Pierre Bourdieu 1986. The forms of capital.
Capital is accumulated labor.
- a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures.
- a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world.
Capital is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible.
The structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.
CAPITAL can present itself in three fundamental guises:
- as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights;
- as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications;
- and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.
Cultural capital exists in three forms:
- in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. Its aquisition is called Bildung, cultivation – presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor.
a) it cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange.
b)it cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent.
c) it declines and dies with its bearer (with his biological capacity, his memory, etc.).
d) it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital (ecause the social conditions of its transmission and acquisition are more disguised than those of economic capital).
- in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.;
a) is transmissible in its materiality (but what is transmissible is legal ownership and not (or not necessarily) what constitutes the precondition for specific appropriation, namely, the possession of the means of ‘consuming’ a painting or using a machine, which, being nothing other than embodied capital, are subject to the same laws of transmission).
b) remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate (i.e., to the cultural capital embodied in each agent or even in the aggregate of the agents).
c) it exists as symbolically and materially active, effective capital only insofar as it is appropriated by agents and implemented and invested as a weapon and a stake.
- and in the institutionalized state - in the form of academic qualifications.
Social capital:
It is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ .
a) The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.
b) the profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the solidarity which makes them possible.
c) The existence of a network of connections is the product of an endless effort, at institution, of which institution rites – often wrongly described as rites of passage – mark the essential moments and which is necessary in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits.
d) the reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed.
e) every group has its more or less institutionalized forms of delegation which enable it to concentrate the totality of the social capital, which is the basis of the existence of the group (a family or a nation, of course, but also an association or a party), in the hands of a single agent or a small group of agents and to mandate this plenipotentiary, charged with plena potestas agendi et loquendi, to represent the group, to speak and act in its name.
Conversions of capital:
The different types of capital can be derived from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.
Economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital.
In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another (so that a concept like wastage has no meaning in a general science of the economy of practices). The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense).
Every reproduction strategy is at the same time a legitimation strategy aimed at consecrating both an exclusive appropriation and its reproduction.
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