The Floating Tribe In University Field

With the progress of the popularization of higher education, young teachers have become the main force of faculty in China. Their development, to a considerable extent, decides the speed,level and quality of the development of a university and even the country's higher education. Young teachers'development is not only the important problem about the development of higher education but also the essential proposition of effective faculty development policy. The deep study about their living status,valus and behaviors should be done imperatively.According to the grounded theory in qualitative research, the research method of this study is designed and young teachers in research universities of China are selected as research objects. Their lives and complex inner world are understood and touched by deep-going interviews and on-site observation, and a large number of first-hand materials are collected. Through thick description, the daily work and lives of these young research teachers who are at the preliminary stage of their academic careers and in face of drastic reform are displayed in an all-around way. Coding of original materials is conducted by means of backward induction to summarize relevant core concepts and theses, and finally these concepts are linked and inducted to form a certain"substantive theory".Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's field theory provides a unique angle of observation for this study, and its core concepts such as"field","capital","habitus", etc. are used in this study to form its analysis frame: Chinese research universities are taken as a"field"to study young teachers'positions and standpoints, how they participate in capital competition and perform game rules, what habitus they form and how the habitus affect their behavior strategies and reproduce university field structure in the combination and formation of this physical and meaning space.By probing into new methods and theories, this study achieves new findings and conclusions. The university field presented here is not an academic community discussing the truth in an equal way, but a bureaucratized field with rigid hierarchization. Young teachers are isolated or scattered at the edge of the field by visible or invisible force and encounter a series of"reality shock"and perplexity in all aspects such as economic income, teaching, scientific research, management and psychology, and so on. Like lonely single elements, they float in every corner of the field. Facts demonstrate that it is not true that young teachers'standpoints direct their academic career development status, which we usually take for granted, but their positions in university field shape their standpoints on relevant issues.The amount and structure of capital decide young teachers'positions in the filed and also affect their strategies and orientations. In university field, cultural field is still the goal of the new generation of scholars, but the pursuit of institutionalized form of cultural capital surpasses the embodied form of cultural capital. Social capital and economic capital are playing more and more important roles at the same time. A few professors and administrative personnel having enough economic capital and social capital occupy favorable positions and become the dominant class in university field. They compete for academic power by accumulating capital existing in the form of administrative status and honorable titles .They decide the selection, promotion and career development of young teachers and attempt to maintain and reproduce present order. As for their orientations of development and endeavor, young teachers'will also change from pursuing cultural capital to seeking economic capital and social capital, so as to increase their total capital volumes and change their positions. The young teachers's development trace is different because of different discipline teams.Those team members having rich funds for scientific research and projects have relatively large space and smooth trace of development. They are challenged by marginal difference.Many so-called rules of university field define the normal career development of teachers. These rules interiorize young teachers and become their habitus which further shape their behavior strategies. As a whole,"compliance"and"submission"are still the basic living strategy of them, the"illusio"about the future are the momentum supporting their breaking through and entering the field, and"going to teaching universities"is their main choice in case of helpless withdrawal. Despite their objection to the legality of those behaviors within the field and the hidden tense relations between their values and the reform orientations being implemented and expected by universities, young teachers still make efforts to obtain the acknowledge of relevant organs, and such behavior strategies will reproduce the structure of university field, and the field may then achieve legal distribution of power resources and reproduction function.In this study, the author holds that current university field takes on a reverse structure, i.e."creators of culture"gives place to"persons in charge of culture"who rely on bureaucratized empowering and dominated by market. The using of logic of bureaucratized field and economic field in university field has distorted the nature of academic profession and misled the development of young teachers participating in this field game. To change bureaucratized field towards science field and create a university ecological environment conforming to internal logic of academic profession development is the fundamental method to promote the healthy development of young teachers and to establish effective faculty development policy.