Cultural capital reproduction in the UK

This paper studies the transmission of cultural capital between parents and children in UK. To that end, I examined the intergenerational effects of parents´ embodied and institutionalized cultural capital on their children’s cultural capital. The findings show that cultural capital is inherited within families in the UK today, but also that this general statement has to be qualified. In accordance with previous contributions, it is demonstrated that cultural transmission is “type-specific”, that is, while parents´ educational achievements tend to affect those of their children, parents’ own tastes are mainly reproduced through their children’s tastes. Although these findings on the whole support Bourdieu´s general thesis regarding the cross-generational transmission of cultural capital, they point to some important distinctions that need to be drawn between subtypes of this kind of capital. Furthermore, the effect of gender is also found in the regression models. Mothers’ and fathers’ cultural behaviour and level of education are both important, but their impact varies according to the type of cultural capital.