The operational value of human capital theory and cultural capital theory in social stratification

Abstract

Policy prescriptions concerning the state of pedagogy by previous government administrations have transformed the education system into a market model where brand values and purchasing power appear to be increasingly dictating access to education rather than the ability to learn and meritocracy. This article explores the pervasion of market values and market norms into the realms of pedagogy and the influence of class power in determining the dispensation and consumption of human capital and cultural capital.

Introduction

The discussion that follows is a critical comparison and contrast of the operational value of human capital theory and cultural capital theory in social stratification. The discussion segmented into four sections begins with an overview of social stratification. Karl Marx and Max Weber’s conceptualizations of social stratification are introduced briefly which form the social backdrop of the discussion and are deployed as a critical second perspective in measuring the operational value of both human capital theory and cultural capital theory. The second section focuses on human capital theory by examining productivity at both the individual microeconomic and aggregate macroeconomic level and by extending to a global context argues that the pervasion of class power in the utilization of human capital benefits the dominant capitalist societies. Human capital investment in knowledge and training from a societal and global context is argued as allowing the Bourgeoisie classes through symbolic repression and structural violence to organize human capital to maximize surplus value through mechanization, automation, and exportation of the modes of production facilitated in part by human capital.

The third section of the discussion examines the role of cultural capital in social stratification by examining Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the theory by examining the cultural reproduction model as well as the role of the pedagogical systems of Western society in the reproduction of social inequalities and the imposition of market values both in the pedagogical system and in society. The fourth section of the discussion is a triangulation of the key themes of both human capital theory and cultural capital theory which are compared and contrasted to extrapolate the operational advantages and limitations by applying the theorems of Marx and Weber as a tertiary perspective in deriving the operational value of both capitals and concludes by asserting the operational value of cultural capital theory is more complicated but reveals more about social disparities and gradients of social life than human capital theory in the role of social stratification.

Social stratification

The concept of

social stratification is the ubiquitous characteristics of societies to organize people in a hierarchy of level or “strata” on a variety of dimensions. These dimensions include power, wealth, social status, education level, and prestige of one’s occupation, social standing, and many others. (Gabrenya, 2003: 3)

The origins of social stratification can be found in the history of all societies dating back to early hunting and gathering tribes sharing the same homogeneous systems of production and social equality. Evolutionary efficiency in the agricultural, horticultural, as well as pastoral societies led to the emergence of societal divisions of labor and what members of each society throughout history perceived as an accumulation of resources over others and for the first time a system of social inequality (SparkNotes Editors, 2006). “These changes in work accompanied the transition to hierarchical societies with ruling elites and social differentiation” (Budd, 2011: 5), where some possessed more than others members within society, transferring their accumulated wealth through each generation, mobilizing wealth into small privileged groups leading to the creation of a clear social hierarchy (Morrison, 2006). These divisions in society between the dominant and dominated grew further during the decline of feudalism and the emergence of the industrial revolution and defined more explicitly the concepts of class through the enormously uneven and unprecedented growth in inequality of average living standards (Lucas, 2002).

The transition of European societies from an agricultural economy to an industrial capitalist economy led to the inception of one of the most prominent conceptualizations of social class theory compared to its predecessors of its time. Elucidated by Karl Marx in 1848, the stratification system rested on the means of production and the economy as the base which gave form to social relations and the social structure. Marx through his writings suggested, “the very first act of all societies was always economic because human beings had to satisfy their everyday material needs before anything else” (Morrison, 2006: 37). Marx’s class dichotomy consisted of two distinct groups: the Bourgeoisie who comprised the elite wealthy classes who owned and controlled resources, the means of production, and the proletariats who traded labor power as a commodity and generated surplus value in a profit-driven economy. Marx’s assertion that over time the proliferation of class antagonisms would lead to social polarization and an eventual revolutionary reconstruction of society never came to flourish-on for much of Western society bar the Bolshevik revolution. Instead, Western society appears to have embraced the international capitalist model in what Weber (2013 [1904–1905]) famously termed “The spirit of capitalism” and become dependent on its success, becoming stake holders in the economic transformation of society through the ownership of commodities in capitalism in what could be described as the postindustrial global society of neoliberal free market fundamentalism which embraces the idea of a market solution to all of society’s problems.

By contrast, fellow German sociologist and economist Max Weber rejected Marx’s purely economic interpretation of society and argued property relationships based on materialism and economic relations alone did not constitute a measure of class formations, but additional non-economic, cultural perspectives were necessary as a measure of social structures:

just as Marx attached great significance to the locus of control over the material means of production, so Weber, in his analysis of political, military, and scientific institutions, centered his attention on the locus of control over the means of administration. (Pandey, 1989: 186)

For Weber, the composite structure of society rested on the realms of the political, economic, legal, and religious spheres of society, and consent and authority which gave form to what he termed as the “class situation” of those who had ownership of property and those who did not. Weber inferred that in the absence of property ownership, human capital credentials such as degrees and diploma could be exchanged in the market for income and improvements in life chances. Although Marx’s work was written over 150 years ago, his contribution combined with that of Weber still has relevance in today’s postindustrial society. Their explanatory models of social constructs offer an important contribution to our understanding of the social world and offer a social prism from which we can view the remnants of the systems which have come to shape many of the social institutions and social relations that form many of the current constructs of social strata; for that reason, the narrative arc and social tropes of this discussion are extrapolated from the contributions of both Marx and Weber and form the tertiary lens in assessing the operational value of the two capitals of this discussion that is centered on the concept of life chances outside of direct property ownership, determined by the competing approaches of human capital theory and cultural capital theory in the contribution to social stratification.

Human capital theory

Compared to Marx, Weber was a modernist and understood that society was transforming from how Marx interpreted society in his time. Marx conceptualized his social class theory at a time when many workers were engaged in work that entailed the embodiment of what could be described as early rudimentary forms of human capital that took place largely in factories with clear divisions of labor. Marx argued that labor did not amount to capital, but the workers’ ability to deploy their labor power in the process of production amounted to capital (Marx, 1990 [1867]). In contrast, Weber elucidated his theory of the modern class situation at the turning point in human history following the postindustrial revolution where “for the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth … generated by technological change and the accumulation of human capital” (Lucas, 2002: 109–113). “Nothing remotely like this economic behavior is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility” (Lucas, 2002: 113). The classical economic argument advocated a self-regulating free market that did not require government intervention to achieve market equilibrium. For Weber, the free market afforded opportunities that did not require the material ownership of property but afforded opportunities through the investiture in human capital, namely, educational credentials which when exchanged in the market could improve life chances and advance social position.

The spectrum of human capital is broad as well as multifaceted, encompassing determinates of productivity at both the individual microeconomic and the aggregate macroeconomic level (Fuente and Ciccone, 2002). The effect of human capital can also be categorized into three components: individual, organizational, and societal (Dae-Bong, 2009). At an individual level, Becker (1964, 1975, 1993) argued that the investment process of human capital in a modern economy made it durable and complementary to other forms of capital such as social capital and unlike economic capital did not depreciate over time but embodied the individual throughout their lifetime if used accordingly and could generate a much greater yield in life chances. Like Becker, Weber also suggested that the attainment of educational credentials in the form of degrees, diplomas, and so on offered by the pedagogical system is a form of guaranteed certification of skills recognized and valued by society as worthy and demanded by the market that could be exchanged for greater incomes. Weber like many current economists and social scientists highlighted the relationship between education and lifetime earnings. Weber delineated that this direct personal investment afforded a distinct socioeconomic status reproducing opportunities for individuals who did not have material property ownership but could generate greater wealth as well as social position and power by virtue of personal investment, that is, human capital investment (Morrison, 2006; Weber, 1978 [1956]).

Human capital from an organizational context “conceptualizes workers as embodying a set of skills which can be ‘rented out’ to employers” (Ehrenberg and Smith, 1997: 290). At an organizational level, human capital appears embodied in individuals and not owned by the organization (Armstrong and Baron, 2007) but secured through employment relations which when developed through training and experience can take the form of intellectual capital. Davenport (1999) argued that treating workers within an organization as assets prone to exploitation was limited as “human asset accounting” could not quantifiably take into account the added value of human capital and the freedom of workers as free agents who could decide for which organization they wish to work for as “a worker who acts like a human capital investor will place his or her investable capital where it can earn the highest return” (p. 8). By contrast, Bowles and Gintis (1975) rejected the idea of individual choice and argued that although individuals and families made choices to some degree with regard to education, the human capital framework avoided class concepts and its influence on education and inferred that the role of pedagogical institutions was to condition human capital to the demands of the capitalist society inferring that “peak level performance by workers benefits the capitalist rather than the worker” (pp. 74–82).

Human capital extended to a societal and global context could be argued as being juxtaposed. Education in Becker’s (1964, 1975, 1993) and Schultz’s (1975) understanding is the supposition that the investment in human capital produces individual growth which subsequently contributes to aggregate social and national growth. The author’s argument stands at odds with the imperfections of the global labor market. The proliferation of postindustrial societies coupled with the mechanization of labor has resulted in fewer people now working in factories with industrial output remaining similar if not higher; the surplus value created in this process has enabled the development of the public sector and financial services sector with increasing number of workers now engaged in service sector work. The cost of labor is higher in Western countries; in order to minimize labor costs for the production of surplus value, organizations have exported the modes of production to third world countries for macro-level exploitation.

Becker’s (1964) and Schultz’s (1975) argument also falls short of acknowledging the fact that advancements and investments in knowledge have led to technical changes to the means of production which have had a greater impact in the transmission of the embodied skills and knowledge of some workers. In Britain manufacturing, the traditional occupation of the working class has been in steady decline since the 1960s and replaced with service sector work, and advancements in technology used in manufacturing have cheapened labor further and deskilled labor as a commodity, thus reducing the value of human capital embodied by workers and weakening the resolve to obtain a competitive wage. Advancements in technology, such as

computer programs and robots are being used increasingly to re imagine complete industries, – from farming to fashion to transportation and medicine, current examples include plans for driverless tube trains, self service ticket stations, self service supermarket counters, touch screen customer service and menu option driven fully automated call centers etc. ‘Robots have been replacing repetitive or dangerous work for years, but the rise of big data and new algorithms that can make sense of large amounts of information are pushing robots into new domains. In the process, they are putting many more jobs at risk of obsolescence. (Shields, 2014: 14a)

The obsolescence in certain jobs created by advancements and investments in knowledge could lead to a prolonged absence of economic activity for some workers, effectively leading to little growth or return in investment from human capital and depreciation in the value of the embodied human capital of workers.

The relaxing of global trade laws has further opened global labor markets for the Bourgeoisie classes to export their proletariat problem abroad, making workers in the British labor market more susceptible as well as making the transfer of labor abroad to countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh, and India easier for large-scale organizations to continue to mobilize the embodied human capital of workers to expropriate greater surplus value for substantially less of what Marx termed as “socially necessary labour time” as well as less pay (Marx, 1992 [1885]). The orientation of Western society toward neoliberal market values and norms has forced some societies with reduced dispositions of the material means of production into precariousness, marginalized social positions and inflicted on those societies of the power elite of a myth of “mondialization” in what Bourdieu (1998) denounced as the “neo liberal scourge” (Swartz and Zolberg, 2004). These neoliberal developments Galtung (1969) and Bourdieu (1998) stressed equated to structural inequalities in the world in the form of symbolic repression and structural violence where globalization rather than leading to homogenization instead facilitated further the solidification of power and influence of the dominant nations. A modern Marxist perspective argument would suggest the mobilization of human capital embodied by the workers facilitates the world’s capitalist ruling class bourgeoisie to cultivate what dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank (1966) described as the creation of an “international division of labour,” so as to extract surplus value from those countries which are comparatively underdeveloped (Fine and Saad-Filo, 2012; Littlejohn, 1972). Schultz (1975) suggested human capital offered laborers the ability to successfully deal with this “disequilibrium” caused by changes in economic conditions through the macroeconomic application of human capital.

The decline in the earlier rudimentary forms of human capital embodied in agricultural and manufacturing labor power processes coupled with the advancement in technology has transformed Western society to one that is based increasingly on the knowledge-based economy where educational investment is now seen as an important determinant in creating life chances as well as the creation of social positions. “Laborers have become capitalists not from a diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks … but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value” (Schultz, 1961: 3).

Some social scientists citing empirical observations on class power refute human capitals’ ability to improve life chances and social position, suggesting the emergence of class statutes in the education system has transformed education as a credential operated as a symbolic token that opened social gates operated by those who already had inherited social status suggesting “that persons in power open social gates, choose which credentials to accept and favor credentials that distinguish persons similar to themselves from others” (Mirowsky and Ross, 2003: 171). The discourse surrounding the mobilization of human capital in the pedagogical system is evident from a number of empirical studies. As a case in point, a study carried out by Webber and Butler (2005) at University College London and Kings College London found that pupil’s social background played a pivotal part in educational success. The research found that middle-class children from affluent areas achieved overall better General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) grades than students from less affluent areas and concluded that class consciousness mattered and success in school was closely linked to the pupil’s family background.

The pervasion of class status in the pedagogical system was given further credence by academics Jerrim et al. (2012) at the Institute of Education, University of London. Drawing on current research, their findings demonstrated the sharp social class divide in the entry rates into higher education, and the researchers’ analysis highlighted the cumulative advantages held by pupils with higher socioeconomic backgrounds when entering higher education. Admittance figures released in 2011 for the top universities in the Russell Group which includes elite institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge showed the average number of students who attended secondary school who had received free school meals was just 64 out of the thousands admitted to universities that year (Scripps, 2014). Webber and Butler’s (2005) research highlights an important argument in this discussion insofar as to suggest that the grades obtained by children from privileged backgrounds can often obscure the structuralized disadvantages faced by the children from more modest backgrounds. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) termed this formation as “cultural arbitrary” and suggested that all cultural institutions, that is, colleges, universities, and so on can often mask the arbitrariness inequalities reproduced by the same institutions which are subsequently presented as part of the norms of the accepted culture.

Francis and Perry (2010) argued that middle-class families had higher levels of economic and cultural capital and as a consequence could mobilize their resources, for example, by applying their economic capital in the purchase of a home in a catchment area with schools classed as outstanding by Ofsted school inspection reports or absorbing rising university tuition fees introduced by the coalition government in 2012, and so on. The

cultural capital provided via educational experience and well-resourced networks provides middle-class families with knowledge of ‘the rules of the game’, understanding of the way the system works and the hierarchies therein, and confidence in liaising with the school. (Francis and Perry, 2010: 13)

This sense of entitlement exhibited by middle- and upper-class families was, as Lareau (2003) argued, a product of a process of “concerted cultivation” and a conscious effort to give their children the very best possible start in life by utilizing their cultural and economic capital concertedly to increase their children’s social mobility through structured activities that condition the habitual social capital skills necessary for their children to navigate successfully through the semi-autonomous and ever more specialized social spheres. Bourdieu (1985) based on the theorems of Marx and Weber termed these spheres as “fields” and suggested the power relations both between and within these fields gave form and structure to human behavior and based on the composition of capitals embodied within the agents habitus when entering the field could be transformed through symbolic capital to ascribe the social positions of the actors according to the common doxa of the field.

Cultural capital theory

According to Bourdieu (1986), cultural capital can exist in the embodied, objectified, and institutionalized state. Bourdieu (1990) referred to the embodiment of cultural capital as the “habitus” of the individual and in its physical embodiment was a disposition of the mind and body and non-transmissible but over time and through a process of socialization via family values and norms conditioned tacitly as competencies that constitute the most dominant habitus, and so on can cultivate the qualities that can have cumulative cultural advantages. For example, cultural capital, like human capital, could be converted to economic capital in the market, that is, the obtainment of qualifications as tokens by privileged and socialized children that allow admittance into the most privileged positions within the labor market in the attainment and accumulation of economic capital, so cultural capital reproduction facilitates social reproduction of privilege and is no lesser value than economic capital. The objectified state of cultural capital such as artifacts, books, and paintings can be transmissible provided the correct foundations are in place for the receiver to understand and appreciate the value of the materialized acquisition of the objectified cultural capital. The institutionalized form of cultural capital affords individuals’ institutional recognition predominantly in the form of academic qualifications that confirm the value of the holder as well as acting as an indicator to the labor market of the composite value of the cultural capital held by the holder which can be converted to economic capital as well as a form of certification of cultural competencies (Bourdieu, 1986)

Guillory (1993) argued that cultural capital was instrumental in establishing class status and suggested that the absence of a unitary curriculum perpetuated the pedagogical systems of Western societies to enact a process of “social sorting” where the elite institutions distilled the dominant curriculum and distribution of the highest cultural capital, and the differences in the social stratification of the schools, colleagues, and universities were determined by the distribution of cultural capital, and the social function of these institutions appears not to just regulate cultural capital but also invariably reproduce and sustain these differentiations within society. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) argued that the education system of Western societies facilitated by cultural capital produced cultural reproduction of class inequalities. DiMaggio (1982), by contrast, rejected Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction model. DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) acknowledged the historical link between class status and attainment but argued that link between class status and educational attainment was weak. DiMaggio (1982) proposed his own alternative “cultural mobility model” and suggested that cultural capital as a facilitator of educational attainment was not the preserve of the elite but open to all groups irrespective of their socioeconomic background. Bourdieu in defense could argue that DiMaggio’s findings were extrapolated using data from the 1960s, and the data analysis does not take into account the subsequent economic trends of the following decades.

Sullivan (2002) suggested that “Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is not clearly defined” (p. 155) and as a consequence of a lack of conceptual clarity was open to a varied number of operational interpretations. Lamont (1992) studied with Bourdieu in Paris and also criticized Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Lamont argued that cultural capital was limited in addressing the importance of moral boundaries. Comparing American and French cultural attitudes and practices, she argued that “symbolic boundaries,” that is, cultural boundaries, in group formations differed greatly across groups and nations and cultural capital could not be accurately operationalized to ascribe social positions as groups with comparable socioeconomic status had immeasurably different group-shared value systems and did not apply Bourdieuian cultural orientations as social distinctions. Kingston (2001) argued that distinctions in cultural consumption tastes as demarcations of class that Bourdieu claimed had existed in France did not have the same correlations in the United States due to cultural overlaps. Peterson (1992) termed these cultural overlaps in tastes and consumption between classes as “cultural omnivorousness” and pointed out that groups with high status were not averse to the consumption of popular culture adding to their own cultural repertoire, for example, an aristocrat who attends a pop or rock concert and consumes popular culture is still an aristocrat in much the same way a working class postman who attends an opera or ballet performance is still working class.

Some feminist scholars argue that the pervasion of “andocentric biases” and a lack of consideration to feminist theory have limited the conceptual value of cultural capital, and as a consequence, feminist scholars have adapted cultural capital to feminist empirical analysis (Laberge, 2014; Skeggs, 2004). According to Bourdieu (1984), the operational value of cultural capital was twofold for women. “Women make use of the capital for acquiring husbands, and women play the key role of transmitting the cultural capital to their children” as homemakers (Dumais, 2002: 47). Yet, Bourdieu delineates social origin as deriving from the father as a product of Western gender-based habitus resultant from masculine domination and feminine submission (Silva, 2005).

Lovell (2000) argued that Bourdieu’s view of women as capital bearers (objects) within the domain of the family that facilitate the production of cultural capital rather than capital accumulators (subjects) within the social field was contrived. Feminist scholars such as Skeggs (1997) have shown that women could be capital-accumulating subjects. McCall (1992) suggested that gender operated both as a hidden form of cultural capital and as a disposition; these “gendered dispositions are hidden behind the normal construction of categories, enabling the misrecognition of gender” (Skeggs and Adkins, 2004: 23). Gender inequalities have a multitude of different manifestations, many of which are embedded in institutional practices and organizational structures that appear vis-à-vis normal but on closer examination reveal particular relations of reproduced inequality and stratification along the axis of gender as well as race and class relations (Holvino, 2010). “The sexual division of labour characteristic of capitalist society is seen as a fundamental pillar of women’s oppression, including gender structure of the labour market” (Holvino, 2010: 257). Bourdieu (1984) suggested that these gender divisions of labor were less prominent according to positions within the social hierarchy and according to the habitus of the agent and the structure of the field.

Human capital versus cultural capital

The underlying narratives of Webber and Butler (2005), Jerrim et al. (2012), Francis and Perry (2010), and Lareau (2003) all serve to illustrate a much broader point in the discussion, that human capital from a Weberian perspective remains problematic insofar as to suggest the attainment of institutionalized statutes and symbols in the form of, for example, diplomas and degrees as a composition of human capital when entering the labor market as an exchange may not be sufficient to challenge stratification. The pedagogic actions of the bourgeoisie classes in the economic domination and mobilization of human capital as a transmission of cultural capital akin to a form of institutionalized culture and legitimate power effectively legitimize and perpetuate structures in class and serve the elite, and these institutionalized forms of human capital and cultural capital can exclude social groups with a more modest means of production and social position and marginalize these groups when entering the different pedagogical systems in the pursuit of attainment or maximization of human capital (Jenkins, 1992). What cultural capital reveals that human capital does not is social inequality. The role of the pedagogical system may be to enhance and facilitate the social reproduction of quality labor power and to create competitive advantages through human capital investment, but the pervasion of class values in effect stratifies and segregates the pedagogical systems of Western society and reproduces inequalities that leads to the imposition of market values and market norms where those with the highest economic capital can obtain admittance into the cultural institutions that distill the highest of cultural capital provision that ultimately benefits the capitalist bourgeoisie classes while marginalizing the economically insecure proletariat classes.

These arbitrary practices of the most symbolically powerful institutions and those agents who wield power amount to a imposition of what Bourdieu (1991) characterized as “symbolic violence,” that admittance into some of the most prestigious institutions of education may appear explicitly to be based on educational merit alone, but tacitly background plays a pivotal part and may not be a coincidence but a construct embedded in what Marx terms as a false consciousness (Engels, 1893), cloaked in symbolic power where admittance is not open to all socioeconomic groups. But those with the most mediated distinctive and exigent forms of habitus and social caliber, that is, with the highest posits of cultural capital and when coupled with social capital as well as economic capital and transmitted through symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984) form a potent concoction of accumulated advantages. This empowers those classes to enter the labor market with their reinforced and reproduced privileges and quickly assimilate roles that serve their preconditioned constructs of legitimate power and sense of entitlement inculcated early on in the admittance through the pedagogical system and as a consequence of their social position. “Bourdieu’s intent with cultural capital, and his work more generally, was to expose the way in which social stratification, particularly class-based inequality, was acquired, perpetuated, and reinforced” (Wagner, 2010: 70).

Conclusion

The application analysis of both human and cultural capital theory reveals differing perspectives to social stratification. Human capital theory examined from a microeconomic perspective offers a means for understanding how the embodied skills and knowledge of the worker can determine the course of the lifetime economic capital accumulated by an individual and how this direct investment can alleviate certain social inequalities. The analysis of human capital when broadened to an organizational and global context reveals a more conflicting perspective and suggests that human capital investment benefits the capitalist Bourgeoisie more than the workers embodying the skills and knowledge. The pervasion of power and wealth of the elite in the conscription of human capital has facilitated the dominant societies of the west to continue to extract even greater surplus value from less economically developed countries. Both human capital and cultural capital share a strong common axel in emphasizing the role of education in creating life chances, but where the operational value of human capital appears relatively uncomplicated, cultural capital, however, extends beyond human capital by entering into other spheres of social life and reveals the anomaly within the human capital construct. Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital based on the dominant cultural norms was never elucidated in more concrete terms and as a consequence remains open to a varied number of operational interpretations. Cultural capital viewed as a cultural prism reveals the social gradient of class invisible in the human capital construct that is inculcated early on in the socialization of the individual long before entrance into the pedagogy system. Cultural capital reveals the classification of people into distinct groups according to their associated composition of cultural capital and qualifications as social markers that characteristically reveal the social inequalities arbitrarily reproduced by the pedagogical system as a consequence of the pervasion of class consciousness and the marketization of education that acts as a signifier which informs the labor market which agents have accumulated the greatest composition of capitals demanded by the market (Brown and Carasso, 2013).

The marketization and commodification of Western pedagogical systems as economic organizations selling quantified forms of capital to purchasers have perpetuated the persistence of reputational hierarchies and class-based inequalities in the pedagogical system (Brown and Carasso, 2013) where those who enter the system with a view to consuming or embodying cultural capital do so not only based on the quality of education on offer but also by the strength of their economic capital as a purchaser and the reputation or “brand value” of the institutions that distribute the cultural capital certifications that act as social signals to the labor market. From a modern Marxist perspective, the pervasion of class values in the pedagogical system appears to perpetuate inequality. “The dominant classes of modern societies use their superior ‘cultural capital’, no less than their superior economic capital, in order to maintain their position of dominance” (Chan and Goldthorpe, 2010: 4). This canonical confirmation of the dominant culture and superiority creates the perception that legitimates the elite class’ position from other classes. From a Marxian perspective, a capitalist economy appears to need a workforce that does not embody legitimate culture so as to ultimately continue to exploit the proletariat.

All markets require a degree of government intervention to address market imbalances and to ensure greater social equality. The pervasion of class status and market values in education has tainted the true value of education and altered the choices individuals make. Education, especially higher education as cultural capital that leads to social advancement, should be made available and more accessible to all of society irrespective of social origin. Only through the amelioration of structuralized inequalities in education that leads to a distributional inequality in capitals will an equalization of a fairer means of embodying cultural capital be possible by all admitted through the pedagogical system.