Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). In J. Karabel & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and Ideology in Education. pp. 487-511. New York: Oxford University Press. (Originally from Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, R. Brown(Ed.), London: Tavistock, 1973)

Bourdieu reveals that the level of education plays the major role in cultural consumption, "legitimate" activities. He emphasizes, however, that the education can reach the full effectiveness among individuals who bring acquired culture and familiarity with the appreciation of art by their family upbringing. In short, the education system proportions academic success to the cultural capital. He further argues that the education system reinforce the initial inequality and contribute to reproduction of unequally distributed cultural capital among classes because it tends to transmit dominant culture, thus forming the monopoly of that culture. This[symbolic violence*] results in self-elimination of children from culturally unfavored classes in the form of self-depreciation, devaluation of the school, or a resigned attitude to failure and exclusion.

In terms of legitimizing the reproduction process, Bourdieu writes, "[B]y converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the education system fulfills a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the "social order" as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship" (p.498).

In his analysis about the relations between economic capital and cultural capital, he writes those who have less economic capital among the dominant classes invest more in education of their children so that they can at least maintain their social classes. His analysis about meritocratic ideology is sharp. He writes,

"the value of the diploma, outside the specifically academic market, depends on the economic and social values of the person who possesses it, inasmuch as the yield of academic capital (which is converted form of cultural capital) depends upon the economic and social capital which can be put to its valorization" (p. 506).

Thus, "the diploma is all the more indispensable for those from families less favoured in economic and social capital," however, "the possession of a diploma, as prestigious as it may be, is in any case less and less capable of guaranteeing access to the highest positions and is never sufficient to guarantee in itself access to economic power" (p. 507).

* The term of symbolic violence doesn't appear in this article. See in Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977).