4 - Expectations and hopes for educational success

Summary

This chapter and Chapter 5 focus on the mobilisation of cultural resources in the reproduction of advantage. In the introduction, I noted how Goldthorpe initially equated his notion of cultural resources to Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital to refer to the value attached to education within families. He also included issues of occupational inheritance and traditions of self-employment within families. Later, however, he rejected Bourdieu's culturalist explanation of class stability because of its inability to explain change: namely, the increasing participation of both middle-class and working-class children in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. He also directed hostile criticism at Bourdieu's characterisation of a working class seemingly lacking in cultural capital and suffering from a ‘poverty of aspirations’. Now, as I have argued elsewhere, it is one thing to identify the shortcomings of Bourdieu's theory and another to deny the importance of cultural dispositions and practices in the reproduction of advantage altogether. Despite some of the problems with Bourdieu's work, which plenty of others besides Goldthorpe have noted, I think his ideas about the importance of cultural capital in the reproduction of privilege and power are worth considering further. After all, the previous two chapters illustrated how parents convert their economic capital into cultural capital by investing in a good education for their children so that they acquire the necessary credentials to gain access to desirable jobs. That they invested their financial resources in this way was influenced by the value attached to educational success.