Marshaling the Professional Experience of Doctoral Students: A Contribution to the Practical Relevance Debate

We are arguing that, through three practical domains (see p. 679), these students have acquired a significant amount of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984), capital that is now wasted rather than systematically developed. In fact, the “boot camp” mentality of the early Ph.D. training years seems to have had the impact of purging much of that capital from the students’ psyche (Montealegre and Truex 2005; Truex and Long 2005; Truex et al. 2005). Indeed, Bourdieu stresses that economic, cultural, and social dimensions of human capital only matter socially if their importance in social fields confer some authority, credit, and recognition to those who own them, that is, when either form of capital represent some symbolic capital as well. Bourdieu (1980) also applied his theory to the field of academia to detect domination effects through the three