Abstract
The article reports on parts of an empirical longitudinal study. Students of engineering, business administration, medicine and psychology have been interviewed at the beginning and at the end of their education. The focus in the present article is on the students of business administration. Two of the questions in the interview asked for the student’s conceptions about the most prominent contemporary economic problem and the cause of famine in the underdeveloped countries.
The results show that the students of business administration to a large extent seem to change form an initially held political, distributionoriented perspective on the two questions to a more depoliticized efficiency perspective. This change means, in the case of the more general question about the most prominent economic problem that the initial emphasis on the uneven distribution of economic resources either in an international or in a national perspective in many cases was replaced by a stress on a more efficient utilization of resources or the necessity of more incentives for individual or collective initiatives. This tendency is not found among the students of medicine. In the second question the initially fragmented reasons for famine in terms of the relationship between developed and underdeveloped countries decreased in frequency leading to a stress on unfavorable conditions for food production or the new Maltusian notion of the different rates of population growth and increase in food production.
Résumé
Dans cet article ont présente une partie des données recueillies à la faveur d’une étude longitudinale auprés d’étudiants de différentes disciplines univeritaires interviewés au début et à la fin de leur cursus. Les sujets concernés sont des étudiants en administration des affaires interrogés sur leurs conceptions relatives à deux domaines: le problème économique actuellement le plus important à leurs yeux et la cause de la famine dans les pays sous-développés. Les résultats montrent une évolution des conceptions de ces étudiants: leur point de vue, d’abord distributionniste et politiquement argumenté se dépolitise et s’exprime en termes d’efficacité. Ainsi, à propos de la première question, l’accent mis initialement sur l’inégalité de distribution nationale et internationale des ressources économiques cède la place à un discours sur l’utilisation rationnelle de ces ressources et la nécessité de fortes incitations à l’initiative individuelle et collective. A titre de comparaison, on ne trouve pas une telle évolution chez les étudiants en médecine par exemple. A l’égard de la deuxiéme question, on note une évolution dans le même sens: la faim, d’abord analysée en termes de relations entre pays développés, est plus souvent mise sur le compte de mauvaises conditions de production ou analysée à la lumiere de la notion néo-malthusienne de taux de populations.
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The research reported here has been financially supported by the Swedish National Board of universities and colleges.
The concept of habitus is mainly to be understood in the way it was been used by Bourdieu & Passeron (1970), as a habit, a propensity to conceive of and act towards, the surrounding world that is moulded by the social and cultural environment to which a person is acculturized.
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Dahlgren, L.O. Fragments of an economic habitus. Conceptions of economic phenomena in freshmen and seniors. Eur J Psychol Educ 4, 547 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172716
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172716