"An alternative proposal for the education of librarians, emphasizing general knowledge and intellectual rigor and …
Based on an extensive study of law and business (MBA) students in an American university in which she used the concept of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Debra J. Schleef (2006: 21) showed that the key motivational factor for attending professional schools was students’ desire for “maintaining a possibly precarious class status.” As they internalized the tastes, values, context, and world view of their immediate family, they did not aspire to be professionals because of “an ardent interest or perceived aptitude in these fields,” but because of “a deep-seated economic source—the need for the credentials that provide the salary, prestige, and lifestyle attendant on the upper-middle class” (Schleef, 2006: 20). Things really had not changed that much from the late 1970s, when Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater (1978) wrote that earning a substantial income was the principal determinant of career choice : “[t]he status attached to given schooling levels is a function of the realistic observations people make of how much money those in different educational categories actually earn” (qtd. in Brint, 1994: 42).
Professionalism amounted to “[t]he process of reproducing a class position” across generations; students “did not consider the advantages of a given occupation separate from its social class position” (Schleef, 2006: 20, 45, 202, 203). And once at their respective schools, they allowed themselves not only to be convinced to take career paths that were presented as “appropriate to their elite status,” but also to see such choices “as inevitable.” Students “modif[ied] [any] earlier entrepreneurial and anti-corporate attitudes to value more traditional big business goals,” easily moving “from the amorphous careers they were considering at entry to careers in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law in large firms.” Professionalism became a “remarkable” form of “class continuity,” where individuals, as they progressed in their chosen occupation, learned to embrace the logic, attitudes, choices, and procedures of that occupation so as to ensure that they remained within the social-class level to which they had become accustomed and to which they now had an even stronger personal allegiance.