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Abstract
Cultural capital has been an important but often elusive concept in the study of educational processes and social class reproduction. The authors suggest that this is partly because a country's educational system and ways of evaluating students at different educational transitions set the context for the mechanisms through which embodied and objectified cultural capital operate. Moreover, parents in some societies invest in children's "shadow education" (extracurricular classes or tutoring) at key educational transitions, and it is not clear whether this replaces cultural capital or supplements it. The authors use data from Japan, a country whose educational system depends heavily but not exclusively on standardized examinations, to examine how cultural capital affects students' progress at three points in the educational process that involve different relative emphasis on examinations and on teachers' subjective judgment. In this way, the authors clarify the ways that embodied and objectified cultural capital exert effects on educational outcomes.
Keywords
cultural capital, Japan, educational attainment, shadow education
INTRODUCTION
The reproduction of social class through educational attainment is a central theme in studies of inequality. Following Bourdieu, many sociologists have considered the role of cultural capital in translating an individual's social class background into educational attainment. Sociologists have used a plethora of empirical indicators to tap into the abstract concept of cultural capital. The positive association between socioeconomic background and exposure to literary and artistic products and activities - commonly used measures of cultural capital - appears to be a general phenomenon across countries. However, the subsequent effect of cultural capital on individuals' educational achievement and attainment does not appear to be universal (De Graaf et al. 2000; DiMaggio 1982; Dumais 2002; Katsillis and Rubinson 1990; Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell 1999). This has given rise to questions about the societal conditions under which cultural capital impacts educational outcomes, especially since the concept was developed in the specific context of French culture.
In this article, we consider how the effect of cultural capital on educational performance and attainment in Japan may be conditioned by characteristics of educational systems that are particularly salient in East Asia: (1) a strong reliance on student assessment through standardized examinations and (2) widespread parental investment in academic tutoring and private exam preparation courses for their children. Under these circumstances,...