Abstract
This article examines evolving uses of Bourdieu’s signature concept of Cultural Capital in American educational research. Bourdieu originally developed the concept in the 1960s and 1970s by mixing French intellectual traditions with ideas from American social science. American researchers have adopted the term over three generations. The first generation understood the concept during the 1970s and early 1980s within broader traditions of mobility research, educational stratification, and conflict theory. Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, a second generation produced three variants of the concept. Over the past decade, a third generation has elaborated those variants into three distinct streams. A first stream, the “DiMaggio tradition,” uses survey methods to conceive cultural capital as resources that shape student outcomes. A second stream, the “Lareau tradition,” uses qualitative observations to interpret cultural capital as family strategies that align with schools’ institutional rewards. A third stream, the “Collins tradition,” offers the most micro-oriented conception of cultural capital, seen as stocks of meanings that facilitate ritual interactions. We end by assessing this evolution and offering possibilities for a next generation of research.
“Cultural capital,” Pierre Bourdieu’s signature concept, has become a mainstay in American educational research, invoked in hundreds of academic works over several decades. Bourdieu is a celebrated figure across different segments of educational research. The American Sociological Association’s section on Sociology of Education names its best book prize “The Pierre Bourdieu Award.” Citation counts in education journals rate him among the top authors, the lone nonpsychologist in the top 10 (Walters & Lareau, 2009). Because his work spanned ethnography, survey research, and philosophy-inspired theorizing, and yet remained grounded in empiricism, Bourdieu’s ideas appeal to many educational researchers, particularly those using sociological approaches. Many scholars have attested to the importance of Bourdieu’s research in both sociology and education (Grenfell & James, 2004; James, 2011; Nash, 1990; Rawolle & Lingard, 2008, 2013; Sullivan, 2002). Cultural capital has long been part of the lexicon of researchers interested in the cultural correlates of educational stratification. It has proven to be a remarkably durable concept since having entered English-language educational research in the 1970s, with citations and references to it continually rising (Lamont, 2012b; Ollion & Abbott, 2015; Sallaz & Zavisca, 2007; Serre & Wagner, 2015; Stokes & McLevey, 2016).
But what exactly is meant by the term? In its most generic version, the term “cultural capital” refers to cultural traits that are rewarded in fields like education. Yet Bourdieu himself used the term differently in his various writings. Indeed, 45 years after its introduction into English-language research, there is still no consensus over its definition. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s concept has inspired a wide range of empirical work, utilizing varying definitions and methods over the past several decades. This article reviews the evolving uses of the concept in empirical studies of education. Its purpose is not to restate Bourdieu’s ideas in detail, nor to rehearse all of the praise and criticism they have encountered, but rather to catalogue the wide range of empirical usages of the term, tracking its various branches and extensions. We focus mainly on scholarship done in United States and on English-language work from other countries that has been directly inspired by American studies.
To capture the variety of studies that invoke the concept of cultural capital, our review takes a narrative approach. Quantitative studies are only one of several types of that research, and so any meta-analysis or systematic review would exclude the other branches. Even among quantitative researchers, there are no agreed-upon and standardized survey measures, scales, or items for observational checklists. From a strictly scientific vantage point, this lack of consensus might be seen to weaken the term’s conceptual power and empirical rigor. Yet the concept has flourished in educational research nonetheless. In our concluding section, we attempt to understand the curious career of the term, assessing its utility for educational researchers, and pondering future directions for research.
To build our review, we combined impressionistic and semistructured techniques. In the initial phase, we devised our framework using our broad impression of Bourdieu’s writings and the empirical literature on cultural capital, surmising that the latter had unfolded over three generations in three branches. In the subsequent phase, we searched more systematically within those categories, looking for peer-reviewed journal articles and dissertations published between 2000 and 2017. We used online databases in the areas of sociology, social sciences, and education, along with Google Scholar. We searched combinations of keywords including “Bourdieu,” “cultural capital,” “qualitative,” “quantitative,” “DiMaggio,” “Lareau,” “Collins,” and “Education.” In addition, we used more specific keywords such as “concerted cultivation” for the Lareau branch, “high culture” for the DiMaggio branch, and “ritual and cultural capital” for the Collins branch. From there, we used snowball techniques to search for related works in the references listed in articles. We then excluded articles that did not empirically explore the concept of cultural capital. For accepted articles, we created a matrix for each of the three branches (DiMaggio, Lareau, and Collins), noting each article’s title and source, year published, author name, empirical methodology, major findings and results, key words, and country of origin. We then used these matrices to guide our review of how each of the three branches has been elaborated (see supplemental tables, available in the online version of the journal, for additional information).
Our review provides an interesting illustration of how concepts spread through the field over a long term. When Bourdieu’s term was initially received in America in the 1970s, the study of culture and educational stratification was already a relatively crowded field in which a variety of concepts and theories competed and coexisted. Some might predict that the entrée of the term, as part of Bourdieu’s broader conceptual arsenal, might trigger a paradigmatic rupture, a toppling of prevailing approaches and a dramatic rethinking of educational stratification. Alternatively, some might predict that over time, scholars would initially embrace an expansive concept like cultural capital, then refine its meaning until they reach a consensus, then devising for it a set of consistent procedures and measures. Others still might expect Bourdieu’s concepts to be used only selectively, getting incorporated into prevailing theoretical and methodological traditions (for a discussion of these processes, see Lamont, 2012a).
Our review supports the latter prediction. We contend that English-language empirical research on cultural capital has thrived over several decades, but only by developing over three generations and splitting into distinct branches. The first generation consisted of scholars who initially received English-language translations of Bourdieu’s educational writings in the 1970s and 1980s, and categorized the term within an overarching “conflict theory” of educational stratification and mobility. They greeted cultural capital as a fresh idea for embedding notions of culture in a broader theory of inequality, though not as a grand innovation or as a venture into new territory. The second generation applied the term in different ways throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s and created three very different understandings of the term while engaging in many definitional and exegetical disputes. The third generation then coalesced into three distinct empirical streams, each of which has extended and elaborated the study of cultural capital while taking on a life of its own. This latter generation has taken a pragmatic approach, seemingly concerned more about empirics than exegetical conflicts. Contemporary empirical research on cultural capital has thus become increasingly pluralistic, international, and methodologically diverse—little of it resembling the kind work that Bourdieu did himself.
Our ending sections assess the utility of this three-generation trajectory for empirical research on educational stratification, along with the prospects for a next generation. We argue that Bourdieu’s concept has proven to be quite generative; its meanings and uses have continually shifted in response to well-known criticisms, though not by prompting clear “corrections” of problems but by launching a plurality of approaches. The term has endured not by closely dictating empirical investigation but by being amenable to use in a wide variety of research traditions, even those that otherwise stand in opposition to one another.
Setting the Contexts: Influences on Bourdieu’s Educational Writings
France had an intellectual and political climate during the postwar decades that differed markedly from that of the United States. In the aftermath of France’s wartime occupation and Vichy-era collaboration, France was home to a strong tradition of leftist politics. The country had robust Communist and Socialist parties. Paris was a nexus for radicals who sympathized with various Marxist regimes, whether the Soviet Bloc, China, Cambodia, or movements in Africa and South America. Many French intellectuals were profoundly skeptical about the future of capitalist liberal democracies, yet voiced that skepticism with a particular sensibility.
Major French thinkers articulated their ideas in largely philosophical terms, even when discussing social issues. Virtually all the leading intellectuals came from a hierarchical, elite-driven school system, and so they internalized some of its sensibilities, favoring abstract discourse over more grounded forms of debate. They associated revolutionary stances with social sophistication and exclusivity, and liberal reformism with vulgarity and mediocrity. Some had an instinctive disdain for American-styled, empirical research, portraying it as philosophically naïve at best, and as politically toxic at worst, indicative of a liberal “selling-out” that implicitly accepted present states of affairs and failed to embrace more radical visions (for a review, see Judt, 2005).
This political and intellectual climate complicated French intellectuals’ support for major social programs, such as educational expansion and reform. On the one hand, they criticized schools for being class-biased and for ill-serving the bulk of French youth. Yet, on the other hand, their stances did not readily lend themselves to concrete action. They called for new kinds of institutions that would launch entirely different kinds of societies, and from that stance, they denigrated existing school reforms as servants to the entrenched hegemony of Western capitalism. But few radicals could back that uncompromising stance with concrete action, and so many only played the role of social critic.
Bourdieu was in many respects a creature of that context. 1 He articulated many of the prevailing sensibilities, points of intellectual reference, conceptual framings, and analytic categories of French academe. His educational writings were far more drenched in philosophical terminology than were comparable writings by American social scientists. Bourdieu often framed his problems in terms of subject-object relations, existential free will versus structural determinism, phenomenology, or reflexivity, as opposed to a more science-oriented discourse that would involve stating testable propositions, specifying causal relations, discussing measurement, and the like. Bourdieu was also well-versed in the left wing thought that prevailed in France from the 1950s into the 1980s. He often adopted the voicings and terminology of radical politics, depicting state institutions as monolithic structures of domination and the reproduction of social hierarchies as seemingly inevitable; despite describing occasional ruptures in fields of power, he repeatedly portrayed fields as settling back into an equilibrium of domination (e.g., see Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus [1988] and The State Nobility [1989]).
Yet unlike those French intellectuals who proclaimed a Sartrean engagement in politics as their defining feature, Bourdieu championed independent, rigorous scholars who prioritized empirical research over political commentary and philosophical speculation. From his early writings in Algeria in the 1960s (Heilbron, 2011) to his posthumous Science of Science and Reflexivity (Bourdieu, 2004), he presented himself as a scientist who could separate analysis from ideology. Bourdieu did not regard his concepts as products of any leftist politics, but instead portrayed them as products of working through empirical problems (Heilbron, 2011). For instance, he developed his notion of cultural capital as a neo-Durkheimian rebuttal to economistic images of rational actors seeking only utility through education. He embedded cultural capital, in contrast, within an image of “homo sociologus” who acted in a context in which schooling had great symbolic potency and associations with honor and prestige.
When his concept entered the United States, it encountered a very different intellectual and political climate. In contrast to French academe, American academe during the postwar decades had a far more optimistic and reformist outlook. In the aftermath of wartime victory, unprecedented economic growth, an expanding welfare state, a Civil Rights movement, and Great Society reforms, many American social scientists saw themselves as seekers of empirical knowledge that could nurture equal opportunity. In the field of education, they developed a menu of concepts and empirical techniques aimed at measuring unequal outcomes, uncovering biases and barriers to opportunity, and developing initiatives to improve outcomes (for a classic review, see Karabel & Halsey, 1977; for an updated review, see Mehta & Davies, 2018).
Bourdieu was influenced by some of this American (and British) social science. One core influence was research on social mobility—the intragenerational and intergenerational movement of individuals through educational systems and occupational structures. When Bourdieu’s educational writings were initially received in the United States in the 1970s, empirical researchers were distinguishing “structural” from “exchange” mobility. Structural mobility referred to broad historic shifts in economies, often fueled by technological change, that strongly altered occupational orders. For instance, the evolution from farm to industrial to postindustrial economies over the previous century triggered concomitant shifts in broad sets of occupations, channeling employment out of farming and manufacturing and into business and government administration, as well as social services like health care, education, and other professions. Many sociologists deemed these transformations to represent a large degree of structural mobility—an occupational upgrading that improved working conditions and standards of living for the bulk of the populace.
Exchange mobility referred to intra- and intergenerational flows of individuals through education systems and into the occupational order in a process called status attainment. Researchers measured associations between children’s origins and their attainments, and deemed weak associations as indicating fairly equal opportunity, and large associations as representing relative immobility. Using these concepts in tandem, researchers concluded that Western societies had achieved considerable rates of structural mobility, but mostly middling rates of exchange mobility over the postwar era (for a review, see Erickson & Goldthorpe, 1992). To comprehend broad changes across occupational orders, economic sectors, and educational systems, they also developed typologies to characterize gradual societal shifts, variously contrasting “Traditional Society” to “Modernizing Society” (e.g., Inkeles), or “Industrial Society” (e.g., Lipset), and later to “Post Industrial Society” (e.g., Bell). Mobility researchers used these typologies to embed their notions of exchange and structural mobility within grand theories of social change.
Bourdieu both drew on and criticized this research. He used comparable measures of occupations and arrayed them in similar kinds of tables. He repeatedly showed the powerful influences of French children’s class background—usually measured as their father’s occupational category—on school outcomes, entry into university, and eventual destinations in their own occupational categories. Those mobility tables became a backbone of Bourdieu’s early empirical research in education (e.g., Bourdieu & Passerson, 1977/1990). Likewise, in his major treatise, The State Nobility (Bourdieu, 1989), Bourdieu showed that despite massive expansion of higher education, and despite facing greater competition than in previous eras, youth from upper-middle-class origins remained greatly overrepresented in France’s top universities. To explain the generation of these class patterns, Bourdieu also drew on a menu of middle-range concepts from 1960s and 1970s Anglo-American sociology, such as labelling, speech codes, institutional gatekeeping, and so on.
However, Bourdieu also departed from American social science in key ways. He drew on Marxian images of European social classes that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s, portraying sharp contrasts between business owners and professionals with dwellers of traditional working-class communities. He understood working-class culture as a product of industrial economies and unionized factory jobs, often handed down across generations of males, that created class-segregated neighborhoods that were stable and cohesive, though offering few routes for upward mobility. He recognized that this political economy forged strong class identities with thick cultural boundaries from superordinate classes that lasted until the 1980s, as immortalized in Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977). Bourdieu was influenced by Willis’s and other school ethnographies (P. Brown, 1987) that portrayed working-class youth as rarely aspiring to higher education, and as seeing schooling not as a vehicle for climbing social ladders, but as a boring irrelevance for their likely future jobs. Yet being too young for full-time employment, these youths expressed their restlessness by celebrating masculine manual labor, by denigrating book learning as effeminate, and by experimenting with irreverent fashions from the world of pop culture (for a review, see Davies, 1995).
Moreover, Bourdieu also theorized structural change quite differently. He recognized that by the late 1960s, French young adults were entering rather different occupational sectors than did their forebears, that sectors like farming were shrinking, and that education systems were expanding. But he was largely uninterested in the rising quality of occupations and improved life chances, since he focused on underlying hierarchies of social positions. He portrayed expanded higher education and the new postindustrial occupational order not as evidence of dramatic transformation but as an updated form of social reproduction. Even if the new order appeared to be improving standards of living and working conditions, he remained focused on the persistence of class hierarchies. While he repeatedly documented uneven educational outcomes by class origins, he also portrayed successful students, regardless of their origins, as “structural heirs” of a hierarchical system that continued to fuel class domination. For him, this new epoch was distinctive only because it was reproduced largely indirectly through education and cultural capital, rather than directly through family inheritance of economic power. He emphasized that educational expansion was largely legitimizing, not dismantling, inequality. Bourdieu thus distinguished himself from mobility researchers by not deeming “postindustrialism” as representing any kind of momentous change since its new occupational orders remained hierarchical, and since its rates of exchange mobility were relatively stagnant. 2
The First Generation: Bourdieu’s Initial Reception in the United States
The first generation consisted of educational scholars who were among the initial North American readers of Bourdieu’s writings in the 1960s and 1970s. These scholars introduced Bourdieu’s studies of educational stratification to a new audience this side of the Atlantic, including his books, Reproduction in Education (Bourdieu & Passerson, 1977/1990) and The Inheritors (Bourdieu & Passerson, 1979), and essays like “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” (Bourdieu, 1973). They cited Bourdieu in major reviews (e.g., Collins, 1971; Hurn, 1978; Karabel & Halsey, 1977; Murphy, 1979), predating the publication of Distinction (1984), which soon brought him wider acclaim in English-speaking sociology beyond the subfield of education.
The first generation saw four original twists in Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital for their field. First, they interpreted him as conceiving of cultural capital as a familiarity with the culture of the “dominant” class, understood as high-brow tastes, dispositions, and practices engaged in by the upper classes and professionals. That culture was seen to be embodied in higher status literature, music and art, and in subtle styles of interacting, conversing, and expressing personal taste. Advantaged youth were seen to acquire an ease with that culture as their families exposed them to its formal manifestations in cultural products and to its informal manifestations in everyday interaction styles.
Such ideas about class cultures were, by themselves, not news to sociologists and educational researchers in the 1970s. But Bourdieu was hailed for a second twist: He extended the “capital” metaphor to the realm of culture, following Gary Becker’s concept of human capital, which previously extended the metaphor from the realm of machinery to that of human skill. For Bourdieu, cultural advantages became a form of “capital” when schools rewarded them. Third, Bourdieu also followed other “conflict theorists” (e.g., Collins, 1971) who, inverting older functionalist paradigms, directly implicated schools in processes that generated inequality. Importantly, Bourdieu portrayed schools as imposing their own class-biased valuations on class culture, determining the social currency of various practices, manners, and know-how. Finally, Bourdieu claimed that this stratifying process was, however, “misrecognized” under the guise of meritocracy: Schools claimed to be neutral institutions, innocently rewarding sheer effort and cognitive skill in open competitions, while in reality their valuations were arbitrary and class biased.
Embracing this set of ideas, the First Generation categorized Bourdieu as one of many “conflict theorists” of social inequality and schooling, albeit one who, more freely than others, mixed Marxian, Weberian, and Durkheimian influences (e.g., Collins, 1971; Hurn, 1978; Karabel & Halsey, 1977). They also understood Bourdieu’s thinking about reproduction largely in terms of exchange mobility and were largely silent on his structural theorizing. Researchers situated cultural capital among a host of complimentary ideas in their field, noting its compatibility with then-popular concepts such as Bernstein’s (1973) linguistic codes, Rist’s (1970) labelling, Clark’s (1960) cooling out function, and Cicourel and Kitsue’s (1963) gatekeeping. The concept quickly gained currency as a mechanism for explaining disparities in school outcomes, one term in an emerging vocabulary. In particular, the capital metaphor allowed scholars to embed school processes within a synthetic theory that wove together a variety of otherwise disparate sociological themes, including notions of language, labelling, cooling out, meritocratic ideology, and so on. The term thus served as a complement to prevailing thinking about educational stratification. Yet Bourdieu was not seen as offering a dramatic discontinuity from existing research or causing any toppling in the field. The sociology of education already had a focus on culture, evidenced by works on student subcultures, categories of teacher judgment in the [then] New Sociology of Education, Meyer’s emerging institutional analyses, and Bernstein’s work of scholastic classifications (for reviews, see Davies, 1995; Karabel & Halsey, 1977). Nevertheless, cultural capital was welcomed as an additional conceptual tool for understanding class inequalities in schooling—one embedded in a synthetic framework in which class advantages were converted into educational credentials in ways that were obscured and legitimated.
The Second Generation: Key Exegetical Splits
The second generation arose in the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Bourdieu’s fame in educational research had continued to grow, his older writings now bolstered by newer ones, including “The Forms of Capital” (1986), Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1988), The State Nobility (1989), and Acts of Resistance (1998). Furthermore, a series of influential reviews reinterpreted the concept of cultural capital for American sociologists (e.g., Gartman, 1991; Katsillis & Rubinson, 1990; Lamont & Lareau, 1988), exposing more researchers to his ideas. Citations of Bourdieu steadily grew over this period, powered especially by his concept of cultural capital (Sallaz & Zavisca, 2007). But amid this growing influence, the second generation took that concept in very different empirical directions, sparked by influential studies by Paul DiMaggio, Annette Lareau, and, to a lesser extent, Randall Collins.
DiMaggio (1982; DiMaggio & Mohr, 1985) inserted the concept into a status attainment framework. Status attainment researchers examined statistical predictors of social mobility through education and into labor markets. DiMaggio used surveys to quantify cultural capital as participation in high-status cultural activities, and then tested its power to mediate statistical links between class background and school outcomes. 3 He operationalized cultural capital as children’s exposure to cultural forms such as classical music, great works of literature, the arts, galleries, and museums, assuming that such exposure was provided largely by families. DiMaggio reasoned that school rewards for that exposure could be detected in boosts to standardized test scores, teacher-awarded grades, and the attainment of credentials. In this framework, cultural capital became a “primary mechanism” of educational inequality (using Boudon’s, 1974, terminology) that shaped children’s capacity to learn school material.
DiMaggio’s major findings offered a twist on Bourdieu’s overwhelming emphasis on reproduction, however. His data suggested that participation in high-status culture often had an independent effect on school outcomes, over and above measures of class background and ability. He interpreted this as suggesting that cultural capital was not necessarily the exclusive property of the upper middle classes, but was instead a robust resource that could facilitate anyone’s success in education, leading to either socioeconomic mobility or reproduction. Indeed, DiMaggio’s twin emphasis on reproduction and upward mobility distinguished him both from Bourdieu and the other major streams in the second generation.
Annette Lareau (1989/2000, 2002; Lareau & Weininger, 2003), in contrast, took the concept in a qualitative direction, focusing on the class-influenced capacities of families to align their practices with school requirements. In contrast to DiMaggio, Lareau drew on a lengthy tradition of ethnography that elucidated links between class, families and schools (e.g., Hargreaves, 1967; P. Jackson, 1968; B. Jackson & Marsden, 1962; Macleod, 1985; Willis, 1977). Rather than interpreting cultural capital as familiarity with the beaux arts, she focused on class differences in various “home advantages” by which families aligned their practices with school reward systems. In contrast to DiMaggio, Lareau implicitly described a “secondary mechanism” of educational inequality (Boudon, 1974): Rather than focusing on capacities to learn educational material, she examined processes by which already-advantaged families secured further advantages by intervening effectively in school matters, participating in school events, and mirroring educational activities at home (Lareau, 1989/2000). Lareau later became well-known for capturing an assortment of practices with her concept of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau, 2002), a parenting logic that she contrasted to working-class and poor parents’ practice of “natural growth.” Concerted cultivators treat their children as projects-in-the-making, micro-managing their lives through a range of structured activities that can create close alignments between family activities and school requirements. The logic of natural growth, in contrast, aims to satisfy children’s basic needs while allowing them to develop more freely and independently, and thus allows for an implicit division of labor between parents and school authorities. Lareau paralleled Bourdieu by focusing on class-differentiated cultures and their arbitrary rewards in the educational system, but diverged by emphasizing the very active—even frenetic—practices by which middle-class parents customize their children’s experiences and entice educational professionals to comply with their wishes.
A third meaning of cultural capital, albeit less well-known and less developed than the other two, was offered by Randall Collins (1998, 2004, 2008). Collins took the term to its most micro-level, conceiving it as a core element of face-to-face interaction. Collins imported the concept into his theory of interaction ritual chains. He defined rituals as any interaction in which people assemble in small groups with barriers to outsiders, and attain a mutual focus of attention and a shared mood. Successful rituals generate feelings of group membership by charging individuals with “emotional energy,” feelings of social confidence that facilitate further rituals. In contrast, unsuccessful rituals deplete levels of emotional energy and negatively affect people’s motivation to engage in future rituals.
In Collins’s framework, cultural capital plays important roles in rituals when people invoke shared symbols or emblems that represent the group. In his version, cultural capital refers to knowledge of basic vocabularies, concepts, styles, and sacred objects in any set of rituals. Someone with Collins’s version of cultural capital is well-versed in emblems, terms, phrases, gestures, or other representations that have currency in particular settings. In this alternate understanding, cultural capital is a resource that facilitates interaction in any group, not just those with elevated statuses, as per Bourdieu’s usage. It is any stock of symbols that facilitates interaction in any group. For instance, in a Christian religious sect, cultural capital would be an ability to recite scripture; on inner-city streets, it would be a capacity to code-switch and signal toughness, accurately interpret gang emblems, or convincingly engage in “street talk” when necessary. Each type of cultural agility becomes “capital” if it brings one status in specific rituals. This understanding of cultural capital signaled a minor departure from Collins’s previous work on status groups. He came to prefer the term “cultural capital” over Weber’s “status group culture” in order to capture the micro-level role of cultural symbols in charging people with emotional energy in immediate situations, and thereby generating group solidarity in the process (Collins, 1998, p. 984). He originally applied this framework to analyze networks of philosophers (Collins, 1998), and has since applied it to topics as disparate as the micro-level actions of opera fans (Benzecry, 2011; Benzecry & Collins, 2014), school bullying, and many others. 4
Collins broke from Bourdieu by placing greater causal importance on micro-level productions of cultural capital, and by recognizing subordinate cultural forms. He saw rituals as a social mechanism that can transform cultural fields not merely reproduce them. He believed that Bourdieu overstated the importance of cultural forms that are transmitted by formal culture-producing institutions (schools, galleries, museums, literary associations) and overestimated the degree that they are “pulled down” by micro-level actors. According to Collins, intense ritual experiences can themselves focus attention on new symbolic objects, and charge them with emotional energy. When mobilized on an expanded scale eventually “pulled” up to the macro-level, newly charged rituals can fuel cultural change, altering notions of prestige and status among cultural forms (Collins, 2004). Collins’s version of cultural capital thus ascribed greater causal power to the micro-level than did Bourdieu, with a much stronger emotional element.
Collins also departed from Bourdieu by seeing cultural capital as something that could be possessed by nondominant groups. In Collins’s framework, low-status groups do not simply suffer from “cultural deficits” if they are able to generate bonds and confer status among themselves in particular situations, even those not deemed to be prestigious by dominant groups. Whereas Bourdieu emphasized the valorization of high-status culture, in Collins’s framework, anyone who is well-connected into some kind of social group has some kind of cultural capital. The challenge for Collins was to understand how certain forms of cultural capital win out over others, which he analyzed in his book on philosophers (Collins, 1998).
In sum, the second generation imported the concept of cultural capital into very different frameworks. Three starkly different renderings of the concept emerged. DiMaggio embedded it within status attainment models; Lareau inserted it into traditions of family–school ethnographies, and Collins integrated it into his theory of interaction rituals. Each reinvented Bourdieu’s concept in a different way, and strongly imprinted a new third generation, to which we turn next.
The Third Generation: A Plurality of Elaborations
Over the past decade and a half, a new generation of research on cultural capital has emerged. In this section, we argue that it has (a) coalesced into three streams; (b) become disengaged from many of the exegetical debates that continue to animate theorists in the field; (c) become empirically pluralistic and abundantly “elaborated” in new directions; and (d) sometimes cross-pollinated with each other. Below, we describe the three branches of this third generation, focusing on ways they have extended into broader empirical domains.
The DiMaggio Tradition: Aligning Cultural Resources
Following in the footsteps of DiMaggio, a large branch of research has continued to examine the impact of cultural resources on school outcomes using survey-based methods. His initial followers undertook a variety of empirical tests in several countries, including the United States, but also the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Israel, and France (for reviews, see Kingston, 2001; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; see also Aschaffenburg & Maas, 1997; De Graaf, De Graaf, & Kraaykamp, 2000; Farkas, Grobe, Sheehan, & Shuan, 1990; Kalmijn & Kraaykamp, 1996; Katsillis & Rubinson, 1990; Robinson & Garnier, 1985; Roscigno & Ainsworth-Darnell, 1999). Within the premises of DiMaggio’s status attainment framework, these studies had mixed results. Some claimed to confirm Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction, finding strong correlations between measures of cultural capital and social class, and concluding that those measures statistically mediated the impact of social class background on educational outcomes. But others found considerable upward mobility through education, which they interpreted as exposing a weakness in Bourdieu’s theory. Some critics debated the relative importance of high-status culture in school valuations, contending that schools simply reward prosaic things like good work habits and reading skills (see reviews by Goldthorpe, 2007; Kingston, 2001; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Lizardo, 2008; Olneck, 1993, 2000).
Despite these mixed results and interpretations, the DiMaggio branch has been further elaborated in several ways over the past 15 years. First, many researchers have debated the relative impact of participation in elite culture versus other kinds of cultural resources. DiMaggio himself (DiMaggio & Mukhtar, 2004) and others (e.g., Sintas & Álvarez, 2002) have examined whether the nature of “cultural capital” is changing with the rise of “cultural omnivores” and gradual declines of mass participation in high-brow activities. Some scholars have focused on home reading habits as the prime cultural resource that influences school achievement (e.g., Cheung & Andersen, 2003; M. Evans, Kelley, Sikora, & Treiman, 2010;M. D. R. Evans, Kelley, & Sikora, 2014; Kraaykamp, 2003; Lund-Chaix & Gelles, 2014; Roose, 2015; Tramonte & Willims, 2010). Others are examining teachers’ responses to students’ habits, styles, and status signals, with some doubting that teachers necessarily favor students who signal their participation in high-status culture unless they themselves possess cultural capital (Wildhagen, 2009), while others contending that teachers do in fact favor students they perceive as having impressive cultural endowments (e.g., Leopold & Shavit, 2013).
Second, a series of hybrid studies have retained DiMaggio’s status attainment framework while adding measures that operationalize Lareau’s concept of concerted cultivation. Studies have measured parents’ gathering of information about school transitions (e.g., Dumais & Ward, 2010); the positive relationship between paternal age and resources in acquiring cultural capital (B. Powell, Steelman, & Carini, 2006); relations between students’ family background characteristics and their acquisition of new cultural capital (Kisida, Greene, & Bowen, 2014); and networks by which families share cultural resources that bring future success (e.g., Cherng, Calarco, & Kao, 2013). Jaeger (2009) has also merged the two frameworks, measuring cultural capital as a combination of parental socialization, parental investment, and child investment.
Third, studies are moving beyond measuring the effects of cultural capital on outcomes like school achievement to also examine its effects on outcomes such as elite university admissions and persistence in higher education (e.g., Brooks, 2008; Davies, 2009; Dumais & Ward, 2010; Grayson, 2011; Khan, 2011; Sheng, 2014; Zimdars, Sullivan, & Heath, 2009). These studies are not finding strong net impacts of participation of high culture resources on outcomes, but do suggest that a broader familiarity and understanding of that culture can aid competitions to enter elite institutions and to persist in college.
Fourth, the DiMaggio tradition has become increasingly international. Studies beyond the United States have emerged from the Netherlands (Kraaykamp, 2003; Kraaykamp & Eijck, 2010; Nagel, 2010; Nagel & Verboord, 2012; Van de Wefhorst & Hofstede, 2007), Brazil (Marteleto & Andrade, 2014), Denmark (Jaeger, 2009, 2011; Prieur, Rosenlund, & Skjott-Larsen, 2008), China (Sheng, 2014; Wang, Davis, & Bian, 2006; Wu, 2008), the United Kingdom (Cheung & Andersen, 2003; Noble & Davies, 2009; Sullivan, 2001), Spain (Sintas & Álvarez, 2002), Turkey (Becker, 2010), Japan (Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010), Finland (Purhonen, Gronow, & Rahkonen, 2011), Norway (P. Andersen & Hansen, 2012), Belgium (Roose, 2015), Canada (Grayson, 2011), and Israel (Leopold & Shavit, 2013; Yaish & Katz-Gerro, 2012). Several researchers have conducted large scale, multinational studies (e.g., I. Andersen & Jaeger, 2015; Chiu, 2010; M. Evans et al., 2010; M. D. R. Evans et al., 2014; Katz-Gerro, 2002; Xu & Hampden-Thompson, 2012). These studies tend to reinforce DiMaggio’s suggestion that family resources such as possessing books are key predictors of educational outcomes, though they offer mixed assessments of whether they aid cultural mobility or reproduction.
Fifth, scholars continue to extend DiMaggio’s framework beyond social class to variables such as gender and race. Christin (2012), Dumais (2002), Lagaert, Van Houtte, and Roose (2017), Purhonen et al. (2011), and Katz-Gerro (2002) find, for example, that females have more high-status cultural participation and receive better returns than do males. Others, such as Dumais (2002), speculate that high culture participation may “fit” better with female roles than with masculine roles, while scholars such as Sintas and Álvarez (2002) in their study of Spanish consumers, conclude that women do not necessarily consume more highbrow cultural products than men.
The Lareau Tradition: Aligning Family Routines
A new generation of scholars is also elaborating on Lareau’s work. A series of studies have detailed how middle-class parents—mainly mothers—maneuver school institutions and activate cultural logics, aligning their family routines, lifestyles, and practices with school rewards by structuring children’s activities, intervening with teachers, prioritizing homework, engaging in school choice, or preparing for key educational decisions. Specifically, the Lareau tradition has extended in the following ways.
First, many scholars are reexamining variations in parenting logics across a variety of social groupings. Whereas Lareau emphasized differences by class, and downplayed independent differences by race, others are reemphasizing intersections of race, class, gender, and immigration (e.g., Cucchiara & Horvat, 2009; Dumais, Kessinger, & Gosh, 2012; Horvat, Weinninger, & Lareau, 2003; Irwin & Elley, 2011; Lareau, 2015; J. Lee & Bowen, 2006; Naidoo, 2015; Perrier, 2012; Potter & Roska, 2013; Roska & Potter, 2011). Some are examining variations within social classes (Bennett, Lutz, & Jayaram, 2012; Carolan & Wasserman, 2015; Perrier, 2012) and school sectors (Dumais, 2005). Others are examining changes across generations (e.g., Roska & Potter, 2011) and among minority ethnic and racial groups (Archer, 2010; Banks, 2012; Bodovski, 2010; Cheadle, 2009; Cheadle & Amato, 2011; Dumais et al., 2012; Hadley, 2009; Vincent, Rollock, Ball, & Gillborn, 2012). Jack (2015), for instance, examined varying orientations among lower income students in high-status universities, interpreting cultural capital as eased interactions with faculty. He found that poor students who attend high-status secondary schools acquired more ease in interacting within the institution than did their peers who attended lesser status schools. He reasoned that the former acquired that cultural capital not through home socialization but through their secondary schools.
Other scholars are elaborating on the gendered components of these processes. Lareau (2000, 2002) emphasized that mothers did most of the activating of cultural capital but did not focus on gender differences in outcomes. Newer studies are further emphasizing gendered parenting and its impact on learning opportunities for children (e.g., Blum, 2007; Craig & Mullan, 2012; Gillies, 2006; Kimelberg, 2014; Li, 2010; Perrier, 2012; Sheng, 2012; Stirrup, Duncombe, & Sandford, 2015; Reay, 1998, 2000, 2005). Some are suggesting that a child’s gender shapes how their parents encourage them to partake in out-of-school activities (e.g., McCoy, Byrne, & Banks, 2012) and whether they are recipients of concerted cultivation (Cheadle & Amato, 2011).
Second, several scholars are taking Lareau’s emphasis on the active generation of cultural capital by emphasizing how children themselves, not only their parents, can build or deplete cultural capital (e.g., Calarco, 2011, 2014; Chin & Phillips, 2004; Hadley, 2009; Morimoto & Friedland, 2013). Using the concept of “child capital,” Chin and Phillips (2004) argued that beyond parents’ class-related resources, children’s own temperaments strongly influence what they secure for themselves. Calarco (2011, 2014) has taken Lareau’s framework into schools, finding that middle-class children create their advantages by invoking intensive interaction strategies by which they command attention from their teachers. Aurini (2014) has argued that much of the ethos of concerted cultivation has “trickled down” to working-class parents over the past 20 years, though those parents are less skilled at enacting that ethos to bring educational rewards for their children.
Third, as mentioned in the previous section, Lareau has inspired a branch of survey research that has quantified her concept of concerted cultivation (Bodovski, 2010; Bodovski & Farkas, 2008; Buis, 2013; Cheadle, 2008, 2009; Cheadle & Amato, 2011; Condron, 2007; Domina, 2005; Dumais, 2005, 2006; Dumais et al., 2012; Henderson, 2013; Kloosterman, Notten, Tolsma, & Kraaykamp, 2011; Nelson & Schutz, 2007; Redford, Johnson, & Honnold, 2009; Potter & Roska, 2013; Roska & Potter, 2011; Weininger, Lareau, & Conley, 2015). These hybrid studies have brought mixed results. Domina (2005), for instance, suggested that parental involvement does not independently improve children’s learning but can prevent behavioral problems. Nelson and Schutz (2007) found that measures of concerted cultivation significantly predict children’s outcomes, while Bodovski and Farkas (2008) found positive associations between concerted cultivation and test scores, and teacher judgements. Redford et al. (2009) found that concerted cultivation predicted both student GPA and standardized test scores. Lareau herself has found that mother’s level of education predicts children’s engagement in a variety of organized extracurricular activities (Weininger et al., 2015).
Fourth, the Lareau branch has become increasingly international. Both qualitative and quantitative studies have emerged from France (Barg, 2013), South Korea (Byun, Schofer, & Kim, 2012), the United Kingdom (Crozier, Reay, & James, 2011; Gracia, 2015; Henderson, 2013; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2013; Pensiero, 2011; Stirrup et al., 2015; Vincent & Ball, 2007), the Netherlands (Kloosterman et al., 2011), China (Sheng, 2012, 2014), Taiwan (Shih & Yi, 2014), Denmark (Jaeger, 2009), Canada (Davies & Aurini, 2008; Milne, 2011; Milne & Aurini, 2015), Australia (Naidoo, 2015), Cyprus (Symeou, 2007), and Ireland (McCoy et al., 2012).
Fifth, the Lareau tradition has been extended into new empirical realms beyond its original focus on family involvement and school achievement. Lareau herself has examined conflicts between involved organized parents and school personnel (Lareau & Muñoz, 2012).
Milne and Aurini (2015) have argued that school discipline policy shifts from zero tolerance to those known as “progressive discipline” have created a space for parents to influence students’ disciplinary outcomes, since progressive discipline calls for greater parental negotiation with school officials. Importantly, Milne and Aurini (2015) found that higher socioeconomic status parents had more cultural know-how needed to advocate for their children in disciplinary cases. Others have examined how cultural capital and concerted cultivation infuse parents’ school choice (Davies & Aurini, 2008; Cucchiara, 2013). Some have even examined the unequal distribution of civic engagement opportunities (Morimoto & Friedland, 2013). Finally, qualitative researchers have examined how parents’ cultural capital can help them navigate their search for school accommodations and advantageous diagnoses (Demerath, 2009; Deroche, 2014; Ong-Dean, 2009; Ong-Dean, Daly, & Park, 2011). The latter three studies each found that highly educated parents with great volumes of cultural capital were likelier to obtain advantageous labels and interventions for their children. These examples from school choice, discipline, and special education each illustrate the broadening of the Lareau branch from core outcomes like achievement and attainment to other educational realms. Their common theme is that cultural capital is the resource that allows advantaged parents to exploit a variety of discretionary spaces in schools.
The Collins Tradition: Aligning Interaction Rituals
Numerous scholars have applied interaction ritual theory to schooling over the past decade. Several find that teachers have varying degrees of success when they attempt to spark student interest and deepen understandings of school material by incorporating elements of peer culture (e.g., Olitsky, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Smardon, 2004, 2005). Sargeant (2009), for instance, has applied Collins’s theory to analyze China’s embrace of progressive pedagogy over rote methods in its hope to make its schools more engaging and student-directed. Hallett (2007, 2010) used Collins to inject his usage of cultural capital with a stronger emotional component when he examined the unsettling of authority relations between teachers and administrators during a period of policy change. McFarland (2001, 2004) drew on the same framework to observe various kinds of “resistance” and “drama” in classrooms that distract students from school-sponsored interactions. Bortolin (2013) examined how Gay-Straight Alliances in schools partly upended traditional peer norms that prized heterosexual attractiveness and tended to deplete the emotional energy of sexual minorities, bullied students, and other low-status peers. In sum, these otherwise dissimilar studies each observe group interactions to gauge their alignment with school reward processes.
More recently, Rivera (2015) has used interaction ritual theory to examine emotional processes in elite job interviews. Her work complements the Collins branch by highlighting the emotional dimensions of cultural capital in stratifying contests, examining how shared stocks of activities and meanings get rewarded and prized in gatekeeping rituals. By extending this thinking from college graduation into the hiring process, her work offers a glimpse into the changing nature of cultural capital among gatekeepers in later stages of life.
The Collins tradition also connects to a venerable body of work on youth subcultures. For more than a half century since Coleman’s (1962) Adolescent Society, sociologists have documented how school-based peers generate their own emotional energy, and how educators sometimes attempt to suppress that energy, and at other times seek to rechannel it toward schools’ intellectual, athletic, or social goals. Older work from the 1950s and 1960s mostly explored mismatches between schools and student subcultures using a crime and deviance framework to examine how working-class teens, particularly males, disengaged from school dictates, deeming them irrelevant for their future work and family lives (Davies, 1995). In the 1970s and 1980s, Marxists reinterpreted these processes as acts of “resistance” to capitalism (e.g., Macleod, 1985; Willis, 1977) or, among Black American youth, to “acting White” (Ogbu, 1979). In this literature, teens’ alternative slang and oppositional meanings were seen to defy and disrupt official educational activities while also generating their own emotional charges and social hierarchies, most of which were misaligned with school rewards. Collins’s framework speaks to these classic accounts by portraying youth subcultures as rituals that generate group-specific cultural capital.
For the past 15 years, American ethnographers have conducted similar subcultural analyses in racially segregated, deindustrialized cities. They have described street-based subcultures that, if anything, are even further mismatched with conventional student roles than those described in a previous generation (e.g., Anderson, 1999; Goffman, 2014; Paulle, 2013). They too are highlighting mismatches between youth’s focal peer interests and school’s prescribed student roles; these incongruences are particularly glaring among poor and minority males (e.g., Carter, 2003, 2006; DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013; Morris, 2012). But notions of mismatch have been tempered somewhat in a literature on what is known as “subcultural capital” (Carter, 2006; Hollingworth, 2015) or multicultural capital (Achinstein, Curry, & Ogawa, 2015; Bryson, 1996). These works describe variations in cultural capital by gender, race, and class (e.g., Achinstein et al., 2015; Bettie, 2003; Cho, 2010; Espino, 2014; Hollingworth, 2015; Lu, 2013; Morris, 2012; Olneck, 1993, 2000, 2001; Paulle, 2013; Rios-Ellis et al., 2015; Warikoo, 2011; Yosso, 2005). Some studies have revived old criticisms of Bourdieu for emphasizing “family deficits”; these critics instead emphasize that families with modest incomes have unrecognized “funds of knowledge” and community cultural wealth—skills and emotional resources—that allow them to survive with pride and respect (Gonsalves, 2014; Gonzalez et al., 1995; Kiyama, 2010; Moje et al., 2004; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Yosso, 2005). These authors claim that if educators see these resources as pedagogically worthy, and if institutional agents such as guidance counselors provide effective support, these families are less likely to view schools as impenetrable fortresses (Stanton-Salazar, 1997; Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch, 1995; Stanton-Salazar & Spina, 2000, 2005). Espino (2014) uses this asset-based conception to study graduate school completion among Mexican American PhD students. Similar studies focus on “multicultural navigators” and “cultural straddlers” (Carter, 2006) who mix cultural resources from both minority and majority communities, balancing their pursuit of school rewards with the cultural demands of their peers.
Furthermore, some literature is exploring peer orientations beyond prevailing “middle-class/working-class” and “White–Black” dichotomies, focusing on high achieving Asian Americans (Jimenez & Horowitz, 2013); Mexican American high school students (Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch, 1995); high school students in India (Milner, 2013); immigrants in London, England, and Amsterdam (Paulle, 2013; Warikoo, 2011); and Chinese peer groups (Hadley, 2009). Likewise, Lu (2013) explored how Chinese immigrant families develop their own kind of capital that pays off in school. Viewed as a whole, the Collins branch has done the most to extend analyses of cultural capital to nondominant groups. While it is the least developed of the three traditions, it has enriched prevailing understandings of cultural capital by taking it to the micro-level.
Two Paths Toward the Next Generation?
What are the likely directions for a next generation of research on cultural capital? One possible direction, in response to calls from theorists, might be to re-embed the concept within Bourdieu’s fuller framework. Commentators have faulted empirical researchers for disconnecting cultural capital from his accompanying concepts of field, habitus, and practice (e.g., Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Lee & Kramer, 2012; Lizardo, 2008). Decrying studies that tear the concept out of its surrounding framework and its related notions of field, habitus, and practice, they contend that forms of culture become “capital” only in relation to the dynamics of its surrounding field. The challenge, they note, is to understand why certain cultural traits are valorized and ascribed with value and honor in certain fields. They argue that cultural capital should not be conceived as having any a priori substance; rather it is any cultural capacity that gets consecrated in its surrounding field. Bourdieu focused on traditional European high-status culture only because it was rewarded in French schools, they note. Bourdieu himself (e.g., Bourdieu, 1990, chapter 7; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) long voiced this concern, contending that cultural capital is a relational concept, not a substantive one.
A second possible direction is that each of the three existing branches could further embed their understanding of cultural capital within their own frameworks. In this direction, each branch would not need to draw explicitly on Bourdieu’s broader framework if they can develop their own substitutes for context (field) and socialization (habitus).
For instance, the Collins branch could link its version of cultural capital to the surrounding field by drawing on Collins’s (1979) classic ideas about credential dynamics and status competition. The Collins branch is already context-sensitive, conceiving cultural capital less as a substantive trait and more as a capacity to engage in successful rituals. To further develop a parallel to a conception of habitus, this branch could also draw on Collins’s (2004) ideas about stocks of emotional energy and long-standing ritual chains. Combining notions of credential competition and ritual chains, future studies could specify which group meanings, symbols, and rituals align best with school rewards in an era of ongoing credential inflation and curricular revision. This branch could inject more dynamism into understandings of cultural capital by examining how changing interaction styles, meanings, and status signals can alter school valuations, particularly in our era of globalization. It could also remind researchers that schools host a variety of rituals, not only in classrooms but also in student clubs, sports teams, and informal peer realms; each ritual type can replenish or deplete students’ stocks of cultural capital. 5
The Lareau branch, in turn, could build on her implicit image of the educational field as strongly shaped by stratification in surrounding neighborhoods (e.g., Lareau & Goyette, 2014). That emphasis, along with conceiving parenting practices as forms of habitus, could be used to examine how different kinds of neighborhoods generate different kinds of family practices. So far this branch has implicitly assumed that schools mostly reward similar practices. A next stage of research in this branch could examine whether schools reward multiple parenting practices.
The DiMaggio branch could readily capture links between cultural capital and the surrounding context by drawing on his neoinstitutional theory (W. Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). This too could charge conceptions of cultural capital with a new dynamism. Whereas DiMaggio originally presumed that high-status culture is broadly institutionalized across Western societies, recent works in his branch have reopened this issue, exploring whether high-status culture is still firmly institutionalized in today’s age of the multicultural omnivore, and whether that has changed school valuations in turn. The international scope of the DiMaggio branch well positions it to explore variations in the institutionalization of culture over time and space. Moreover, DiMaggio’s (1997) cognitive sociology could be mined for analogues to notions of habitus.
All three branches would benefit by being sensitized to shifts that have occurred in the broader field of education since the first generation encountered Bourdieu over 40 years ago. His original formulation was based on this implicit image: A relatively constricted (though expanding) higher education system, a curriculum dominated by high-status literature, relatively limited parent roles in schooling, distinct class cultures outside of schools, and strong gatekeeping processes within schools. He described higher education as largely a “foreign territory” for youth from humble origins, and characterized daily discourse in universities as a sort of “secret handshake” among high-status peers. Other influential actors like guidance counsellors “cooled out marks” and discouraged working-class students from considering university. Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital was thus embedded within a particular configuration of educational institutions, labor markets, and class cultures. But that configuration has changed. Continual expansion of higher education around the world since the 1970s (Schofer & Meyer, 2005) has raised educational aspirations and intensified competition, particularly in developed nations, where the majority of youth, including many from the lowest income categories, now enter some sort of college or university. Most youth now possess more school credentials than their parents. These widened flows of students through credential tiers changes the nature of institutional gatekeeping, shifting competition laterally as students jockey to enter the most advantageous programs and institutions within any tier (e.g., D. Brown, 2001; Davies, Maldonado, & Zarifa, 2014; Gerber & Cheung, 2008; Radford, 2013). Cultural aspirations and gatekeeping may change as more “mature” students enter an increasingly elaborate “second chance” system to earn high school credits and/or enter transitional year programs to access postsecondary studies. It is not surprising, then, that newer usages of the cultural capital concept have spanned levels of schooling from preschool to high school to college to graduate education (e.g., Brooker, 2015; Dumais, 2005, Miller, Hilgendorf, & Dilworth-Bart, 2014; Radford, 2013; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). Furthermore, school choice has heightened the role of parents in education; yet only a few studies have explored how cultural capital shapes these new markets. The Lareau branch is particularly well-positioned for this task through its understanding of cultural capital as an ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Today’s curriculum has also changed from Bourdieu’s heyday. The growth of STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) and other technical content, along with most curriculum being written and vetted by professional specialists and bureaucrats, has weakened connections between public school pedagogy and traditional elite culture. Today’s curriculum is arguably broader, more populist, more “omnivore,” and perhaps more open to new forms of assessment and evaluation, reflecting broader trends in society at large (Lamont, 2012a). Furthermore, interaction styles in classrooms have changed over a half century, undergoing what Collins (2004) has dubbed a “Goffmanian revolution” in which formal demeanors have given way to more relaxed, engaging and informal manners. This possibility is ripe for reanalysis by any of the three branches.
Conclusion
Cultural capital is a core concept, coined by an important thinker, aimed at understanding persisting inequalities in schooling, a problem that has long been central in educational research. Since being introduced into the American field over 40 years ago, a range of empirical researchers continue to invoke, reinterpret, measure, and test the concept. We have charted the evolving uses of the concept over three generations and three distinct branches, each of which has taken the concept in a different direction. Through this process, studies of cultural capital have become more international; more sensitive to variations by race, class, and gender; and extended into schooling realms beyond achievement, such as discipline and choice. We end this review by posing and addressing the following questions: Why has the concept of cultural capital evolved in this manner? and has it been useful for empirical researchers?
We contend that Bourdieu’s concept has been popular due to its synthetic quality. His blending of French thought with Anglo American social science gave his ideas a distinctive flavor that has broadened their appeal to a range of scholarly sensibilities. His focus on social class appealed to Marxists, yet like Weberian scholars, he saw class culture as a weapon in status competition, not as a cathode for revolutionary action. Mainstream researchers of social mobility and educational stratification have long been attracted to his likening of culture to “capital,” since it connects seemingly innocent activities such as leisure reading and attending museums and concerts to educational contests. By claiming that the cultures of upper class and professionals were baked into curricula and the cognitive categories by which teachers perceived, judged, and rewarded their students, Bourdieu appealed to both Durkheimians and various Critical theorists who were interested in the social bases of cognitive classifications. By spanning both individual and structural levels of analysis, the concept of cultural capital appealed both to micro-level qualitative researchers and macro-oriented quantitative researchers. Finally, by blending mainstream social science with the idioms of Parisian academe, the concept spoke to the concerns of mainstream researchers aiming to uncover barriers to equal opportunity, while also appealing to Critical theorists wishing to engage in structural criticisms of schooling.
Yet because the concept has appealed to an incredibly wide range of scholars, its evolution over three generations has not been a linear one in which its conceptual clarity has been enhanced or its explanatory power improved. For example, pointed, trenchant, and empirically oriented critics such as Kingston (2001) and Goldthorpe (2007) have not greatly influenced the third generation. Why? It may be that a lack of consensus over meanings and measures of the concept allows scholars from one camp to ignore criticisms or counterfindings from others, and instead pursue their own avenues. The utility of the concept has thus been its capacity to stimulate new avenues of research. That is, while different scholars have fine-tuned their understanding of the concept partly in response to standard scholarly criticism, the aggregate impact of criticisms has not been to rectify “mistakes” such as vague conceptualization or a lack of empirical verification. Instead, criticisms have had the effect of multiplying its conceptions and operationalizations, rather than narrowing them.
For instance, some of Bourdieu’s early American critics faulted his original notion of cultural capital as being ambiguous, deterministic, untested, and insufficiently attuned to the U.S. context. So, DiMaggio responded to two of those criticisms—that Bourdieu’s ideas were overly deterministic, understood as not recognizing exchange mobility—and had not been rigorously tested, which he then embedded measures of cultural capital in status attainment models. Lareau later criticized the DiMaggio branch for its insufficiently agentic conception of cultural capital, one that ignored the role of parenting strategies aimed to boost children’s school fortunes, and that relied too heavily on notions of high-status culture. Those criticisms shaped her distinctive qualitative branch of research that focused increasingly on parenting strategies. Collins criticized Bourdieu for being insufficiently attuned to the micro-level and the potency of status-enhancing symbols in local rituals. That prime criticism defined his distinctive, micro-oriented version of cultural capital. Thus, the impact of these three major criticisms were not to correct errors as much as to stimulate new branches of research.
Given the concept’s broad appeal and curious evolution, it what ways has it been useful for empirical researchers? Our review shows that it has been undeniably generative, invoked in hundreds of studies by leading researchers. But this generativity has come from its flexibility, its amenability to very different research genres, from survey research to school ethnographies to micro-sociology to subcultural studies. It is difficult to think of other middle-range concepts that have been successfully imported into research traditions as disparate as status attainment modeling, school–family ethnography, and interaction ritual theory. This flexibility has allowed researchers to use the concept to probe multiple dimensions of educational inequality, including ones that Bourdieu himself did not consider. The DiMaggio branch has explored an array of statistical associations between measures of social background, various cultural resources and practices, and school outcomes. The Lareau branch has focused on parenting logics and their alignment with school rewards. The Collins branch has offered a micro-level examination of group processes that can affect schooling. Each branch has used the concept to probe a different dimension of the problem of educational inequality, whether by focusing on status cultures, parenting practices, or group rituals. Furthermore, this flexibility has allowed it to enter a wide array of national contexts beyond France and the United States. Whereas sociological concepts are often bound to particular concepts, cultural capital has been invoked across a range of nations, persisting despite considerable social change over the decades.
An irony, however, is that the same flexibility through which cultural capital research has flourished can also be seen as a weakness. For methodologists who associate rigor with standardized definitions and measures, concepts like cultural capital are worrisome. Its very ambiguity can allow researchers in different camps to readily speak past one another and ignore each other’s work, which hinders any accumulation of findings that might lead to a research consensus. As a consequence, we cannot conclude that the three generations have amassed a firm body of consistent empirical findings, generated a uniform set of research procedures, or has led to clear policy or political action. Likewise, it is difficult to conclude that usages of the concept have necessarily deepened theorizing about educational inequality in ways that would please advocates of Bourdieu’s broader framework.
Instead, its key benefit has been its facility to generate studies of different dimensions of educational inequality, while still providing researchers with a common language to pursue similar questions. Since disciplines like sociology and fields like education have limited consensus over theory and method, the lasting utility of a concept like cultural capital is a capacity to stimulate a variety of quality empirical studies rather than prompting conceptual consistency and repeated empirical verification. This pluralism has proven to be a source of creativity. The concept’s flexibility has allowed it to be grafted onto dissimilar, preexisting research traditions, leading to its enlivening. Reflecting on citation patterns in education journals, Walters and Lareau (2009) noted that highly cited works tended to be broad and theoretically informed, if not particularly rigorous. They appeal to researchers across a variety of subfields by connecting empirical matters to larger intellectual concerns. We believe, likewise, that concepts like cultural capital have been generative, even while lacking consistent definitions and methodological operations, because it has spoken to different research traditions within the same broad topic, thereby extending the concept into new empirical realms, and generating ideas well beyond Bourdieu’s original writings.
Cultural capital continues to be a pivotal concept within educational research. It has evolved over several branches, and over several generations, spanning methodological and theoretical divides. A wide array of researchers have used it, which is fitting given Bourdieu’s eclectic borrowing across strands of social science and philosophy. The concept will likely evolve further as school institutions themselves change. We doubt that a unified theory of cultural capital will ever emerge; instead, we anticipate that the coming generation will continue to use it within plurality of methods and theories.
Footnotes
Notes
Authors
SCOTT DAVIES is a professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6; email:
JESSICA RIZK is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University, 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S,4L7; email:
References
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