Cultural Capital - Relation To Other Types of Capital

Relation To Other Types of Capital

In The Forms of Capital (1986), Bourdieu distinguishes between three types of capital:

  • Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
  • Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu described social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."
  • Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.

Later he adds symbolic capital (resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition) to this list.

Read more about this topic:  Cultural Capital

Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, types and/or capital:

    “... a worker was seldom so much annoyed by what he got as by what he got in relation to his fellow workers.”
    —Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)

    “A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
    —Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)

    “... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
    —Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    “We make needless ado about capital punishment,—taking lives, when there is no life to take.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)