Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital:

Perspectives to phenomena in the sociology of education

Authors

• Taina Civil Hämeen ammattikorkeakoulu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1924-1405

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.146695

Keywords:

cultural capital, academic achievement, cultural taste, Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

The legacy of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the field of the sociology of education remains strong – or does it? Cultural capital is one of Bourdieu's most utilized concepts, which he defines as a resource which is admired, valued, contested, but relatively difficult to obtain. Bourdieu argued that children acquire and inherit cultural capital from their parents as they are socialized to certain cultural consumption habits, values, and norms exhibited and modelled by their parents. Bourdieu used the concept of cultural capital to explain why children of highly educated parents perform better in school compared to children of less educated parents. In Bourdieu's later work, cultural capital gained new meanings as an indicator of social class status and as distinctions in cultural taste. In this paper, I focus on the contribution of cultural capital as a key element of Bourdieu's theoretical-conceptual apparatus and as a tool for understanding various sociological phenomena in education, while also reflecting on Bourdieu's legacy in the sociology of education.