Cultural Capital and Social Stratification in Britain.ppt

Cultural Capital and Social Stratification in Britain Mike Savage, (Sociology CRESC), University of Manchester The fall and rise of class in Britain During the 1980s and early 1990s, British class analysis becomes increasingly marginalised and loses its way…. Loss of theoretical engagement with issues of social change Exclusive focus on structural issues, e.g. social mobility, rather than culture and identity Loss of engagement with American traditions Since the mid 1990s, there has been a striking revival of class analysis, much of it with a strongly ‘cultural’ inflection. Key writers include Stephen Ball, Simon Charlesworth, Tim Butler, Fiona Devine, Diane Reay, Andrew Sayer, Bev Skeggs, Valerie Walkerdine, Alan Warde. Indicative work includes Rethinking Class, culture, identities and lifestyle (ed Devine, Savage, Scott and Crompton) Sociology, special issue on ‘class and identities’, December 2005 Bourdieu is the central theoretical reference point of this new work, but his claims about cultural capital have not been explicitly tested in the UK using both quantitative and qualitative research. This is also necessary to allow an engagement with older ‘class structural’ traditions of research This is the remit of the major ESRC funded project, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion, directed by Tony Bennett and Elizabeth Silva (Open University), myself and Alan Warde. Our three aims What is the nature of cultural capital in Britain? How important is cultural capital, vis-à-vis economic and social capital How does the concept of cultural capital address issues of policy concern around social exclusion Researching class cultural capital Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital raises a host of difficult issues…. Is the concept of habitus over determinist? Is Bourdieu’s Distinction too rooted in place (France) and time (1960s) to have contemporary relevance? How does the approach relate to the ‘class analysis’ tradition? . Most British sociologists have two ve