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:
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today’s story is that fatherhood is superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.”
—David Blankenhorn (20th century)
“A good many have been thrown out on their broad capital bases.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)