European inventory of
societal values of culture

Igarashi & Saito - Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital

Igarashi, H. and Saito, H., 2014. Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital: Exploring the intersection of globalization, education and stratification. Cultural Sociology, 8(3), pp.222-239.. Cultural Sociology, 8(3): 222-239.

In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, the authors examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, they first probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. Authors then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities.