The meritocracy, which today often has negative connotations, in which a person's social position (and perhaps even his or her worth) depends on his or her own ability and performance, is a child of modernity. The meritocratic promise in modern societies enables the realistic dream of improving one's status through effort, diligence, and talent, and climbing the social ladder accordingly.
It opens the way to a social structure legitimized far from castes and estates. Stairs and (later) elevators have been built into the social shell over the last 200 years. However, the idea that everyone can be the architect of his or her own fortune through talent, diligence and performance proves to be empirically uninformed upon closer examination.
On the one hand, there are findings that attest to measurable deficits in the education system with regard to performance equity; on the other hand, the question of how (recognized) performance is created and defined is hardly answered satisfactorily. Thus, a close connection between social origin, educational success and social status in adulthood can still be observed – and in Germany in a particularly pronounced way. At the same time, the mechanisms of social inequality have changed.
The origin effect runs through all phases of life, from early childhood to university entrance. Family socialization conditions and institutional structures are always used to explain this inequality in the acquisition of educational titles. However, it is still unclear how exactly "the process of intergenerational transmission of educational opportunities takes place via the transmission of knowledge, skills and abilities, orientations and attitudes of parents to their children (such as the willingness to achieve)" (Becker/Lauterbach 2008a, p. 16).
One approach to clarifying this open question that has not been explored much is to look at educational advancement processes. This approach is based on the assumption that more can be learned about the mechanisms of educational inequality by examining not the barriers themselves but the conditions of their permeability. Thus, on the one hand, it is a matter of analyzing statistically unlikely phenomena, and on the other hand, of reconstructing typical coping patterns in the transformation of the conditions of origin. Thus, it is not so much the educational institutions that are analyzed, but rather the social constellations as well as the psychosocial demands that accompany educational advancement.
It can be assumed that social structures and subjective forms of coping must be considered in equal measure if one wants to understand how social inequality is reproduced or transformed. In the concept of habitus, these two perspectives are intertwined. In Bourdieu's concept of habitus, both the social structures and the acting actor are related to the analyses of social inequality. From this perspective, the structures operate in and through the agents. Usually, the habitus concept is used to explain educational disadvantage or the reproduction of social inequality. As Bourdieu uses the (class-specific) habitus to explain social practice within conditions of existence shaped by social structures, questions arise when analyzing processes of social advancement: What happens to a person's habitus when the conditions of existence fundamentally change within his or her biography? And: How does it come about that a person 'leaves' his socialization context?
This study attempts to use the concept of habitus to understand social and educational mobility processes, i.e., the transformations of the conditions of origin. Based on habitus theory, we reconstruct the processuality of educational success within upward mobility biographies. The central inequality dimensions (1) class-specific origin as well as (2) ethnic origin and (3) gender are usually considered selectively in each case. The present empirical study will analyze these three dimensions of social inequality comparatively in their interacting form within biographies. The concept of habitus is able to maintain a unified perspective in the face of this heterogeneity and multidimensionality. Due to the biographical "sustainability" of the origin effect, we reconstruct the educational advancement processes of individuals who (1) come from educationally deprived homes, (2) grew up in materially scarce circumstances and in a disadvantaged residential environment, (3) have obtained an academic degree, and (4) are professionally established. This stark contrast between background and advancement allows for a more contoured account of the challenges in the advancement process. A total of eight narrative-biographical interviews with educational climbers are analyzed in the empirical study presented here.1 These are the biographies of four men and four women, half of whom are of Turkish origin and half of whom are native.2 Through the individual stratifications of experience in the biographies, an attempt is made to work out the experiential spaces that are constitutive for the genesis of the habitus and the transformation of the conditions of origin.
The three central questions are: How did the upwardly mobile successfully overcome the restrictions of social background in their individual educational careers? What are the typical differences between natives and migrants, and between men and women? And: How can the transformation of the conditions of origin be grasped with the concept of habitus?
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EL-MAFAALANI, Aladin, 2012. BildungsaufsteigerInnen aus benachteiligten Milieus: Habitustransformation und soziale Mobilität bei Einheimischen und Türkeistämmigen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ISBN 978-3-531-19319-9.