Cultural Capital

Forms of Capital

The concept of capital is borrowed from economic theory. However, with Bourdieu, capital has acquired an expanded meaning. By reducing all forms of exchange to an economic one, economists have been utilizing the term limitedly for a long time. On the other hand, Bourdieu insists that social exchange involves a multivaried form of interaction in which social actors are motivated by both “interested” and “disinterested” reasons. Whereas the former are carried out for instrumental reasons, that is, for the purposes of maximizing profit in its multifaceted modes, the latter are activities that are carried out as ends in themselves. Mindful of this and avoiding a reductionist approach, Bourdieu defines capital as an “accumulated labor,” which can be appropriated in the form of “social energy” that acts both as a force and as a principle permeating the social world. Consequently, the place that members of society have in the system of social relations is reflected in their possession of the overall volume and the composition of diverse forms of capital within their respective social fields.

Although varied species of capital, including political capital and linguistic capital, are the subject of academic deliberation, the major forms of capital often discussed by Bourdieu and other researchers are economic capital, social capital, symbolic capital, and cultural capital. Each form of capital is associated with what Bourdieu calls social fields, social patterns of objective relations between different social positions. In fact, capital and field are so interrelated that one is inconceivable without the other. The common denominator among all the different forms of capital is that they are resources that allow agents to maintain their social position or status and thereby occasion the reproduction of social inequality. Yet Bourdieu does not think that agents fall into simple bifurcated dominant–dominated levels, because modern societies are increasingly differentiated wholes where one's standing in one area may not necessarily spill over to other social fields, although one form of capital can be converted into another. Among the four species of capital, it is economic capital that is the most transmutable one. Mostly existing in the mode of material goods, it also has the unique property of being amenable to quantitative description and being institutionalized in the form of legal rights. Social capital, on the other hand, refers to the resources social actors possess by virtue of their place in the node of social relations. Of the four forms of capital, symbolic capital is qualitatively distinct; because it is not specifically related to a social field, it is used to legitimate the possession of other forms of capital.

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