The Forms Of Capital By Bourdieu Summary

In The Forms of Capital, Bourdieu discusses the foundations of capital and cultural capital. In his book, Bourdieu defines capital as our accumulated labor or work that we put into something that creates profits for the person. According to Bourdieu, these profits don’t have to have an economic value, but can also be embody in the body and the brain. Bourdieu calls this embody form of capital as cultural capital because it can be carry in our bodies as skills and in our brain as knowledge, views and cultural competencies. Bourdieu also mentions that there are other forms of capital: economic capital, which produces economic security for the individual and social capital which involves both social obligations and networks (Bourdieu, 1986).

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For instance, Lareau found how middle class parents transmitted their cultural capital to their children by organizing meaningful and structural activities for them. Moreover, she also noticed that middle class parents help their children by exercising their physical voice. Lareau believe that from their parents’ concerted cultivation, middle class children learned to possess some advantages over working class kids and within that a newfound appreciation for control and endowment (Lareau, 2002). In contrary, Lareau found that working class parents also transmitted cultural capital to their children, but to them, their focus relied more on the home and on providing their children with basic necessities. Thus, many working- class parents didn’t feel the need to cultivate cultural capital or social skills to their children because they saw this process as spontaneous and as naturally unfolding. However, Lareau claims that working families did exercise some boundaries and within those boundaries, they gave their children control over their own time and environment, for which they use most of the time to watch TV or play with the neighborhood kids. Finally, Lareau concluded that from their families’ cultural capital, working class children absorbed a sense of restraining because they couldn’t use or knew how to use their physical voice to express frustration against their establishment (Lareau,