Curriculum and conversions of capital in the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge

Bourdieu (1986) suggests that students' social skills andcultural orientations are forms of 'capital' that can be converted into other forms of capital, such as high school of college performance or educational credentials. The argument developed in this paper is that within educational institutions curricular structures create pressures and constraints on such conversions of capital, in particular, on conversions of social capital into academic capital. The focus will be two undergraduate programmes-physics and management-at a major research university in the US . I examine the interplay of students' academic and social experiences in the two programmes and show how the curricular structures create opportunities and pressures for particular kinds of social relations that, in turn, influencehow students perform the academic tasks embedded in the curricula.