The Cosmopolitan Brands of Elite Universities: Reproducing Local Inequalities on the Global Stage

This paper draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the competition for economic, social and cultural capitals within educational fields to analyse the work of elite university brands. Despite their immediate recognisability, exclusive brands such as Nike or Chanel, Harvard or Oxford, possess a nebulous quality that is difficult to define or value. Brands often act as a medium through which relational values are generated and in which consumers invest in a brand experience. The relational nature between brands and brand consumers can readily be understood within a Bourdiesian frame as the competition for cultural, economic and social capitals. Whilst elite university brands perform similar functions of generating value, they also exhibit other characteristics that are more unusual. This includes elite universities being uniquely positioned to ‘self-certify’ their brand’s value without the need to generate greater brand consumption. For example, unlike many universities they do not have to compete for students, and if anything their exclusivity, including along lines of class and race, adds value to the brand. Elite universities also reproduce institutional positions in which they are the final arbiters of knowledge production. Their brands function effectively within global educational economies, such as measures of world rankings, by legitimising the provenance of their local, institutional elite status. The paper will explore how this brand exclusivity functions as a local phenomenon with the ability to generate value and power nationally and transnationally. We conclude elite university brands are ‘Cosmopolitan Brands’ immersed in local and highly exclusive practices which reinforce wider inequalities of class and race globally. The paper draws upon qualitative research conducted at four elite universities in the US and UK.