Capitalising culture : the political career of a governmental actor

Tony Bennett

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

As the literature on cultural capital continues to grow so too do the levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication which accompany its analysis. Initially singular in form, cultural capital has now been pluralised and diversified, and this is reflected in the qualifications and revisions that are in evidence regarding the methods through which the relations between different cultural capitals might best be measured and visualised. There has, however, been much less critical examination of what is at stake politically in cultural capital research, or of how this has changed since the concept made its initial appearance in Pierre Bourdieu's work in the 1960s. In what follows I offer a partial corrective to this by looking at some of the mutations that have characterised the career of cultural capital as a governmental actor. Rather than engaging with the concept entirely on its own terms as a set of problems to be resolved by a conjunction of sociological reasoning and statistical measurement (although I shall not neglect these considerations) I shall approach it through a Foucauldian optic by considering the distinctive governmental logic associated with Bourdieu's initial formulations of cultural capital and the shifting governmental logics that have characterised its subsequent pluralisation and diversification.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBourdieusian Prospects
EditorsLisa Adkins, Caragh Brosnan, Steven Threadgold
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherRoutledge
Pages91-111
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9781315728353
ISBN (Print)9781138845084
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002
  • cultural capital
  • cultural sociology
  • culture

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