In a Class of Their Own: Using Cultural Capital to Win Jurisdiction

A central project for occupational groups is acquiring and defending jurisdiction; scholars have investigated abstract knowledge, material resources, and social connections as channels by which this is accomplished. We propose a new mechanism, cultural capital, for winning jurisdiction, and delineate a process model that shows how it is used in each of the critical stages: searching for new opportunities, acquiring support of external audiences like customers, and convincing incumbents to relinquish their hold on tasks. We demonstrate this process, and the role of cultural capital within it, with an ethnography of a craft cluster in India where jurisdiction shifted from indigenous artisans to outsider designers. In this cluster, possession of theory, money, and friends were insufficient to accomplish the observed jurisdictional transfer. Instead, this phenomenon is best explained by differentials in cultural capital between the jurisdictional challengers and the incumbent craftsmen. By focusing the cultural repertoires associated with the class backgrounds prevalent within an occupational group, we reinvigorate the study of class while presenting an under-explored source of occupational power for winning jurisdiction, which may provide additional analytical leverage over existing mechanisms.