Whose cultural capital? Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of cultural capital through cultural value

Abstract

Two articulations of cultural capital found in two disciplinary contexts are examined: one from Bourdieu’s sociology and one from Throsby’s cultural economics. These conceptions, it is argued, intersect in the notion of cultural value and need to be integrated. Bourdieu needs Throsby for cultural capital to be an object of decision-making but Throsby needs Bourdieu to make the definitional feature of cultural capital—cultural value—meaningful. This is because cultural value is not an aggregated sum of individual utilities the way economics conceives of value; but, and in line with Bourdieu, it is constituted through the collective meaning-making of situated social agents. Rather than a static, discrete object of measurement, cultural capital is a mutable and relational object of interpretation in social contexts and must be understood accordingly, before it can be calculated in economic terms. Cultural policy needs the humanities and sociology before it can make use of economics.