The Distinction between the Absolute and Relative Advantages of Cultural Capital: Different Conceptualizations,Different Consequences

Abstract

Cultural capital has been increasingly understood as acquirable cultural resources that concern a plural class structure and localized relational symbolic struggles. Against this background, the advantages of cultural capital can be conceptualized not only as the gap between the upper and the lower classes (the absolute advantage), but also as the status relative to the peers of a substantively meaningful group (the relative advantage). The current study makes the distinction between the absolute and relative advantages of cultural capital, and illustrates it using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000. Both types of advantages are significantly stratified by family origin, but the absolute advantage has a significantly stronger positive correlation with test performances than the relative advantage while only the relative advantage reveals a significantly negative correlation with school misbehaviour.

Keywords

absolute advantage cultural capital relative advantage sociology of stratification

Introduction

The concept of cultural capital has been a mainstay for the understanding of intergenerational transmission of class advantages (Davies and Rizk, 2018; Jæger and Breen, 2016). According to Bourdieu (1977: 488), cultural capital refers to the ‘instruments for the appropriation of symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought and possessed’. This concept bridges the class privileges across generations, since the endowment of cultural capital is stratified by family origin and convertible to children’s educational inequalities. Following this line of thinking, a large number of empirical studies have been conducted to investigate this educational reproduction process (e.g. Byun et al., 2012; De Graaf, 1986; DiMaggio, 1982; Gaddis, 2013; Jæger, 2011; Katsillis and Rubinson, 1990; Marteleto and Andrade, 2014; Sullivan, 2001; Yamamoto and Brinton, 2010).

A common approach to conceptualizing cultural capital is to view it as advantage of the upper class (also called the middle, dominant or elite class) over the lower class (also called the working class), as found in many empirical studies on cultural capital, such as Zimdars et al. (2009), and the theoretical interpretations of Bourdieu’s work, such as DiMaggio (1979). The essence of this kind of cultural advantage, as articulated by Bourdieu and colleagues, lies in the elites’ ‘natural’ familiarity with the mainstream highbrow cultural cues and the rule of academic games, the consequence of their high-culture-ridden socialization process (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Kingston, 2001; Lamont and Lareau, 1988). Drawing on the term coined by Prieur and Savage (2013), the class difference in terms of whether or not to have the specific features of elite culture can be named the absolute advantage (AA).

However, partially focusing on the AA can be theoretically limited and practically misleading. Recent theoretical extensions of cultural capital research suggest that cultural capital might not always take the form of the institutionally recognizable class-stratified cultural goods or tastes, but sometimes involve cultural resources transgressing class divides (e.g. Hanquinet et al., 2014; Roose, 2015); that is, floating and acquirable cultural resources that potentially benefit people of all class origins (e.g. the cultural mobility theme in DiMaggio, 1982 and De Graaf et al., 2000).¹ With this shift of conceptualization, the class gap in terms of cultural capital endowment can go beyond the early family bestowal and be possibly narrowed through intentional learning or institutional compensations (Chin and Phillips, 2004; Kisida et al., 2014; Roksa and Potter, 2011). These theoretical advances no longer take cultural capital to be some fixed elite attributes, challenging the AA perspective.

In addition, more recent works increasingly recognize that the field in which cultural capital operates may not be universal, but localized (Mohr, 2013). This is consistent with Bourdieu’s idea, since capitalizing the habitual familiarity with the cultural cues takes place in a specific local setting (i.e. school) where people engage in relational interactions and comparisons (Andersen and Jæger, 2015; Jæger and Møllegaard, 2017; Robinson and Roksa, 2016; Roksa and Robinson, 2017). Against the background of a localized social setting, cultural capital advantage is materialized not with reference to the fixed class divide, but to the distributional characteristics of the local field. In this case, the AA of cultural capital becomes less relevant. This point of view is also undergirded by the sorting process of schooling, where students of the same class are likely to attend the same kind of school so that the within-school disparities of cultural capital limitedly reflect the disparities between the higher and lower classes (e.g. the frog-pond model in Attewell (2001) and Espenshade et al. (2005)). As far as the comparisons with localized peers are concerned, we name the advantage the relative advantage (RA). This term is consistent with similar uses for other topics (e.g. relative poverty), and neatly responds to the AA discussed above.

Taken together, the advantage of cultural capital can be understood as either AA or RA. Using data of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000, we illustrate this distinction by showing that, both the AA and RA are significantly correlated with the family socio-economic status (SES). However, they bring about distinct educational consequences: for the academic test scores, the AA of cultural capital endowment has a stronger effect than the RA, but for the outcome variables that are related to school environment, such as school misbehaviour, the RA stands out and wins over the AA to reveal a significant association.

The General Absolute-versus-Relative Distinction

It is not uncommon for social scientists to gauge the extent of differentiation with regard to the distinction of the absolute and relative measures. Perhaps the most well-known paired concepts for sociologists are the relative and absolute mobility (e.g. Noble, 2000; Paterson and Iannelli, 2008). A similar contrast can be constructed for income (Diener et al., 1993), educational attainment (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2016) and poverty (Foster, 1998), to name a few.

Essentially speaking, the absolute-versus-relative distinction lies in how to configure the comparison reference. The absolute measure defines the comparison reference to be a priori fixed status (e.g. the class divide), while the relative measure considers the comparison with reference to the distributional status of a particular group of individuals. To place this distinction in the context of cultural capital research, the AA emphasizes the canonized highbrow cultural features whose possession or not is in line with the established class divides, while the RA considers people’s localized, situational and relational grouping process, concerning the peer attributes. For instance, in a sample of five students where their amounts of cultural capital are respectively 10, 20, 30, 50 and 50, the last two students have the AA over the first three when no grouping is considered. But if the first three attend one school and the other two attend another, the within-school RA for the last two students would be zero since no one wins out, while the third student has the RA over the first and second schoolmates.

Arguably, in the case of meaningful social grouping (e.g. schooling), the RA would be more relevant and bring about new insights compared with the AA. Specifically, the theoretical implications of the AA-versus-RA distinction are summarized in Table 1. In the following sections, we will discuss them in detail.

Table 1.

Distinctions of the absolute and relative advantages of cultural capital.

	Absolute advantage	Relative advantage
Image of class structure	Binary	Gradient
Acquirability of cultural capital	Limited	Acknowledged
Legitimacy	Global	Local

The Two Forms of Advantages in Cultural Capital

Despite many readings of Bourdieu’s works, one acknowledged theme of Bourdieu’s educational research is to understand how family privileges are converted into educational advantages in a seemingly neutral and legitimate fashion (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). The key concept is cultural capital. For each individual, cultural capital is manifested by a particular habitus (Reay, 2004), a subtle and latent system of dispositions to a certain practice (Bourdieu, 1984). Cultural capital helps to maintain the intergenerational transmission of class advantages, because, for one thing, the distribution of cultural capital is unequal: children from advantaged families have more opportunities to be exposed to high culture and cultivate the desirable habitus than the lower-class counterparts; for another thing, the habitus lying beneath cultural capital reflects the socially legitimate culture, so it is legitimately valorized at school. As a result, those with cultural capital have a better chance to benefit from their familiarity with the cultural cues and reap educational advantages. Bourdieu’s theoretical discussions on cultural capital illustrate the idea of AA, but recent theoretical developments considerably extend Bourdieu’s original conceptualization and direct scholar’s attention to the RA. Specifically, this concerns pluralizing class structure, acknowledging acquirability of cultural capital and localizing the meaning of legitimacy.

Pluralizing Class Structure

Because Bourdieu and colleagues approach cultural capital from the perspective of the highbrow culture, the relevance of cultural capital is unsurprisingly narrated, although sometimes implicitly, with reference to a binary class structure between the upper and the lower. As put by Andersen and Hansen (2012: 608): ‘(for the) vague class concepts . . . the main line of division tends to run between the “working” and the “middle” classes’. Hence, despite the multidimensionality of class advocated by Bourdieu (1984),² cultural capital endowment is often operationalized to be part of the privilege of one class over the other.

However, this binary class structure adopted by empirical researchers is a simplified conceptual framework, and it cannot be satisfying practically. As widely noted, class status should be understood as a gradient of hierarchy, with many classes or class factions lying between the top and the bottom (Andersen and Hansen, 2012; Van de Werfhorst, 2010). In this case, the extent of differential in the endowment of cultural capital should not be a matter of ‘to have or not to have’, but instead shows considerable heterogeneity. For example, Jack (2016) finds that, among the lower-income undergraduates, some still cultivate more cultural capital than others. This study exactly illustrates the heterogeneity of cultural capital endowment even within the same class. Altogether, cultural capital is not something that can be either cultivated or not. Instead, a common situation is that a large number of individuals are ‘differentially’ cultivated. This more nuanced differentiation highlights the relevance of the RA.

Acknowledging Acquirability of Cultural Capital

The key to culturally differentiate the dominant class from the dominated class, as discussed by Bourdieu and colleagues, is the symbolic power; that is, the habitual familiarity with the elite cultural attributes. This habitus is believed to be hard to be mimicked and acquired by the lower-class students because the latter simply lack the high-cultural life experiences and the socialization process. Because of this, the cultural capital advantage is often taken to be ‘inherent’ or even ‘born’. Meanwhile, efforts of the disadvantaged students after entering school are often taken to be futile or at least insufficient to close the class gap, despite the fact that they might acquire the specific social, linguistic and cultural competencies (Kingston, 2001: 89; Lamont and Lareau, 1988: 155).

This stance of non-acquirability of cultural capital, however, has been challenged by more recent theoretical developments. For instance, the contents of cultural capital have been expanded to include the general cognitive skills and knowledge (e.g. Lamont and Lareau, 1988; Lareau and Weininger, 2003; Yamamoto and Brinton, 2010). As such, cultural capital refers not just to the long-formed elite habitus that cannot be easily picked up by the lower class, but also some attributes acquirable by the disadvantaged children. Consequently, the class disparities of cultural capital endowment can be narrowed or even closed.

Perhaps the most famous illustration of this point of view is DiMaggio’s (1982) thesis of cultural mobility, where children from the dominated families could compensate for their disadvantaged status by intentionally acquiring cultural capital. The efforts may come from both lower-class parents and children. On the part of parents, it has been shown that the concerted cultivation coined by Lareau (2011) can be adopted by the working-class parents in so far as to provide their children with culturally enriching activities (Roksa and Potter, 2011). On the part of children, they could actively reach out and seek cultural capital in order to compensate for the class-origin deficiencies (Chin and Phillips, 2004). When exposed to cultural institutions, disadvantaged children can be motivated to acquire new cultural capital as new cultural customers (Kisida et al., 2014).

One implication of the increasingly acknowledged acquirable cultural capital is that cultural capital endowment is static and rigidly accordant with the existing class divides. Instead, it should be floating, dynamic and varying. More importantly, with the potential of disadvantaged students to catch up, the conventional AA perspective appears to be limited, and the RA perspective becomes more relevant.

Localizing the Meaning of Legitimacy

The chain from family origin to cultural capital and then to educational stratification, according to the idea of Bourdieu, constitutes a legitimate mechanism of maintaining the status quo. Here, the meaning of legitimacy is ‘global’ since the habitus manifesting cultural capital is linked with the societally established highbrow culture. In other words, it is believed that the cultural differential between classes is based on the ‘common standards’ to which all social members across social contexts are subject.

However, ‘all Bourdieu’s concepts were relational’ (Prieur and Savage, 2013: 249), but such a relationality is not well captured by the socially global idea of legitimacy since it fails to illustrate the ‘localized’ interactions, struggles, and competitions among agents. According to the theory of local legitimacy (Reimann et al., 2012), these situational dynamics matter because they help to establish the ‘localized’ rules for judging the appropriateness of dispositions and behaviours.³ The local heterogeneous legitimacies could even form a ‘discursive gap’ with and thus challenge a universal version of legitimacy (Vassenden and Jonvik, 2019).

Since the seeming neutrality of cultural capital in stratifying individuals is backboned by the idea of legitimacy, the shift of attention from the global to the local legitimacy implies the necessity to study cultural capital in terms of its localized relational field. In empirical settings, this field primarily concerns the school environment, and when placed in the school environment, the RA is more relevant, for two reasons.

First, school attendance is assortative, where children of similar SES are likely to attend the same type of school (Attewell, 2001; Billings et al., 2013). This homophily implies that students of the same school are likely to have similar cultural capital characteristics and what matters more for them is the subtler relativity among peers. Second, as mentioned, the conversion of cultural capital to material educational privileges depends on teachers’ evaluations that are geared to valorize cultural capital.⁴ For a given group of students, this kind of valorization reasonably takes place with reference to the practical group situation (e.g. who is more culturally advantaged within a class or a school) instead of an ‘abstract’ class situation reference (peer evaluation has been widely used by teachers; see Van den Berg et al., 2006). On the part of students, the RA is also relevant. That is because characteristics per cultural capital (e.g. behaviours, attitudes and dispositions) are immediately visible and readily perceivable. Those with relatively less cultural capital may suffer from the feeling of relative deprivation and opt not to continue the formal education. This is called the self-elimination by Lamont and Lareau (1988), a kind of indirect educational exclusion (Bourdieu, 1974 [1966]: 35).

Empirical Relevance of the Absolute–Relative Distinctions and Hypotheses

Thus far, we have discussed the distinction between AA and RA from a theoretical perspective. In order to illustrate the empirical relevance of this distinction, it is necessary to reflect on the position of these two forms of advantages within the whole course of educational reproduction. This is tantamount to looking into two kinds of associations: one between family background and the two forms of cultural capital advantages, and the other between the two kinds of cultural capital advantages and certain educational outcomes.

In terms of the potential link with family origin, the AA and RA only differ in the way of configuring comparisons, so the innate connections of cultural capital, if any, with family origin should be preserved. That is to say, the class-based differential in cultural capital endowment as described by Bourdieu and many subsequent scholars could persist regardless of the specific type of advantage at issue. As a result, children of advantaged families would be bestowed with both the AA and RA. Following this idea, the following hypothesis is proposed:

H1: Family background is positively correlated with both the AA and RA of cultural capital.

For the link between cultural capital and educational outcomes, we suspect that distinct patterns exist for the two types of advantages. Specifically, for an educational outcome that does not directly relate to the local school context, such as the performances in the general tests, it should be the AA instead of the RA that matters more. That is because these tests are taken by students from all schools. Hence, if there exists any innate positive connection between cultural capital and test performance, it would transcend beyond the school boundary, resulting in a pattern where the ranking of the test performance of students from all schools mirrors the overall distribution of cultural capital.

H2: The AA of cultural capital has a stronger association with formal test performances than the RA of cultural capital.

In contrast, if the outcome variable refers to the one that is strongly related to the school environment and peers, such as school adaptation or school misbehaviours, we hypothesize greater relevance of the RA than that of the AA. This hypothesis is drawn based on the fact that school-based performances concern primarily the localized context so that the kind of cultural capital advantage that would better capture such contextual characteristics – the RA – should exert stronger effects. Comparatively, the AA concerning students of the other schools cannot be efficiently convertible to better performances in one’s own school.

H3: The RA of cultural capital has a stronger association with school-based performances than the AA of cultural capital.

It is necessary to mention that H2 and H3 concern the relative strength of association between the AA and RA. Since the RA, as a kind of within-school advantage, should be based on at least some accumulated amounts of cultural capital (this is related to AA), it is not our intent to argue that the RA is independent from the test performances, or the AA is independent from the school-based performances.

Methodology

Sample

The distinction between the AA and RA is illustrated using the data of the PISA 2000. Although it is relatively old, it is very suitable for this article by providing rich items to measure cultural capital endowment (also see Andersen and Jæger, 2015; Xu and Hampden-Thompson, 2012). In addition to the large sample size and the cross-national design, an especially important merit of the PISA 2000 is the availability of school ID, a key measure for identifying school peers and constructing the RA. These merits are not carried on by other large-scale surveys, or the subsequent waves of the PISA where many measures of cultural capital are left out.

Due to space limitation, we do not present the details of the sampling procedure, which can be found at the website of PISA (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/). The variables used in this article are retrieved from the student questionnaire. In the survey process, the student respondents were instructed to read and fill out the questionnaire by themselves in order to minimize the influences from teachers. In addition, according to the survey manual, to ensure survey quality, the respondents were reminded that: ‘In this questionnaire, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Your answers should be the ones that are “right” for you.’

The original sample size of the PISA 2000 is 228,784, including respondents from 43 societies. However, some societies fail to provide valid information for some key variables (e.g. location), and some societies surveyed less than 50 students per school (the school size restriction is necessary for the construction of the RA, as discussed below). After excluding these societies, we have 33 societies for the final analyses. To handle the other kinds of missing data, we use the method of ‘multiple imputation then deletion (MID)’ proposed by Von Hippel (2007).

Measures

Multiple variables of the PISA 2000 are used, as follows.

Family SES

Family SES is an aggregate measure based on the scaled values⁵ of (1) family wealth, (2) parental education and (3) parental occupational prestige.

Absolute Advantage of Cultural Capital

The AA of cultural capital is gauged by calculating an aggregate score of cultural capital. In order to do so, we first compute the scaled values of (1) cultural activities, (2) cultural communication, (3) cultural possessions and (4) cultural resources, respectively for each society.⁶ Subsequently, we summed these scaled variables up to constitute an aggregate measure. Note that this measure is scaled again to be between zero and one so that it is comparable with the RA.

It is worth mentioning that the conceptualization of cultural capital among individuals of different societies could vary. Although many studies adopt the idea of Bourdieu and DiMaggio by defining cultural capital to be the exposure to the highbrow culture, the meaning of cultural capital can be context-specific; that is, the shadow education in Kenya (Buchmann, 2002), the concerted parenting style in the United States (Lareau, 2011) or the learning skills and motivations in Japan (Yamamoto and Brinton, 2010). It goes beyond the scope of this article to scrutinize all forms of cultural capital operationalization. To maintain the consistency with previous studies, we adopt the highbrow culture definition and use the related items in the PISA 2000, but it is by no means our intent to reject other operationalization schemes had they been available.

Relative Advantage of Cultural Capital

The RA of cultural capital endowment, as discussed earlier, should be constructed with reference to a particular group. The PISA 2000 has the merit of providing the school ID for each respondent, which enables us to compute the school-based RA. Here, the RA of cultural capital is constructed using the Deaton index of relative deprivation, which gauges students’ relative position in school, on the basis of their aggregate cultural capital score computed above. The Deaton index of relative deprivation (RD) of a student i is calculated as $R D_{i} = \frac{1}{μ} * \frac{1}{N} \sum_{u} (y_{u} - y_{i}), \forall y_{u} > y_{i},$ where N is the total number of students within a school and µ is the mean cultural capital score of a school (Deaton, 2001; Lhila and Simon, 2010). $y_{i}$ is the cultural capital score of the student i, $y_{u}$ is the cultural capital score of a student u with a higher cultural capital score than student i. A student will feel more deprived as the number of students above him or her in school increases. The Deaton index ranges from zero to one, with one indicating the highest level of relative deprivation. Based on it, the RA of cultural capital endowment is computed as $R A_{i} = 1 - R D_{i}$ , a value ranging between zero and one, the larger, the more advantaged.

Regarding this measure of RA, three caveats should be mentioned. First, the Deaton index of relative deprivation is more desirable than the routine ranking measure because this index accommodates simultaneously the distributional characteristics of the peers and the quantitative differences from others. Relatively, the ranking is partial by only reflecting the distributional positioning (i.e. the same rank vector 3-2-1 is returned for the two cultural capital distributions of 10-20-30, and 1-200-3000. Clearly, the quantitative differences are ignored.) Second, we in this article are interested in the relative advantage instead of one’s extent of being consistent with the majority. For the former, we expect those who can locally win out would have less school misbehaviours and show better adaptation. In contrast, the idea of majority consistency would suggest that school misbehaviour or adaptation is a function of outliers with respect to the school norm. As a result, those who are different from most peers, with either more or less cultural capital, are less likely to feel like they belong.⁷ As shown below, the relative advantage theme is empirically supported. Third, the computation of the RA should be based on a relative large group of individuals for each school. It does not make practical sense to compute the RA if the number of the sampled cases in a school is too small. Hence, we restrict the computation of the RA to the schools with at least 50 surveyed students.

Outcome Variables

The outcomes that do not explicitly concern the school environment and school peers are the scores of the mathematics, science and reading tests. Following the routine practices, these scores are z-standardized for each society (each raw score minuses the mean and is divided by the standard deviation). In addition to them, two school-related outcomes are constructed: school misbehaviours and school adaptation difficulty. The former is measured by the summation of the frequencies of the following misbehaviours in the previous two weeks: (1) to miss school, (2) to skip classes and (3) to arrive late for school. School adaptation difficulty is the summation of the extent of agreement with the following statements: My school is a place where: (1) I feel like an outsider (or left out of things), (2) I feel awkward and out of place, (3) I feel lonely, (4) I do not want to go and (5) I often feel bored.⁸

Control Variables

Control variables we take into account include age in month, gender, grade, number of siblings, birth order, family structure and location. In addition to these individual-level measures, we also include the dummies for the surveyed societies as the fixed-effect terms (Allison, 2009).

Detailed information of these variables can be found in Appendix Table A1.

Empirical Strategies

We in this study examine the association between family SES and the two measures of cultural capital advantages, as well as the associations of these two measures of cultural capital advantages with various outcomes. Because the RA is constructed in terms of the school one attends, the modelling process should accommodate the school-level variance by fitting the random-effect regression models, as follows:

A A_{i j} = α_{0} + α_{1} F a m i l y S E S_{i j} + X α + τ_{j} + ϑ_{i j}

(1)

R A_{i j} = β_{0} + β_{1} F a m i l y S E S_{i j} + X β + ε_{j} + ω_{i j}

(2)

O u t c o m e_{i j k} = γ_{0} + γ_{1} F a m i l y S E S_{i j k} + γ_{3} A A_{i j} + γ_{4} R A_{i j} + X γ + φ_{j k} + ρ_{i j k}

(3)

In these models, subscripts i and j respectively stand for the individual and school, and subscript k identifies the specific outcome variables, so k = 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. $α$ , $β$ and $γ$ are the coefficients. $X α$ , $X β$ and $X γ$ are the product of the covariate matrix and their coefficient vector, where the covariates include the dummies of societies as the fixed-effects terms. $τ_{j}$ , $ε_{j}$ and $φ_{j k}$ refer to the inter-school random error terms, while $ϑ_{i j}$ , $ω_{i j}$ and $ρ_{i j k}$ refer to the within-school individual-level random error terms. All of them are assumed to follow the normal distribution. School-level and individual-level random errors are assumed to be mutually independent. For model (3), both unstandardized and standardized coefficients are reported.

In addition to fitting the above models, we also examine how the AA and RA mediate between family SES and the outcome variables by performing the mediation analysis (VanderWeele, 2015). With this method, the total association between family SES and a particular outcome can be decomposed into two components: one refers to the association that is mediated by the AA or RA, and the other is the direct association that does not go through cultural capital. The empirical findings help to show a complete associational chain and cross-validate the regression-based results.

Results

Empirical Patterns

The distribution of the AA and RA across societies can be found in Figure 1.⁹ Both constructs of cultural capital advantages show noticeable inter-society variation, but the extent of such a variation seems to be stronger for the AA compared with the RA. This is affirmed by the fact that the standard deviation of the society means for the AA is 0.05 while that for the RA is 0.02. In this case, the RA, by considering the grouping process of individuals, narrows the extent of inter-society variations in the cultural capital advantages.

Figure 1.

Cross-society distributions of the two forms of cultural capital advantages.

Multivariate Analyses

The analytical results of the random-effects models are presented in Figure 2 (detailed results can be found in the Appendix Tables A2 and A3).¹⁰ On the association between family origin and the two types of cultural capital advantages (Figure 2(a)), it is detected that family SES is significantly correlated with both, so H1 is confirmed. Note that no multicollinearity exists with the variance inflation factors all smaller than six. Also note that the coefficient of the AA is estimated net of the RA, and vice versa.

Figure 2.

Analytical results of the random effect models.

On the association between the cultural capital advantages and the outcomes, as shown in Figure 2(b), the AA of cultural capital significantly correlates with the performances of all three tests, while the unstandardized coefficients of the RA are significantly smaller for the mathematics and reading tests, and not significant for the science test. School misbehaviour and adaptation difficulty, as expected, are negatively related to the RA. The AA, in contrast, is independent from school misbehaviour, and significantly correlated with school adaptation difficulty with a smaller point estimate.¹¹ The results based on the standardized coefficients, as presented in Figure 2(c), show similar patterns. These results, taken together, generally support H2 and H3.

Mediation Analyses

To show a comprehensive picture from family SES to cultural capital advantages and then to the outcome variables, we perform the mediation analyses, with the results shown in Table 2. The AA of cultural capital assumes a significant mediating role between family SES and test performances, but the mediation effect for the RA is non-significant. The situation is almost reversed when we examine school-based outcomes. The RA of cultural capital can significantly mediate the association between family SES and the negative school-based outcomes. However, the AA has a non-significant mediating role for school misbehaviours and the sign of the mediation for school adaptation difficulty is simply opposite to the theoretical hypothesis. Altogether, the mediation analyses provide further evidence to support the distinctive roles between the AA and RA in the process of educational reproduction.

Table 2.

Results of the mediation analyses.

	The AA of cultural capital			The RA of cultural capital
	Estimate	SE	P	Estimate	SE	P
Mathematics test score
Direct effect	0.145	0.005	0.000	0.145	0.005	0.000
Indirect effect	0.023	0.001	0.000	−0.001	0.000	0.131
Total effect	0.168	0.005	0.000	0.148	0.005	0.000
% of total effect that is mediated	13.69%			NS
Reading test score
Direct effect	0.128	0.003	0.000	0.128	0.003	0.000
Indirect effect	0.027	0.000	0.000	−0.001	0.000	0.163
Total effect	0.155	0.003	0.000	0.128	0.003	0.000
% of total effect that is mediated	17.42%			NS
Science test score
Direct effect	0.139	0.005	0.000	0.139	0.005	0.000
Indirect effect	0.030	0.001	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.112
Total effect	0.169	0.005	0.000	0.140	0.005	0.000
% of total effect that is mediated	17.75%			NS
School misbehaviour
Direct effect	0.039	0.006	0.000	0.039	0.006	0.000
Indirect effect	−0.001	0.002	0.385	0.004	0.001	0.000
Total effect	0.037	0.006	0.000	0.043	0.006	0.000
% of total effect that is mediated	NS			9.30%
School adaptation difficulty
Direct effect	0.075	0.012	0.000	0.075	0.012	0.000
Indirect effect	−0.021	0.003	0.000	0.006	0.000	0.000
Total effect	0.054	0.011	0.000	0.081	0.012	0.000
% of total effect that is mediated	OS			7.41%

Note: AA = absolute advantage; RA = relative advantage; NS = not significant; OS = opposite in sign.

Data source: PISA 2000.

Cross-Society Patterns

What is shown thus far concerns the average pattern net of the society peculiarities. In this section, we present the cross-society patterns by fitting the random effect models respectively using the cases of each society. The results are presented in Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Analytical results across societies.

The society-specific results support the positive association between family SES and the two constructs of cultural capital advantages (Figure 3(a)). Moreover, these associations of family SES with the AA and RA are positively correlated, as shown in Figure 3(b). That is, family SES that gives rise to the AA also promotes the RA, and vice versa. Figure 3(c) through Figure 3(g) show the cross-society patterns of the AA and RA’s correlations with the series of outcome variables. No matter which outcome variable is concerned, the effects of the AA and RA reveal an interesting negative correlation. One possible explanation is the assortative schooling process, where those with strong AA and those with weak AA are segregated from each other to attend different kinds of schools. Consequently, those with high AA could have low RA because the peers are strong. Similarly, those with limited AA might have a high level of RA since the peers are weak. To preliminarily test this explanation, we examine the relationship between the AA and the school mean of AA, which is shown in Figure 3(h). As expected, a significantly positive line is fitted, which lends support to the homophily in the process of school attendance.

We also test whether or not the extent of school segregation is related to the effects of the AA and RA. We retrieve the society-based segregation index from Gutiérrez et al. (2020) and compute the correlation coefficient with the society-based AA and RA’s estimated effects. It shows that school segregation has always been an independent factor. Readers should note that this test is preliminary because the segregation indexes provided in Gutiérrez et al. (2020) concern only 18 societies, much fewer than the number of societies surveyed by the PISA 2000.

Conclusion and Discussions

What is cultural capital? The answer to this question has been changing since Bourdieu coined this term in the 1970s. Despite the conventional approach that frames cultural capital with reference to a binary class structure, limited acquirability and global legitimacy, more recent theoretical advances start to understand cultural capital as acquirable cultural resources that get along with a gradient model of class structure and operate in a specific relational and localized setting. All of these theoretical advances suggest that both the AA and RA of cultural capital should be considered. Following this line of thinking, the current study articulates and illustrates this distinction using the PISA 2000. Although both the AA and the RA of cultural capital endowment are stratified by family SES, the AA is detected to have a significant and stronger correlation with formal test performances than the RA. The RA, in contrast, wins over the AA to have significant and stronger association with the outcomes that are directly related to the school environment.

This study highlights the contextual properties of cultural capital. That is, social context could govern the specific properties of functioning of cultural capital. For the same ‘amount’ of cultural capital, it could bring about different or even contrasting consequences, depending on the cultural capital endowment of the immediate peers: the AA-oriented comparison between an elite-school attendee and a non-elite-school attendee might reveal a tremendous quantitative gap in cultural capital, but attending an elite school where most students have affluent cultural capital would set up a high bar for the RA.¹² This ‘frog pond effect’ emphasizes the ‘localized’ comparative dynamic (Attewell, 2001; Espenshade et al., 2005). Hence, both of the AA and RA should be considered in order to reveal a comprehensive picture per the role of cultural capital in the process of educational reproduction.

Relatedly, the idea of peer-comparison directs scholars’ attention to the research of general school contextual homogeneity, by which we mean the extent of variations in the characteristics of members of a particular group. On this, we suspect that a school where students’ cultural capital endowments do not vary greatly from one to another presents a micro social context that differs greatly from a school where the endowment of cultural capital among students is more unequally distributed. The effect of cultural capital on the transmission of class advantages should be larger in a more unequal environment. Recent studies in social stratification and inequality have already directed scholars’ attention to the local environment homogeneity, and more attention should be paid to this theme in the future (Andersen and Jæger, 2015; Jæger and Møllegaard, 2017; Robinson and Roksa, 2016; Roksa and Robinson, 2017).

Another implication of this article is that the findings provide one potential explanation for the heterogeneous consequences of cultural capital in the current literature. Since it was coined, cultural capital has been widely cited to account for educational inequality in a large number of societies, but the conclusions are far from reaching consensus: that is, positive, neutral and mixed results have all been found (e.g. Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997; Jæger, 2011; Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell, 1999; Roksa and Potter, 2011). Thus far, investigations into the causes of such an effect heterogeneity are still lacking, and our study suggests one potential one: whether or not the measure of cultural capital advantages ‘matches’ the properties of the outcome. As illustrated by this study, only the RA well accounts for the outcome variables that are linked to school life. Therefore, an insignificant finding might not necessarily be the evidence for the theoretical irrelevance of cultural capital. Instead, it could suggest an inappropriate way of constructing the measure of the cultural capital advantages.

This study highlights the AA-versus-RA distinction, and the empirical illustrative case still has room for further improvement. The RA is measured based on the school-level grouping of respondents, which is not ideal. A better measure can be constructed by aggregating the smaller classroom-level information had it been available, or simply by interviewing respondents about their subjective evaluation of their own endowment of cultural capital compared with others. Also, the measure of cultural capital is aggregated based on multiple items. This operation, despite the merit of facilitating our analyses by providing a single and neat measure, inevitably sacrifices analytical sophistication and conceals the more nuanced differentiation. Therefore, if different types of cultural capital – embodied, objectified and institutional – are all measured, we may examine the type-specific AA and RA, which, we believe, would provide richer information about the role of cultural capital in maintaining class privilege across generations.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-soc-10.1177_0038038520973588 – Supplemental material for The Distinction between the Absolute and Relative Advantages of Cultural Capital: Different Conceptualizations, Different Consequences

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-soc-10.1177_0038038520973588 for The Distinction between the Absolute and Relative Advantages of Cultural Capital: Different Conceptualizations, Different Consequences by Anning Hu and Chen Yin in Sociology

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: this study is supported by Fudan University’s ‘Double First Class’ initiative key project ‘Sociological Theory and Method Innovation Platform for Social Transformation and Governance’.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Anning Hu is Professor of Sociology at Fudan University. His research interests include social stratification and mobility, trust and statistical methods. Previous research conducted by Professor Hu has appeared in major Sociological journals such as British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science Research and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, to name a few. For further information, please visit http://homepage.fudan.edu.cn/huanning or .

Chen Yin is Associate Professor of Economics at Fudan University. His research interests include applied economics, capital market and regional economics. Professor Yin has published two monographs and served as the associated editor for five books. His research has appeared in journals such as Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Economic Studies (Chinese) and Management World (Chinese), to name a few. For further information, please visit .

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