Cultural capital and cultural policy

Introduction. The concept of cultural capital has been identified as a crucial axis of social inequality, especially in the internationally renowned work of Pierre Bourdieu (notably 1970; 1984). Interest in the significance of cultural capital has proliferated in recent years (Devine, 2004; Savage, Barlow, Dickens and Fielding, 1992; Skeggs, 1997), and indeed the eminent American sociologist, Donald Treiman (2002), recently pronounced that cultural capital was the single most important factor generating the transmission of inherited social position in all western societies. Yet although these debates about the concept of cultural capital have raged for decades in studies of education and social stratification, there remains a surprising lacuna in considering the significance of cultural capital for understanding the nature of cultural citizenship and cultural policy. This absence is all the more surprising given the increasing interest in developing cultural policy in recent years. Therefore, the aim of this special collection is to offer a series of interventions on the potential value of the concept of cultural capital for these rapidly emerging areas of academic and policy concern.