Nutshell Studies: Bourdieu (1977)

Another Nutshell Study to add to your growing collection (use the right-hand “Categories” menu to find any you’ve missed), this one digests the work of Pierre Bourdieu “Cultural Capital” (2007).

As ever the Nutshell involves an everyday example to help you understand the basic idea followed by Insights into the concept, how it can be applied to different sociological perspectives and a couple of possible exam-type applications.

Bourdieu: Cultural Capital (1977)

Illustration “The Museum Trip That Meant More Than It Seemed”

Two Year 9 students, Amelia and Brian, go on a school trip to a museum of modern art. Amelia, whose parents are university lecturers, confidently discusses the exhibits with her teacher, referencing artists her parents admire and using sophisticated vocabulary to explain what she likes, dislikes and why.

Brian, whose parents are both shop workers and have never visited a museum, is much less familiar with the formality of his surroundings and feels out of place – “a bit like a fish out of water” as he puts it. He is confused by the art and struggles to engage with it. When asked about them by his teacher he describes the sculptures as “weird” and questions how the “dots and squiggles” displayed on the walls were any different to those he made when he was a very young kid.

Both students are bright in their different ways, but Amelia’s familiarity with abstract concepts, academic language and cultural institutions like museums gives her a clear advantage in her education. Teachers unconsciously interpret her style as “intelligent” and “perceptive” while Brian’s response is seen as “immature.”

Insights

Cultural Capital explains how middle-class students gain an advantage in education through their easy familiarity with the dominant (middle-class) cultural norms and expectations of the school.

Cultural Capital refers to things like the knowledge, language, tastes and behaviours that we all possess through growing-up in a particular society. While everyone has cultural capital, the problem, in the education system, is that teachers and examiners value some forms above others. Middle-class students have a cultural advantage over their working-class peers because the capital they own (how they speak, the things they like, how they behave and so forth) is recognised by schools as valuable. It can be “spent” in ways that give middle-class families an unseen advantage in education as in life.

To develop the idea further and apply it to specific instances we can talk about different aspects of cultural capital:

• Embodied capital involves intangibles like levels of self-confidence and depth of vocabulary that develop as an integral part of the individual’s life.
• Objectified capital relates to levels of access to valuable cultural resources, from books to computers to art.
• Institutionalised capital refers to things like qualifications, credentials and status (attending a prestigious school…) that generate further, symbolic, forms of cultural capital that can be “spent” in later life (the “right degree” from the “right university” gives you access to certain jobs).

Habitus refers to the situations within which people live and how they internalise ideas and dispositions that are shaped by their social background. Amelia’s confidence and analytical style, for example, reflects a habitus aligned with academic norms and expectations, while Brian’s reflects a very different cultural milieu to that found in schools.

Field: Education is a social space (“field”) where some forms of capital are valued more than others. While economic capital might be crucial, for example, in ensuring your child attends a particular kind of school, different forms of cultural capital are more-valued than others within schools themselves. Theoretical knowledge, such as the ability to write an essay, for example,

is generally more-valued than practical knowledge, such as the ability to build a desk

In some school contexts, however, the reverse is sometimes true: practical knowledge, such as the ability to run very fast or throw and catch a football better than anyone else may be a form of cultural capital more-highly valued than theoretical knowledge.

Symbolic Violence: The education system implicitly legitimises middle-class culture as “superior” and desirable and symbolically devalues working-class styles of expression as “inferior” forms. The notion of “compensatory education”, where working class children are “compensated” for the perceived deficiencies of their cultural background by being exposed to things like “classic literature and music” is one form of symbolic violence.

Reproduction of Inequality: As with other forms of capital, such as economic or social, those students whose cultural capital most closely aligns with that of the school receive the greater rewards in terms of educational qualifications. While schools have the appearance of meritocracy they actually serve the purpose of reproducing class advantages (cultural reproduction).

Implications

Perspective	Implication
Marxism (Bourdieu)	Education is a form of cultural reproduction. Schools advantage upper and middle class children, at the expensive of their working class peers, by rewarding their cultural fit with school cultures.
Interactionism	A hidden curriculum of teacher expectations, about cultural categories like class, gender and ethnicity, and classroom interactions shape student outcomes.
Functionalism	Bourdieu challenges the claim schools are meritocratic systems: success, he argues, depends more on cultural familiarity and competence than ability.
Feminism	Can be extended to explore how cultural capital intersects with gendered expectations and subject choices.

Exam tips and Where to Apply Them:

Use different forms of cultural capital (embodied, objectified, Institutionalised) to demonstrate your understanding of different forms of educational inequality.

Role of Education: Use cultural capital to question the idea of meritocracy.

Differential educational achievement:Use cultural capital as a way to criticise explanations like material and cultural deprivation.

Subject choice: Link differences in subject choice post-16 to differences in cultural capital and teacher / parent / peers expectations.