Cultural Capital

The analysis of consumer culture is premised on both the top-down understanding of the emergence and effects of large-scale systems for the production and market-mediated dissemination of cultural objects, performances, and experiences and the bottom-up theorizing of the process through which people select and appropriate particular offerings (while, by implication, excluding others) as part of their own active attempt to build a “lifestyle.” The concept of cultural capital has recently come to acquire a central place in our understanding of lifestyle choices in consumer societies (Holt 1998) by allowing us to, on the one hand, better conceptualize the usually hard-to-appreciate systematicity to be found in otherwise seemingly arbitrary choices across putatively disconnected consumption domains and, on the other hand, allowing us to link these choice styles to the consumer's socialization history and current social position.

The term cultural capital was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to better understand patterns of inequality—such as educational inheritance, or the differential ability of the sons and daughters of educated parents to be judged as better students by their teachers—in educational outcomes in French schools. Bourdieu and Passeron suggested that educational institutions are “imprinted” with the styles of thought and classification as well as habitual orientations toward institutionally validated cultural goods and experiences of the status groups that exercises control over them (e.g., higher-education professionals). Cultural capital differences among pupils thus partly explained differential educational trajectories for students originating from different class fractions.

In their original statement, the acquisition of a set of tacit competences in culturally privileged households lead to an unconscious, undirected, but ultimately systematic development of an organized set of expectations, styles of appreciation, and systems of practical action in recurrent status-marked situations that Bourdieu (1984) later came to refer to as the class habitus. This class habitus is an enduring (but dynamic) cognitive structure that produces thoughts, reactions (aesthetic, cognitive, and moral), and choices (e.g., what to buy, what to major in, who to marry) that are in tune with and attempts (within constraints) to re-create the environment during which it developed. The habitus does this by making “choices” that are consonant with its conditions of development, because it is essentially a set of practical dispositions that unconsciously construe and expect the future to be similar in shape and pattern to the past, unless subject to a process of radical disconfirmation (for instance, by way of systematic exposure to a series of countervailing experiences).

The thought styles and habitual cultural practices that are rewarded in formal school settings, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, are similar to those that are more likely to be promoted and imparted in middle-class households and are qualitatively distinct from those that are implicitly transmitted in working-class households. Bourdieu's mature formulation of this process came to differ from other arguments as to the impact of socialization on educational outcomes (e.g., those provided by Basil Bernstein) in construing parental socialization as less driven [Page 382]by an unintentional process of “code” transmission mediated by linguistic forms and more by an implicit, embodied, unconscious immersion in an entire social, symbolic, and material environment (mainly composed of parental practices, but also material objects, built environments, as well as specific sensory and cultural experiences).

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