In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society. [1] 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; [2] [3] thus cultural capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers rare and worth seeking. [4] 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. [5]
In "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" (1977), Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron presented cultural capital to conceptually explain the differences among the levels of performance and academic achievement of children within the educational system of France in the 1960s.
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. [5] : 56
There are three types of cultural capital: embodied capital; objectified capital; and institutionalised capital.
Embodied cultural capital comprises the knowledge that is consciously acquired and passively inherited, by socialization to culture and tradition. Unlike property, cultural capital is not transmissible, but is acquired over time, as it is impressed upon the person's habitus (i.e., character and way of thinking), which, in turn, becomes more receptive to similar cultural influences. Linguistic cultural capital is the mastery of language and its relations. The embodied cultural capital, which is a person's means of communication and self-presentation, is acquired from the national culture. [6]
The cultural capital of an individual is linked to his or her habitus (i.e., embodied disposition and tendencies) and field (i.e., social positions), which are configured as a social-relation structure. [7]
The habitus of a person is composed of the intellectual dispositions inculcated to him or her by family and the familial environment, and are manifested according to the nature of the person. [8] [9] [10] As such, the social formation of a person's habitus is influenced by family, [11] by objective changes in social class, [12] and by social interactions with other people in daily life; [13] moreover, the habitus of a person also changes when he or she changes social positions within the field. [14]
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.
Objectified cultural capital comprises the person's property (e.g. a work of art, scientific instruments, etc.) that can be transmitted for economic profit (buying-and-selling) and for symbolically conveying the possession of cultural capital facilitated by owning such things. Yet, whilst possessing a work of art (objectified cultural-capital) the person can consume the art (understand its cultural meaning) only with the proper conceptual and historical foundations of prior cultural-capital. As such, cultural capital is not transmitted in the sale of the work of art, except by coincidental and independent causation, when the seller explains the artwork's significance to the buyer.[ citation needed ]
Institutionalized cultural capital comprises an institution's formal recognition of a person's cultural capital, usually academic credentials or professional qualifications. The greatest social role of institutionalized cultural-capital is in the labor market (a job), wherein it allows the expression of the person's array of cultural capital as qualitative and quantitative measurements (which are compared against the measures of cultural capital of other people). The institutional recognition facilitates the conversion of cultural capital into economic capital, by serving as a heuristic (practical solution) with which the seller can describe his or her cultural capital to the buyer. [5] : 47
The concept of cultural capital has received widespread attention all around the world, from theorists and researchers alike. It is mostly employed in relation to the education system, but on the odd occasion has been used or developed in other discourses. Use of Bourdieu's cultural capital can be broken up into a number of basic categories. First, are those who explore the theory as a possible means of explanation or employ it as the framework for their research. Second, are those who build on or expand Bourdieu's theory. Finally, there are those who attempt to disprove Bourdieu's findings or to discount them in favour of an alternative theory. The majority of these works deal with Bourdieu's theory in relation to education, only a small number apply his theory to other instances of inequality in society.[ citation needed ]
A number of works expand Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital in a beneficial manner, without deviating from Bourdieu's framework of the different forms of capital. In fact, these authors can be seen to explore unarticulated areas of Bourdieu's theory as opposed to constructing a new theory.
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. [15] 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. [15] : 92 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. [16] 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 advantage on those families that possess them." Specifically computers are "machines" that form a type of objectified cultural capital, [5] : 47 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. [17] 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" [17] : 49 as being a form of cultural capital. 'White' is not a stable, biologically determined trait, but a "shifting set of social practices." [17] : 49 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. [18]
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 internet memes, 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. [19] Through these styles and tastes, they draw symbolic class boundaries in opposition to co-believers from lower-class backgrounds.
Sociologist Paul DiMaggio expands on Bourdieu's view on cultural capital and its influence on education: "Following Bourdieu, I measure high school students' cultural capital using self-reports of involvement in art, music, and literature." [20]
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. [21] : 121 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. [22] 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." [23] He simply did not articulate the differences attributable to gender in his general theory of reproduction in the education system.
Extending the theory of cultural capital, Richard A. Peterson and A. Simkus (1992) distinguish the (secondary) analysis of survey data on Americans exclusively. [24] They use the term cultural omnivores as a particular higher status section in the US that has broader cultural engagements and tastes spanning an eclectic range from highbrow arts to popular culture. [25]
Originally, it was Peterson (1992) who coined the term to address an anomaly observed in the evidence revealed by his work with Simkus (1992),[ full citation needed ] 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. [26] 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. [27]
In the UK, Louise Archer and colleagues (2015) developed the concept of science capital . [28] The concept of science capital draws from the work of Bourdieu, particularly his studies focusing on the reproduction of social inequalities in society. Science capital is made up of science-related cultural capital and social capital as well as habitus. It encapsulates the various influences that a young person's life experiences can have on their science identity and participation in science-related activities. The empirical work on science capital builds from a growing body of data into students' aspirations and attitudes to science, including University College London's ASPIRES Research [29] and King's College London's Enterprising Science. [30]
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 [31] and practitioners [32] with a useful framework to help understand what shapes young people's engagement with (and potential resistance to) science.
Criticisms of Bourdieu's concept have been made on many grounds, including a lack of conceptual clarity. [33] Perhaps due to this lack of clarity, researchers have operationalised the concept in diverse ways, and have varied in their conclusions. While some researchers may be criticised for using measures of cultural capital which focus only on certain aspects of 'highbrow' culture, this is a criticism which could also be leveled at Bourdieu's own work. Several studies have attempted to refine the measurement of cultural capital in order to examine which aspects of middle-class culture actually have value in the education system. [34] [20] [35] [36]
It has been claimed that Bourdieu's theory, and in particular his notion of habitus , is entirely deterministic, leaving no place for individual agency or even individual consciousness. [37] [38] 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's view of the transmission of cultural capital as a key process in social reproduction is simply wrong. And the more detailed findings of the research, as noted above, could then have been taken as helping to explain just why it is wrong. That is, because differing class conditions do not give rise to such distinctive and abiding forms of habitus as Bourdieu would suppose; because even within more disadvantaged classes, with little access to high culture, values favouring education may still prevail and perhaps some relevant cultural resources exist; and because, therefore, schools and other educational institutions can function as important agencies of re-socialisation – that is, can not only underwrite but also in various respects complement, compensate for or indeed counter family influences in the creation and transmission of "cultural capital", and not just in the case of Wunderkinder but in fact on a mass scale. [39]
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. [40] 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. [41]
In sociology, habitus is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character. People with a common cultural background share a habitus as the way that group culture and personal history shape the mind of a person; consequently, the habitus of a person influences and shapes the social actions of the person.
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu, is a sociological report about the state of French culture, based upon the author's empirical research from 1963 until 1968. The English translation was published in 1984, and, in 1998, the International Sociological Association voted Distinction as an important book of sociology published in the 20th century.
In aesthetics, the concept of taste has been the interest of philosophers such as Plato, Hume and Kant.
The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as the ways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's way of life.
In sociology, distinction is a social force whereby people use various strategies—consciously or not—to differentiate and distance themselves from others in society, and to assign themselves greater value in the process. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu described how those in power define aesthetic concepts like "good taste", with the consequence that the social class of a person tends to predict and in fact determine his or her cultural interests, likes, and dislikes.
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct field research may simply observe animals interacting with their environments, whereas social scientists conducting field research may interview or observe people in their natural environments to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures.
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.
Cultural reproduction, a concept first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time. In other words, reproduction, as it is applied to culture, is the process by which aspects of culture are passed on from person to person or from society to society.
Social reproduction describes the reproduction of social structures and systems, mainly on the basis of particular preconditions in demographics, education and inheritance of material property or legal titles. Reproduction is understood as the maintenance and continuation of existing social relations. Originally proposed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, this concept is a variety of Marx's notion of economic reproduction.
In sociology, social transformation is a somewhat ambiguous term that has two broad definitions.
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes and phenomenological method. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society to macro-level analyses.
Practice theory is a body of social theory within anthropology and sociology that explains society and culture as the result of structure and individual agency. Practice theory emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.
In sociology, academic capital is the potential of an individual’s education and other academic experience to be used to gain a place in society. Much like other forms of capital, academic capital doesn't depend on one sole factor—the measured duration of schooling—but instead is made up of many different factors, including the individual's academic transmission from his/her family, status of the academic institutions attended, and publications produced by the individual.
Educational capital refers to educational goods that are converted into commodities to be bought, sold, withheld, traded, consumed, and profited from in the educational system. Educational capital can be utilized to produce or reproduce inequality, and it can also serve as a leveling mechanism that fosters social justice and equal opportunity. Educational capital has been the focus of study in Economic anthropology, which provides a framework for understanding educational capital in its endeavor to understand human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology.
Cultural deprivation is a theory in sociology where a person has inferior norms, values, skills and knowledge. The theory states that people of lower social classes experience cultural deprivation compared with those above and that this disadvantages them, as a result of which the gap between classes increases.
In sociology, field theory examines how individuals construct socialfields, and how they are affected by such fields. Social fields are environments in which competition between individuals and between groups takes place, such as markets, academic disciplines, musical genres, etc.
Symbolic violence is a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu, a prominent 20th-century French sociologist, and appears in his works as early as the 1970s. Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups. It is often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties and is manifested in an imposition of the norms of the group possessing greater social power on those of the subordinate group. Symbolic violence can be manifested across different social domains such as nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic identity.
Science capital is a conceptual tool developed by Professor Louise Archer and colleagues at King's College London. It uses the theoretical frameworks created by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to summarise an individual’s science-related habitus and capital. It can be used to help understanding how social class affects people's aspirations and involvement in science. The concept comes from research in education but is also used more broadly in practice and policy, for instance in the work of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons in the UK.
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