While cultural sociology has recently made a comeback in research on social inequality both in the context of poverty studies and studies of immigrant integration, it has rarely investigated how particular constructions of the problem of socioeconomic mobility are themselves culturally situated. The article addresses this neglect by investigating the problematization of disadvantaged lives within the relational framework of Bourdieu’s cultural theory of the state. Here, the state exercises symbolic violence by transforming one arbitrary cultural standpoint in social space into a universal standard, or a taken-for-granted “doxa,” against which other cultural positions can only come off as deficient. The article extends this perspective by addressing the role of official statistics in this process. Taking Germany’s official monitoring of the socioeconomic integration of immigrants as its case and drawing from document analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, and data from the German General Social Survey, the article shows how such statistical instruments of the welfare state in fact tacitly universalize a model of the good life particular to civil servants, the very constructors of the monitors, as a benchmark for immigrant integration.

尽管文化社会学最近在贫困研究和移民融合研究的背景下对社会不平等的研究卷土重来，但它很少调查社会经济流动性问题的特定结构本身是如何在文化上定位的。这篇文章通过在布迪厄的国家文化理论的关系框架内调查弱势生活的问题化来解决这种忽视。在这里，国家通过将社会空间中的一种任意文化立场转变为普遍标准或被视为理所当然的“doxa”来行使象征性暴力，其他文化立场与之相比只能显得不足。本文通过阐述官方统计数据在这一过程中的作用扩展了这一观点。