Bourdieu's claim that culture functions as currency: embodied in your manner, objectified in your books and furniture, institutionalized in your degrees, convertible into money and power at rates the exchange never publishes.
Documented
The three states
Documented: Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital (written 1979, published 1983 in German, 1986 in English) distinguishes cultural capital in three states, embodied (dispositions of mind and body), objectified (cultural goods), institutionalized (credentials), alongside economic and social capital. The embodied form's documented feature: it cannot be gifted or bought instantly, only acquired over time, which is why old money reads as natural.
Assessment: Documented: the essay and the triad. The non-transferability of embodied capital is the text's own observation.
Stories
The reproduction machine
The documented application: cultural capital explains school reproduction, children of the cultivated arrive pre-equipped with the dispositions schools reward, so meritocracy certifies inheritance as talent. Reproduction (1970, with Passeron) laid the argument; the empirical literature on concerted cultivation and curriculum familiarity across countries is its descendant.
Assessment: Documented: the 1970 book and four decades of replication debate. The core correlation, class culture predicting school success, is robust; the mechanism's weight is argued.
Interesting claims
The audit problem
The standing critique, documented in the literature: cultural capital is defined by its effects, so proving it independently of the outcomes it explains is hard, and American operationalizations (opera attendance) misfit its French theory. Defenders answer that the dispositions are measurable and the correlations hold. The concept survives as sociology's most useful circularity.
Assessment: Interesting: the circularity charge is in print from the concept's friends, not just its enemies. The archive files it as load-bearing and self-aware.
Sources and further reading
Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Forms of Capital' (Okonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital, 1983; English in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 1986) (primary essay)
Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture, 1970 (the school reproduction argument)
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, 2003 (the American operationalization and its debate)