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As the deployment of ICT and the Internet especially increases all around the world, the urgency of providing access to the “have-nots” appears at least diminished, with new issues and urgencies at the forefront. However, studies show that even when the best conditions for access are established, not everyone uses their digital devices for the same purposes, even when sharing the same goals, or when participating in the same experiences.

To explore potential explanations of these phenomena, this study examines survey data from students from a private university in Peru regarding their backgrounds and expertise with ICT. We use the twin concepts of social and cultural capital to establish a connection between their larger lifeworld experiences and their use of digital media. For this purpose, we analyze the data using polychoric correlations to explore patterns resulting from self-perception of access and skills, as well as processes related to social capital such as differentiated media use.

Findings indicate that there are differentiated processes of capital accrual using ICTs, but, at the same time, the productive and leisure dimensions of ICT use must be considered.

The purpose of this chapter is to reveal explanations for completing upper secondary education. Focus is on the mechanisms that drive attainment of upper secondary education. I analyze the relative contributions of different factors measured by the relative increases in the log likelihood function. I also investigate the importance of characteristics other than the traditional variables, such as fathers’ and mothers’ occupations, their education, and household income, often applied in studies of educational attainment. I used a recent 1984 cohort database with information about educational completion and an informative set of measurements on noncognitive capacities, parental cultural capital, cultural capital, reading score, several school-related variables, and a rich set of family background variables. Attainment of upper secondary education was analyzed by a multinomial logit model, showing that characteristics other than the traditional variables all have significant importance. The analysis clearly depicted that the social position and educational levels of both parents remain important in determining whether the child embarks on completing an upper secondary education. Additionally, noncognitive dispositions show to be very important in explaining educational attainment, even when controlling for family background and refined cultural capital variables. Therefore, society should direct more efforts towards establishing children's cognitive and noncognitive skills and their ability to focus on schoolwork along with building their beliefs. Parents should be involved in a more content-sensitive sense when raising their children.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

Bourdieu clearly articulates how cultural capital works at the macro-level and how it leads to the reproduction and legitimation of inequality. He is less clear about other levels of analysis. We address this gap by drawing on social psychological theories and by suggesting that cultural capital is best treated as a multi-level concept – with “cultural capital” produced at the macro-level, “subcultural capital” produced at the meso-level, and “multicultural capital” produced at the micro-level. We illustrate with an exploratory analysis of an advertising agency in Eastern Europe, thereby highlighting legitimacy processes occurring among its departments and personnel.

In this paper, we discuss how “cultural capital” and “symbolic capital,” understood as specialized subsets of intangible resources and capabilities, enable firms to achieve valuable strategic positions in ways that are currently underexplored by mainstream strategy literature. We articulate the similarities and differences between cultural and symbolic capital and the intangible assets that have been the focus of mainstream strategy researchers, such as intellectual, social, and reputational capital. Our theoretical arguments build on insights from a number of studies conducted primarily in non-North American settings that have shown how symbolic properties of products create value. We conclude by delineating future avenues of research that strategy scholarship should consider in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relationships between intangible resources and capabilities, and value creation.

This chapter explores the inter-urban dimensions of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom. It does so by drawing on quantitative measures of inequality from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Great British Class Survey’ experiment of 2011–2013 and representative economic indicators of productivity. It takes its starting point as an acknowledgement of the deepening inequalities in western, developed economies, a reality reflecting in the burgeoning of literature on macro-economic disparities at the start of the twenty-first century. Whilst invaluable, this literature has tended to focus solely on economic definitions of inequality between countries or regions. The purpose of this chapter is to continue the expansion of our understanding of the manifold dimensions of inequality into the social and cultural domains. The data from the Great British Class Survey are uniquely positioned to do this: approximately 325,000 people participated in the online questionnaire, providing information not just on their stocks of economic capital but also on the size and scope of their social networks and the nature and extent of their cultural activities. The size of the sample thus provides an unparalleled tool for analysing the complex nuances of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom using a framework informed by the theoretical approach to cultural class analysis pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu. The analysis here focuses solely on inter-urban disparities in the United Kingdom and demonstrates the ways in which economic inequalities are reflected and reinforced in the social and cultural domains.

The purpose of this case study is to investigate one conduit through which racial inequality is perpetuated in American schools. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, this chapter uses visual ethnography to examine the signage of one predominately African American high school in the Midwest. Some of the signs, which are featured photographically in the chapter, include bans on “sagging,” bans on certain slang words, an emphasis on individual accountability, and more. The chapter finds that this school works to normalize forms of cultural capital considered valuable in the White, middle to upper-middle class communities while simultaneously discrediting and preventing less dominant forms of capital. The implications of this analysis are that Black students must gain access to dominant forms of capital in order to experience success in school. Such an analysis asks leaders in higher education to: (1) recognize that high schools often negatively evaluate a student’s non-dominant cultural capital – as reflected in poor student discipline records, low achievement and attainment; (2) consider transforming the college admissions process to be more inclusive of measures of non-dominant capital; and (3) consider how to authentically value what matriculating students with non-dominant forms of capital bring to the campus.