A Dynamic Model of Cultural Reproduction

We draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction to develop a formal model of the pathways though which cultural capital acts to enhance children’s educational success. We argue that our approach brings conceptual and empirical clarity to an important area of study that hitherto has been short of both. Our model describes how parents transmit cultural capital to their children and how children convert cultural capital into educational success. We review results from existing empirical research on the role of cultural capital in education to demonstrate the usefulness of our model for interpretative purposes and we use NLSY-CYA survey data to test its implications.