2025
Pierre Bourdieu: Class, Culture,
and the Social Reproduction of
Inequality
Stratification/Inequality
Multiple dimensions:
• Economic capital (material assets/resources)
• Social capital (who you know/connections)
• Cultural capital (everyday taste, ease, competence,
education, coolness)
Ø Social class differences are a function of differences
in volume and use of economic, social, and cultural
capital
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Capital
• Economic, social, and cultural capital are analytically
separate/independent
• But they are also interrelated
• All forms of capital are useable and exchangeable
• One type of capital can be converted into another
• Some individuals/groups have higher amounts of one
type of capital and relatively lower amounts of other
types of capital
Economic and Cultural Capital
• Bourdieu gave most attention to the interrelation
between economic and cultural capital
• Different types/combinations of capital required and
rewarded in different institutional fields
• All institutional fields (e.g., an occupational sector; a
sports league; a religious denomination) are
characterized by inequality
• What counts for symbolic capital (reputation) varies
depending on the specific field
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Families & Cultural Capital
• Significance of family-of-origin in determining
individuals’ access to capital
• Education/educational capital independently
enhances economic capital
• Nonetheless, there is a close positive relationship
between family socio-economic background and the
educational capital of its members
Schools
• Require and reward middle-class cultural
competencies
• Success at school, i.e., acquiring educational capital,
is contingent on the cultural capital and cultural
competencies acquired prior to school (in one’s
family/neighborhood)
• Schools link employers and (successful)
students/employees
Ø Reproduce social inequality
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Schools/colleges:
• Do not automatically reproduce the economic status
quo
• But neither are they neutral institutions that provide
a level playing-field for economic achievement
• Dynamic interaction between family background and
school culture
o There is class/occupational mobility but socio-
economic inequality is also reproduced
Social Class and Taste
§ Taste is evident in the ordinary choices of everyday
life
• What we eat
• Where we live
• What clubs we join
• What music we like (e.g., Country & Western, Hip
Hop, Electronic Rock)
• What television shows we watch (e.g., “Roseanne,”
or “Silicon Valley”)
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Taste Is an Everyday Practice
• Conditioned by social class
• Embodied
o We use our bodies to smell, look at, taste food
o We use our bodies as we experience – smell, feel,
see – the surroundings in which we eat
• Socially learned, habituated ways of
seeing/perceiving, appreciating, and appropriating
everyday things
Cultural Habitus
• Comes from everyday experiences and
habits/practices in our family of origin
• Family context itself conditioned by social class
o Social class and family context interact to
condition judgments of taste
• We internalize, embody, and act on these tastes
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Gendered Taste
• Women more responsible than men for the
consumption of symbolic goods; responsible
for status display
• Within the family, women convert economic
capital into symbolic capital
• Significance of fashion choices in demarcating
taste and status
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Upper-Class Taste
• The aesthetic disposition
• Taste for style rather than for practical function
• Artistic or symbolic consumption demarcates class
distinctions
o Distinctions in taste and in the economic and
cultural capital possessed and used by different
classes
• The “game of culture” requires cultural ease/cultural
capital in playing the game
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Working-Class Taste
• Economic and cultural necessity (limited resources)
impose a taste for necessity
Ø Taste for practicality, functionality, conformity; not
for how things look, but for what they do
• Taste choices are reasonable/sensible given working
class individuals’ everyday social class contexts
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Class Tastes
• Taste as an economy of practice
• Each class makes strategic choices (based on their
respective resources)
o Choices that fit with and express their different
volume and use of economic and cultural capital
o Choices that maximize individuals’ symbolic
capital within the class contexts in which they
move
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Distinctions of Taste
• Reproduce social class differences
• Reproduce social class boundaries
• Reproduce social inequality
• We distinguish ourselves – we convey our social
background and social status – by the distinctions we
make in everyday life (food, clothes, furniture, art,
music, etc.)
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Social Hierarchies
• Individuals make choices; they exert agency
• But the choices they make - and how and why they
make them - are socially conditioned
• Social class structures taste
• Taste expresses and reproduces class distinctions,
social hierarchies
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