1.1 Setting the stage: transnational human capital and social inequality
In a world of self-contained, and often self-centered, nation-states, it would probably have been unthinkable that a nonnational could be appointed as director of one of the country’s most important cultural institutions. And yet, this is exactly what happened in 2015 with the venerable British Museum in London and the future Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. The British Museum nominated a German art historian, Hartwig Fischer, as its new director after the previous director, Neil Mac-Gregor, stepped down and was in turn appointed as one of the founding directors of the Humboldt-Forum, a new, globally oriented center for art and culture right in the heart of the German capital.
Admittedly, the image of a world consisting of more or less self-contained nation-states seems somewhat outdated, since the world in general – and the art world in particular – have moved ever closer together thanks to globalization processes. Nevertheless, one might ask what it is that allows some people, like Neil MacGregor, to change country and job with apparently little effort, while others, even with similar work experience, cannot. Of course, in the case of Neil Mac-Gregor, one is tempted to see his nomination to the Humboldt-Forum as a result of his successful occupational past. In 1987, he became director of the British National Gallery, which was followed by his appointment as director of the British Museum in 2002. In both functions, he organized a number of highly acclaimed exhibitions and reached out to a mass audience via books and broadcasts. Commentators and journalists have repeatedly praised him for his curatorial, administrative, and commercial abilities, for his role as a public intellectual and for his diplomatic capacities. On top of it all, he speaks French and German fluently and is known for his personal charm and urbane manners – he is a citizen of the world.
And yet, it seems there is more to it. If we take a closer look at his biography, it appears that he was used to moving within unfamiliar and foreign surroundings from an early age. Neil MacGregor was born in 1946 in Glasgow into a well-todo middle-class family; his parents were both doctors. As a boy, he attended the prestigious Glasgow Academy, a private school founded in 1845 with a long list of notable alumni. The family seems to have led an active cultural life – it’s not for nothing that, according to an oft-told story, Neil MacGregor was turned towards art (and away from the family-approved professions of medicine, the church, or the law) by seeing a crucifixion painted by Salvador Dalí in the local Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The MacGregors also often spent their family holidays in France and Germany, thus giving their son the chance to get to know other cultures and societies from an early age. Furthermore, his grandparents had a strong affinity to Germany; they had German friends, and despite the two world wars, their sympathies for the country and its people remained to some extent. Given this family background, it does not come as a big surprise that, at the age of 16, he went to Hamburg. A host family was arranged for him via friends of friends and he attended school there while on temporary leave from his school in Glasgow. In an interview with a German newspaper, he remarked on this experience that, due to his family, it felt “completely normal for me to go to Germany.”1
These early encounters with other countries and cultures were not to be his last; in fact, they prepared the ground for more. After school, he studied modern languages (French and German) at the University of Oxford and then went abroad to study philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, thus further deepening his foreign language skills and experiences abroad. Returning to the United Kingdom, he studied law at Edinburgh University, but decided after graduation to continue with art history at the Courtauld Institute of the University of London, marking his entrance into the art world.
Thus, it is not only his previous professional success that recommended him for the post of founding director of the Humboldt-Forum; Neil MacGregor is also equipped with what we call “transnational human capital.” By this, we refer to skills and credentials that allow people to act beyond the confines of their own nation-state or within transnationalized contexts that transcend national borders. Foreign language skills, which allow people from different societies to interact with each other, a knowledge of other countries, and intercultural competences – such as an openness to, appreciation of, and empathy for people from different cultures – are all part of transnational human capital. We regard such skills as “capital,” since it is a resource that gives those who possess it the chance to act transnationally and, potentially, to yield specific “returns.”
But transnational human capital is not intrinsically a useful or relevant resource. Imagine the world as a cluster of many self-contained units, as we did earlier. These would have no or only little contact with each other. Under such circumstances, it would not make much sense to learn other societies’ languages, customs, and sets of rules, because there would be no context in which to apply them. But, increasingly, this image of the world as a cluster of isolated societies no longer reflects reality. Due to how the world has developed since the 1970s, the conditions shaping the use of transnational human capital have changed fundamentally. The world has moved closer together, because interactions between different national societies and (world) regions have increased tremendously. This process, generally described as “globalization,” turns transnational human capital into an increasingly important resource, since it enables participation in an interconnecting world – or at least facilitates it enormously. Thus, those who possess such transnational competences can make use of the new opportunity structure, while those who do not know or speak foreign languages, and do not have intercultural skills, are to a greater extent bound to their national “container.” Hence, the possession of transnational human capital is directly linked to the question of emerging new social inequalities.
However, the example of Neil MacGregor also shows that acquiring this form of capital probably depends to a huge extent on someone’s familial class position. Looking at the biographical sequence of family trips abroad, his time as a schoolboy in Hamburg, his study of foreign languages at one of the most prestigious universities in the UK, followed by a period at a French elite institution, we can see a step-by-step process of transnational human capital accumulation that prepared the ground for his later career. But what chance do children from less advantaged social backgrounds have of acquiring transnational human capital?
This is the central question of our study, which analyzes the extent to which access to transnational human capital depends on social class origin and, furthermore, asks how such a relationship is brought about within families. We can assume that families who are equipped with abundant resources – that is, a high income, a high level of education, international contacts, and so forth – find it much easier to prepare their children for a globalizing world than families who occupy a lower-class position and have access to fewer resources. Due to the changing contextual conditions set by globalization processes, unequal resource endowments of this kind reproduce and exacerbate social inequalities in general, since chances for participation in a globalizing world are distributed unequally.
Transnational human capital can be acquired in very different ways. In our study, we concentrate on two examples that occur early on in life and can be regarded as highly influential for people’s subsequent life trajectories. The first example is preschool children’s attendance of daycare centers with bilingual programs and the second is the so-called school year abroad – that is, when high school students attend a school abroad for half or up to one year and then return to their country of origin to finish school there. For high school students from all over the world, participating in so-called international student exchange programs is a popular way to acquire transnational human capital. The major destination countries are English-speaking countries, such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and above all, the United States of America. This form of mobility is rather popular in Germany (Weichbrodt, 2014) and is quite common in many other countries, too. According to a 2011 Eurobarometer survey, the proportion of Europeans of 35 years of age or younger who had spent at least three months abroad for educational purposes during school varies between 0.8 percent in Greece and 11 percent in Luxembourg (Flash EB 319, own calculations). Today, a considerable number of young Europeans acquire transnational cultural capital by going abroad, boosting an evolving international education market in which the UK in particular has positioned itself strategically (see Brooks and Waters, 2015).
In our study, we will focus solely on the example of Germany. We will concentrate on analyzing German schoolchildren who go abroad to attend school for a period and those who attend bilingual day care in Germany. By focusing on preschool children’s attendance of bilingual daycare centers and the school year abroad, we examine effective ways of acquiring transnational human capital. First, psychological research shows that younger children acquire new language skills more easily than older ones and adults; psychologists therefore speak of a “critical period” for second language acquisition (Meisel, 2011). Once this period is over it becomes considerably more difficult to learn a new language. Second, a stay abroad means a constant “immersion” of the child in a new linguistic and cultural environment. As a result, the high school student learns language skills as well as more general cultural codes and schemata 24 hours a day – something that is quite difficult to achieve at home (Baker, 1993). Finally, life course research has shown that decisions made early in life considerably influence future life paths and are hard to change later on (Breen and Jonsson, 2005). This principle of a continuous accumulation of educational advantages also holds true for the acquisition of transnational human capital – as several studies focusing on the example of student mobility have repeatedly shown (Finger, 2011; Parey and Waldinger, 2011; Netz, 2015; for further details, see Chapter 7).
This book develops its argument over seven chapters. We will now provide a brief synopsis of each of these.
In the remaining part of the first chapter we will outline the theoretical framework used throughout the book. This framework is inspired by the works of Pierre Bourdieu and builds on his theory of social class and social fields. At the same time, we modify his theoretical framework to some extent. Bourdieu’s theory argues within a nation-state frame, neglecting the fact that globalization has significantly altered the basic parameters of social reproduction – a perspective that has generally been criticized for its inherent methodological nationalism. We define transnational human capital as a specific form of capital that comprises foreign language skills, cross-cultural competences, knowledge about other countries and institutions, and international experiences that allow individuals to act in social fields beyond their own nation-state as well as to act in transnationalized areas of society within the nation-state. Following Bourdieu’s terminology, we distinguish between embodied, objectified, and institutionalized forms of transnational human capital, and we point out different ways through which transnational human capital can be acquired during the life course. Against this background, we then argue that spending a school year abroad and attending a bilingual day care are particularly effective ways of acquiring transnational human capital. The first chapter ends with a review of the current state of the research literature. This concerns studies on the relation between globalization processes and social inequality, analyses of educational inequalities, and previous research on attendance of educational institutions abroad by high school and university students.
As we have stated before, investing in transnational human capital is not a sensible strategy per se, but only under certain circumstances. In the second chapter, we focus on why and how the demand for transnational capital has grown over the last decades, proceeding in three steps. First, we argue that the growing demand for transnational capital results from both globalization processes and a societal redefinition of education, whereby transnational skills have become part of educational and occupational profiles and cosmopolitan orientations have become a normatively desirable value. As a result of these processes, foreign language skills, international experiences, and intercultural competences are increasingly in demand.
Second, we assert that transnational human capital as a new kind of “asset” has also gained in importance because educational credentials that were previously the preserve of the few have become devalued due to educational expansion. Therefore, demonstrating that they have international experience and transnational competences is one way for the middle and upper classes to assert themselves in the ongoing positional competition between social classes and is a means to gain distinction. Thus, the acquisition of transnational human capital not only has an instrumental function, facilitating transnational communication, but also serves as symbolic capital by providing distinction vis-à-vis those who do not possess such capital.
Third, building on this theoretical argument, we present the results of a cross-national content analysis of job advertisements in daily newspapers, which we conducted in order to verify the expected long-term development of labor market demand for transnational human capital as well as to test for pos...
