Cultural Capital in East Asian Educational Systems

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.