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1986

On Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital

Three years after its original publication in German in 1983, Pierre Bourdieu's influential article 'The Forms ofCapital' is published in English. In this brief but insightful work, Bourdieu identified three forms of capital(economic, cultural and social), paying special attention to the mechanisms of accumulation and conversion.

In this article, Bourdieu challenged economic theory for narrowly focusing only on economic capital (thatcapital which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form ofproperty rights). Bourdieu argues that by doing so, the whole universe of exchanges is reduced to mercantileexchange aimed at the self-interested maximization of profit, whereas all other forms of exchange areconceived as noneconomic and therefore disinterested. In response, Bourdieu proposed the development ofa general science of the economy of practices, capable of examining capital (understood as power) in all itsforms. Hence, in addition to economic capital, Bourdieu identified cultural and social capital as well.

Social capital, in Bourdieu's approach, consists of all actual or potential resources linked to possession of adurable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition. It is apersonal asset that provides tangible advantages to those individuals, families or groups that are betterconnected. This meaning is different from the one attributed by authors like Putnam, Coleman and Fukuyama,who understand social capital as social networks of trust, solidarity and reciprocity. For them it is a communityasset, and by implication assumes the existence of a homogeneous community with common interests andshared values. While the latter do not pay sufficient attention to issues of unequal distribution of power,Bourdieu was particularly concerned with the reproduction of inequalities.

Cultural capital includes three states: embodied in the individual (as a type of habitus), objectified in culturalgoods or institutionalized as academic credentials or diplomas. For Bourdieu, schools are not as much sites

of distribution of cultural capital, but sites of valorization and legitimation of the cultural capital of the middleand upper classes, which is reified and rewarded. In developing the concept of cultural capital, Bourdieuexplicitly departed from human capital theory, arguing that such theory fails to recognize the role of theeducational system in reproducing the social structure.

Bourdieu's approach has been subjected to several criticisms, especially that his analysis of power anddomination is mechanistic, overdeterministic and inflexible, in the sense that it does not pay enough attentionto human agency, or to the complex dynamics of creation, resistance, incorporation and accommodation. Inspite of it, he contributed to a theory of capital that overcame the economic/non-economic dichotomy, andhelped to better elucidate the connections between culture, social networks and power.