Cultural Capital

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and habitus can help us understand why diversifying advertising isn’t just about getting more working class people (or any other underrepresented group for that matter) joining the industry. Bourdieu’s ideas are a move away from the traditional explanations of class of bourgeoisie vs proletariat. They give us a real understanding of how class differences are lived out, of the real experiences encountered.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, 2010), he defines cultural capital as a collection of ‘tastes’ we learn from others:

“Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.” (Bourdieu, 2010, p.xxiv)

From a young age, our community, family, peers and institutions (such as schools) shape our tastes. Tastes may present as music, literature, art, and knowledge. But it’s not just about which tastes we’ve gained. How we decode knowledge also forms cultural capital,

“A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.” (Bourdieu, 2010, p.xxv).

They act as signifiers, as "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”, (Bourdieu, 2010, p.xxix), allowing others to put us in a category and vice versa. So you might get a working class copywriter who grew up with a huge love of ITV and whose only experience of theatre might have been pantomime. Their parents might not have been able to afford (or have the time) to watch plays - and it’s quite possible that the domination of the theatre by the middle class could have led their parents to reject it because ‘it’s not for the likes of us’. Even if they had grown up with a love of theatre, do they ‘unlock’ the meaning of a play the same way the middle class accepts?

Bourdieu gives these tastes or capital the same weight as money in society. A person's success depends on having a type of cultural capital recognised as valid by those in power, or the ‘tastemakers’ as Bourdieu calls them, as well as economic capital (money) and social capital (connections). In the world of advertising and media, these tastemakers are, by and large, the decision makers in agencies and in client organisations; those who hire, promote and fire.

Cultural capital works alongside ‘habitus’. How we view and understand the world embodies habitus and affects our behaviour, the way we present ourselves (our accent, posture - also known as bodily hexis) and how we react to the world too. Bourdieu describes it as “systems of dispositions” (ibid). We build these views and behaviours through the culture in which we live. So, a working class planner could act very differently in meetings to their middle class colleagues. Unable to ‘get’ the cultural references being bandied around, they may feel out of their depth and a sense of inferiority. As a consequence, it’s likely they’ll be quieter in the meeting. Less confident. Perhaps they won’t volunteer or push to take on an important project.

Jed Hallam's (2021) anecdote, one of the founders of Common People perfectly illustrates these concepts. The codes Jed talks about (in the guise of dauphinoise potatoes) are the cultural capital. His habitus displays itself as his anxiety before the meal, and then suppressing his own cultural capital or identity after. You can listen to the anecdote below.

Entrenched othering

If we want to understand the real life experiences of working class advertising professionals in the industry, Bourdieu makes an excellent foundation. And Edward Saïd’s (2014) concept of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ builds on this foundation. In Orientalism, the ‘Self' represents the West, or ‘us’, and the ‘Other’, the East or ‘them’. Essentially, Saïd is saying this process, the process of ‘othering’, defines the self as human, and anything else (other), as not human:

“Orientalism is never far from what Denis Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both inside and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.” (Saïd, 2014, p31)

The idea of defining yourself as what you are not, mirrors Bourdieu’s writing on the role of the working classes for the middle classes:

“As for the working classes, perhaps their sole function in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negative reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive negations.” (Bourdieu, 2010, p50)

‘Othering’ is a well known concept in terms of race - it’s acknowledged ethnic minorities often feel obliged to change themselves to appear more like the ‘Self’, to enable progress in cultural fields. But coming from Bourdieu’s viewpoint, we see that it applies to the working class, too. In fact, these groups’ cultural capital often overlaps, because it develops in response to similar forms of discrimination and according to Yosso (2005), can propel them to the success they reach.

And yet, tastemakers, the ‘Self’ or the Metropolitan Elite (Lind, 2020), will dismiss and not value these groups' cultural capital. In fact, Lind and Wallace (2017) build on both Bourdieu and Saïd here. They suggest that for those in power, they see anyone unlike them as simply lower class, which Wallace describes as ‘class imaging’. In the advertising industry, hiring and senior managers represent the ‘Self’ here. They set the tone and the culture in agencies. They are class imaging others unlike them.

This ‘othering’ is deeply ingrained. Hollingworth and Williams (2009) found that middle class children attach negative connotations to their working class peers from a young age at school. Associating them with not valuing education, they equate the working class and their cultural capital with a lack of education, or intelligence. Senior advertising leaders were once these children. And so, for working class advertising professionals, not only do they contend with not having the cultural capital of the Metropolitan Elite, they also deal with rejection of their own culture.

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Accent signals class

Once in the workplace, instant othering relies on signifiers beyond cultural capital. For ethnic minorities, appearance is an obvious one. But for all of us, there is one signal that hasn’t been mentioned - accent. Interestingly, apart from Bourdieu, none of the writers reviewed so far mention the role of accents as a signifier. But it is. We use accent as a shortcut to guessing a person’s class. And a 2006 survey found almost 76% of employers admitted to discriminating based on accent (Queen Mary University of London, 2021). In fact, the Accent Bias in Britain report found:

“ ...our results show a persistent hierarchy of accents: one that penalises non-standard working-class and ethnic accents and upholds the belief that national standard varieties are the most prestigious.” (Queen Mary University of London, 2021, Results, Overview, section 2)

In other words, the Metropolitan Elite are likely to think less of those who sound working class. Given the Metropolitan Elite dominate the advertising and media industries, how present is accent bias, how much does it impact these sectors and what's the effect on creative effectiveness?