Managerial Cultural Capital

Conceptual Overview

Bourdieu sees education institutions as important sites for legitimating certain forms of capital as cultural capital: They do so through servicing needs for credentials; hence, not surprisingly, the sociology of education routinely refers to this work. Bourdieu's work is quintessentially French and provides great insight into the reproduction of capital within French society through grandes écoles and the like. Nonetheless, his ideas are not bounded by the social realities of French society. They have a broader applicability to the role of business and management schools and to qualifications such as the MBA. Work by writers such as Jane Marceau and Richard Whitley has explored the acquisition of cultural capital gained by going to business school. Where individuals achieve differential mastery of a particular management discourse, such mastery implies they are “richer” in cultural capital. The acquisition of richness in cultural capital affords, among other things, a capacity to speak and cast pronouncements on a particular domain.

It does not follow that to be rich in one form of capital equates with an overall richness in capital. For instance, Bourdieu distinguishes between those rich and poor in different capitals—the intelligentsia may be poor in economic capital yet rich in cultural capital when contrasted with nouveau riche property speculators who are rich in money but impoverished in ideas of culture. Studying the dynamics of capital over two generations, Bourdieu discovered that those especially rich in economic capital were able to convert wealth in one form of capital to that of another, thus perpetuating elite reproduction. An example would be that of a property speculator or self-made business entrepreneur who is rich in economic capital but weak in cultural capital; by investing heavily in his or her children's education, the children's levels of cultural capital are raised, thus seeing a conversion of economic capital into cultural capital. Equally, the acts of a child of school teachers or university lecturers—who Bourdieu refers to as a dominated part of the dominant class—are rich in cultural capital but relatively poor when it comes to economic capital; typically, for these people getting access to an elite education followed by a career in law would be to provide an example of cultural capital being converted to economic capital.

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