Cultural Capital Definition

expected to be high performers as well as those who were expected to be low performers. The names of the students were selected in a random fashion for both the categories. They then monitored the teachers’ behavior towards them and their academic performance thereafter. They observed that the students who were told to the teachers to be high performers not only witnessed a change in the attitude of the teacher towards them but also experienced a significant surge in the performance after the experiments. While these effects varied with the age, gender and other parameters like the intellectual abilities of the students, etc. the impact of teachers’ favorable attitude towards the selected students’ abilities did perform statistically significant

The concept of cultural capital was conceptualized majorly by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that while the pecuniary assets and financial capital are necessary factors which determine the status of an individual within a society, cultural capital is also a strong factor that influences his social position immensely (Brimi, 2005). He defined this cultural capital as the sum total of his knowledge, educational background, beliefs that he conformed to and the values and morals that he held (Brimi, 2005). This cultural capital can exist in an embodied or intangible state, where the capital is stored and manifested in terms of the capabilities and disposition of the mental abilities and beliefs, or it can exist in an objectified or tangible state, where this cultural capital presents itself in the form of cultural works like books, works of art, machines, etc. (Throsby, 1999). It is also stated that this cultural capital, similar to the social and economic capital, gets transferred on an intergenerational basis (Saraceno, et al.,

Intergenerational social mobility is defined as the relationship between the social and economic status of the two consecutive generations of a family (OECD, 2010). In other words, this measure defines how much of a difference can exist between the socio-economic position of the parents and that of their children. A common unit for measuring the intergenerational mobility is the intergenerational income elasticity which is found to be positively correlated with the GINI coefficient, which in turn is a measure of the income inequality present in a country (Jerrim & Macmillan, 2014). This finding further supports the important role that the socio-economic background of the parents have in determining the educational and occupational choices made by their children as argued by Scherger and Savage which is the basis of this essay. Their argument indirectly states that the people belonging to lower social status and poor economic background are less likely to have the potential for upward intergenerational mobility both in terms of education and in occupational choice (Imeraj, et al.,