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In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, social capital, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital functions as a social relation within an economy of practices (i.e. system of exchange), and includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power;Harker, 1990:13Barker, Chris. 2004. " Cultural capital." Pp. 37 in The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. London: SAGE Publications. thus cultural capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers rare and worth seeking. The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th ed.). 2009. p. 127. There are three types of cultural capital: (i) embodied capital, (ii) objectified capital, and (iii) institutionalised capital.
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron coined and defined the term cultural capital in the essay "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" (1977). Bourdieu then developed the concept in the essay "The Forms of Capital" (1985) and in the book The State Nobility: Élite Schools in the Field of Power (1996) to explain that the education (knowledge and intellectual skills) of a person provides social mobility in achieving a higher social status in society.Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985 1986. "The Forms of Capital." Pp. 46–58 in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education.
Bourdieu further developed the concept in his essay "The Forms of Capital" (1985) and in his book The State Nobility: Élite Schools in the Field of Power (1996). In the essay, Bourdieu lists cultural capital among two other categories of capital: economic capital, which refers to the command of economic resources (money, assets, property); and social capital, which is the actual and potential resources linked to the possession of a durable network of institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.
The habitus of a person is composed of the intellectualism dispositions inculcated to him or her by family and the familial environment, and are manifested according to the nature of the person.Harker, 1990, p. 10.Webb, 2002, p. 37.Gorder, 1980, p. 226. As such, the social formation of a person's habitus is influenced by family,Harker et al., 1990, p.11 by objective changes in social class,King, 2005, p. 222. and by social interactions with other people in daily life;Gorder, 1980, p. 226 moreover, the habitus of a person also changes when he or she changes social positions within the field.Harker, 1990, p. 11.
The field is the place of social position that is constituted by the conflicts that occur when social groups endeavour to establish and define what is cultural capital, within a given social space; therefore, depending upon the social field, one type of cultural capital can simultaneously be legitimate and illegitimate. In that way, the legitimization (societal recognition) of a type of cultural capital can be arbitrary and derived from symbolic capital.
One creative modification of Bourdieu's work is that of Emirbayer & Williams (2005), who use Bourdieu's notion of fields and capital to examine the power relations in the field of social services, particularly homeless shelters.Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Eva M. Williams. 2005. "Bourdieu and Social Work." Social Service Review 79(4):689–724. . . The authors talk of the two separate fields that operate in the same geographic location (the shelter) and the types of capital that are legitimate and valued in each. Specifically they show how homeless people can possess "staff-sanctioned capital" or "client-sanctioned capital" and show how in the shelter, they are both at the same time, desirable and undesirable, valued and disparaged, depending on which of the two fields they are operating in. Although the authors do not clearly define staff-sanctioned and client-sanctioned capital as cultural capital, and state that usually the resources that form these two capitals are gathered from a person's life as opposed to their family, it can be seen how Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital can be a valuable theory in analysing inequality in any social setting.
On the other hand, some have introduced new variables into Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. The work of Emmison & Frow (1998) centers on an exploration of the ability of Information Technology to be considered a form of cultural capital.Emmison, M., and J. Frow. 1998. "Information Technology as Cultural Capital." Australian Universities Review 1(1998):41-45. The authors state that "a familiarity with, and a positive disposition towards the use of bourgeoisie technologies of the information age can be seen as an additional form of cultural capital bestowing Digital divide." Specifically computers are "machines" that form a type of objectified cultural capital, and the ability to use them is an embodied type of cultural capital. This work is useful because it shows the ways in which Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital can be expanded and updated to include cultural goods and practices which are progressively more important in determining achievement both in the school and without.
Dolby (2000) cites the work of Hage, who uses Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital to explore multiculturalism and racism in Australia.Dolby, N. 2000. "Race, National, State: Multiculturalism in Australia." Arena Magazine (45):48–51. Hage's discussion around race is distinct from Bourdieu's treatment of migrants and their amount of linguistic capital and habitus. Hage actually conceives of "whiteness" as being a form of cultural capital. 'White' is not a stable, biologically determined trait, but a "shifting set of social practices." He conceptualizes the nation as a circular field, with the hierarchy moving from the powerful center (composed of 'white' Australians) to the less powerful periphery (composed of the 'others'). The 'others' however are not simply dominated, but are forced to compete with each other for a place closer to the centre. This use of Bourdieu's notion of capital and fields is extremely illuminating to understand how people of non-Anglo ethnicities may try and exchange the cultural capital of their ethnic background with that of 'whiteness' to gain a higher position in the hierarchy. It is especially useful to see it in these terms as it exposes the arbitrary nature of what is "Australian", and how it is determined by those in the dominant position (mainly 'white' Australians). In a path-breaking study, Bauder (2006) uses the notions of habitus and cultural capital to explain the situation of migrants in the labor market and society.Bauder, Harald. 2006. Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu's theory has been expanded to reflect modern forms of cultural capital. For instance, studies conducted by Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman (2017) on the topic of , utilising the website 4chan to analyse how these memes can be seen as forms of cultural capital. Discourse demonstrates the different forums and mediums that memes can be expressed through, such as different 'boards' on 4chan. Additionally, scholars have extended Bourdieu's theory to the field of religion where embodied cultural capital allows middle classes for developing distinctive religious styles and tastes. Through these styles and tastes, they draw symbolic class boundaries in opposition to co-believers from lower-class backgrounds.
Retired teacher John Taylor Gatto, in his article "Against School" (2003), addresses education in modern schooling. The relation of cultural capital can be linked to Alexander Inglis' Principles of Secondary Education (1918), which indicates how American schooling is similar to Prussian schooling in the 1820s. The objective was to divide children into sections, by distributing them by subject, by age, and by test score. Inglis introduces six basic functions for modern schooling; the third, fourth, and fifth basic functions listed by Inglis are related to cultural capital, and describe the manner in which schooling enforces the cultural capital of each child, from a young age:
The idea is to help American society by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the socially unfit with poor grades, remedial-schooling placement, and other notable social punishments that their peers will then view and accept them as intellectually inferior, and effectively bar them from the reproductive (sexual, economic, and cultural) sweepstakes of life. That was the purpose of petty humiliation in school: "It was the dirt down the drain." The three functions are directly related to cultural capital, because through schooling children are discriminated by social class and cognitively placed into the destination that will make them fit to sustain that social role. That is the path leading to their determined social class; and, during the fifth function, they will be socially undesirable to the privileged children, and so kept in a low social stratum.
Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch (1995) examine how those people with the desired types of cultural (and linguistic) capital in a school transform this capital into "instrumental relations" or social capital with institutional agents who can transmit valuable resources to the person, furthering their success in the school.Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D., and Sanford M. Dornbusch. 1995. "Social Capital and the Reproduction of Inequality: Information Networks among Mexican-Origin High School Students." Sociology of Education 68(2):116–35. . . They state that this is simply an elaboration of Bourdieu's theory. Similarly, Dumais (2002) introduces the variable of gender to determine the ability of cultural capital to increase educational achievement.Dumais, Susan A. 2002. "Cultural Capital, Gender, and School Success: The Role of Habitus." Sociology of Education 75(1):44–68. . . . The author shows how gender and social class interact to produce different benefits from cultural capital. In fact in Distinction, Bourdieu states "sexual properties are as inseparable from class properties as the yellowness of lemons is inseparable from its acidity."Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. p. 107. He simply did not articulate the differences attributable to gender in his general theory of reproduction in the education system.
Originally, it was Peterson (1992) who coined the term to address an anomaly observed in the evidence revealed by his work with Simkus (1992), which showed that people of higher social status, contrary to elite-mass models of cultural taste developed by French scholars with French data, were not averse to participation in activities associated with popular culture. The work rejected the universal adaptation of the cultural capital theory, especially in the 20th century in advanced post-industrialist societies like the United States.
The concept of science capital was developed as a way to understand why these science-related resources, attitudes and aspirations led some children to pursue science, while others did not. The concept provides policy makers and practitioners with a useful framework to help understand what shapes young people's engagement with (and potential resistance to) science.
It has been claimed that Bourdieu's theory, and in particular his notion of habitus, is entirely Determinism, leaving no place for individual agency or even individual consciousness. However, Bourdieu never claimed to have done so entirely, but defined a new approach; that is, Bourdieu's work attempts to reconcile the paradoxical dichotomy of structure and agency.
Some scholars such as John Goldthorpe dismiss Bourdieu's approach:
Bourdieu has also been criticised for his lack of consideration of gender. Kanter (in Robinson & Garnier 1986) points out the lack of interest in gender inequalities in the labour market in Bourdieu's work.Robinson, R., and M. Garnier. 1986 2000. "Class Reproduction Among Men and Women in France: Reproduction Theory on its Home Ground." Pp. 144–53 in Pierre Bourdieu Volume I, edited by D. Robbins. London: Sage Publications. However, Bourdieu addressed the topic of gender head-on in his 2001 book Masculine Domination, in which he states on the first page of the prelude that he considers masculine domination to be a prime example of symbolic violence.
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