A Study Of Bourdieu's Cultural Capital Theory And Cultural Entrepreneurial Practice

Bourdieu is first a cultural entrepreneur and then a master of cultural capital theories. He is either fragmentarily accepted or degraded to be nothing. We need time to understand him further and wholly. A call is made for treating Bourdieu seriously in this thesis.Symbolic violence is not the whole but only a part in his theory. According to Bourdieu, culture capital is the capitalization of social practical relationship on the basis of the daily life, it contains embodied, objectified, and institutional forms. Cultural capital investment is a kind of social action, it is restricted by and transforms habitus and field at the same time. The foundation of social action is the sense of practice but not rational calculation. The eclectic relationship between meaning of life and rational power is the dynamic of cultural capital development. Knowledge, symbolic form and creative spirit are the three fundamental elements of cultural capital. Bourdieu's cultural entrepreneurship in this study refers to his cultural capital investment in theory construction, field position-taking and contribution to society. The key to understand Bourdieu is to grasp his Society-oriented way of breaking binary thinking model. In combination with his manipulation of such theoretical tool as field, habitus and cultural capital, We can understand in the Way-seeking method his construction of study-object, structure of works system, configuration and rhythm of his academic output, and the skill of expression and discursive rhetoric, etc. So, in this perspective, his cultural capital theory and cultural entrepreneurial practice is united harmoniously.Bourdieu's cultural capital theory, directly engendered the emergency and rising of the concept of cultural entrepreneurship, and is closely relevant to the development and paradigm shifting of the entrepreneurship theory in general. Moreover, Bourdieu's cultural capital theory and cultural entrepreneurship practice is perfectly embodied in Bourdieu's personal life and academic career. The Said synthesizer, all other cultural capital theories and practices trace back, or refer to him.Bourdieu's cultural capital theory developed in three phases, he has different research objects, foci, and corresponding strategies in each one. This is not the pretext for us to cut him up, but the innate demand of his theory. Bourdieu's cultural theory budded and began to take shape in50's and60's,20th century in Algeria and Beam, France. Principle, framework, and developmental direction of Bourdieu's cultural capital theory and cultural entrepreneurial practice took form through his understanding of the relationship between individual habitus and environment, life experience and reality construction, holistic recognition and social condition, and also through his observation of first son status and marital exchange relation, thinking of the game nature and profit gain mechanism of social life, analysis of autonomy of social game and the way out for the disadvantaged. In this regard, symbolic computation and world corporeity are two keys important to understand Bourdieu.Sixties and seventies20th century saw Bourdieu's establishment of his cultural capital theory and his critical period of cultural entrepreneuring. Bourdieu forwarded the cultural capitalist participation assumption, and explored and localized the position of cultural theory and practice on the continuum between power and meaning. Starting from research of education and cultural consumption, he decided that education system is the direct producer of cultural capital and the latter is not personal affair as it seems to be, but the arbitrary act and even the monopoly of symbolic violence by group or class. Cultural capital needs tradition, standard, and social status to be rational, and it is determined eventually by political and economic power in general. Eighties and nineties saw the expansion of Bourdieu's cultural capital theory. After analyzing the structure and rules of cultural capital distribution in social groups, strata, and classes, Bourdieu did the case study of professor groups in higher education system, uncovering the fierce competition and hardship of cultural capital amassing and operation for them. However, for Bourdieu himself, Heidegger is the illuminating star of cultural capital and theory in his view timely. With Heidegger as the philosophical cultural entrepreneurial star in his sky and male domination fragility under his hypercritical microscope, Bourdieu found the route and confidence to be a cultural entrepreneur. Further, in the study of the case of Flaubert and the whole literary field of France, Bourdieu made out generally and systematically the categories and characteristics of cultural production and the rules of cultural entrepreneurship. On the cultural entrepreneurial practice, Bourdieu insisted upon the periodicity of cultural production and the stability of personal habitus, striving for the organization establishment of cultural production and in-depth social participation, and winning the privileged scholarship position and the opportunity to develop in the English world, especially in the U.S.. Nineties onward in20th century, Bourdieu confronted the mechanism of national cultural capital operation, proposing the direction, agenda, frame, and principle of the cultural capital construction and operation in national level. Bourdieu regarded the cultivation of the elite as the foundation of the national cultural capital production. In this regard, personal cultural capital of national elite is integrated closely into the national cultural capital, of which the mechanism is to monopoly the privileged social position and opportunity and further to form the spirit of realism and entrepreneuring. Through the analysis of national cultural capital, Bourdieu emphasized its weak autonomy, multi-facedness and non-essentialist characteristics, wishing to get rid of the symbolic violence, rejuvenate the traditional republicanism rich in democracy, liberty, and equality, and then reconstruct French national cultural capital. Bourdieu stressed that the obstacle to reconstruct the national cultural capital was mainly the unlimited manapuation of it by neo-liberalism. After analysis of the intervention of intellectual cultural production field by the symbolic violence, Bourdieu, according to the experience of art production field, proposed the basic principle and strategy of the whole intellectual cultural production field. For Bourdieu, intellectuals are endowed with the mission of partaking the construction of national cultural capital, and he himself is an excellent example.The creativity of cultural capital is represented by the originality spirit of the individual ultimately. Bourdieu demonstrated the possibility, regularity, and principle, of personal cultural entrepreneurship with his own achievement. For Bourdieu, personal entrepreneuring is to situate oneself in the stability of his habitus and field, discovering and creating possibility and constructing his life track. We explore the emotional characteristics or mentality of personal cultural capital investment which Bourdieu himself did not cope with openly, and stressing its intrinsic and transcendent character. Bourdieu also explored the necessity for the intellectuals to take part in objectivity construction and fight the neo-liberalism with critical mentality. Moreover, Bourdieu forwarded the general outline for cultural capital construction of the field of intellectuals for the purpose of the establishment of new universalism which founded on intellectual union and fighting against neo-liberalism. A champion of rejuvenating intellectual cultural capital and social innovation, Bourdieu initiate new frontiers for a study of self-organization and self-regeneration of Society.We summarized the main contributions, shortcomings, and further developments of Bourdieu's cultural capital theory. First, the contributions are the deeply exploring and understanding of the phenomenon of capitalization of culture, the discovering of the inner crisis of capitalization of culture and path-founding of new world, the inheriting and carrying forward of the spirit of Enlightenment movement, and responding to and partaking of the new entrepreneurship society; Second, the main short-coming of Bourdieu's cultural capital theory is its lack of operationality. Yet, many followers and critics scrutinized the connotation, creativity, and influence of his theory. We also probed the developmental direction of Bourdieu' theory in terms of cultural value and content, organization study, cultural globalization, and pointed out the trend of integrating and transforming the Bourdieuian theory of cultural capital theory in world scholarship.In summary, we think that in Bourdieu's cultural capital theory contains three fundamental elements:knowledge inheriting, symbolic leverage, and creativity and innovation. The integration of the three elements and especially the last one as the most important driving force, enable Bourdieu's theory to open up a society-oriented cultural ecology scholarship, which emphasizing the balance-keeping between life meaning and social power. In a word, Bourdieu's cultural capital theory and cultural entrepreneuring practice provide us with a fundamental way to observe and study cultural capitalization.