Page 60 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURAL CAPITAL

the challenge of using creative inputs to support core business.
Furthermore, entire industries have emerged to support the creative
sector, including impresarios, agents, management companies, pub-
licists, events and exhibition managers, and knowledge and cultural
entrepreneurs (see Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999).

CULTURAL CAPITAL

The theory of cultural capital argues that, like economic wealth, access
to and possession of cultural and symbolic power work to produce and
reinforce social distinctions. The term was first employed by Bourdieu
(1984). The theory outlines howeducation, taste and systematic
patterns of consumption of cultural goods are not only socially
stratified, but are also productive sources of power in their own right.
Evaluations based on taste distinctions have turned out to have
economic and status consequences – pecking orders were established
by howmuch cultural as well as economic capital a class or individual
could command.
Fiske (1987) attempts to overcome the dystopian nature of
Bourdieu’s thesis by introducing the term popular cultural capital.
He argues that this form of capital ‘is an accumulation of meanings and
pleasures that serves the interests of the subordinate’ (1987: 18). With
popular cultural capital, individuals are able to form subjectivities
based on an opposition to dominant values, or as he states, find ‘power
in being different’ (1987: 19). For Fiske, television and its traditional
genres are symbolic of this process.
This populist tone is absent in the work of Bourdieu and
subsequent studies that have followed his approach (see for example
Bennett et al., 1999). In these approaches, the stance of the authors
themselves may de-legitimate the culture of those under analysis
because of their own investment in cultural capital. For example,
Bennett et al. comment with surprise that ‘[i]t may carry just as much
kudos at a dinner party to showthat you know the current line-up of
the Spice Girls as to knowthe name of Philip Glass’ latest
composition’ (1987: 200).
With theories of class currently undergoing reconsideration, the
notion of cultural capital may too need re-examining. As the above
example demonstrates, knowledge workers may share prejudices
against or ignorance of popular culture, and so serve to reproduce
cultural capital along very traditional lines. But simply inverting
established taste hierarchies, or assigning positive evaluations to

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