Cultural Capital

• Bourdieu: 


  3 types of capital:

  1. Economic
  2. Educational
  3. Cultural
• Bourdieu - Economic Capital: Money, property, income.
• Bourdieu - Educational Capital: Qualifications, knowledge, skills.
• Bourdieu - Cultural Capital: Taste, values, attitudes, language, manners, dress sense.
• Sullivan - Testing Cultural Capital


  Used questionnaires to survey 465 pupils in 4 schools. Looked at Reading and TV habits, trips to art galleries, museums and theatres, and compared this to vocabulary and knowledge on cultural figures.
• Sullivan - Test findings

  Those reading complex fiction and watching serious documentaries had the widest vocabulary and cultural knowledge.

  • These students were mostly children of graduates, and were also most likely to succeed at GCSE.

  However, CC only accounts for part of the class difference in achievement.

  • Where pupils of different social classes had the same gap in cultural capital, m/c did better.

  She puts this down to resources and aspirations of the m/c to fill this gap.