Cultural Capital

Pierre Bourdieu is the social theorist who gave prominence to the concept of cultural capital —that is, the cultural goods one uses or attains in order to gain social standing. The concept, like other terms coined by Bourdieu—including habitus, field, and others—was formulated in congruence with his special theory of practice. This theory, generative structuralism (or reflexive sociology, as it is known alternatively), is markedly different from previous theories in its coverage of both social psychological and structural processes in the explanation of the ...