Class Culture and Cultural Capital
In order for an individual to gain membership into a group, he or she must engage in "requisite role enactments" to be recognized and legitimized as a member of the group. This means taking on the commonly associated scripts associated with different classes, understood through studying the different types of class culture and forms of culture capital. This can include cultural capital, a term created by Pierre Bourdieu, and can be in three states:
- Embodied: Inherited and acquired way of thinking about one's self or habitus.
- Objectified: Things (objects) which are owned, such as a BMW, a home, a painting, etc.
- Institutionalized: Recognition on an institutional level, such as earning a college degree or prestigious award.
In a study by Mark Granfield of working-class law students aiming to succeed at an Ivy-League law school, Granfield noted the importance of making alterations in the students' "interpersonal relations" including everyday changes such as patterns in their clothing and speech.
Read more about this topic: Social Transformation
Famous quotes containing the words class, culture, cultural and/or capital:
“Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
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“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
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—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)