Introduction
Capital, depending on the area in which it operates, and the price is more or less serious transformations that are a prerequisite for its effective action in this area, can act in three main guises : economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and institutionalized in the form of property rights, cultural capital, which under certain conditions, be converted into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; social capital formed social obligations (bonds), which under certain conditions, be converted into economic capital and may be institutionalized, for example, in the form of aristocratic title.
Cultural Capital
Cultural capital can act in three states : embodied state, i.e. in the form of long-term disposition of mind and body ; objectified state - in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, tools, machines, etc.), is an imprint or incarnation of theories or their critics, some disk problems, etc. and finally, the institutionalized state, ie in the form of objectification (it should be considered separately because, as will be seen in the educational qualifications, cultural capital gives a completely original properties, which are supposed to, that saves).
Most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that, in its ground state, it is associated with the body and assumes a certain embodiment. Accumulation of cultural capital in the incorporated state, i.e. in the form of what is called culture, building, involves the process of incarnation in bodily form (embodiment), incorporation. Since this process entails efforts to develop and assimilation, it is time-consuming, the investor directly. Like physical build muscle or acquisition of Sun, it is impossible to do at second hand (hence the possibility of delegating powers do not work here).
Work on the acquisition of such properties - is the work of a (self-improvement), suggesting their own efforts (on paie de sa personne, as we say in French). This investment - primarily time, but also socially constructed forms of desire, libido sciendi, all paired with her limitations, self-denial and self-sacrifice. It follows that the least inaccurate measurements of cultural capital are those that are elected as a standard duration of temporary acquisition of the desired properties - of course, provided that the latter is not limited to the duration of schooling, but also takes into account earlier and home education. The latter may receive a positive evaluation (like win time handicap) or a negative assessment (wasting your time, which is doubly aggravating the situation, because then require even more time to fix the consequences) - depending on the requirements of the academic approach to the market.
Such incorporated capital, external wealth converted into an integral part of the individual, habitus, can not be transmitted instantaneously by an act of the gift or inheritance, purchase, or exchange (unlike money, property rights, or even aristocratic titles). Consequently, the use or exploitation of the cultural capital presents particular problems for owners of an economic or political capital - whether private owners or, if we take the other extreme, entrepreneurs, hiring performers with certain cultural skills (not to mention the leaders of the new state). How can I buy this capital so rigidly tied to a person who is not buying with the person and thus losing the essence of legitimation, involving simulation of dependence? How can I concentrate this capital (as required by some undertakings) without concentrating their owners, which can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences ?
Cultural capital can be purchased - in different amounts, depending on the time period, society, social class - without any kind was his intentional plantings, ie, quite unconsciously. It always bears the imprints of the earliest conditions of its acquisition, and these are more or less visible fingerprints (e.g., pronunciation, speaking about belonging to a certain class or region) help define its distinctive features. It can not save, regardless of individual abilities agent acquiring it, he dies and dies together with its owner (along with his biological abilities, memory, etc.). Thus, as cultural capital is tied to many threads man in his biological uniqueness and inherited (which is hidden, even invisibly), it does not apply to old, deep-seated discrimination, which was carried out between Greek lawyers qualities inherited (ta patroa) and acquired (epikteta), i.e. those which the individual adds to his inheritance.
Thus, the actual effect of capital as a means of appropriation of the product of accumulated labor in the objectified state, carried by the agent performs depends on the shape of the distribution of funds accumulated and objectively assigning available resources. Relationship between the agent and the assignment objectively available resources (and therefore the profits they produce) mediated relations competition (objective and / or subjective) between this agent and the other owners of capital, competing for the same good. In these relationships formed deficit situation, and through her social value generated resources. Structure of the field, i.e., the unequal distribution of capital, determines the specific implications of this capital, namely the appropriation of profit and the ability to enforce the laws of functioning of the field most favorable to capital and its reproduction.
Social Capital
Social capital is a set of actual or potential resources which are associated with the possession of durable networks of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition - in other words, to membership in a group. The latter gives its members support in the form of collectively-owned capital, credential, allowing them to obtain loans in all senses of the word. These relationships may exist only in the practical state, in the form of material and / or symbolic exchange, which contributes to their maintenance. They can also be socially instituted and guaranteed by the common name (the name of family, class, tribe, school, parties, etc.), or a whole set of instituting acts, designed to simultaneously generate and inform those who pass through them, in which case they are more or less really driven, and then maintained and controlled in the process of exchange. Being based on the indissoluble acts material and symbolic exchange, the emergence and maintenance which involves reacknowledgment of proximity, they are also partially reducible to objective relations in physical proximity (geographical) or even in the present economic and social space.
Thus, the volume of social capital, to whom a given agent depends on the size of the network connections that he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of capital (economic, cultural or symbolic), which, in turn, has every one of those who are with him connected. This means that although social capital is relatively irreducible to economic and cultural capital of a particular agent, or even a group of related agents, it is never completely independent of these forms of capital, as the exchanges that generate mutual recognition, suggest a certain minimum objective confirmation homogeneity and because it (social capital) has a multiplicative effect on capital, which already has the agent.
Profit brought by membership in the group is the basis of solidarity, which makes it possible to receive it. This does not mean that agents deliberately seek profit as such, even if it is a select club, organized precisely in order to concentrate the social capital, as a result of receiving the full benefit from the multiplier effect of concentration and save money from their membership (material - like, say, all kinds of services that bring useful contacts, and symbolic - for example, due to profit from a rare, prestigious group).
Conversions
Different types of capital may result from economic capital, but this is only possible at the cost of more or less serious transformation efforts required to produce the type of power that would be effective in this field. For example, a goods and services, economic capital provides direct access without any whatsoever secondary costs. Others can only be obtained by the ratio of social capital (or social obligations), which can not occur instantaneously at some opportune moment to until will not develop and will not be supported for a long time - as if being an end in itself (and hence without being tied to the period of its use). This is achieved at the cost of investment in sociability, which is necessarily a long-term (for example, the delay in the payment of debt - one of the factors of the pure form of a simple conversion of debt in recognition not concretized sense of obligation towards someone called gratitude). In contrast to the cynical (but economical) transparency of economic exchange, which at one time equivalents pass from one hand to another, the essential ambiguity of social exchange, predetermining misrecognition (in other words, some form of good or bad faith, understood as self-deception), involves much more thin economy of time.
At the same time it should be noted that the economic capital forms the basis for all other types of capital that these transformed, mutated (and never fully reducible to it is not) the types of economic capital have their own specific effect only to the extent that they can hide (including from their owners) existence based on, and ultimately at the origins of the influence of economic capital. The real logic of functioning capital, the conversion of one of its type to another and moving their conservation law can not be understood without having to not overcome two opposing views. On one side is economism, ignoring the specific effect of other types of capital on the grounds that any of them will eventually be reduced to economic capital. On the other side - semiologizm (now represented by structuralism, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology), which reduces social exchanges to communicative phenomena and ignoring the hard fact of the universal information to all forms of economic base.
The ability to convert any type of capital is the basis of strategies aimed at ensuring the reproduction of capital (and the position taken by its owner in the social space) through transformations that minimize costs and losses, which involves the conversion itself (under the given state of social relations of power). It is possible to differentiate the different types of capital depending on their ability to reproduce, or more precisely, depending on whether they are easily transmitted (ie, at what cost, and how explicitly or implicitly). The costs and the degree of opening, usually vary in inverse proportion. Anything that helps to hide the economic aspect, as a rule, also increases the risk of loss (especially in the case of transfer of capital between generations). Thus, the (apparent) any type of capital disparity leads to a high degree of uncertainty of the different types of transactions between the holders. Similarly, proclaimed rejection of payments and guarantees that characterizes exchanges aimed at the production of social capital in the form of a more or less long-term liabilities (exchanges of gifts, services, visits, etc.), inevitably entails the risk of hitting the ingratitude, the abandonment of recognition of unsecured debt that this kind of exchange is intended to produce. And accordingly, a high degree of secrecy in the transmission of cultural capital has the disadvantage (in addition to his usual risks of loss) that the academic qualification - its institutionalized form - can not be passed (like the aristocratic titles) and not be subject to the agreement (like shares or units of). More precisely, the cultural capital, diffuse, continuous process of transmission within the family which is carried out without supervision and control (whereby it seems that the educational system bestows its awards based solely on natural abilities), and which is increasingly reaches its most efficient state (at least the labor market), only when it validated the educational system, ie when he turned into the capital of qualifications - is the subject of a more hidden, but more risky forms.
Works Cited
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