to upgrade the economy. The native villagers, now forming an urban upper-class of rentiers, have capitalized on their overseas connections and capital accumulation to finance their school, allowing for their elite’s upward social mobility after, but also already under Mao. After China’s transition to capitalism, this school has served as an asset in generating value in the context of redevelopment and the real estate-driven upgrading of Shenzhen’s economy. Property ownership is now a major criterion in points-based systems for accessing school places. I make two interrelated arguments. First, there is a closer relationship between the secondary circuit of socialized capital and the larger circuit of capital than what the literature on social reproduction implies. Second, the conditionality of quality education upon value generation amounts to separating the population deemed worthy of socialized reproduction and the surplus population that is left out. The paper connects diverse strands of social reproduction theory, Althusser’s interpellation and ideological state apparatuses, feminist agentive social reproduction theories, and Bourdieu’s capital conversion recuperated within a Marxian framework, to provide an integrated approach to social reproduction within capitalism.

The Application of Bourdieu’s Theory: Challenges faced by Master Chinese International Students during the Capital Conversion

This essay is divided into five sections. The first section is a brief introduction about this essay. It points out the theory employed by the author and introduces the research background, the research significance and the essay’s structure. In the second part, the author provides a description about what Master Chinese international students face in the British university. The third part gives a literature review about Bourdieu’s Theory: capital, habitus and field. In the next section, the previous mentioned theory will be applied to the Master Chinese student in the UK university, and the author will analyse it. At last, the conclusion will be presented.

Constructing symbolic capital to coordinate teaching-focused university-industry collaborations in China: a documentary, videological and empirical analysis

This paper explores how the Chinese government constructs symbolic capital and uses its converted forms to coordinate the relationship between the industry and the higher education sector for implementing teaching-focused university-industry collaboration (UIC). Through videological analysis of thirteen video segments, documentary analysis of three important state policy documents and a special website, and semi-structured interviews with six enterprise representatives and three university representatives, the study reveals that the forms of explicit symbolic capital include linking teaching-focused UIC with national development and rejuvenation, endowing participants with high accolades, and selecting exemplary cases for special recognition. The implicit symbolic capital includes putting teaching-focused UIC within the framework of formal university assessment schemes and untapping participants’ economic capital based upon expanded potential markets. Capital conversion and mobility have led to an education-oriented ecosystem where various stakeholders share a common vision for quality advancement in higher education.

Bourdieusian capital conversion during crises of socio-political legitimacy: Sponsorship of the arts by Barclays Bank, 1972 to 1987

This paper advances our understanding of how organisations engage in the process of Bourdieusian capital conversion during crises of socio-political legitimacy. We do so by analysing the arts sponsorship strategies of Barclays between 1972 and 1987. During this period, Barclays faced numerous challenges to its organisational legitimacy as a result of its continued dealings in apartheid South Africa and its ability to generate extraordinary profits despite general economic malaise in Britain. As a response, Barclays increased its sponsorship of the arts, exchanging its substantial economic capital for the symbolic capital associated with high-status arts institutions. We identify the forces that facilitated and inhibited these capital exchanges and how they affected Barclays’ sponsorship strategies. This paper will be of interest to Bourdieusian scholars interested in capital exchange, to business historians interested in banking in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, and researchers interested in the evolution of corporate sponsorship and philanthropy.

A felsőoktatási továbbtanulás mint humántőke-befektetés

In our paper, we examine the motives of further studies in higher education among higher education students, as well as how socio-demographic variables modify these motives. Our research method is quantitative. We used a research database gathered in the historical Partium region in 2014 (N = 1792). The theoretical backgrounds of our research are the human capital theory and Bourdieu’s capital conversion model. Based on ten motives of further studies, we made a cluster analysis and examined the relationships of these clusters and the socio-demographic background variables. Our finding is that the most important motive of further studies among students was expanding knowledge. Therefore, the motive of getting higher wages in the future, which is the central aspect in the human capital model, proved to be of minor importance. Based on the capital conversion theory students wanted to gain cultural and social capital when they decided to study further, as both can be profitable for them in the future. However, while the motives of further studies were affected by the social background of students, contrary to our hypothesis, financial motives were not more important for those students coming from disadvantage backgrounds than for other students

Determinants of Chinese students’ increasing pursuit of UK’s taught master degree under the third wave of international education mobility

ABSTRACT Although there is an abundance of research on international students’ study and life experiences in the receiving countries and their post-study labour market outcomes in the sending countries, the motivations to study in a specific country have rarely been studied. Based on the theoretically grounded analysis, this article aims to explore the determinants driving Chinese students to increasingly choose UK’s postgraduate taught programmes, under the context of the third wave of international student mobility. Drawing on 41 interviews and thematic analysis, this study finds a variety of determinants: China’s intense domestic competition for the master programme entry, social networks, China’s traditional culture, short duration of master programme, global competence and parental influence. Also, the results suggest that China’s domestic master education is experiencing great changes. The findings provide implications for UK higher education institutions and Chinese students in terms of studying abroad. This study contributes to a broadened empirical and conceptual understanding of capital conversion and push-pull model under Chinese student context, offering empirical evidence for explaining the inner decision process of studying in the UK regarding students coming from China’s contemporary middle class.

Ecosistemas y beneficios ecosistémicos. ¿Qué valoran y qué estrategias de apropiación utilizan los productores agropecuarios?

In the west of the province of Córdoba (Argentina) deep socio-productive changes are occurring as a consequence of the expansion of the agricultural frontier. Drawing upon a participatory, multiactor and interdisciplinary methodology, the paper analyzes a) how different types of producers perceive and value ecosystems and the Nature’s Contributions to people (NCP) they produce; b) the strategies developed by producers to appropriate the NCP, and c) the role that those appropriations play in the processes of capital accumulation. Regarding NCP valuation, the results show a high heterogeneity. Campesinos identify and value 21 out of 22 NCP; large cattle ranchers (LCR), 7, and large farmers (LF), only 4. The ecosystems where native forests are best preserved offer a higher number of NCP. We observed different perceptions, valuations and uses of the main six ecosystems identified in the region, which are linked to different ways in which nature is appropriated. While campesinos have developed more conservative and broader strategies, the ones followed by LCR and LF are much more acquisitive and focused. The expansion of the agricultural frontier over native forests promotes the conversion of natural capital into economic capital, in favor of the most capitalized producers (i.e., LCR and LF), generating social and environmental liabilities. Such transformations should be understood within the frame of more general economic and political processes, that deepen extractivism, capital accumulation and economic concentration. The new accumulation strategies demand new ways in which the territory is organized, as well as the social acceptance of mainstream narratives that justify and legitimize the expansion of agrarian capital.