Cultural Capital

The theory of Cultural Capital is a simple one to outline but, as is usually the case, quite complicated to apply. In basic terms it argues that everyone has a "cultural history", accumulated through the primary and secondary socialisation process, which includes anything that gives you an advantage or disadvantage in certain situations.

For example, something as simple as your biological sex or skin colour can, under certain circumstances, be advantageous or disadvantages for your life chances. In South Africa during the Apartheid regime, for example, to be classified as "non-white" was to be considered a second-class citizen; non-whites suffered discrimination and reduced life chances when compared with those classified as "white".

Cultural Capital, therefore, can be considered to be anything in your personal / social background that helps or hinders you during your life. It can, for example, be things like family background and status (Prince Charles, for example, because of his membership of the Royal Family, has greater cultural capital than you or I), income, wealth, educational qualifications or whatever. There is, in effect, no limit to what can or cannot be considered Cultural Capital - it depends, as they say, on the context in which you are trying to achieve or avoid something...

The theory was originally developed by Bourdieu and Passeron ("Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction", 1973). Bourdieu in particular developed the idea of situational constraints by using the concept of cultural capital to demonstrate how the working classes are systematically blamed for their relative failure within the education system and to understand the theory a little more we need to understand the concept of cultural reproduction.

Cultural reproduction means, in this context, the way schools, in conjunction with other social institutions, help to perpetuate social and economic inequalities across the generations. For Bourdieu, the relationship between the education system (considered as part of the political / ideological superstructure in Capitalist society), and the economic infrastructure (or "base") is a dependent one:

In Capitalist society, where the economic infrastructure is highly stratified, and based upon fundamental inequality, this stratification (and hence inequality) will be reflected in the education system. In basic terms, schools will always be forced to turn-out students who can be differentiated in ways that fit them into the economic system.

In basic terms, some students (the minority) will leave school to go on to higher education and professional work while others (the majority) will leave school to go into lower paid, lower status work (including work within the home).

In cultural / class terms, therefore, the class that dominates economically (the bourgeoisie) will also dominate all other classes culturally and ideologically. Schools are seen as agencies of cultural and ideological transmission and the dominant economic class (the class that owns the Means of Production) dominates culturally through the transmission of its cultural values through the school.

What this, in effect, means, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, is that in an economically-stratified society the institution that serves the workplace (education in modern societies) will also have to be stratified in terms of different educational qualifications, for example.

In the past, the very rich could simply "buy" education for their sons (and, more-rarely, their daughters) and this, to an extent, is still the case - the very rich can send their children to expensive public schools, for example.

However, this does not explain why the children of the upper classes tend, in the main, to achieve the highest qualifications in our society. To explain this, Bourdieu and Passeron argue that cultural capital takes many different forms. It might, for example, involve the status that comes through wealth or the ability to buy the resources that may give their children an educational advantage (books, computers and so forth).

It also, however, involves less tangible things. Upper class children, for example, may expect to enter highly-paid, high status, work and, therefore, are more-likely to see the value of educational qualifications as a means towards a desired end (even if, like many of their peers, they find education monotonous and boring). A working-class child, on the other hand, with a family history of low-paid manual labour, may not see education in the same way...

Similarly, teachers may expect and demand more - or less - from students with different levels of cultural capital. There is a great deal of sociological evidence (from writers such as Andy Hargreaves or Robin Nash for example) that supports the idea that teachers classify their students in terms of stereotypical concepts of "ability" - which, in turn, determines the extent to which teachers believe their pupils capable of succeeding educationally and, rather more surprisingly, the different levels of knowledge taught to such pupils.