Cultural Capital

Bourdieu defines cultural capital narrowly as fluency in a society's elite culture. Fluency in low-or middle-status culture does not represent cultural capital because these cultural fluencies do not transmute into elite status; they transmute into middle or low status. Bourdieu was interested in how elites reproduced themselves from one generation to the next. High-status culture emphasizes classical art, music, dance, and literature, but it also includes furniture, architecture, cuisine, vacation resorts, and clothing. Knowledge of these arts represents capital because and to the extent that this knowledge can be turned to the mowner's financial and social advantage at multiple points in the owner's life span. For example, when Josephine Smith wears the right suit, handbag, and shoes to a job interview on Wall Street, she makes a favorable impression and lands the job. Josephine's mother and peers taught her how to dress, a culturally monitored skill that paid off when Josephine landed a lucrative job. When Josephine subsequently marries a millionaire and obtains a share of his fortune, her cultural capital has produced additional financial capital.

Upper-class people acquire cultural capital in the family and in formal schooling. When the school curriculum reinforces the home curriculum, as it routinely does for children of the affluent, students obtain additional access to their own culture in school. Conversely, when the school curriculum contradicts or subverts the home culture, as it does for poor, immigrant, or ethnic minority children, students have to master a foreign culture at school while mastering their own at home. Even if they accomplish this difficult task, poor, immigrant, and minority children still do not learn everything they need to know in order to access the upper class later in life. Schools do not teach all the cultural knowledge needed for that access. For example, they do not teach dress, table manners, and demeanor. The parallel curriculum of the upper-status home teaches children much class-linked knowledge that schools ignore. Since poor or minority children cannot acquire many forms of class-linked cultural knowledge at school or at home, this cultural knowledge is virtually impossible for them to acquire at all.

The parallel curriculum gives children of the affluent a superior endowment in cultural capital. However acquired, at home or in school or both, cultural capital is converted to social and economic advantage in several ways of which the principal is prestige diplomas. Although formal education culminates in diplomas, degrees, and certificates, cultural capital is quite different from human capital, which also emerges from formal education. The difference between human capital and cultural capital resides in how the capital benefits its owner. Human capital increases its owner's productivity, a competence employers reward with high wages. In contrast, cultural capital conveys social recognition and acceptability on the strength of which people get desirable jobs, marriages, and business contacts. Therefore, the same diploma has value as human capital and as cultural capital; and the difference depends on whether we emphasize the real vocational competencies that diploma represents or the prestige recognition it commands. When a person's education has bestowed both enhanced productivity and prestige recognition, that person has two forms of capital (human and cultural), both of which transmute into money and social networks.