Cultural capital and the cultural field in contemporary Britain (original) (raw)
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The Sociological review, 2015
The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists.
Using Mixed Methods for Analysing Culture: The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project
Cultural Sociology, 2009
This paper discusses the use of material generated in a mixed method investigation into cultural tastes and practices, conducted in Britain from 2003 to 2006, which employed a survey, focus groups and household interviews. The study analysed the patterning of cultural life across a number of fields, enhancing the empirical and methodological template provided by Bourdieu's Distinction. Here we discuss criticisms of Bourdieu emerging from subsequent studies of class, culture and taste, outline the arguments related to the use of mixed methods and present illustrative results from the analysis of these different types of data. We discuss how the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods informed our analysis of cultural life in contemporary Britain. No single method was able to shed light on all aspects of our inquiry, lending support to the view that mixing methods is the most productive strategy for the investigation of complex social phenomena.
Editors' introduction: Cultural capital and social inequality
The British Journal of Sociology, 2005
Over the past thirty years, the concept of cultural capital has emerged as an important means of stimulating interdisciplinary debate about the ways in which cultural processes are implicated in the reproduction, generation, and contestation of social division. This special issue brings together papers which explore how the concept can be applied across a range of social and cultural practices, encompassing contributions from sociology, history, cultural studies, media studies, and feminist scholarship, while also ranging over a broad range of cultural practices including the culture industries, the book trade, and museums. We are concerned not only to explore Bourdieu's influential concept of cultural capital itself, but to treat this as a key point of connection to other key concepts in Bourdieu's work (most notably the concepts of field and habitus). The papers presented here thus provide a strategic engagement with the theoretical architecture of Bourdieu's work as a whole as a means of furthering debates within core areas of sociology.
Using Mixed-methods for the analysis of culture: The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project
This article discusses the use of material generated in a mixed method investigation into cultural tastes and practices, conducted in Britain from 2003 to 2006, which employed a survey, focus groups and household interviews. The study analysed the patterning of cultural life across a number of fields, enhancing the empirical and methodological template provided by Bourdieu's Distinction. Here we discuss criticisms of Bourdieu emerging from subsequent studies of class, culture and taste, outline the arguments related to the use of mixed methods and present illustrative results from the analysis of these different types of data.We discuss how the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods informed our analysis of cultural life in contemporary Britain. No single method was able to shed light on all aspects of our inquiry, lending support to the view that mixing methods is the most productive strategy for the investigation of complex social phenomena.
Class and Cultural Division in the UK
Sociology, 2008
Using data drawn from the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study, we examine the relationship between social class membership and cultural participation and taste in the areas of music, reading, television and film, visual arts, leisure, and eating out. Using Geometric Data Analysis, we examine the nature of the two most important axes which distinguish 'the space of lifestyles'. By superimposing socio-demographic variables on this cultural map, we show that the first, most important, axis is indeed strongly associated with class. We inductively assess which kind of class boundaries can most effectively differentiate individuals within this 'space of lifestyles'. The most effective model distinguishes a relatively small professional class (24%) from an intermediate class of lower managerial workers, supervisors, the self-employed, senior technicians and white collar workers (32%) and a relatively large working class which includes lower supervisors and technicians (44%).
Introduction: Cultural capital—Histories, limits, prospects
Poetics, 2011
Where does the concept of cultural capital stand regarding the histories of its creation, uses, debates and the revisions these have provoked? What are its limits? Which are the key aspects holding the best prospects for future research, or most in need of reformation? These are our concerns outlined in this paper setting out the context for our discussion of the seven papers assembled in this special issue. We first set out the concept of cultural capital in Bourdieu's work noting that it was originally shaped pragmatically in critical interventions into education and cultural policies. We then highlight aspects of the career of the concept of cultural capital in relation to empirical studies of cultural consumption noting some key qualifications and limitations. Limits and prospects are discussed vis-Ã -vis the papers assembled, under three headings: (1) cultural capital and the logics of capitalism; (2) cultural capital, education and cultural policy, and 'social exclusion'; and (3) aesthetics and the relationality of the social. In concluding, we note the continuing operation of cultural capital as a mechanism for the reproduction of class advantages pointing to the need to consider further the manners in which it engages elites, uses of new media and hierarchies based on gender and ethnicity. #
The Curriculum Journal, 2022
The notion of cultural capital, defined in its Arnoldian sense, of "the best that has been thought and said", has been at the centre of the Conservative government's education policy for the last few years in England. While it is clear that this version of cultural capital-different from the sense in which it was used by Pierre Bourdieu, who popularised the term-has been deployed to valorise certain types of social, educational and cultural knowledge, it is not clear at all what use teachers make of the term or indeed, how they view it. This article presents data from an evaluation of a programme for disadvantaged students in English primary and secondary schools that sought to make a focus on cultural capital, and tries to assess how teachers perceive and use the term. The article posits that teachers see exhortations to accumulate cultural capital as part of their role, but in much broader terms than the government does, and that they seek to fill the "vacuum" created by the current policy perspective on cultural capital.