Zsuzsa Blaskó
Cultural Reproduction or Cultural Mobility?

This paper investigates how the families' cultural milieu (the inherited cultural capital) has influenced the status attainment process in the Hungarian society in the past decades. Two alternative hypotheses are tested. On the one hand cultural reproduction theory (based on P. Bourdieu's hypotheses) suggests that cultural factors play a significant role in the reproduction of the social inequalities. On the other hand, however, Paul DiMaggio and others assume that cultural capital is more a means of social mobility and can play a compensatory role, helping lower status children achieve above their parents.

So far in Hungary the former function of cultural capital has been believed to be dominant. Our analyses show however that cultural reproduction and cultural mobility have both been present in this society. In fact we find that until the 1960s children with the least educated parents could benefit the most from the family's cultural investments. Since then, the two processes have been of similar importance. Cultural assets have both helped the upper classes to maintain their existing positions but they have also provided a possible source for those occupying lower positions in the social hierarchy to support their children getting forward.


Bukodi Erzsébet
Who Would (not) Marry Whom? Changes of the Patterns
of Partner Selection in Individual Life and in Historical Times

In this analysis we assess the effects of different social characteristics of individuals on the propensity to marriage taking into account the joint educational distribution of spouses. In line with the theoretical hypotheses and the findings of previous research, we have found a tendency for individuals with similar amount of education to marry one another. Persons with compulsory schooling and with university degree are the most likely to marry homogamously. The odds of marrying persons with equal or higher education is greater as individuals are getting older. However, the magnitude of the variable on time out of school becomes smaller on the higher levels of educational hierarchy, especially on university level. This finding refers to the low-cost marriage market function of universities, the fact that these institutions collect students whose future socio-economic outlooks are very homogeneous. Parental education has a consistent effect on marital behaviour. Well-educated individuals who possess more amount of inherited educational capital appear to gain more advantage in marriage market compared to their counterparts with less advantageous background. While for poor-educated persons the lack of parental resources further decreases the likelihood of a “good match”. As for the historical trends are concerned, the likelihood of marriage with poor-educated candidates has declined the most; and in the case of better-educated potential spouses the marriage propensity has even increased, or at least has not decreased to a large extent. This tendency indicates a changing economic context of marriage. Wives' potential occupational success – which is predictable quite well by their educational attainment – may provide the family with a highly adaptive strategy. Women's economic resources may reduce the risk of the collapse of families' financial situation, and it provides a device of helping to maintain living conditions over family's life-cycle. In addition, wives' career resources may have positive effect on their husbands' future labour market success. In sum, modern long-run partnerships are based on whether partners can make a similar valuable contributions to the marriage in order to maintain or increase the total wealth and success of the family.


András Vári
The Social Development of the Rural Intellectuals in the First Half of the 19th Century

Rural intelligence has meant in our period basically the estate stewards of the large and commercially managed agricultural holdings. The group was the third biggest of the “educated” groups after that of the priests and the lawyers, counting about four-five thousand men in 1847. However, their formation and stabilization as a social group was hindered by three factors:

First, the knowledge that they applied was not sufficiently formalized, not esoteric and inaccessible enough to serve as a base for a professionalization strategy, at least not if one compares it with the arcane knowledge of doctors, for example.

Second, the estate stewards were servants of the commercially minded but traditionally styled lords, who tried to push them into positions modelled after that of the personal servants, expecting, on the other hand, expert advice and autonomous management skills. As a result, there was a significant discrepancy between the actual life of the stewards and the model that they were expected to conform to. One aspect of this was the relatively high cultural attainment of the stewards in the face of their inability to attend formal training institutes, due to the utter scarcity of the latter.

Their third demarcation problem seems to lie in the fact, that in their public appearances, their associations and press, the stewards themselves, though engaging in avid professional discussions, incessantly cultivate a political dimension, a political shadow of whatever seemingly narrowly agrotechnical issue they are addressing. Be it tobacco or manure, they always add a political remark or two. While this might be a consequence of trying to cope with censorship, it creates the impression that our stewards were nothing but the shield-bearers, the assistants of the great political movements (liberal vs. conservative) gripping the country at the time.

On all three counts, the group seems to be semi-autonomous, though clearly distinguishable, but still lacking the full legitimation to be called a separate social group. So one either tries to lump them together with other groups that better fit the structuring criteria of modern social science, or accepts the contemporary opinion that did not doubt their separateness and looks for other ways of classification. This is attempted here with respect to the competence of the stewards in cultural domination, or, a la Gramsci, hegemony.

The argument is that their social positions called forth skills, like their inclination to be men of letters as a compensation for missing institutes of formal training that served both their peculiar social positions and fitted admirably with a concept of conservative nation building. While stewards politicized the technical issues, the conservative reformers of the time loved to reduce political issues to technicalities, or at least believed in educating and civilizing the nation on a much wider scale than dirty party politics. So the stewards clicked on to the conservative undertaking of nation building as their group project. Indeed, in the course of their putting up and manning the largest “non-political” associations of the 1840s, most of the original weaknesses of the position of stewards were attended to: pay, prestige, pensions.

Unluckily, the 1848 war of Hungarian independence was lost, capitalism was unleashed with a vengeance by an occupying foreign power, the great estates were sold or leased out and their estate stewards dumped on the highways. The discourse that they developed was, however, resurrected by the neoconservative thinking at the end of the 19th century.