Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Social Capital

Since Bourdieu introduced the terms cultural capital, habitus and social capita into the language of sociology nearly 30 years ago, research in the sociology of education has flourished in attempts to define, outline, and provide empirical support for Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction. In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the theory, and explain the outline of some of these concepts. Cultural capital refers to the things people 'have' (including both objectified/material cultural capital, i.e., books, and embodied cultural capital, i.e. knowledge) and habitus refers the things people 'do' (their regular, embodied forms of behaviour). There are basically four forms of capital according to Pierre Bourdieu, that are; (a) Economic capital; (b) Cultural capital: embodied (in persons), objectified (e.g. art), institutionalised (e.g. university degrees); (c) Social capital: resources grounded in durable exchange-based networks of persons; (d) Symbolic capital: manifestation of each of the other forms of capital when they are naturalised on their own terms.