- Five or more substantive paragraphs summarizing the major points of the readings for the day. Memos should reframe theoretical ideas in your own words and list at least two pieces of evidence that contribute to the interpretation. Evidence connects concepts to the “real world” and/or personal experiences. (up to 5 points)
- WHOA/HMMM: Reflective insight on at least one aspect from the readings that you found most interesting/challenging/confusing. (up to 2 points)
- Answer to CH 13 “Questions for Review” #3: How do everyday food practices and food habits reflect, illuminate, and reproduce social class differences? (up to 3 points)
Chapter Thirteen
THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
OF INEQUALITY
PIERRE BOURDIEU’S THEORY
OF CLASS AND CULTURE
KEY CONCEPTS
structure
culture
social classes
economic capital
class fractions
cultural capital
cultural competence
social capital
symbolic capital
institutional field
educational capital
taste
habitus
symbolic goods
aesthetic disposition
game of culture
collective misrecognition
economy of practice
CHAPTER MENU
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Social Stratification 429
Economic Capital 429
Cultural Capital 429
Social Capital 430
Economic and Cultural Capital in Stratifying Society
432
Family and School in the Production of Cultural Capital
Bourdieu’s Impact on the Sociology of Education 434
Social Policy Implications of Bourdieu’s Analysis 436
Taste and Everyday Practices
433
438
The Class Conditioning of Taste 438
Gendered Taste, Gendered Bodies 441
Upper-Class Taste 442
Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century,
Second Edition. Michele Dillon.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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428
The Social Reproduction of Inequality
The Culture Game 443
Working-Class Taste 444
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? 444
Taste in the Reproduction of Social Inequality 445
Linking Micro Action and Macro Structures 446
Endless Stratification 446
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Summary 447
Points to Remember 448
Glossary 448
Questions for Review 449
Notes 449
References 450
Pierre Bourdieu is “the most influential and original French sociologist since Durkheim …
at once a leading theorist and an empirical researcher of extraordinarily broad interests and
distinctive style” (Calhoun 2000: 696). Like Durkheim, Bourdieu emphasized the thoroughly
social nature of social life and how it is that a certain social order gets maintained. But unlike
Durkheim, Bourdieu made social inequality a key focus. In particular, he underscored how
the objective structure of social class and class relations conditions the individual’s everyday
culture and social interaction. His approach to conceptualizing inequality and stratification
shows the influence of Marx, but especially Weber. Unlike Marx, who regarded economic
capital as the basic source of inequality in society, Bourdieu saw economic capital as just one,
though a very important, dimension of inequality. Like Weber, he conceptualized inequality
as having multiple dimensions; specifically, he identified the inequality stemming from
individuals’ and classes’ differential amounts of what he termed economic capital, social
capital, and cultural capital. In his later years, Bourdieu moved beyond the realm of class
inequality to engage in public debates about globalization, economic inequality, and
everyday human suffering (e.g., Bourdieu 1999); these are important contributions, but
because they are less central to his theoretical framing of social and institutional inequality,
I exclude them from consideration.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Pierre Bourdieu was born into a lower-middle-class
family in a small town in southwestern France in
1930. He excelled academically and made a career at
the highly distinguished Collège de France, Paris (as
did Durkheim). In the mid-1950s, Bourdieu completed required military service in Algeria (following
the French–Algerian war), and subsequently worked
at the University of Algeria; while there he conducted
an ethnographic study of social relations in the province of Kabylia. He was a highly productive researcher
and writer; across his many publications, he elaborated concepts based on his extensive empirical
qualitative and quantitative research studies. Bourdieu
died in 2002 at age 72 (Calhoun 2000).
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
Bourdieu argues that we should think of society as being hierarchically organized or stratified as a three-dimensional space characterized by different types of capital (or power), not
just economic capital: “a space whose three fundamental dimensions are defined by v olumes
of capital, composition of capital, and change in these two properties over time (manifested
by past and potential trajectories in social space)” (Bourdieu 1984: 114). Within the social
space (any society) there are many different classes and class subcomponents, all of which
are primarily distinguished by “their overall volume of capital, understood as the set of
actually usable resources and powers – economic capital, cultural capital and also social
capital” (1984: 114). The distribution of social classes, therefore, is a function of differences
in ownership and use of “the different types of capital (or power, which amounts to the
same thing)” (Bourdieu 1986: 243) and “thus runs from those who are best provided with
both economic and cultural capital to those who are most deprived in both respects”
(Bourdieu 1984: 114).
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ECONOMIC CAPITAL
What comprises economic capital is straightforward and easy to measure: money in the
bank, home-ownership and other property, investment assets, etc. It is relatively easy for
most individuals and families to make a tally of the volume or amount of their economic
capital. And there are ways that we can readily see how our volume of economic capital
compares to others; after graduation you will be eager to compare your starting salary with
that of your friends, knowing that your economic capital, though it may vary over time, is
going to largely determine your long-term, post-college lifestyle. We are reminded of acute
differences in economic capital when newspapers publish details of the earnings and other
economic assets of corporate executives, and list the asset differences among the leading
millionaires and billionaires.
While we tend to think of the wealthy as a homogeneous group, Bourdieu highlights the
differences within economic groups – i.e., among those who occupy a broadly similar social
class position. He argues that economic – and cultural and social capital – varies and is a
source of competition between what he calls class fractions, sub-components of social
classes. Thus, for example, there are competitive economic and lifestyle differences between
the very rich and the super-rich in Silicon Valley; among super-rich yacht owners; and
among Manhattan’s elite who use their postal codes as additional markers of distinction.
CULTURAL CAPITAL
Bourdieu’s concepts of social capital and cultural capital follow a logic of acquisition, use,
and exchange that is parallel to how we think of economic capital, though these concepts
are more difficult to define and measure. “Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the
embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in
the objectified form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines,
etc.) … and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification … [such as conferred by]
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429
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430
The Social Reproduction of Inequality
educational qualifications” (Bourdieu 1986: 243). Cultural capital thus has parallels with
Weber’s conceptualization of social status and lifestyle (see chapter 3). Additionally,
Bourdieu is interested in how formal education and informal everyday cultural habits and
experiences enhance an individual’s cultural competence. This competence includes the
stylistic ease and familiarity with which the individual carries herself or himself – whether
at a party, in a fancy restaurant, in an art museum, or at a football game – and displays a
certain detached practical sense of what is cool (or “hot,” “sick,” “wicked”).
Each social class (and class fraction) has its own culture, and individuals regardless of
social class have a certain cultural competence. By the same token, different social contexts
vary in the value placed on specific cultural competencies (being cool at a car rally requires
a different competence than being cool at a golfing event). Nevertheless, in the objectively
stratified order in society as a whole, some competencies are more highly valued than
others. Specifically, it is upper-class culture that is the most highly valued – it is the legitimate culture. This is the case not because the things and dispositions that the upper class
value have greater value in themselves. Rather, it is because the upper class uses strategies of
exclusion and inclusion made possible by their privileged location in society (e.g., country
club or art gallery membership, attendance at elite schools, etc.), and which enable them to
institutionalize hierarchical distinctions between their culture and the tastes they don’t
value (Bourdieu 1984: 23–28).
In any case, unlike the balance sheet we can read detailing our stock of economic capital,
it is more difficult to itemize and make a tally of individuals’ cultural capital. We can easily
count an individual’s years of education, but formal education is only one part of what comprises cultural capital. Assessing the extent of our own, or of someone else’s, stylistic comfort
and the ease with which they make ordinary everyday choices (e.g., chicken wings or Brie?
Fish and chips or smoked salmon?), calls for a subtle system of classification and evaluation.
Moreover, any class schema of everyday cultural taste in the US, for example, would need to
incorporate the greater ideological emphasis on popular (mass-democratic) than on elite
culture, notwithstanding the importance of class distinctions in the US (e.g., Lamont 1992).
The anti-elitism in US culture is reflected, for example, in the frequency with which
Republican politicians publicly belittle their Democratic rivals as being out of touch with
“ordinary folk” because they allegedly prefer wine to beer, and arugula to lettuce, etc.
SOCIAL CAPITAL
Social capital, for Bourdieu, is
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 –
or in other words to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the
backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a “credential” which entitles them to credit, in the
various senses of the word … The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent
[individual] … depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize
and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural, or symbolic) possessed in his own right
by each of those to whom he is connected. (Bourdieu 1986: 248–249)
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
Thus social capital refers to individuals’ social connections, the social networks and
alliances that link them in all sorts of direct as well as indirect and informal ways to
opportunities that can enhance their stock of capital (whether economic, social, or
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Topic 13.1
Social capital as a collective good
Although it is easy to see that individuals can possess social capital, it is also true that
any given neighborhood or community can use the social connections and networks
that exist within their neighborhood/community to enhance the community’s
economic, and/or social and cultural, capital. Like many rural communities in the US
and Europe, Coös County in northern New Hampshire is a geographically isolated
region currently in economic transition as a result of the decline of manufacturing
industries (e.g., paper and pulp mills using wood from local forests). Other rural
communities confront similar challenges due to the decline in agriculture. Although
economic resources are clearly important, a community’s economic development
does not, and indeed need not, rely on economic capital alone. As Bourdieu emphasizes, social (and cultural) capital are analytically independent of economic capital.
Hence, communities (and individuals) with little economic capital can strategically
use their social capital – something that tends to be plentiful in small-scale rural
communities – to foster economic development (and thus convert their social into
economic capital).
In rural New Hampshire, local community leaders from different sectors (e.g.,
business, education, social services) and towns across the region are proactively using
their personal connections with others – as neighbors, school volunteers, local
committee and community association members – to help foster community-wide
support for tourism development initiatives – and thus to convert community social
capital into economic capital (see Dillon 2011). The region is rich in natural resources
and amenities (e.g., rivers, lakes, mountains) but in the past it has not actively marketed these to potential tourists (partly because of its cushioning by manufacturing
jobs). A tourist economy, however, cannot be imposed top-down; it needs community
buy-in so that local residents will be hospitable toward tourists and maintain the high
standards of quality and service that tourists expect. Hence local leaders are active in
efforts to rebrand and market the region, and equally energetic in simultaneously
trying to get local residents on board with this new economic venture. Leaders have
to use their personal connections and ties to others – connections forged over many
years – and to use them on a person-to-person basis, to persuade their neighbors,
relatives, and co-workers that tourism will benefit the region. Their efforts are
beginning to pay off; there is evidence of a substantial increase in community support
for the tourism marketing initiative. Such support, however, needs to be sustained
through the ongoing use of community-wide social capital. As Bourdieu emphasizes,
social capital (like other forms of capital) has to be continuously used if it is to
continue to yield dividends and translate into economic capital.
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
cultural capital, or any combination thereof). In the US, college fraternities and sororities are good sources of durable social capital; such connections frequently open doors
to members’ first college internship, first post-college job interview and first job, and
assure members that when they move or travel to other places they have a ready-made
social network (for life). In assessing social capital, the volume is contingent not just on
the number of people you know but on how important the people you know are, i.e.,
how much economic, cultural, and social capital the people you know have and are willing to use on your behalf, and which in turn you can use to expand your volume of
economic, cultural, and social capital. As with economic capital, the accumulation of
social and cultural capital takes time, and while each is distinct, there are multiple links
among all three.
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ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL CAPITAL IN STRATIFYING SOCIETY
Bourdieu is most attentive to the roles played by economic and cultural capital in producing and reproducing social inequality. Economic and cultural capital are analytically
independent (though interrelated) resources. Thus, an individual can have a lot of
economic capital and not much objectively valued cultural capital, or can have a lot of
cultural capital and relatively little economic capital. Many newly rich business executives and investment-fund managers have a large volume of economic capital, but are
low on cultural capital – they experience anxiety in their high socio-economic circles
because they do not have the cultural competencies to move with ease in the art and
cultural worlds that are a core part of the upper-class social scene. Thus, for example, the
super-rich who hire butlers to signify their high social status (see chapter 3), can also
themselves avail of courses that teach the rules of formal dinner etiquette. The ButlerValet School in Oxfordshire, England, for example, offers four-week courses at a cost of
8,000 pounds sterling (approx. $12,000) where employers can learn, among other things,
that port should always be passed to the left, regardless of the rank of the person sitting
next to you.
Because all types of capital are exchangeable, an individual can use one type of capital to
gain more of another type. This is exactly what many economically rich people do – they
pay to acquire cultural capital. Its acquisition, however, is not based automatically on an
economic exchange: Money can quickly earn an individual some cultural capital – if, for
example, they purchase an expensive piece of art. But the ease of art appreciation which is
so intrinsic to cultural competence/cultural capital means that they must also use their
money to get immersed and spend time in the art world. Thus some hire art consultants
who teach them about different types of art, and who guide them in visits to many different
galleries so that eventually they will feel more at ease with making their own personal art
choices rather than relying completely on the advice of a paid art consultant. And, importantly, the economically rich may be able to convert their (new) increased cultural capital
into additional economic capital if they buy and subsequently sell for profit one of their
acquired pieces of art.
By the same token, art historians, while they have high cultural capital, may be relatively
low on economic capital. But they can use their art expertise to advise rich clients and hence
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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over time increase their economic capital, as well as further consolidating their cultural
capital if they are able to enhance their reputation – i.e., their symbolic capital (Bourdieu
1984: 291) – in the institutional field of art and culture as competent and accomplished art
advisers. Bourdieu thus sees a very dynamic relation between the different types of capital
and the conditions for their exchange and accumulation within and across particular
institutional fields.
Bourdieu uses the term “institutional field” in a somewhat similar way to how sociologists discuss different, specialized domains of institutional behavior in society (e.g., in
the realm of the economy, family life, law, education, culture, religion, etc). Additionally,
for Bourdieu, the analysis of institutional fields – of culture, education, religion, etc. –
gives him the opportunity to highlight how the particular practices or the logic and
competencies and organizational composition and interrelations within any one field
may vary from those of other fields; and, how, notwithstanding this variation, all institutional fields work to reproduce inequality within their respective field and within
society as a whole.1
In summary, for Bourdieu, each type of capital is and has to be usable; thus economic and
cultural capital are resources that can be accumulated and/or converted into other forms of
capital and/or traded, exchanged, and transmitted to others (as an inheritance or a gift).
They are also resources that might and can be under-used or only partially converted into
other types of capital. Bourdieu emphasizes that there is nothing automatic about the relationship between economic capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984: 105); there is
autonomy or agency in how any particular family or individual chooses to use their
economic capital. This becomes readily apparent when you see intra-family cultural or
economic differences among those who nonetheless have similar family background and
social class origins. In any case, an important point emphasized by Bourdieu is that capital
is not simply something that an individual or a social class or class fraction has, it is also
something they use, and (must) use to show, establish, or change their positioning in and
among the economic-social-cultural hierarchies that comprise society.
FAMILY AND SCHOOL IN THE PRODUCTION
OF CULTURAL CAPITAL
Bourdieu underscores the sociological significance of the family of origin in determining an
individual’s access to capital. Someone from a relatively poor family can, through educational
qualifications (what Bourdieu calls academic or educational capital), subsequently gain a
considerable amount of capital (economic, social, and/or cultural); indeed, many empirical
studies document such patterns of upward occupational and social mobility in the US and
the UK (e.g., Fischer and Hout 2006; Heath et al. 2008) At the same time, however, there is a
close positive relationship between socio-economic background and educational capital.
This means that children who grow up in families of high socio-economic status – i.e., families that have relatively large amounts of economic and/or cultural capital – are more likely
than children from families of low socio-economic status to go to and succeed in college (i.e.,
acquire educational capital) and subsequently achieve occupational-economic success.2
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
Consequently, as Bourdieu argues, “the educational capital held at a given moment
expresses, among other things, the economic and social level of the family of origin” (Bourdieu
1984: 105). Academic capital is contingent on (though also somewhat autonomous of) the
cultural capital inherited within the family (1984: 22–23). This insight is influential in sociolinguistics, which recognizes that language skills and vocabulary are determined not alone by
formal cognitive learning but also by experiences within the family-social context in which
children grow and learn. And, as sociologists document, family learning environments are
further mediated by varied gender, ethnic, and social class differences (e.g., Lareau 2003).
Therefore, although we might think of the educational system as a social institution
whose functioning and effectiveness stand apart from other institutions, including the
family and the economy, this is not the case. Bourdieu argues that the cultural disposition
required by schools is one that emphasizes the student’s familiarity with a general culture
that can only be transmitted by families who already have cultural capital. What he means
by this is that children who grow up in families with cultural capital are exposed to everyday
cultural experiences (reading, travel, visiting art museums, etc.) and habits (e.g., punctuality, task-completion, an emphasis on knowledge appreciation and on the normalcy of
reading, visiting museums, etc.) that cultivate in them the “natural” disposition and habits
necessary for success at school – success both in the classroom and, importantly too, among
one’s peers on the playing fields and in other daily activities.
These cultivated habits are conducive to success in terms of the formal curriculum and
the school’s “scholastically recognized knowledge and practices” (Bourdieu 1984: 23).
Academic success, in turn, credentials the individual with the necessary academic qualifications that are the gateway to occupational-economic opportunities and success (Bourdieu
1996: 336; and see note 2 below). These habits are also crucial to developing the individual’s
more general “cultivated disposition” (Bourdieu 1984: 23), his or her ability to be at ease
with the everyday cultural requirements of being a member of the upper class to which
academic credentials are a conduit.
Both the family and the school are engaged in cultural transmission (Bourdieu 1984: 23),
and these institutions entwine to reinforce the dispositions and practices that constitute and
facilitate the accumulation of cultural and economic capital. The school is the one institution
in society, Bourdieu argues, that reproduces social divisions both objectively, through its impact
in credentializing and positioning individuals in the occupational-social class hierarchy, and
subjectively, by inculcating individuals with ways of perceiving and evaluating the social world
(Bourdieu 1996: xix). In particular, “It is largely through the crucial role it plays in individual
and collective transactions between employers … and employees … that the educational
system directly contributes to the reproduction of social classifications” (1996: 121).
BOURDIEU’S IMPACT ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
Bourdieu’s insights into the interlinking of family and school culture have been influential
in orienting research and debates within the sociology of education. In the post-World War
II era, the expansion of education, especially university education, in the US and western
European countries was a crucial institutional mechanism promoting economic growth
and the expansion of the middle class. Education was widely seen by sociologists and
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olicy-makers as a highly effective system for transmitting the knowledge and values
p
required in a high-functioning society, securing individual upward mobility, and advancing
societal modernization and social progress (e.g., Smelser 1968; see chapter 4).
This Parsons-influenced perspective was well represented in the research of such
renowned sociologists of education as James Coleman (1961), whose analysis of the norms
and values that characterize effectively functioning school communities (and that are consensually shared, more or less, by parents, teachers, and adolescent peers) dominated the
field until the 1980s. This functionalist approach drew criticism from education scholars
using a Marxist-derived framework. Most notably, Bowles and Gintis (1976) argued that
the organization and the authority and rewards system (e.g., grades, competition) of the
school (as part of the capitalist superstructure; see Marx; chapter 1) basically perpetuate the
economic and class inequality of the larger society.
Autonomy of economic and cultural capital
It was not until the 1980s, however, that sociologists had a new way of thinking about the
place of school in society. Bourdieu offered a more dynamic and nuanced analysis of how
schools work. His theorizing argued against Parsons’s emphasis on the functionality of
schools in determining individuals’ positioning within the occupational and stratification
sub-systems of society, and against the Marxist view of schools as an arm of capitalist structure and ideology. Highlighting the analytical and empirical independence of different
types of capital, i.e., that cultural capital can be autonomous of economic capital, he
advanced sociological recognition that schools produce and transmit cultural capital – e.g.,
academic credentials and a general cultivated disposition – and do so somewhat independent
of the family and of social class. At the same time, Bourdieu’s emphasis on the linkages between economic and cultural capital, and between family/social class and school, showed
that while the school (or education as an institutional field) has some autonomy from the
economy and from family, it is nonetheless positioned to reproduce the socio-economic
inequalities that antecede, are reflected in, and extend beyond the school. Importantly,
however, this reproduction effect is not automatic; the analytical separateness of cultural
and economic capital fosters slippage in the reproduction of both privilege and inequality.
Further, because of the autonomy of cultural and economic capital, Bourdieu’s analysis also
highlights how educational capital itself becomes a force in inter-class competition (rather
than simply a mechanism of upward class mobility). Inter-class competition is fueled by the
expansion of educational opportunities and the attendant increase in university enrollment of
individuals from lower-class families. It is also pushed by the related emphasis on merit and
academic credentials in securing access to well-paying jobs. Bourdieu argues:
When class fractions who previously made little use of the school system enter the race for
academic qualifications, the effect is to force the groups whose reproduction was mainly or
exclusively achieved through education to step up their investments so as to maintain the
relative scarcity of their qualifications and consequently, their position in the class structure.
Academic qualifications and the school system which awards them thus become one of the key
stakes in an interclass competition which generates a general and continuous growth in the
demand for education and an inflation of academic qualifications. (Bourdieu 1984: 133)
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital and education is based on empirical studies he
conducted of schooling in France (Bourdieu and Passeron 1971; Bourdieu 1996), and hence
his theorizing about education is very much grounded in a specific socio-cultural context
rather than deduced from abstract generalizations. The educational and social class system
in France is more highly stratified and more competitive than in the US (see note 2 below).
Nevertheless, recent empirical studies of education in the US (e.g., Karabel 2005; Lareau
2003; Lareau and Weininger 2003) affirm the value of Bourdieu’s insights concerning the
strong influence of family background on educational capital, and on the role of schools in
the transmission and reproduction of cultural and economic capital. This is especially true
of elite colleges (e.g., Harvard, Yale) that, by continuing to give preferential treatment to the
admission of children of alumni, operate a relatively closed system of upper-class status
reproduction, notwithstanding their admission also of modest numbers of students from
middle- and lower-income families (Karabel 2005: 548–549).
SOCIAL POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF BOURDIEU’S ANALYSIS
From a social policy perspective, Bourdieu’s findings highlight the challenge entailed in
efforts to reduce inequality. Although his framework allows for upward (and downward)
mobility, his strong emphasis on the significance of family cultural capital in determining
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Topic 13.2
College education and economic mobility
A recent study conducted by the Brookings Institution documents the positive benefits
of a college education for students who come from low-income families (Haskins et al.
2009). A college education gives them close to a one-in-five chance of joining the top
one-fifth of earners in the US, and almost a two-out-of-three chance of joining the
middle class or better. These are good odds. Unfortunately, however, individuals from
the lowest-income bracket are far less likely than others to go to college: 11 percent,
compared to 53 percent of children from families among the country’s highest earners.
The majority of children from high-earning families who graduate from college maintain their family’s high socio-economic status (SES) in adulthood. Further, almost one
in four of the children who come from the top income bracket are likely to remain
within that bracket in adulthood even if they do not graduate from college. In sum,
college education significantly enhances the economic opportunities of children from
low-income families; and for those from high-income families, family SES cushions
against the absence of a college degree. Independent of social class as well as racial
minority variation in access to and achievement within education not only in the US
but in the UK too (e.g., Fischer and Hout 2006; Heath et al. 2008), the overall economic
and social value of college education is well documented by sociologists. Based on
in-depth examination of a wide range of data, the sociologist Michael Hout (2012) concludes: “Education makes life better. People who pursue more education and achieve it
make more money, live healthier lives, divorce less often, and contribute more to the
functioning and civility of their communities than less educated people do.”
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
Box 13.1
Erotic capital
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An interesting and controversial extension of Bourdieu’s capital schema is a new
theory of erotic capital put forward by Catherine Hakim (2010), a British scholar. She
argues that erotic capital (sexual attractiveness, energy, and competence) should be
considered a personal capital asset that, like other forms of capital, can be translated
into and used to acquire economic, social, and cultural capital. In Hakim’s construal,
erotic capital is multifaceted and can include (1) beauty; (2) sexual attractiveness;
(3) social interaction skills such as charm and grace (parallel to Hochschild’s emotional
labor; see chapter 10); (4) liveliness/social energy and good humor; (5) style of dress
and self-presentation; and (6) sexuality itself which includes sexual competence,
erotic imagination, playfulness. Hakim argues that women have more erotic capital
than men; that it is advantageous in mating, marriage, and the labor market, and has
“greater value when it is linked to high levels of economic, cultural, and social capital”
(2010: 503).
Hakim acknowledges that the different elements of erotic capital are difficult to
measure objectively, and that they may vary across cultures and social contexts. Not
surprisingly, the construct is controversial, especially among feminists. After
decades of feminist-inspired resistance against the equation of women as sexual
objects, the idea of erotic capital explicitly focuses on and affirms the “special assets”
that women (though not only women) may possess as a result of their sexual-erotic
skills and attributes. Nonetheless, the construct also taps into everyday empirical
realities associated not only with gender differences but differences in the assets of
individual women and men, differences that may have real material consequences
in everyday life (at work, at home, in public) for individuals who are well-endowed
with erotic capital.
an individual’s class position, independent of school, puts a damper on liberal democratic
policies that seek to bolster access to education for the economically and socially underprivileged. One implication of his analysis is that access to education, without the attendant
cultural competencies that come with a high social class background, will fall short of making a substantial dent in equalizing the economic and cultural differences between social
classes (e.g., MacLeod 1995; Willis 1977).
For example, a lower-class individual may be the first in his or her family to go to
college and is also likely to come from a neighborhood where very few students go to
college. Once in college – not only a new educational but also, for working-class students,
a new social class environment – this student will not be as familiar as middle-class students with the expectations and practices (e.g., punctuality, independence) that characterize college everyday reality. He or she will not already know that certain study habits
and certain seminars, majors, and summer internships are “better” than others in positioning a student for college and post-college success. Equally important, a lower-class
student – feeling out of place in a middle- (and upper-) class environment – may be shyer
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
or feel less entitled about interacting with and getting academic help from professors (and
thus achieving a higher grade). Working-class students who graduate from college are
likely to have much greater economic success than those who don’t go to college (e.g.,
Haskins et al. 2009; Hout 2012). But, on average, they may not do as well in college and
after college as middle-class students. This is because working-class students are disadvantaged by working-class culture and family/neighborhood experiences that inhibit
the “self-assurance of legitimate membership and the ease given by familiarity” (Bourdieu
1984: 81) with the middle-class culture required, affirmed, and rewarded by schools.
Nevertheless, school is still the one crucial mechanism facilitating upward mobility
(see Topic 13.2).
TASTE AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES
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THE CLASS CONDITIONING OF TASTE
Bourdieu’s analysis of education and cultural capital is part of his larger interest in how
ordinary, everyday habits reflect and reproduce social class differences. He emphasizes the
social class conditioning of taste in all the “ordinary choices of everyday existence” (Bourdieu
1984: 77). Although we think of our taste in clothes and food, etc., as uniquely ours,
Bourdieu concludes – from empirical surveys in France of individuals’ everyday habits –
that individual tastes are patterned along social class lines. We like what we like not on the
basis of individual sensory or aesthetic taste per se – no matter how natural some of our
tastes may seem to us – but as a consequence of what it is we have learned to like or appreciate or to think is cool as a result of the social conditions and class culture in which we live
and in which we have been brought up.
These dispositions and tastes are not the result of formal learning, even though at
school and college we learn “the linguistic tools and references which enable aesthetic
preferences to be expressed and to be constituted by being expressed” (Bourdieu 1984: 53),
and we can learn to discover and acquire new tastes. Rather, taste is part of our cultural
habitus. The habitus, for Bourdieu refers essentially to the everyday tastes and dispositions we actively and literally (though unconsciously) embody, the relatively enduring
schemes of perception, appreciation, and appropriation of the world that we enact. We
acquire our cultural habitus from the repetitive, everyday habits that we experience (and
enact or practice) within our family of origin, a socio-cultural context which itself is
conditioned by social class and by the particular everyday habits that distinguish each
social class (1984: 101).
In emphasizing the habitus as culturally and physically embodied, Bourdieu means that
the tastes we have are not just cognitively learned habits, but also deeply grounded in the
smells, looks, and sounds that surrounded and infused the habits in our homes and families
while we were growing up. Judgments of taste
impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as
the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum, the harsh
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
smell of bleach or perfumes as imperceptible as a negative scent. Every interior expresses, in its
own language, the present and even the past state of its occupants, bespeaking the elegant
self-assurance of inherited wealth, the flashy arrogance of the nouveaux riches, the discreet
shabbiness of the poor and the gilded shabbiness of “poor relations” striving to live beyond
their means. (Bourdieu 1984: 77)
Tastes in food and how we eat
Similarly, Bourdieu argues that we learn – quite readily, almost naturally, as a result of our
own family’s class-conditioned and gender-mediated habits – to embody cultural expectations of what “people like us” eat and do – how we live. Writing in generalized terms about
class differences in France, he states:
Tastes in food … depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the
body, that is, on its strength, health, and beauty; and on the categories it uses to evaluate these
effects, some of which may be important for one class and ignored by another, and which different classes may rank in different ways. Thus, whereas the working classes are more attentive
to the strength of the (male) body than its shape, and tend to go for products that are both
cheap and nutritious, the professions prefer products that are tasty, health-giving, light and not
fattening. (Bourdieu 1984: 190).
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He further elaborates:
The whole body schema, in particular the physical approach to the act of eating, governs
the selection of certain foods. For example, in the working classes, fish tends to be
regarded as an unsuitable food for men, not only because it is a light food, insufficiently
“filling,” which would only be cooked for health reasons, i.e., for invalids and children,
but also because, like fruit (except bananas) it is one of the “fiddly” things which a
man’s hands cannot cope with and which make him childlike … but above all, it is
because fish has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the masculine way of
eating, that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently, with the front of the
mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of the bones). The whole masculine identity –
what is called virility – is involved in these two ways of eating, nibbling and picking, as
befits a woman, or with whole-hearted male gulps and mouthfuls [as befits a man].
(Bourdieu 1984: 190–191)
Therefore it is not just the foods chosen, as Bourdieu stresses, but “the treatment of food
and the act of eating” itself that reaffirm and reproduce the different class habits and cultures (Bourdieu 1984: 197). Hence, the working class, concerned with eating as a functional
task – something necessary to nourish and replenish the body – prefer large portions of
heavy foods like meat and stews and don’t pay much attention to the meal’s presentation.
By contrast, the upper class deny eating’s primary bodily function, thus preferring small
portions of light food (e.g., salad, fish) (1984: 197–198), and instead construe the meal as
“a social ceremony” (1984: 196).
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439
Box 13.2
Norbert Elias: The civilizing process
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The German social theorist Norbert Elias (1897–1990) used the term “habitus” to refer to
the socializing/civilizing process, the social prohibitions, whereby certain everyday social
habits and manners (e.g., how to hold your knife and fork) are ingrained in the “civilized”
individual, such that habits of “self-restraint” (e.g., “Don’t stuff your mouth”) become “second nature,” i.e., operating against the individual’s “conscious wishes” (Elias 1978: 129).
Elias elaborates: socially imposed civilized manners “appear to [individuals] as highly
personal, something ‘inward,’ implanted in them by nature … later it becomes more and
more an inner automatism, the imprint of society on the inner self, the superego, that
forbids the individual to eat in any other way than with a fork” (1978: 128–129).
Elias’s analysis of the evolution of manners is part of his larger interest in how society
changes over time and, with these changes, how the individual is construed and how
group life is regulated. His inquiry parallels Durkheim’s focus on the shift from traditional
to modern society and how the structure, rules, and bonds of community change. It also
parallels Weber’s focus on the gradual rationalization of societal processes (e.g., religion,
economy, bureaucratization). Thus Elias addresses the increased emphasis on individualization associated with modernity, the emergence and expanding regulatory power of
the nation state, and the changing social class structure and its associated competitive
tensions (e.g., away from monarchy and aristocracy to a more differentiated social class
formation). He probes how these macro-level changes converge over time to produce new
civilizing movements; new understandings of what a civilized individual and a civilized
society should look like and how they should behave; and the development of new interrelated structures (e.g., institutions and norms) that demarcate and regulate “civilized”
behavior. Elias’s focus on the sociology of civilizing processes and the context in which
they emerge and take hold has renewed relevance today as we witness the modernization
of Asian societies (e.g., China, South Korea, India). It will be interesting to see the extent
to which western and non-western understandings of etiquette and manners will be
mutually adapted and incorporated into a cosmopolitan habitus (see chapter 15). (See
Mennell and Goudsblom [1998] for an introduction to Elias’s writings.)
Figure 13.1 What looks good, smells good, and tastes good is conditioned by our everyday social class and family habits
and practices. Photos courtesy of Andrew Wink.
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
GENDERED TASTES, GENDERED BODIES
Bourdieu also elaborates on the class-mediated gender differences in the disposition toward
food and the body: “There is also the principle of the division of foods between the sexes,
a division which both sexes recognize in their practices and their language. It behooves a
man to drink and eat more, and to eat and drink stronger things” (Bourdieu 1984: 190, 192),
to eat meat rather than fish, and to have seconds rather than women’s single and smaller
portion. Thus, talking about the “abundance” of the working-class meal, Bourdieu notes:
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Plain speaking, plain eating: the working class meal is characterized by plenty … and above all
by freedom … “abundant” dishes are brought to the table – soups or sauces, pasta or potatoes …
and served with a ladle or spoon, to avoid too much measuring and counting, in contrast to
everything that has to be cut and divided, such as roasts [of meat]. This impression of abundance, which is the norm on special occasions, and always applies, so far as is possible, for the
men, whose plates are filled twice (a privilege which marks a boy’s accession to manhood), is
often balanced, on ordinary occasions, by restrictions which generally apply to the women,
who will share one portion between two, or eat left-overs of the previous day; a girl’s accession
to womanhood is marked by doing without. (Bourdieu 1984: 194–195)
And, as we know from the prevalence of women who diet and who are diagnosed with
anorexia, women, somewhat independent of class, tend to “do without.” This cultural message is further reinforced by fashion models and a fashion model industry that requires
extreme thinness (i.e., below size 0).
In sum, our judgments of taste are conditioned and structured by the intersecting family
and social class context in which we are socialized. We internalize and act on these conditionings through a myriad of everyday practices – for example, by what our family eats for
dinner and how, who cooks it and washes up, and whether and how we talk about sports,
work, music, and politics over dinner. These practices are explicitly prescribed by “the
semi-legitimate legitimizing agencies” (Bourdieu 1984: 77), including women’s and “ideal
home” magazines and neighborhood stores, reminding us that this is what people like me
(us) eat, buy, like (see also Smith’s discussion of the ruling discourse of femininity in chapter
10). And, it is through these everyday practices that the macro structures of society – stratification, gender, family, religion, for example – get institutionalized and reproduced in the
individual’s everyday life.
Gender divisions, for example, get reproduced through the parallel objective divisions
between home and work and between women and men (see chapter 10), into which the
family habitus and its everyday habits socialize us. Decisions of taste and of fashion are, by
and large, established as women’s domain; it is women, Bourdieu argues, who are responsible for the consumption of symbolic goods – for the buying, displaying, and gift-giving of
those goods that reproduce the family’s good taste/status reputation, or what can be called
the “production of the signs of distinction” (Bourdieu 2001: 101). The symbolic goods people buy and place on display objectify their (socially conditioned) “personal” taste, i.e., their
cultural capital, and position them hierarchically in relation to others (Bourdieu 1984: 282).
And, because of women’s responsibility for the “conversion of economic capital into
symbolic capital within the domestic unit,” they are the ones in the vanguard of the competitive cultural practices that characterize intra- and inter-class status competition. Women
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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“are predisposed to enter into the permanent dialectic of pretension and distinction for
which fashion offers one of the most favourable terrains and which is the motor of cultural
life as a perpetual movement of overtaking and outflanking” (Bourdieu 2001: 101).
The sociological pairing of women and fashion is not new. At the start of the twentieth
century, Georg Simmel (1904/1971: 309, 313) argued that women were fashion’s “staunchest adherents.” He maintained that this was because it compensated for their lack of
professional career and that, in fact, “emancipated women” were indifferent to fashion.
Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1903/1972) argued that if women could claim
economic equality and be released from the home burdens of “domestic art,” they would not
need to be so subjugated to fashion.
Bourdieu, is not saying that women are naturally (biologically) inclined toward
fashion. He is arguing rather that their objective positioning as women within the gender
hierarchy of a stratified society requires them to use their (socially conditioned) taste for
fashion to acquire and use symbolic capital that will reproduce their class and (unequal)
gender status. Bourdieu recognizes that gender hierarchies are arbitrary – not biologically determined but “historical mechanisms responsible for the relative dehistoricization and eternalization of the structure of the sexual division and the corresponding
principles of division” (Bourdieu 2001: vii–viii). These gendered structures are institutionalized and reproduced in and through everyday practices. For Bourdieu, nonetheless, gender is relevant mostly insofar as it mediates class reproduction, and helps explain
symbolic and other capital accumulation processes. For example, Bourdieu observes
that in societies where economic assets are scarce, women are used as objects of capital
accumulation:
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When – as is the case in Kabylia [province in Algeria] – the acquisition of symbolic capital and
social capital is more or less the only possible form of accumulation, women are assets which
must be protected from offence and suspicion and which, when invested in exchanges, can
produce alliances, in other words social capital, and prestigious allies, in other words, symbolic
capital. (Bourdieu 2001: 45)
Nevertheless, Bourdieu affirms the political significance of the women’s movement and its
efforts to resist masculine domination and transform women’s subordination into gender
equality (Bourdieu 2001: 88–90).3
UPPER-CLASS TASTE
Because taste is conditioned by social class conditions, each social class produces its own
distinctive class habitus, a set of taste dispositions that can be seen in the choices made (and
not made) by class inhabitants. Bourdieu argues that the upper-class habitus is, for example,
marked by an aesthetic disposition that requires the upper class to admire a work of art or
music for its stylistic form rather than any practical function it might have; and similarly
regarding clothes, food, furniture, and other everyday objects. The aesthetic disposition
signals both economic and cultural capital and their merging as a result of freedom from
economic necessity.
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
The aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to
bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical
function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and
through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves such as … the contemplation
of works of art. (Bourdieu 1984: 54)
This engagement in practices that have no practical function is itself produced (and
required) by the upper class’s economic power, which, as Bourdieu notes,
is first and foremost a power to keep economic necessity at arm’s length. This is why it universally asserts itself by … conspicuous consumption, squandering, and every form of gratuitous
luxury … Material or symbolic consumption of works of art constitutes one of the supreme
manifestations of ease, in the sense both of objective leisure and subjective facility [cultural
competence]. (Bourdieu 1984: 55)
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THE CULTURE GAME
The (established) upper class, therefore, play the game of culture with the playful seriousness (Bourdieu 1984: 54) that comes only from familiarity with its rules, the spoken and
also, importantly – as in any game – the unspoken rules, the insider’s knowledge of and feel
for the game. Like accomplished basketball players on the court, the upper class know the
right moves, the insider subtleties that are not necessarily written down anywhere – where
to seamlessly position themselves, and when to score and how to score with ease and finesse,
thus enhancing their good reputation (symbolic capital), and likely too, adding to their
economic and cultural capital. And like watching accomplished athletes whose game-playing
seems so natural to us, so too the upper class show their “natural” claim on the game – even
though, as in sports, we know that notwithstanding any natural talent, the best players also
train and practice a lot.
The different social classes and class fractions play the culture game through their
everyday practices of taste and consumption, practices that serve to distinguish the classes
from one another (Bourdieu 1984: 250). The culture game – and the hierarchical positioning games played in other institutional fields (e.g., the religious field; Bourdieu 1998) –
“like all social stakes, simultaneously presupposes and demands that one take part in the
game and be taken in by it” (Bourdieu 1984: 250). We misrecognize the arbitrariness of the
game’s structure and rules; to play is to be taken in by the game. All games are symbolic
struggles over the appropriation of scarce goods; only the winners get trophies, i.e., objects
that affirm their symbolic capital, their reputation as a “winner.”
Bourdieu argues that collective misrecognition of the arbitrariness of the social hierarchies and evaluative categories that structure everyday practices is the process which necessarily sustains unequal social relations across all institutional fields (culture, education, art,
law, religion). As he states, “there is no way out of the game of culture” (Bourdieu 1984: 12).
Hence we variously engage in practices that we tacitly know are arbitrary (e.g., why should
visiting an art museum be considered more culturally worthy than visiting a sports
museum?), but which, if we were to explicitly acknowledge them as arbitrary, would lose
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
their symbolic power, the symbolic power necessary to maintain unequal class and other
unequal social relations (e.g., gender hierarchies in the Catholic church through the
exclusion of women from ordination).
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WORKING-CLASS TASTE
In contrast to the upper-class habitus, the working-class habitus, Bourdieu argues, produces
a taste and style that are dictated by economic and cultural necessity: “Necessity imposes a
taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of
the necessary, a resignation to the inevitable” conditions of class and the choices it allows
in ordinary everyday existence (Bourdieu 1984: 373). Necessity produces a working-class
habitus whereby, for example, manual workers indicate an appreciation for clothes that are
“good value for money,” that are cheap and long-lasting, practical or functional, and not
stylistically risky. Their choices are not determined by their volume of economic capital
alone, though this clearly is an important dimension of necessity. Their choices are codetermined by the coincidence of economic and cultural necessity: Among the working
class, conformity rather than personal autonomy is valued.
As Bourdieu points out, this functional disposition toward buying clothes (or toward
food) is a reasonable strategy for the working class given the economic and cultural capital
(and time) that buying more fashionable clothes would require. Moreover, the symbolic
capital, the gains to their reputation, that might be expected from such an investment would
be low for manual workers (at least while at work, given the nature of their work) compared,
say, to clerical workers, whose taste in fashion can enhance their reputation among peers
and supervisors at work (Bourdieu 1984: 377–378).
There is thus what Bourdieu calls an economy of practice in working-class taste, an economy
that also characterizes the practices of all social classes. Given what they’ve got – given the
economic and cultural capital they have – each class makes reasonable strategic investments in
order to expand and maximize their symbolic capital. Thus, Walmart’s consumer categories are
not only a good market-control strategy (see Topic 5.4, chapter 5,); they also make good cultural
sense: “Value-price shoppers,” “brand aspirationals,” and “price-sensitive affluents” are all composed of class-situated individuals who are making the most economically and culturally of
what they have got (economically and culturally). Bourdieu states:
The interest the different classes have in self-presentation, the attention they devote to it, their
awareness of the profits it gives and the investment of time, effort, sacrifice and care which they
actually put into it are proportionate to the chances of material or symbolic profit they can
reasonably expect from it. (Bourdieu 1984: 202)
WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?
Furthermore, Bourdieu emphasizes that, because taste is produced in and by a class-conditioned
habitus and hence is a relatively enduring system of judgments and dispositions, the individual’s taste does not change just because he or she suddenly wins the lottery. “Having a
million does not in itself make one able to live like a millionaire; and parvenus [the newly
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
arrived rich] generally take a long time to learn that what they see as culpable prodigality
[excessive self-indulgent spending] is, in their new [economic] condition, expenditure of
basic necessity” (Bourdieu 1984: 374). To live like a millionaire, or as an upwardly mobile
rich person, requires the acquisition of a new class disposition such that the individual can
be at ease in claiming as his or her own that which he or she can afford, and to learn to appreciate that “one man’s extravagance is another man’s necessity” (1984: 375). Thus there are
nuances between extravagance and necessity in the lifestyles of residents who live in any
highly affluent community.
The cultural competence projected in being at ease with one’s new-found wealth, the
“self-assurance of legitimate membership and the ease given by familiarity” (Bourdieu
1984: 81), require, Bourdieu argues, following Goffman, a certain amount of role distance.
One cannot show oneself as being ever so excited to have all this new money (or to be in a
museum or an expensive restaurant for the first time); one has to act as if this is what you
are used to, as if this is your habitus (1984: 54). Thus,
to appreciate the “true value” of the purely symbolic services which in many areas (hotels, hairdressing etc.) make the essential difference between luxury establishments and ordinary businesses,
one has to feel oneself the legitimate recipient of this bureaucratically personalized care and attention
and to display vis-à-vis those who offer it the mixture of distance (including “generous” gratuities)
and freedom which the bourgeois have toward their servants. (Bourdieu 1984: 374)
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TASTE IN THE REPRODUCTION OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY
The different, economically conditioned class cultures of everyday life reinforce the
objective distinctions between the classes (i.e., in how they act and where they come from)
as well as the boundaries between the classes and the dispositions that class-situated individuals subjectively feel toward the crossing of class boundaries. One structural consequence
of this system of distinction is the reinforcement of class inequality. The familiarity and
comfort individuals feel in their own class habitus, with their own culture’s ways of doing
things, means that working-class individuals, for example, feel less attracted, less entitled, to
entering and participating in institutional spaces such as universities whose culture – the
legitimate culture – they perceive to be so at odds with their own everyday culture. This
becomes an objectively structured, and subjectively felt, impediment, therefore, to the
educational success (as discussed above, p. 436) and upward mobility of children from
working-class families. Once they make this break, however, then their own children, born
into a higher class fraction, can be more at ease with legitimate culture.
In sum, Bourdieu argues, “We distinguish ourselves by the distinctions we make.” Our
taste reveals who we are. Taste reveals our social class conditioning and at the same time,
embodied in our everyday habits, reproduces and extends the social class conditioning and
the social class differences that characterize everyday cultural choices. Thus taste
unites and separates. Being the product of the conditionings associated with a particular class
of conditions of existence, it unites all those who are the product of similar conditions while
distinguishing them from all others. And it distinguishes in an essential way, since taste is the
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pointloma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1566387.
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445
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
basis of all that one has – people and things – and all that one is for others, whereby one
classifies oneself and is classified by others … Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of
the strongest barriers between the classes; class endogamy is evidence of this … Objectively
and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing or home
decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space, as a rank to
be upheld or a distance to be kept. (Bourdieu 1984: 56–57)
In short, “Taste is what brings together things and people that go together” (Bourdieu
1984: 241).
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LINKING MICRO ACTION AND MACRO STRUCTURES
Bourdieu’s discussion of everyday taste highlights his larger theoretical emphasis that
micro-level individual action matters in society, and at the same time, individual choices
are invariably conditioned by and work back on macro-structural processes (e.g., inequality
in society, at work, in gender relations). There is a tendency in sociology to counterpoise
micro-level with macro-level perspectives, and similarly to contrast approaches that emphasize individual or collective agency with those which focus on explaining social action in
terms of structural and institutional processes. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how we
should analyze and understand society transcends these polarizing opposites.
Bourdieu’s writing demonstrates the agency of individuals in everyday life – the individual
makes choices every day about what food to buy, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to,
what church to attend, what political party to support, what gift to buy, etc. Yet, at the same
time, the individual – no matter how avant-garde or autonomous – does not act alone or in
some sort of existential vacuum. Ordinary, everyday existence is saturated by society and we
cannot escape from its structural and cultural forces. Individual agency is always constrained,
always structured, as Bourdieu states, by formal education, social class, family habits, and the
distinctive (and unequal) cultural codes and practices that these contexts teach us and which
we reproduce, more or less, through our everyday social relations and behavior. Thus Bourdieu
presents us with a portrait of society wherein individuals embody the habits and attitudes, the
culture, of those around them, and act back on that culture in everyday social life with a
certain degree of individual autonomy (choosing chicken or fish). Yet the cultural options
available to the most agential of individuals are themselves constrained by an objective class –
and racial and gender – structure wherein the distribution of resources – economic and
cultural resources – makes certain options more culturally reasonable or “natural” (though
arbitrary) than others. It is through such ordinary, everyday actions as food shopping and
eating that we as individuals reproduce the objective structural order, even though we have
a certain amount of latitude in the choices and distinctions we make.
ENDLESS STRATIFICATION
Some readers may find Bourdieu’s emphasis that we cannot escape the game of culture –
i.e., that we cannot escape distinguishing ourselves by the (arbitrary but class-conditioned)
taste distinctions we make everyday – an exaggeration of the importance of hierarchies in
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pointloma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1566387.
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
social life, that everything we do, every taste we express, reflects and feeds into a system of
stratification. This is an understandable response to his work. Yet, by making us think about
taste as a socially conditioned and socially conditioning set of practices, Bourdieu alerts us
to the many small (as well as big) ways in which class divisions – and gender divisions too –
get reproduced. These are important contributions. His detailed focus on the minutiae of
different habits as socially conditioned and socially contextualized individual choices and
tastes, makes us aware that social inequality is found and reproduced ubiquitously. It is not
just in the institutional arenas where we might expect to find inequality – in schools,
business, sports – but also in what we might think of as relatively benign everyday sites (e.g.,
the dinner table) and everyday activities (e.g., having a picnic).
Feminists (e.g., Martineau, Gilman, Smith, Collins, Hochschild) have long identified the
kitchen and the home as sites for the reproduction of gender inequality. The gender division of labor is visible in who cooks and who cleans and who smiles and who doesn’t get to
leave the home for the economic-public world (see chapter 10). And theorists like Nancy
Chodorow (1978) highlight the social-psychodynamic forces that reproduce gendered patterns in the taste or desire for mothering. Bourdieu adds to the sociological understanding
of how and why structures of inequality are so resilient. His analysis illuminates how individuals acting on their own (socially conditioned) taste in making everyday choices about
apparently mundane things are really enacting practices and habits that are grounded in,
reflect, and reproduce society’s institutionalized social hierarchies. This does not mean that
women and men do not have individual agency, or that we cannot change the structures
and cultural practices that reproduce inequality. But it cautions us that change in the social
order is a long and slow process. It is so largely because of the ways in which everyday practices embody cultures of hierarchy (e.g., social class) and domination (e.g., masculinity)
and do so across the interconnected institutions (e.g., the state, the economy, the home, the
university, mass media, advertising, sports, the church) that make such practices of
inequality appear normal and necessary (Bourdieu 2001: viii).
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SUMMARY
Across his prolific writings, Bourdieu’s overarching focus was on social inequality – on
stratification in schools, art, clothes, food, etc. – and on how inequality gets reproduced
across varied institutional and cultural domains. He outlines the details of individual
choices in the micro contexts of everyday life, but his analysis overall is more concerned
with macro structures and processes than with micro relations. His conceptualization of the
habitus shows how micro practices are conditioned by and reproduce macro structures
(e.g., of class inequality), and how objective macro structures (e.g., the educational system,
the social class system) get internalized into individuals’ everyday habits and dispositions.
His approach thus exemplifies how sociologists must necessarily attend to the interplay of
micro and macro processes.
Although Bourdieu discusses the strategic choices made by individuals and the fact that,
for example, there are economic efficiencies in working-class tastes (dictated by necessity), he
does not regard individual choices as motivated by the same individual self-interested,
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
tilitarian motives elaborated by rational choice theorists (see chapter 7). For Bourdieu,
u
individual choices are invariably located within a class-conditioned cultural habitus and thus
are structured by a particular social, economic, and cultural context.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
Pierre Bourdieu (France, 1930–2002)
Focus on the reproduction of inequality in society
●●
Inequality due to class-conditioned differences in volume of capital (economic, social,
cultural capital)
●●
Special attention to the links between economic and cultural capital
●●
School is a major transmitter and reproducer of cultural and economic capital
●●
Everyday taste is socially conditioned by the social class habitus
●●
Different social classes construe the body, food, and eating differently
●●
Different social classes and genders have a (socially conditioned) taste for different cultures, different everyday habits
●●
Taste reproduces social hierarchies, including gender hierarchies; we distinguish ourselves by the distinctions we make
●●
Different institutional fields (e.g., education, art, etc.) have their own respective logics of
symbolic differentiation and inequality
●●
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GLOSSARY
aesthetic disposition the class-inculcated attitude that
allows and requires the upper class to admire art, clothes,
etc., for style rather than practical function.
cultural competence possessing the appropriate family
and social class background, knowledge, and taste to display
(and acquire additional) cultural capital.
class fraction differentiated, hierarchical sub-components
(e.g., the lower-middle class) of broadly defined social
classes (e.g., the middle class); the economic and cultural
capital of class fractions varies.
culture dispositions, tastes, evaluative judgments, and
knowledge inculcated in and as a result of class-conditioned,
embodied experiences (including but not limited to formal
education).
collective misrecognition immersion in a particular habitus or set of everyday practices whereby we (necessarily)
fail to perceive the arbitrary, though highly determining
ways in which those practices reproduce inequality.
economic capital amount of economic assets an individual/
family has; can be converted into social and cultural capital
and to acquire additional economic capital.
cultural capital familiarity and ease with (the legitimate)
habits, knowledge, tastes, skills, and style of everyday living;
education is one institutional field which requires, transmits, produces, and reproduces cultural capital; can be used
to acquire economic and social capital and to accumulate
additional cultural capital.
economy of practice individuals’ and social classes’ use of
the economic and cultural capital they have to make reasonable strategic investments that expand and maximize their
economic, cultural, and symbolic capital.
educational capital competencies acquired through
school; can be converted into economic and cultural
capital.
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
game of culture participation in the evaluative
and taste practices that confer style or distinction
as if “naturally” rather than due to class conditioning; reproduces social class differences.
habitus relatively enduring schemes of perception,
appreciation, and appropriation of things, embodied
in and through class-conditioned socialization and
enacted in everyday choices and taste.
institutional field specific institutional spheres
(e.g., education, culture, religion, law) characterized by institution-specific rules and practices
reproducing inequality.
social capital individuals’ ties or connections to
others; can be converted into economic and
cultural capital and into additional social capital.
social classes broad groups based on objective
differences in amounts of economic, social, and
cultural capital.
449
structure objective ways in which society is
organized; e.g., the social class structure exists
and has objective consequences for individuals
independent of individuals’ subjective social
class feelings and self-categorization.
symbolic capital one’s reputation for competence, good taste, integrity, accomplishment,
etc.; has exchange-value, convertible to economic,
social, and cultural capital.
symbolic goods goods we buy, display, and give
to distinguish ourselves from others; signal and
reproduce taste, status, social hierarchy, social
class inequality.
taste social class- and family-conditioned, ordinary, everyday preferences and habits; socially
learned ways of appreciation, style.
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QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
1 What are the different types of capital analysed by Bourdieu? What does each type consist
of, and accomplish? What is the interrelation among the different types?
2 What is the role of school (formal education) in the reproduction of class inequality? Is
knowledge acquired outside of the classroom valuable in increasing a person’s cultural
capital? Explain why/why not.
3 How do everyday food preferences and food habits reflect, illuminate, and reproduce
social class differences?
4 How do gender hierarchies get manifested in and reproduced through taste? How is the
body implicated in social class and in gender hierarchies?
NOTES
1
2
In Bourdieu’s (1991, 1998) analysis of the religious
field, for example, he construes “religious capital” and
its reproduction in terms of the differentiated access of
lay people and clergy to the unequally distributed
symbolic resources within a particular religious institutional field, e.g. Catholicism; see Dillon (2001).
Although in France the state finances the costs of university education, schools and universities are more stratified in terms of status and credentials than in the US.
3
In France, the grandes écoles are the most prestigious colleges, mostly admitting students from upper professional
and executive-class families, who upon graduation are
employed in these high-paying, high-status occupational
sectors; universités, in contrast, as “mass institutions” are
less selective and less tightly connected to occupational
opportunities (Bourdieu 1996: xiv; Lamont 1992: 45, 78).
See Adkins and Skeggs (2004) for a feminist critique
and extension of Bourdieu’s theorizing.
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
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The Social Reproduction of Inequality
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Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pointloma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1566387.
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