ReviseSociology

Tag: cultural capital

  • Unequal parental choice

    marketisation policies mean unequal parental choice as middle class parents have more cultural capital

  • The Great British Class Survey

    The GBCS found seven ‘objective’ social classes based on economic, cultural and social capital. However, most people do not identify with these social classes!

  • The working class don’t feel like they fit in middle-class jobs

    People from working class backgrounds who are socially mobile and make it into middle class jobs are less likely to feel they fit into those jobs than those from middle class backgrounds. This is according to some contemporary sociological research which suggests support for the view that lack of cultural capital not only hinders working…

  • How to Break Into the Elite

    Why don’t working class graduates with good degrees get the best jobs?

  • Mary Berry Doffs Her Bonnet – and Legitimates the Class Structure (Again)

    I’ve blogged about how Mary Berry’s uses her middle class cultural capital to maintain the class-order through demonising working class taste , but in her latest series of outings – Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets, she takes this to another level… I could only stomach one episode, which I watched to confirm my suspicions about…

  • Cultural Capital, Practical Intelligence and Success

    Being an analytical genius is not necessarily enough to achieve success in life – it also helps if your parents have sufficient cultural capital to provide you with ‘practical intelligence’.  In this post, I continue my summary of Malcom Gladwell’s most excellent ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’ (chapter 5: the trouble with geniuses part 2).…

  • Bourdieu’s Structuration Theory

    Bourdieu didn’t like the label ‘social theorist’ because he insisted that there was a fundamentally important relationship between empirical data, research methods and ‘theory’. He was not interested in making grand theoretical claims, but rather was engaged in examining particular substantive areas (fields) of social life that existed at particular times and places, such as…

  • The Apprentice Final Five and Class Inequality

    The Apprentice – The Final Five demonstrates some of the subtle ways in which the class structure disadvantages those from working class backgrounds – To focus on just one example, Frances was a straight A student who dropped out of the University of Durham because ‘it sounds ridiculous’ but she didn’t feel liked she fitted in.…

  • The Hidden Privileges of Identity: On Being Middle Class

    A summary of Steph Lawler’s ‘Sociological Perspectives on Identity’, chapter 7 During summer 2000 and in January 2001, there were two separate community-protests over the housing of child-offenders in the local community, one in a working-class area, by working-class people, another in a middle class area, by middle-class people. The first protest took place in…

  • Mary Berry’s Cultural Capital and Gregg Wallace’s Love of Sociology

    Mary Berry’s recent comments against deep fat fryers and Jaffa cake dunking could be interpreted (using Bourdieu) as an example of the unconscious process through which the middle classes assert and maintain their superiority by defining working class practices as ‘bad taste’ and ‘unhealthy’. Gregg Wallace picked up on this with his comments about Berry’s attack…