Abstract
The 410 Movement for educational reform which occurred in Taiwan in 1994, set up a claim for widely establishing senior high schools and universities. It deserves analyses concerning whether the claim can actually improve social justice or push the equalitarian distribution of social resources. This would connect with the topic of credentialism. Through analyzing viewpoints of Collins’ credential society, this paper points out that, by using his modified concept of “status group” from Max Weber, Collins claims the “dominant class” will make the “cultural market” a key to the maintenance of its “positions”. Thus the credential becomes “cultural currency”, and, under the condition of inflation of “cultural currency”, organizations of many governments and private enterprises increase “sinecures” to contain those who have high-order credentials.
After discussions, we discover Collins’ Weberian perspective can still be understood in the framework of Marxian thoughts of class, though he uses Weber’s theory as an axis to absorb the traditions of Marx, Durkheim and so on. This discourse benefits to some extent the understanding of the education and the unequal distribution of social resources in Taiwan.
| Keywords: | political economy of culture; organizational politics; cultural capital |
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