Cultural capital or habitus? Bourdieu and beyond in the explanation of enduring educational inequality

Abstract

Evidence for Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory and its contributions to understanding educational inequality has been relatively mixed. Critics discount the usefulness of core concepts such as cultural capital and habitus and most studies invoking these concepts have focused only on one or the other, often conflating the two, to the detriment of both. We disentangle cultural capital and habitus, and argue that taken together – in conjunction with practice and field – they hold significant explanatory potential. Moreover, we argue that these concepts can be incorporated into a scientific realist ‘structure–disposition–practice’ explanatory framework that seeks to address the misalignment between Bourdieuian relational constructs and standard positivist quantitative research methods. This reframing can help generate practical, actionable knowledge of the mechanisms underlying persistent socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment.