Generating the cultural and economic capital of research: The work of Pierre Bourdieu and the rhetorical practices of grant writing

This dissertation seeks to contexualize the fundamental rhetorical acts involved in writing a successful grant in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of class perpetuation through the effective acquisition and display of three kinds of capital: cultural (knowledge, skills, and other cultural acquisitions such as education and technical knowledge), symbolic (accumulated prestige or honor), and economic (material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, and property). After reviewing current writing and rhetorical theory, this dissertation develops a decade-by-decade discussion of the various handbooks produced since 1970 on grant writing. Of particular interest is the extent to which various handbooks implicitly or explicitly base the writing of successful grant applications on Bourdieu's concepts. Taking a specific grant from the Wayne State University Institute of Gerontology whose initial submission was rejected and whose revised submission was accepted by the National Institutes of Health, this dissertation further contextualizes the specific Wayne State grant in terms of the expansion of the relationship between the state and the university and then, specifically, in terms of the history of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Aging, and Wayne State University Institute of Gerontology itself. Drawing upon a close reading of the initial (rejected) and the revised (accepted) versions of the Wayne State grant, this dissertation interprets those revisions in terms of Bourdieu's model to determine which rhetorical strategies made the revisions successful. These interpretations are further developed in terms of my writing my own grant and incorporated in my description of the steps I actually used to research potential doners, create the basic materials, and fashion my final submissions. In general, this study finds that Bourdieu's concept of effectively displaying cultural and symbolic capital to acquire economic capital is extremely useful in preparing a successful grant application, whose award well may be---in itself---a means of class perpetuation.