Postscript : cultural capital and inequality : refining the policy calculus

It is clear from the papers collected in this issue that marked inequalities characterize the British population’s relations to culture, and that these inequalities are strongly connected to some of the main drivers of social stratification more generally. The close relations between both degree and kind of cultural engagement on the one hand and, on the other, occupational class position and level of education, taken, respectively, as rough proxies for economic and cultural capital, are particularly noteworthy in this regard, leaving little room for doubt regarding the regularity of the interconnections between cultural, social and economic inequalities. To return to some of the questions raised in the introduction to this issue and reviewed again in the conclusion to the previous article, there are, though, good reasons for doubting that the vocabulary of social exclusion provides an adequate means of engaging with these. This is not to dispute that there are sections of the population whose degree of cultural disengagement might, as a matter of political convenience, be described in terms of the languages of social exclusion or cultural deprivation. Those in routine and semi-routine occupations, those who have never worked, those with no educational qualifications and the over 65s could all be described in these terms. The issue, rather, concerns the adequacy of the forms of analysis and action that follow in the slipstream of such vocabularies. For by constructing the forms of inequality to which they refer as exceptions, affecting society only at its margins, they suggest that these inequalities are to be addressed through a mixture of integrative mechanisms, some of them material (paid work), many of them moral, through which such groups are to be reconnected to ‘the mainstream’. As our study shows, such exclusions are not an exception to rules that operate differently within ‘the mainstream’, but a particular, albeit extreme, manifestation of the ways in which cultural and economic capital—education and occupational class—also work to produce cultural inequalities within the mainstream.