Cultural Capital

Theory and Research

The concept of cultural capital was first developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues in the 1970s to explain persistent class inequality across generations. This theoretical approach views the educational system as a main institution through which culture reproduces social class. According to Bourdieu, the higher levels of academic achievement among students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds can be explained not by their superior natural abilities but, rather, by culture. He theorizes that students from elite families have an advantage in schools because the cultural tastes and dispositions that they develop within their families and other elite contexts is also the culture that is invisibly institutionalized in schools. Conversely, children from working-class families encounter school cultures that are at odds with the skills and dispositions that they develop in working-class families and communities.

For Bourdieu, schools advantage elite children who enter them armed with elite perspectives and tastes, and schools reinforce those elite tastes and preferences and allow these children to reproduce the elite status that they were born into. Schooling thus acts as a medium that nourishes the cultural capital stocks of elites and gives them advantages in elite social and professional contexts. According to this perspective, when highly educated individuals enter elite social and professional settings they take with them a set of cultural tastes and understandings that allow them to be at ease and be seen as members of the group.

Bourdieu's research focused on Europe, but in the 1980s, scholars began to analyze how cultural capital might help explain long-standing inequalities in other parts of the world. For example, research findings that involvement in the arts among high school students in the United States is positively related to good grades lends support to the perspective that cultural capital influences [Page 502]educational outcomes in national contexts outside of Europe. This research also complicates the class reproduction model of cultural capital by demonstrating that students—regardless of social class background—can experience educational advantages by participating in elite culture. In this way, culture is not just a resource that reproduces class privilege but can also be a mechanism for moving up the class ladder.

Researchers have also identified new mechanisms through which culture reproduces class inequality by documenting tighter home–school relationships among the middle class than among the working class, as well as a more directed focus on the development of children's talents and skills in middle-class families. The link between school cultures and socioeconomic outcomes in the labor market is further elaborated by research demonstrating that job recruiters for top-tier professional firms favor job candidates who participate in high-status extracurricular school activities such as tennis and crew.

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