The legal field as an educational market at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo

Abstract

Supply and demand cause tensions under which the production and acquisition of valued goods takes place. The research is framed by Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of the Economy of Social Practices, the same one that conceives of law as a market that produces various capitals such as legal and political capital, but also bureaucratic capital at a high level of importance. Social production is, in terms of Bourdieu´s theory, the generation of capitals and dispositions in a specific social field. The capitals are the resources or accumulated work that the agents possess according to the interests or inclinations of the same field. Dispositions are those ways of seeing the world, of thinking, feeling, acting or constructing reality that are internalized by the agents that actively intervene within the social field. Therefore, what I know it produces in the field, conceived as a market, in a certain way it reproduces itself there. Capitals and dispositions that the field requires or that are considered effective in it, due to their value as merchandise, prevail. The methodology configured for this work is complementary, according to which use was made of objective information from the field, institutional statistics and the application of questionnaires to students in the two identified subfields, the undergraduate program in Law and the graduate program, the Master’s Degree in Criminal Law and Criminal Sciences of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo. Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with Key Informants to learn more about the subjective aspect of the social reality studied. The educational market of law preserves the forms of classical legal thought, however, it also produces hybrid work positions, endogamous phenomena, and teaching or scientific intentions, which reveals the needs of transformation and innovation of the field to adapt to the current social situation.