The article explores how international students in China are engaging with employability-related programmes to enhance their employment outcomes in their home countries, underpinned by the Graduate Capital Model (GCM). Thirty international students in China participated in in-depth interviews. Findings revealed that international students studying…

This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, we show that: (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite…

The enrolment of Chinese middle-class children in elite international kindergartens is a big education industry in China. Our paper is situated in the broader sociology of elite schooling which has yet to fully explore how middle and upper middle-class parents are increasingly sending their children to elite international kindergartens. We present…

Existing studies have found that the starting point for class divisions is the family: while schools play a interrupting role, it is passive compared to the roles of the family and children themselves. It is therefore taken for granted when rural students are screened out by school education or fail to test into good universities. If the…

Some authors argue that access to elite universities can bring about a 'habitus transformation' for working-class students, however in this paper, based on a three-year life history study, it is suggested that the transformative effects of the elite university experience come about in relation to and constrained by the working-class habitus.…

This paper revisits the scope of Catherine Malabou's thinking as a development of the ontological turn in continental philosophy. It puts this excursion of thinking alongside an account of education in modernity as the apotheosis of biopower. It aligns biopower, as manifest in education, as form of 'technological enframing'. In this it challenges…

The article draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital to provide an in-depth analysis of the gender differences in students' motivation for undertaking postgraduate (PG) education in Mainland China. It reports an in-depth case study comprising 381 questionnaires and 30 semi-structured interviews. The quantitative data show…

Studies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of 'mundane reflexivity' in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class 'exceptions' -- they may achieve academically at university but experience various…

This article employs Bourdieu's conceptual tools to unpack family influences on students' subject and university choices in China. This empirical study employed mixed research approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to examine students' choices of subjects and universities in a sample of secondary school students from the age…

Drawing on a qualitative case study and deploying Bourdieu's thinking tools, this article attempts to understand rural students' subjectivities and practices in a Chinese elite university, relating the types and volumes of capital they possessed to the process of position-takings. It contextualises their experiences against the backdrop of the…

This paper presents a multiple ("n"?=?23), longitudinal case study of the construction of personal employability by Chinese students at a UK university. It draws on the work of Brown and Hesketh to frame notions of employability in order to understand how these students engage with the international and Chinese labour markets from their…