Reality and desire: the training and professional trajectories of an elite group in the world of finance

Abstract

The central idea of this article is to bring to light a study about production engineers from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). We started by analyzing the symbolic capital of these engineers in their last years of undergraduate studies and, afterwards, sought them out to discover which were the first positions this professional group occupied in the labor market. We take into account the social capital and the social background of the students and compare them to the position they occupy in the market through the methodology of multiple correspondence analysis. Finally, we verify the homologies and the social reproduction that exists between the class fractions represented by the professional group and their symbolic capital. The importance for sociology of studying the trajectory of this social group is directly linked to the fact that production engineers are the new dominant agents that fill supervisory positions in big companies in the current capitalist financial market.