1986 On Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital Three years after its original publication in German in 1983, Pierre

Bourdieu's influential article 'The Forms of Capital' is published in English. In this brief but insightful work, Bourdieu identified three forms of capital (economic, cultural and social), paying special attention to the mechanisms of accumulation and conversion. In this article, Bourdieu challenged economic theory for narrowly focusing only on economic capital (that capital which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights). Bourdieu argues that by doing so, the whole universe of exchanges is reduced to mercantile exchange aimed at the self-interested maximization of profit, whereas all other forms of exchange are conceived as noneconomic and therefore disinterested. In response, Bourdieu proposed the development of a general science of the economy of practices, capable of examining capital (understood as power) in all its forms. Hence, in addition to economic capital, Bourdieu identified cultural and social capital as well. Social capital, in Bourdieu's approach, consists of all actual or potential resources linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition. It is a personal asset that provides tangible advantages to those individuals, families or groups that are better connected. This meaning is different from the one attributed by authors like Putnam, Coleman and Fukuyama, who understand social capital as social networks of trust, solidarity and reciprocity. For them it is a community asset, and by implication assumes the existence of a homogeneous community with common interests and shared values. While the latter do not pay sufficient attention to issues of unequal distribution of power, Bourdieu was particularly concerned with the reproduction of inequalities. Cultural capital includes three states: embodied in the individual (as a type of habitus), objectified in cultural goods or institutionalized as academic credentials or diplomas. For Bourdieu, schools are not as much sites of distribution of cultural capital, but sites of valorization and legitimation of the cultural capital of the middle and upper classes, which is reified and rewarded. In developing the concept of cultural capital, Bourdieu explicitly departed from human capital theory, arguing that such theory fails to recognize the role of the educational system in reproducing the social structure. Bourdieu's approach has been subjected to several criticisms, especially that his analysis of power and domination is mechanistic, overdeterministic and inflexible, in the sense that it does not pay enough attention to human agency, or to the complex dynamics of creation, resistance, incorporation and accommodation. In spite of it, he contributed to a theory of capital that overcame the economic/non-economic dichotomy, and helped to better elucidate the connections between culture, social networks and power.