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In the status attainment and social mobility literatures, "talent" is often conceptualized as educational attainment or mental ability. We adapt Bourdieu's notion of embodied cultural capital and Goffman's notion of "staging a character" into another dimension of talent, what we call "cultural talent," and hypothesize that an ability to wield cultural talent in hiring or promotion scenarios facilitates attainment of skilled, complex jobs. Bivariate analyses and multiple regression modeling performed on data from an original survey show that educational credentials and cultural talent both predict occupational skill and complexity. KEY WORDS: Bourdieu; cultural capital; Goffman; skilled occupations; staging characters;
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Careers Open to Talent: Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled EmploymentAuthor(s): Bruce Garnett, Neil Guppy and Gerry VeenstraReviewed work(s):Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 144-164Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20110250 .
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Sociological Forum, Vol. 23, No. I, March 2008 (? 2008) DOI: 10.HH/j.1573-7861.2007.00049.x
Careers Open to Talent: Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment1
Bruce Garnett, Neil Guppy, and Gerry Veenstra2
In the status attainment and social mobility literatures, "talent" is often conceptualized as educational attainment or mental ability. We adapt
Bourdieu's notion of embodied cultural capital and Goffman's notion of "staging a character" into another dimension of talent, what we call
"cultural talent," and hypothesize that an ability to wield cultural talent in
hiring or promotion scenarios facilitates attainment of skilled, complex jobs. Bivariate analyses and multiple regression modeling performed on data from an original survey show that educational credentials and cultural talent both
predict occupational skill and complexity.
KEY WORDS: Bourdieu; cultural capital; Goffman; skilled occupations; staging characters; talent.
CAREERS OPEN TO TALENT: EDUCATIONAL CREDENTIALS AND CULTURAL TALENT
"Careers open to talent" neatly captures an idea deeply embedded
in contemporary understandings of social mobility. The linkage of talent
to careers was originally posited in seventeenth-century Europe, an inno
vative conceptualization at a time when prosperous families routinely handed their offspring considerable economic advantage (Sennett, 2003).
1 The Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded the "Toward a Healthy British Colum
bia" research project under the auspices of Gerry Veenstra's New Investigator Career
Award (2000-2005). Ana Sandrin contributed substantially to the design and administra
tion of the survey questionnaire. We thank the members of the UBC Sociology Workshop Series who read and commented on the article. The authors contributed equally to the
writing of this article and are listed in alphabetical order. 2 Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, 6303 NW Marine Drive,
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T1Z1, Canada; e-mail: [email protected].
144
0884-8971/06/0300-0031/0 ? 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 145
Although inheritance of titles, positions, and fortunes certainly continues
to this day, its influence is considerably muted (Baker and LeTendre,
2005). When it comes to successful careers and the generation of wealth, talent has essentially muscled in to shrink the power of legacy.
Sociological literatures have packaged "careers open to talent" in
novel ways. The status attainment/social mobility literature has adopted the basic premise that various labor force outcomes (careers) depend, at
least in part, on talent. Blau and Duncan's (1967) theoretical and empiri cal contribution to this literature represents a powerful statement of this
position. Using their model, mobility researchers have demonstrated that
while ascriptive family origins continue to play a role in occupational attainment, personal educational achievements and credentials?deemed
measures of individual talent?are powerful forces in determining who
gets ahead in life. Importantly, the major clout of families in shaping the
life chances of their offspring now works indirectly via the schooling of
their children.
What remains relatively unexamined in attainment/mobility research
is the multifaceted notion of "talent" itself. Most often talent is conceptu alized and measured as educational attainment, for example, years of
schooling or highest diploma or degree, although at times it is defined as
mental ability or cognitive development (Cawley et al, 2001). These are
undoubtedly important dimensions of talent. The European literature on
social reproduction, too, has stressed the centrality of educational attain
ment in mobility processes. For example, Pierre Bourdieu has argued that an academic qualification such as a master's degree is a "certificate of
cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional constant
legally guaranteed value with respect to culture" (1986:248). Bourdieu
notes that educational credentials allow for objective comparisons of
qualification holders, performing the "magic" of imposing recognition on
people who, without this formal recognition, would be constantly required to prove themselves. For employers in particular, credentials carry impor tant signals of technical skills and abilities (Lareau and Weininger, 2003).
Bourdieu (1986) refers to academic qualifications as "institutionalized
cultural capital." However, he also highlights another dimension of talent
that has seldom been incorporated into attainment/mobility research?
what he calls "embodied cultural capital." A person's embodied cultural
capital refers to his or her accumulated knowledge of socially valued
norms, behaviors, competencies, information, and beliefs, especially those
beliefs and tastes manifested by the dominant class. A large investment
of time and personal effort is required to acquire a store of embodied
cultural capital. Strongly linked to success in the educational arena and
serving as an important resource in the labor market, embodied cultural
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146 Garnett et al.
capital goes beyond technical abilities to encompass a sense of "cultiva
tion," that is, a culturally sophisticated way of conducting oneself.
Embodied cultural capital is not simply possessed, it is enacted, demon
strated in common, everyday interaction rituals. This kind of cultivation
essentially refers to the art of mis en sc?ne (putting on a show) (Bourdieu,
1983), also resembling what Erving Goffman (1959) called "the work of
successfully staging a character." Goffman, of course, is known for high
lighting the art of impression management, the application of social tal ents that enable successful interactions in social settings. The "staging of
characters" and "putting on shows" are impression management processes
and strategies that are enacted in everyday micro interactions.
Embodied cultural capital was first used by Bourdieu (Bourdieu and
Passeron, 1990) to explain uneven scholastic achievements among children
from different social classes. Rather than accept the view that achievement
stemmed primarily from natural aptitude, Bourdieu argued that the trans
mission of valued cultural competencies to the children of the dominant
classes ensured their success in the French education system. In Distinction
(Bourdieu, 1984), he demonstrated that these kinds of cultural competen cies were also consequential for life chances beyond the classroom. In this
important work, he utilized multiple modes of empirical inquiry to argue that embodied cultural capital is distributed unequally in a social space of
social classes (which is constructed on the basis of possession of economic
capital and institutionalized cultural capital). According to Bourdieu, pos session of the right kind of cultivation enabled French elites to define and
maintain boundaries between themselves and members of lower classes.3 Bourdieu's description of a multidimensional cultural capital has not
escaped criticism. For instance, it has been suggested that, in North Amer
ica at least, it is not so much highbrow culture (the culture of the upper
class) that is important for labor market success but, rather, cultural
diversity that matters most. Erickson (1996:219) has shown that members
of the upper echelons of workplaces are not "cultural snobs but cultural
'omnivores.'" Their strength lies in having a wide variety of cultural
knowledge that they can employ appropriately, rather than a particular
type of cultivation founded on cultural knowledge located at the top of a
hierarchy. Emmison (2003) similarly notes the importance of cultural
mobility in these especially culturally fluid times. It seems reasonable
to think that familiarity with many different cultural forms, a kind of
cultural omnivorism, coupled with the ability to talk about things in the
right place at the right time, enables people to succeed in job interviews,
3 In the United States, Lareau (2003) has identified a "concerted cultivation" of a middle
class "sense of entitlement" that fosters its success.
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 147
at work, and so on. In our opinion, this approach to cultural competency
represents the essence of "staging a character," specially focused on the
ability to stage (or "ad-lib") appropriate characters for different settings. The kind of staged character that facilitates occupational success need not
be refined and cultivated in a specifically highbrow manner?a rounded,
multifaceted, and agile cultivation may matter most.4
We seek to contribute to the status attainment and social mobility literatures by applying this relatively unexplored dimension of talent to
career success in the workplace. Rather than focusing exclusively on talent
defined as educational credentials, cognitive ability, or skills fostered and
developed in the educational system, as is common in the mobility litera
ture, we additionally highlight the importance of talent in the form of par ticular kinds of embodied cultural capital, what we refer to as "cultural
talent." We investigate cultural talent in the form of cultural omnivorism
(following Erickson) and as highbrow cultivation (following Bourdieu),
using original survey data from British Columbia, Canada to investigate the degree to which the different conceptualizations of talent?creden
tialed and cultural, highbrow and omnivore?facilitate the attainment of
occupations characterized by high levels of skill and complexity.
Research Questions
Our overarching goal is to examine how fruitful a multifaceted concept of talent?encompassing both the magic of credentials and the wielding of
cultural talent?is as a predictor of occupational location. Our empirical focus in this article centers on whether occupations that depend on profes
sional-type judgments (highly-skilled jobs requiring creativity and the appli cation of abstract knowledge) are more or less frequently occupied by
people with higher levels of educational achievement and greater stores of
cultural talent. In so doing we focus on the distinction between cultural-tal
ent-omnivore (operationalized here as breadth of cultural knowledge) and
cultural-talent-highbrow (operationalized as highbrow cultural knowledge). The specific research questions guiding our analysis are:
1. What roles do educational credentials and cultural talent play in the
attainment of occupations that are characterized by complexity and
require high levels of skill? Specifically, given that educational experiences may influence cultural competencies and occupational outcomes (thereby
making empirical associations between cultural talent and occupational
4 This approach to conceptualizing cultural talent resembles Swidler's (1986) conception of
"cultural toolkits" that enable "strategies of action."
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148 Garnett et al.
success spurious), does cultural talent influence the attainment of skilled
occupations above and beyond the well-established influence of educa
tional credentials?
2. Which forms of cultural talent are most useful in this regard, omnivore or highbrow?
We use an original survey data set uniquely suited to assessing the
role of various forms of talent and their linkages with skilled occupations.
Although this data set was not originally collected in order to investigate
relationships between cultural talent and occupational success, it contains
various measures of occupational skill and complexity, educational creden
tials, and a wide variety of cultural knowledge items that we have oppor
tunistically marshaled to pursue our research questions.
DATA
Survey Sample
A mailed questionnaire survey of adult residents living in 25 commu
nities5 in the Canadian province of British Columbia was conducted in
2002. A random selection of households from each community was drawn
from the most current telephone listings using a systematic random sam
pling technique, and a survey questionnaire was then administered by mail
in a five-stage process. To select a household member randomly, the reci
pient of the introductory letter was asked to give the survey questionnaire to the person in the household aged 18 and over whose birthday was first
in the year. The survey produced 1,435 respondents in total and an overall
response rate of 56.5%. As a rough indication of how well our survey
sample matches the British Columbian population demographically, we
compared the survey sample to the population of adults aged 18 and over
in British Columbia from the 2001 Census: 47.5% of the survey sample were female and 13.4% were aged 65 and over, whereas in the province as
a whole, 51.5% of adults were female and 17.5% were aged 65 and over.
Because our analysis attempts to uncover factors that facilitate occu
pational success, possibly by making "cultivated" individuals displaying cultural talents attractive to employers who control prestigious career
opportunities, respondents who were not employed full time or part time
5 Campbell River, Comox, Courtenay, Duncan, Gibsons, Gold River, Kitimat, Ladysmith, Masset, Nanaimo, Parksville, Port Alberni, Port Alice, Port Hardy, Port McNeill, Powell
River, Prince Rupert, Qualicum Beach, Sechelt, Squamish, Tahsis, Torino, Ucluelet, Van
couver, and Victoria. See Veenstra (2005a) for more information on the communities and
survey sample sizes and response rates by community.
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 149
at the time of the survey were excluded from our analyses. We also
excluded self-employed respondents and respondents who did not provide answers to survey items comprising the dependent variable, occupational skill and complexity. The sample size was therefore 702, further reduced to 621 in multivariate models due to missing values. Regarding missing values, the two samples did not differ exceedingly from one another along basic demographic lines: 47.4% of the larger sample were female (vs. 47.8% in the smaller sample), the mean age was 41.4 (vs. 43.2), and
21.7% had a university degree (vs. 23.2%).
Demographic Variables
Age, gender, marital status, number of children, First Nations affilia tion (respondents were asked if they belonged to an Indian band),
mother's and father's educational attainment, and the employment status
(full time vs. part time) of survey respondents are described in Table I.
We acknowledge that cultural talent may influence occupational careers differently in different settings. Brown (1995) claims that organiza tional restructuring in the labor market has featured a shift in recent dec
ades from bureaucratic corporate structures to inherently insecure,
flexible, flat, and lean corporate structures. Whereas the bureaucratic career is associated with a "predictable linear progression within corporate hierarchies, flexible careers are invariably contingent and retrospective" (Brown, 1995:36). Clearly, cultural talent may operate differently in
bureaucratic and flexible settings. In light of other mobility research that also emphasizes the importance of labor market context (e.g., Kalleberg, 1988; Lin, 2001), we identified the industry setting of our employed survey
respondents and then distinguished respondents employed in the most
bureaucratically organized industries (i.e., government service, education,
healthcare, and policing and legal services) from those working in the
other, more flexible, industries.6
Occupational Skill and Complexity
We employed respondents' own descriptions of their work activity in
order to assess the skill and complexity inherent to their occupations. As
6 The flexible industries were aquaculture, band council/band administrator, construction,
farming/agriculture, finance/insurance/real estate, fish processing/fish plant, forestry/log ging, hunting/trapping, manufacturing, mining (including oil and gas), paper mill/pulp
mill, saw mill, tourism/service industry, and transportation.
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150 Garnett et al.
Table I. Characteristics of Survey Respondents (Employed Sample, N = 702)
Variable Categories Distribution of Responses
Age
Gender
Marital status
First Nations
Children
Employment status
Bureaucratic/flexible
organization Personal educational
attainment
Mother's educational
attainment
Father's educational
attainment
Occupational skill
and complexity Cultural-talent-omnivore
Cultural-talent-highbrow
Cultural-talent-books
Cultural-talent-artists
Cultural-talent-magazines
Cultural-talent-sports
Female
Male
Married or common-law
Not married or common-law
First Nations
Other
Has children
No children
Full time
Part time
Bureaucratic
Flexible
Less than high school
High school
Community college or technical school
University degree: bachelor
University degree: masters
Doctorate or professional degree Less than high school
High school
Some postsecondary
Community college or technical school
University degree Less than high school
High school
Some postsecondary
Community college or
technical school
University degree
Mean = 44.4
(N =
699, SD = 10.4)
344 (47.6%) 378 (52.4) 496 (70.8%) 205 (29.2) 41 (5.8%)
661 (94.2) 514 (73.5%) 185 (26.5) 536 (76.4%) 166 (23.6) 236 (35.3%) 432 (64.7) 42(6.1%)
332 (48.0) 167 (24.2) 107(15.5) 22 (3.2) 21 (3.0)
218 (32.8%) 222 (33.4)
88 (13.2) 86 (12.9) 51 (7.7)
295 (44.8%) 139(21.1) 55 (8.4) 96 (14.6)
73 (11.1) Mean = 3.69
(N =
702, SD = 0.76)
Mean = 26.4
(N =
702, SD = 10.9)
Mean = 2.43
(N =
702, SD = 3.6)
Mean = 8.92
(N =
702, SD = 5.2)
Mean = 6.07
(N =
702, SD = 3.2)
Mean = 2.90
(N =
702, SD = 2.1)
Mean = 8.49
(N =
702, SD = 5.0)
Reitz (2001) observes, existing taxonomies of occupational prestige or sta
tus often possess considerable within-category variation in the set of skills
required for occupations. In addition, the most current Canadian occupa tional prestige measure is now more than 20 years old (Blishen et al,
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 151
1987). As such, we chose to understand occupational skill and complexity through the meanings that respondents give to their work rather than
through broad, externally imposed and possibly dated classifications that
may mask skills and complex thinking. We utilized five survey items, each scored on a five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to
strongly agree.
1. My job requires a high level of skill.
2. My job requires creativity. 3. My job requires that I learn new things. 4. My job requires abstract knowledge about the ideas behind my work. 5. My job produces highly complex problems that require a high level of abstract theory to solve.
We created an occupational skill and complexity index by summing the responses to these five items, with higher scores representing more
skilled occupations. Scale reliability analysis produced an acceptably high Cronbach's alpha value of 0.83. Our measure of occupational skill and
complexity correlated fairly well with personal income (tau b = .237,
p < .001, N = 675) and the Pineo (tau b =
.310, p < .001, N = 623)
and Blishen (tau b = .294, p < .001, N =
623) occupational prestige measures. The overall mean score for the skill/complexity index was 3.69. To further illuminate the nature of our index, we calculated mean scores
for the most popular occupations in the data set. We obtained mean scores of 4.33 for 31 self-identified teachers in the sample, 4.19 for the electricians (N
= 1), 3.92 for the registered nurses (N
= 10), 3.68 for the
millwrights (N =
8), 3.54 for the administrative assistants (N =
7), and 3.15 for the cooks (N
= 8).
Talent
Seven variables assessing talent, both credentialed and cultural, were
constructed. Educational credential attainment was created in six ordered
categories from a questionnaire item assessing the highest level of educa tion an individual had completed (Table I).
Our conceptualization of cultural talent, like recent North American
investigations into the manifestation of cultural capital more generally, stresses the importance of cultural knowledge. Lamont and Lareau (1988) question whether participation in cultural events, along the dominant
operationalization of cultural capital in North American studies, is an
adequate indicator of cultural capital in that setting. Erickson (1996), too, has demonstrated the utility of cultural capital in various social relations
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152 Garnett et al.
in a Canadian context; crucially, she operationalized cultural capital as
familiarity with cultural artifacts. We follow Erickson's route in our
empirical analysis of the relationship between talent and career success.
The cultural talent variables were created from a series of 71 survey items assessing familiarity with various works of literature, artists, maga
zines, and sports figures (see Table II). The works of literature encom
passed a wide range of classic and popular books, Canadian and
international, whereas the artist names included obscure and well-known
artists, sculptors, and painters, Canadians and non-Canadians. The maga
zines encompassed a range of topical areas, from architecture to finance,
science, and current affairs, while the sports figures spanned both popular and less well-known sports, for example, boxing, cricket, figure-skating, football, hockey, motor-racing, and wrestling. With respect to literature,
respondents were asked to identify from a list of 15 books those that they had heard of, coded 1, and those that they had read, coded 2 (and coded
0 otherwise). Regarding familiarity with art, respondents were asked to
indicate which artists' names they recognized from a list of 18 names, coded 1 (heard of the artist) and 0 (had not heard of the artist) in each
case. Each magazine was coded 1 if the magazine was read and 0 other
wise; each sports figure item was coded 1 if the name was recognized and
0 otherwise.
We created a measure of cultural-talent-omnivore by summing
together scores for all the books, artists, magazines, and sports figures items listed in Table II. Although we do not have a priori reason to believe
that this index should necessarily be internally consistent, the alpha value
for this index of 71 items was very high at 0.90.7 This measure represents a
rough and proximate measure of breadth of cultural knowledge. Literature and art are traditional domains of the highbrow (Lynch,
2004). We used a "rarity" argument to identify the highbrow cultural
knowledge items contained in the list of books and artists presented to
respondents, arguing that a cultural form familiar to a small segment of
the population is more likely to be highbrow than is a form known to
almost everyone (Erickson, 1991). Here, the total survey sample of
TV = 1,435 was employed to indicate rarefied knowledge within the entire
population (Table II). If fewer than 30% of the total sample of respon dents had heard of a book, it was deemed highbrow culture: seven books
fit these criteria. Highbrow artists were defined as those of whom fewer
than 30% of the total sample of respondents had heard: 11 artists fit this
7 Because respondents were awarded two points for having read a book, the books variables
carried more weight in the cultural knowledge measures than did the other variables. This
imbalance was deemed appropriate because of the deeper familiarity with a cultural form
that comes from reading a book vs. simply recognizing a name.
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 153
Table II. Cultural Knowledge Items (Full Sample, N = 1,435)
Books % Heard of Magazines % Read
Out of Africa
Oliver Twist
The Pelican Brief
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Pride and Prejudice
Sophie's Choice The Wealthy Barber
The Handmaid's Tale
The Stone Angel Two Solitudes
Kamouraska
Sunshine Sketches
Sophie's World
What's Bred in the Bone
The Golden Notebook
Artists
Emily Carr
Pablo Picasso Robert Bateman
Andy Warhol
The Group of Seven
Salvador Dali
Degas
Georgia O'Keefe
Henry Moore
Cornelius Krieghoff A. J. Casson
Mary Pratt
Marie Cass?t
Michael Snow Harold Town
Joyce Wieland
87.6
86.5
76.9
75.6
74.0
58.5
57.6
46.1
27.8
19.4
12.8
12.7
11.1
8.6
6.4
% Heard of
93.3
85.9
83.1
71.8
65.0
58.9
43.6
25.9
23.3
18.7
17.3
11.6
10.7
6.1
4.3
3.9
Macleans
Time
Chatelaine
Newsweek
Sports Illustrated
The Financial Times
Cosmopolitan The Economist
Scientific American
Penthouse
Architectural Digest
Saturday Night The New Yorker
Harper's Forbes
Harvard Business Review
Sports Figures
Elvis Stojko Michael Jordan
Eric Lindros
Jennifer Capriati
Shae-Lynn Bourne
Roger Clemens
'Stone Cold' Steve Austin
David Duvall
Danny McManus
Bobby Allison
Brett Favre
Patrick Carpentier Joe Thornton Jim Furyk Rob Boyd Felix Trinidad
Shannon Stewart Todd Martin
Hunter Hurst Helmsley Vin Baker Don Bradman
53.1
41.8
26.2
20.3
16.6
14.3
11.3
8.9
7.9
6.1
5.5
4.9
4.9
3.6
3.1
1.2
% Heard of
93.9
92.0
84.3
58.5
53.7
52.3
50.0
39.7
34.4
29.8
27.2
26.3
24.9
22.4
21.3
18.5
17.0
14.1
10.4
6.9
4.8
criterion. These highbrow books and artists items were merged to create a
single index of cultural-talent-highbrow (Cronbach's alpha = 0.85 among
the 1,435 respondents).8 8
Elsewhere, Veenstra (2005b) performed a principal components factor analysis on the 71
knowledge items, utilizing various class position indicators to predict several of the resul tant cultural knowledge factors. The less-well-known books clustered into one factor, while the less-well-known artists clustered in another. The clustering of knowledge items in this
way lends support to our contention that a rarity argument utilizing a 30% cutoff may
identify highbrow cultural knowledge forms.
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154 Garnett et al.
Finally, we considered cultural genre, toward the goal of determining whether a cultivation (a cultural talent) that enables occupational success
comes in the form of familiarity with literature, art, popular culture (as
displayed in current magazines), or sports. We created four new cultural
talent indices from the original set of 71 cultural knowledge items: a
cultural-talent-books index constructed by summing the books variables
produced alpha =
0.85, a similarly-constructed cultural-talent-artists
index produced alpha =
0.85, a cultural-talent-magazines index had an
alpha of 0.62 and a cultural-talent-sports index had an alpha of 0.89 (in all cases N =
1,435).
RESULTS
Zero-Order Relationships Between Talent and Occupational
Skill/Complexity
We begin our investigation with zero-order relationships between
talent and occupational skill and complexity (Table III). Educational
attainment was fairly strongly and significantly related to occupational skill, while the cultural-talent-omnivore and cultural-talent-highbrow vari
ables were somewhat less effective at predicting occupational skill (the cul
tural-talent-genre variables were even less effective). We note that the
effects on occupational skill of both forms of talent were perhaps stronger for women than for men. This follows a typical pattern where women
often experience greater need to earn their places in the workforce through individual talent than do men. For instance, Boyd (1985) and Wanner
(2000) have shown that educational attainment influences the career paths of women more than those of men in Canada.
Multivariate Predictors of Occupational Skill/Complexity
Next, we created multivariate models on occupational skill in order
to control for demographic variables that might influence both talent and
occupational skill. For example, age might influence occupational skill (if
mastery of skills grows with time and experience in a given business or
sector of industry) and cultural talent (to the degree that cultural knowl
edge and familiarity accumulates over time), making their association
spurious. Table IV displays results from a series of multiple linear regres sions on degree of occupational skill and complexity for the N = 621
respondents who answered all the pertinent survey questions. The first
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 155
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 157
model contains only the demographic controls, the second adds educa
tional credentials to the basic demographic model,9 and the third addition
ally incorporates the cultural-talent-omnivore variable. The remaining models successively incorporate the cultural-talent-highbrow and cultural
talent-genre variables in place of cultural-talent-omnivore.
After controlling for the other demographic variables, we found that men were more likely than women to occupy jobs with higher skill levels, as were respondents with a father with a university degree, who were full
time employees, or were employed in a bureaucratic context (Model 1, Table IV).
Personal educational credentials were strong predictors of occupa tional skill/complexity after controlling for the demographic variables
(Model 2) and made a sizeable contribution to the explained variance (the
adjusted R2 increased by .077 from Model 1 to Model 2). (We suspect that
the effect on occupational skill of father's education evident in Model 1
reflects its influence on educational attainment and hence occupational skill.) Educational credentials apparently facilitate entry into occupations
necessitating professional judgments and decision making, as the research
literature has long demonstrated.
When using cultural-talent-omnivore as the sole measure of talent
(model not shown), the model's R2 was .135 (adjusted R2 = .121), lower
than when educational credentials were used (although the increase in
variance explained from Model 1 was still sizeable). Upon controlling for
the demographic variables and educational credentials, cultural-talent
omnivore remained a significant predictor of occupational skill (Model
3).10 This finding shows that cultural-talent-omnivore assessed is associ
ated with attainment of skilled occupations above and beyond the effect
of educational credentials. Academic credentials and cultural-talent-omni
vore seemingly influence this particular form of occupational attainment. But is a widely based cultural knowledge the most appropriate form
of cultural talent (following Erickson), or might a highbrow or sophisti cated knowledge be more helpful when it comes to succeeding in
the workplace (following Bourdieu)? Table III shows that the zero-order
9 Years of schooling made lesser contributions to the multivariate models than did the six
part credentials version of educational attainment (results for years of schooling are not
shown). 10 Because the zero-order relationships between cultural-talent-omnivore and occupational skill differed to some degree for men and women in Table II, we added an interaction term between gender and cultural talent to Model 3?it was not statistically significant and so was not included in the model. An interaction term between cultural-talent-omni vore and organizational setting (bureaucratic vs. flexible) did not make a significant contribution either. This means that the main results from our analysis of the effects of
cultural-talent-omnivore for occupational skill and complexity are not gender specific or
specific to organizational context (bureaucratic vs. flexible).
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158 Garnett et al.
relationships between cultural-talent-highbrow and occupational skill were very similar to those manifested by cultural-talent-omnivore and
occupational skill. Upon controlling for demographic characteristics
and educational attainment, the cultural-talent-highbrow variable was
also statistically significant (Model 4, Table IV). It seems, therefore, that cultural talent operationalized as cultural knowledge in either highbrow or
omnivore form may be influential for occupational success.
Finally, might the right kind of cultural talent be based on familiarity with literary and artistic themes or perhaps instead on knowledge of
sports or familiarity with popular culture, and so forth? From the zero
order relationships between the genre-specific indices and occupational skill presented in Table III we note that the cultural-talent-books, -artists, and -magazines variables were all significantly related to occupational skill, whereas the cultural-talent-sports variable was mostly unrelated (for both women and men).
We ran separate regression models for the cultural-talent-genre vari
ables, controlling for the demographic variables and educational creden
tials in each case (in manner analogous to Model 3). The beta and
p values for cultural-talent-books and cultural-talent-artists were similar to one another but, in contrast with the zero-order findings of Table III,
cultural-talent-magazines appeared to be the best predictor of skilled
occupations. (Cultural-talent-sports remained irrelevant.) We interpret the
reduction of importance of familiarity with authors and artists from the
zero-order models to the multivariate models to reflect the effect of educa tional attainment on such knowledge. Thus cultural-talent-books and
cultural-talent-artists both possessed predictive capacity for occupational skill/complexity above and beyond the ownership of academic credentials,
although both cultural talent measures were muted by their interrelation
ships with educational attainment. This was not precisely the case with
cultural-talent-magazines, which better held its predictive power net of
educational credentials. Finally, cultural-talent-sports was mostly irrele vant for facilitating attainment of highly skilled and complex occupations.
DISCUSSION
We began our investigation with the well-established premise that
talent is critical in shaping career trajectories. We sought in this article, however, to broaden the dominant understanding of talent in the status
attainment and social mobility literatures, typically assessed by variables linked to formal education (most often as either years of schooling or
credentials) and sometimes conceptualized as cognitive development.
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 159
Bourdieu's notion of embodied cultural capital and Goffman's interac
tional conceptualization of "staging a character" provide a broader vista
for thinking about "cultural talent." We argue that cultural talent can be
fruitfully understood in terms of cultural competencies and impression
management strategies enacted in micro interactions.
Not surprisingly, given the long history of mobility research support
ing this finding, we found that educational credentials were a predictor of
the extent to which occupational skill and complexity characterize career
placement. Nevertheless, cultural talent also made a contribution to
explaining this dimension of career placement, above and beyond posses sion of formal educational certificates and degrees. As such, cultural talent
can be thought of as a "productive resource" (Lin, 2001) operating along side educational credentials. Indeed, our analytic strategy may actually
mask the full power of cultural talent; by first controlling for educational
credentials in our multivariate models we may have parceled out some of
the effect of cultural talent. In effect, to the degree that cultural talent
intervenes between education and occupational skill, we may have artifi
cially reduced the magnitude of the relationship between cultural talent
and skill?the contribution of the cultural talent variable to our multi
variate models represents a skinnier story than might have otherwise
obtained.
We contend that this cultural dimension of talent allows individuals
to stage the kinds of characters?to perform, to put on the right kinds of
shows?that enables them to successfully compete for skilled positions. A
traditional reading of Bourdieu would suggest that knowledge of high brow culture would best indicate the kind of cultivation that facilitates
acquisition of an occupation characterized by skill and complexity. Our
findings parallel Erickson's (1996) in that advantage may also accrue to
cultural omnivores, those conversant with popular and highbrow culture.
The more varied the base of cultural knowledge one has, the better able
one will be to "ad-lib" appropriately in different workplace settings, be
they the human resources office, the lunch room, or the board room.
Nonetheless, we do not wish to understate the relevance of highbrow culture in the North American context. First, of course, highbrow culture
proves significant in our multivariate analyses, but second, our analysis of genres indicates the importance of knowledge of literature and art in
particular?two cultural forms persistently accorded highbrow status in
the long history of studying culture (Lynch, 2004)?in predicting more
complex and skilled occupations. This finding contrasts starkly with the
irrelevance of sports knowledge?perhaps the most egalitarian of the four
genres under discussion?for providing occupational advantage. Following Erickson (1996) again, sports knowledge may allow one to stage the type
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160 Garnett et al.
of character that coordinates well with others in the workplace, but it
likely does little to enable the surpassing of others in occupational attain ment. The more well-read and artistically savvy person can put on a better
show when the stage is set for occupational advancement. Magazine
knowledge in particular appears to be among the more valuable of the
genres. Although magazines probably do not contain the depth of books or paintings, they are current in a way books and paintings clearly are
not. In the accelerated pace of late modern society, one of the most valu
able workplace talents may be to stage a character that is hip, relevant, and au courant.
Careers in the Making: The Importance of Trustworthiness and Social
Similarity
We claim that cultural talent in the form of an ability to stage characters is relevant for career trajectories. But exactly how does cultural
talent in the form of cultural knowledge and competencies affect attainment
of skilled and complex occupations? We think that cultural talent plays an
important role at times of hiring and promotion for such positions within
organizations by virtue of incumbents' abilities to stage characters that
generate perceptions of trustworthiness and social similarity, abilities that
need not necessarily stem from educational experiences or encompass the
wielding of credentials.
This argument would be immediately crippled if educational measures
were a perfectly valid and encompassing measure of talent and if employ ers primarily used educational credential information and assessments of
cognitive ability when making hiring and promotion decisions. Employers
report paying little attention to such matters, however, stressing instead a
range of other factors (e.g., Miller and Rosenbaum, 1997; see review by
Bills, 2004).n These other factors include experience, job history, and
personal qualities (Bills, 1988; Mencken and Winfield, 1998; Moss and
Tilly, 2001; Mouw, 2003). As Petersen et al (2000:764) argue, "subjective assessments carry great weight in hiring." They undoubtedly influence
promotions as well.
11 The status attainment and human capital research traditions clearly demonstrate that
despite what employers might report to interviewers, education is often used to make key
hiring and promotion decisions. Multivariate analyses routinely show that education
and/or mental ability is a strong predictor of career success, acting perhaps as a key sig nal or filter (Bills, 2004). However, the sizeable variance unexplained by these models
points to unmeasured factors, and possibly to unmeasured aspects of talent.
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 161
And how are such subjective assessments derived? With regard to hir
ing, it has been suggested that "word of mouth" is a prevalent recruitment
strategy (Petersen et al, 2000). This likely occurs because word-of-mouth channels carry high-quality information. "Trusted information" flows
through personal connections, connections that provide quality, depend able judgments in the eyes of employers because they can rely on the "word" of their associates. Based on ethnographic work, Kanter (1975) provides one of the most robust accounts detailing why these mechanisms are integral to smooth workplace operation. Building explicitly on Wilbert
Moore's description of a "bureaucratic kinship system," she argues that the modern corporate workplace relies heavily on team players, colleagues
with strong peer acceptance. As Elliot and Smith (2004:369) describe it, the "underlying idea is that communication, discretion, and trust are facil itated by social similarity." Weeden and Grusky (2005:150) similarly argue that "employers and other gatekeepers filter applicants on the basis of individual-level attributes, thus creating ... homogeneity by matching the traits of new recruits with those of current employees," at least in part to
promote "workplace harmony."12
This suggests that the social similarity of occupational incumbents with managers and executives in corporate contexts ought to be high. The recruits that managers and senior executives seek for such jobs are people
who share with them the "right stuff (Mencken and Winfield, 1998), and what is important in hiring is ensuring that new hires will fit in with their
peers. To investigate this idea, Miller and Rosenbaum (1997) interviewed 51 employers in Chicago, inquiring about the information used to make
hiring decisions for entry-level positions in the primary labor market.
They concluded that decisions were made primarily on "trustworthy" information about candidates. For employers, trusted information came
through personal interviews or via the testimonials of close associates
(e.g., key employees, network contacts). Miller and Rosenbaum (1997:504) report employers being skeptical of the trustworthiness of "applicant's teachers, employment agencies, tests, and applicant's past employers."
Trusting "gut instincts" was prevalent. Some evidence suggests that similarity and trust may be more impor
tant in skilled settings than in less skilled ones. Elliot and Smith (2004) used face-to-face interview data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban
Inequality (1992-1994) to examine the extent of ascriptive matching between workers and their immediate supervisors. They concluded that
most superiors prefer to fill power positions that they supervise with
12 "Rational bias theory" presents a social psychological variant of this argument. According to this approach, people believe they can work most effectively with others who share similar interests and a "common culture" (Erickson et al, 2000:297; see also Roth, 2004).
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162 Garnett et al.
people who are ascriptively similar to themselves. Why? Because of
"trust" relations. Supporting Kanter's reasoning, where supervisors need
to rely on the decision making of their subordinates, trusting them to
exercise autonomy and discretion wisely, social similarity is at its highest
(Elliot and Smith, 2004).13 To conclude, subjective assessments?especially those that reflect
trustworthiness and social similarity?undoubtedly influence hiring. Cer
tainly, "social capital" is relevant here, to the degree that social networks are important means for generating trust and confirming social similarity.
Especially for workers in skilled occupational settings, we argue that cul
tural talent?the ability to "stage a character"?is also influential, during
hiring and for promotion as well. Human capital in the form of educa
tional credentials may get one's foot in the door, and social capital in the
form of well-placed social connections may communicate assurance of
trustworthiness for employers, but we claim that an ability to successfully
stage a character who appears to "have the right stuff is also important to career trajectories, especially in highly skilled, complex occupational contexts.
Our conclusions and interpretations are speculative, necessarily so
given the nature of our data and analysis. It is especially important to
acknowledge that our survey data do not directly capture the ritual enact
ment of cultural capacities?ethnographic work is required to access this
level of detail (Hallet, 2003; Lareau, 2003). We also cannot rule out
reverse causality. We have taken an important theoretical step in linking the micro bases of stratification to the longstanding traditions of mobility research, and our results are consistent with some ethnographic accounts
of workplace dynamics. Nevertheless, it may be that longitudinal data will
show that entry into occupations high in skill and complexity facilitates
the development of cultural talent, talent that either develops or is further
honed as one learns to be successful in such work. However, to the extent
that cultural talent is a deeply engrained flair that takes time to nurture
and mature, as Bourdieu and others have argued, then the lines of causal
ity posited here seem reasonable.
If Menken and Winfield (1998) are correct in claiming that displaying the "right stuff is important for occupational success, it is perhaps not
surprising that an advantage is accorded to those with the widest variety of cultural talent in staging appropriate characters. As we suggested
13 Staging a character, or "face work," is critical in many jobs (e.g., waiting tables) where
rewards are directly related to performance. Our point is that in occupations where dis
cernment, tact, and standards are important, trust of character among co-workers, and
especially supervisors, is reinforced by cultural talent. This talent helps in demonstrating that you have the "right stuff."
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Educational Credentials, Cultural Talent, and Skilled Employment 163
above, some of this cultural talent could be gained through experiences in
the educational system. Still, a broadened conception of talent helps
explain the disconnect between employers who claim that credentials are
not the most important factor in hiring and the fact that such credentials
remain strong predictors of occupational attainment (e.g., Bills, 2004). Credentials are a critical part of the career success story, but talent, at
least in the eyes of those making decisions about people's occupational careers, also includes cultural competencies, especially the talent to stage a
character appropriate for a complex occupation. As working muscle, tal
ent has multiple fibers.
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