This study is intended to analyse theoretical relevances of the emotional capital for
understanding Korean mothers' behavior supporting their children's education, and to
critically discuss the limitations included in the concept. The concept of emotional capital
is based on mothers' emotional resources and usually used by women to get educational
and social success of their children. The concept of emotional capital is regarded as
‘gendered capital'. It means women use this capital more than men, and women use it not
for themselves but for their children. Using emotional capital mothers can build up more
power in their family, but it cannot result in change of gender inequality in the society.
Mothers with more economic, social, and cultural capital have possibilities to get more
emotional capital and they can use it more effectively for their children's school adaptation
and achievement. Therefore, emotional capital is supposed to reproduce class inequality.
In Korea the concept of emotional capital enables us to understand why mothers mainly
do the role of supporting their children's education, and how they are alienated because of
it’s limited profits. The concept of emotional capital will be able to explain why middle
class children get more benefits in schooling compare to working class children, and how
supporting strategies of families for their children change according to recent social
mobility in Korean society.
The concept of emotional capital highlighted the sociological understanding of emotion,
and also stimulated studies on the role of emotional capital in work places. However, for
the development of theorizing emotional capital, further researches to understand emotional
capital that men use, to illuminate concrete contents of the concept and the process of it’s
accumulation, and to show how emotional capital exclude disadvantaged group to
reproduce existing class system are required.