Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: Some Observations on Recent Trends in Education, Employment and the Labour Market

The dominant forms of cultural capital associated with middle class access to `bureaucratic' careers are being devalued due to credential inflation and changing patterns of symbolic control within employing organizations. At the same time, the demand for cultural capital in the reproduction of class location has increased in a context of volatile global markets, technological innovation, corporate restructuring, the marketisation of public services, and high unemployment. It will be argued that, in the competition for a livelihood in the 1990s, increasing class conflict is leading to significant changes within the `individualist' rules of exclusion (Parkin 1979) which are heightening the inherent tension within capitalist democracies between an ideological commitment to the creation of an `open' (if not equal) society and the desire to extend social privileges to family members. Although these observations must await detailed empirical investigation, it is suggested that they are likely to have important consequences for processes of class formation and enduring patterns of social inequality.