Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not.     

Social order,cultural capital and citizenship*

The question of whether education should be seen as an instrument of social order is an old topic in the social sciences. There exist several theories concerning this question. Two of these rival theories are dealt with in this paper. On the basis of each, historical data have been looked at anew and empirical research has been carried out into the prevailing conditions in the Netherlands. On the basis of the first theory, which was inspired by Bourdieu and which concerns economic, cultural (including educational) and social capital, data on the Dutch history between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries have been reanalysed with respect to the attitude of the diverse sections of the dominant class towards culture in general and the university in particular. Dutch history can be regarded as a national variant of the universal tensions between ‘culture’and ‘knowledge’and between ‘culture’and ‘economics’in human societies. On the basis of Bourdieu's theory it is assumed that under the prevailing social conditions elementary schools will differ in ‘educational status’in the schools market. Empirical investigation confirms this hypothesis. The ‘educational status’of elementary schools mediates (reproduces) almost all of the influence of the childrens’social background on their school career, and reinforces this influence. On the basis of the second theory, which is based on the work of Meyer, Boli and Ramirez, data on the Dutch history in the Enlightenment period have been reanalysed with respect to the rise of mass education. These historical data give substantial evidence to the theory that the construction of the nation-state is of decisive importance for the rise of mass education. Our empirical investigation, however, does not confirm the hypothesis that in the actual situation elementary schools differ in ‘comprehensiveness’. Neither schools nor parents are oriented towards integration. Rather, the contrasts seem to be getting sharper in the 1980s and the schools as well as the social classes seem to be distancing themselves further from each other. Various sections of the dominant class are busy strengthening their position of power in education. In short, the use of schools to constitute citizens does not lessen the pressure towards differentiation. Thus, the theory of Boli and Ramirez explains the rise of mass education, but cannot explain its social class bound form, a fact that can be explained very well by Bourdieu's theory. Therefore the theories of both Bourdieu and Boli and Ramirez should be regarded not as rivalizing, but as complementary.     

The social gradient in cultural consumption and the information‐processing hypothesis

Patterns of cultural consumption have a strong social gradient which is primarily driven by education, but what explains these educational differences in cultural preferences remains unclear. Explanations based on information processing capacity have gained widespread currency; the perceived cognitive ‘difficulty’ of both appreciating high culture, and of maintaining broad, omnivorous tastes. If, on average, high culture is more complex than low culture then a higher level of information processing capacity may be required to derive enjoyment from it. In contrast, socialization theories suggest that exposure to ‘high’ culture, may explain this gradient, particularly among university graduates with degrees in the Arts or Humanities. To test these two theories we use the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey (n = 1,079) and estimate the association between degree type and measures of cultural preference and consumption, including: film directors, artists, and cultural participation. Compared to non‐graduates, arts, humanities, and social science graduates are more likely to enjoy highbrow directors and artists, and are more likely to be cultural omnivores; while graduates from other subjects are not clearly distinct from non‐graduates in their cultural preferences. These findings suggest that information processing plays a minor role in shaping the social gradient in cultural consumption.     

Cultural capital or relative risk aversion? Two mechanisms for educational inequality compared1

In this paper we empirically examined two explanatory mechanisms for educational inequality: cultural reproduction and relative risk aversion, using survey data taken from secondary school pupils in Amsterdam. Cultural reproduction theory seeks to explain class variations in schooling by cultural differences between social classes. Relative risk aversion theory argues that educational inequalities can be understood by between-class variation in the necessity of pursuing education at branching points in order to avoid downward mobility. We showed that class variations in early demonstrated ability are for a substantial part cultural: cultural capital - measured by parental involvement in highbrow culture - affected school performance at the primary and secondary level. However, relative risk aversion - operationalized by being concerned with downward mobility - strongly affects schooling ambitions, whereas cultural capital had no effect. Thus, we conclude that 'primary effects' of social origin on schooling outcomes are manifested through cultural capital and not through relative risk aversion (in addition to other potential sources of class variations such as genetics). Relative risk aversion, and not cultural capital, affects schooling ambitions, which is relevant for our understanding of secondary effects.     

Book History and ideological hierarchies

The evolving field of Book History has had difficulty in integrating the experiences of immigrant culture. In explaining the origins of print culture in North America, Book History has a tendency to associate lowbrow with immigrants and their struggles to establish a foothold in a new land. Book History therefore symbolically defines immigrant culture as other, institutionalizing a hierarchy so that highbrow or learned culture is privileged. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Homi Bhabha, this paper suggests that this cultural distinction is not only a contingent classificatory choice that sends a fraught ideological message, but one that should be replaced by the idea of hybridity.     

Bourdieu and Adorno: Converging theories of culture and inequality

The theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno both conceive culture as legitimating the inequalities of modern societies. But they postulate different mechanisms of legitimation. For Bourdieu, modern culture is a class culture, characterized by socially ranked symbolic differences among classes that make some seem superior to others. For Adorno, modern culture is a mass culture, characterized by a socially imposed symbolic unity that obscures class differences behind a facade of leveled democracy. In his later writings, however, Bourdieu’s theory converges with that of Adorno. He too begins to privilege the high culture of intellectuals over mass culture by employing the universal standard of autonomy from economic interests. But there remains one vital difference between these theories. Bourdieu grounds the origins of a critical, autonomous culture in specific social structures, while Adorno grounds it in technology.     

Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital

The aim of this paper is to address the dynamics of contemporary cultural capital by interrogating what counts for young people as valuable cultural resources. Considerable support is given in later scholarship for Bourdieu’s model of the social space, as the overall volume of economic and cultural capital combined is regularly found to be the most important axis of opposition, just as in Bourdieu’s work Distinction. Yet, while Bourdieu found the second axis to be structured by an opposition between those with cultural rather than economic capital, and vice versa, many later studies instead find oppositions between the young and the old to structure the second axis. Up till now, this finding has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we hold that considering age-related inequalities offers a powerful way of interpreting recent developments in order to understand the changing stakes of cultural capital, and also their interaction with the intensification of inequalities in economic capital. After a theoretical clarification of the relationship between cultural capital and youth, we will synthesise research on young people and explore the significance of youthful cultural consumption. We will pragmatically focus on the 15–30 years old and put a particular accent on Norwegian studies in our review, as they are the most sophisticated in this genre. Four areas are explored: the restricted role of classical culture; the appeal of popular culture; digital distinctions, and moral-political positions as markers of distinction.     

Gender and Performance Capital among Local Musicians

This article extends Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how learning spaces in the Toronto folk and metal scenes create gendered access to a field-specific form of cultural capital: performance capital, or the instrumental and interpersonal skills required to perform music. Folk musicians develop performance capital in open-access spaces, such as workshops and open stages at local folk clubs, while metal musicians learn in private spaces such as garages, basements, and rented rehearsal rooms. Folk’s learning spaces are open to all aspiring musicians, while access to heavy metal’s learning spaces relies on social networks from which women are often excluded. These different processes of capital development can lead to greater or lesser opportunities for women to become cultural producers: In Toronto, women make up approximately five percent of heavy metal musicians, but almost half of practicing folk musicians.     

Climate,class and culture: political issues as cultural signifiers in the US

Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro‐environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio‐demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston‐area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a ‘classed’ issue – both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational‐choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US.     

The iemoto system and the avant-gardes in the Japanese artistic field: Bourdieu's field theory in comparative perspective

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth‐century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu’s model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu’s field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross‐cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu’s model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early‐twentieth‐century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu’s model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.     

Putting Bourdieu to work for class analysis: reflections on some recent contributions

Recent developments in class analysis, particularly associated with so‐called ‘cultural class analysis’; have seen the works of Pierre Bourdieu take centre stage. Apart from the general influence of ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural capital’, some scholars have tried to reconstruct class analysis with concepts drawn from Bourdieu. This involves a theoretical reorientation, away from the conventional concerns of class analysis with property and market relations, towards an emphasis on the multiple forms of capital. Despite the significant potential of these developments, such a reorientation dismisses or neglects the relations of power and domination founded in the economic institutions of capitalism as a crucial element of what class is. Through a critique of some recent attempts by British authors to develop a ‘Bourdieusian’ class theory, the paper reasserts the centrality of the relations of power and domination that used to be the domain of class analysis. The paper suggests some elements central to a reworked class analysis that benefits from the power of Bourdieu's ideas while retaining a perspective on the fundamentals of class relations in capitalism.     

Cultural Consumption in the Fine and Popular Arts Realms

In this paper, we review recent sociological research dealing with the consumption of culture produced in the fine and popular arts realms. Most of the initial theoretical developments in the study of culture consumption were intended to explain audience segmentation in the fine arts realm under the 'cultural capital' paradigm developed by Pierre Bourdieu. This paradigm shift has led to the current dominance of the 'omnivore thesis' in the sociology of taste. The consumption of popular culture, however, remained for a long time dominated by the Birmingham 'resistance' and 'subculture' paradigms developed in the 1970s. Recent popular arts consumption research has moved beyond the limitations of the subculture paradigm by incorporating the theoretical legacy of the cultural capital paradigm in order to account for patterns in audience and producer differentiation in popular arts 'scenes'. This has brought the study of popular and fine arts culture consumption under a single conceptual framework after a long period of theoretical disengagement.     

What is good taste good for?

Bourdieu afflrme que le capital cultural est utile lorsque Ton veut obtenir une situation de classe supérieure, particuliérement dans certains secteurs, et n'est en fait qu'une seule chose: une culture de condition supérieure. Mais son argument, établit pour une France centralisée, est moins valable pour le Canada plus subdivisé. Cet article étudie les idées de Bourdieu sous tous leurs aspects pour un échantillon quota de Torontoniens. Les résultats suggèrent qu'un capital culturel de condition supérieure existe à Toronto, mais qu'il a peu d'effet sur les relations de classe au travail, ou le véritable capital culturel dirige la culture d'entreprise qui domine les entreprises privées. La culture d'entreprise est aussi repartie en classes et pourrait jouer un role dans la reproduction de classes qui est tres similaire a ce que Bourdieu revendique comme culture de condition supérieure.
Bourdieu argues that cultural capital is useful in gaining higher class location, especially in some sectors, and is essentially a single thing: high status culture. But his argument, developed for centralized France, is less suitable for more subdivided Canada. This paper explores Bourdieu's ideas through a quota sample of 40 Torontonians. Results suggest that high status cultural capital does exist in Toronto, but has little part in class relationships at work, where the true cultural capital is command of the business culture which dominates private enterprises. Business culture is also class stratified, and may play a role in class reproduction which is quite similar to that which Bourdieu asserts for high status culture.     

The strength of weak programs in cultural sociology: A critique of Alexander’s critique of Bourdieu

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures.

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From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

Turning distaste into taste: context-specific habitus and the practical congruity of culture

This article proposes a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus as context-specific, multiple, and decentralized based on nine months of participant-observation fieldwork with dumpster divers in New York City. Dumpster divers are mostly white, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties who eat food from retail trash as a lifestyle choice. Sociologists have recently theorized culture as a fragmented, incoherent “toolkit” of cultured capacities acquired throughout the lifetime. Bourdieu on the contrary, theorized socialized culture as habitus, a relatively durable, classed structure acquired during childhood. While he recognized the possibility of acquiring “specific” habitus (Bourdieu 2000) later in life, he never developed the theoretical implications of socialization across multiple contexts. Building on ethnographic evidence of dumpster divers’ contradictory pursuit of food taste through the distasteful behavior of eating from the trash, I develop an alternative model of habitus as interlinked bundles of dispositions acquired in specific contexts. To theorize the bundled quality of habitus, I introduce what I call the practical congruity of dispositions. I show how rather than being disparate elements of a cultural repertoire, ways of seeing, common sense, dexterity, and orientations “make sense” in conjunction as actors mobilize them in specific contexts: dumpster diving acquires a commonsensical character based on the practical sense practitioners acquire. My understanding of habitus goes beyond the fragmentation assumed in notions of culture as a repertoire of cultured capacities, on the one hand, and the continuity and coherence premised in notions of primary and secondary habitus, on the other hand.     

How are George Orwell’s writings a precursor to studies of popular culture?

George Orwell is known as an acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer, and journalist. But Orwell also wrote widely on a number of themes in and around popular culture. However, even though Orwell's writings might be considered as a precursor to some well-known themes in studies of popular culture his contribution to this area still remains relatively unacknowledged by others in the discipline. The aim of this article is simply, therefore, to provide a basis to begin to rethink Orwell’s contribution to contemporary studies of popular culture. It does so by demonstrating some comparable insights into culture and society between those made by Orwell and those found in the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. These insights are also related to four main areas of discussion: debates in contemporary cultural studies about the contested pleasures of popular culture and experiences; the relationship between language and culture; how social class needs to be defined not just economically but also culturally; and how one might escape cultural relativism when writing about popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofar that some of the cultural themes he explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon.     

Rowing ‘at home’ and ‘away’: sport,heritage and identity in the Malay world

This paper is grounded in a comparison of the cultural identifications that accompany Sambas Malays’ participation in rowing competitions ‘at home’ and ‘away’. Sambas Malays are Indonesian citizens from the regency of Sambas, who ethnically identify as Malay. There, rowing competitions provide the sociocultural infrastructure for developing local and translocal cultural identifications. Two related, yet distinguishable, cultural identifications are evident, each associated with a specific rowing infrastructure. When contests occur ‘at home’, rowing is steeped in local Sambas Malay culture and heritage. However, contests ‘away’, in areas loosely identified as ‘Malay’, generate identifications with a regionally based Malay culture and consociality. Utilizing a non-positivistic conceptualization of ‘border’, this paper considers the intersection of culture, politics, economy, geography and mobility in everyday bordering practices producing two overlapping cultural identifications.