Institutionalised: qualifications, education credentials Objective: cultural goods, books, works of artĮmbodied: language, mannerisms, preferences Bourdieu identified three sources of cultural capital: objective, embodied and institutionalised.Since its publication in English in 1984 Bourdieu’s book, Distinction, has had a significant and lasting impact on academic discourse about class in the UK. He saw families passing on cultural capital to their children by introducing them to dance and music, taking them to theatres, galleries and historic sites, and by talking about literature and art over the dinner table. For both Marx and Bourdieu the more capital you have the more powerful you are.īourdieu defined cultural capital as ‘familiarity with the legitimate culture within a society’ what we might call ‘ high culture’. Bourdieu believed that cultural capital played an important, and subtle role. Karl Marx believed economic capital (money and assets) dictated your position in a social order. In the 1970s Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, developed the idea of cultural capital as a way to explain how power in society was transferred and social classes maintained.

Where did the term cultural capital come from? In this blog post we provide a quick summary of some of the history, academic thinking and definitions of this key term. For the first time the new Ofsted framework requires schools to develop their pupils’ cultural capital.

Distinction bourdieu 1984