Social capital, culture, and codes in higher education: Bourdieusian and Bernsteinian philosophical underpinnings in the South Africa environment

Abstract

Social capital ignored is an “object of political and ideological struggle” created to stifle working-class students in educational spaces. Furthermore, as societal dynamics are constructed in the student-lecturer relationship, this article seeks to evaluate how deliberative democracy in the online higher education space can inspire care through the ongoing dialogue between student and lecturer. This is framed against the Bourdieusian (social capital) and Bernsteinian (social code) framework because both theorists’ work highlights how the dominant class (represented by lecturers) consciously and unconsciously tends to ignore students’ social and cultural capital and codes. This, in turn, leads to a lack of dialogue and care in student-lecturer relationships in higher education. One of this study’s findings is that higher education is aimed to support more middle-class students. The reason for this is that our findings show that lecturers tend not to know what to do with the social habitus of working-class or disadvantaged students. The aforementioned phenomena were foregrounded through Bourdieusian (social capital) and Bernsteinian (social code) model that is situated in the sociological approach, which is interpretive in nature, to explore whether dialogue and care were shown.