Emotional Capital and Professional Socialization: The Case of Mortuary Science Students (and Me)

Abstract

This article is based on an ethnographic study of an accredited mortuary science progam. It describes a variety of ways in which this program and its students' social lives normalize work with and around the dead. It also draws contrasts between the successful mortuary science students' reactions to the work of funeral direction and those of unsuccessful students (and my own), and explains those contrasts in terms of biographical backgrounds. Drawing on these observations, I introduce the concept of emotional capital and explore how it may be implicated in processes of professional socialization and of occupational selection and exclusion, and in the social reproduction of status distinctions in general.