Classrooms are nowadays changing, trying to accommodate an audience of different abilities and backgrounds, linguistically and ethnically. Education policies worldwide demand that education strengthens social cohesion and develops skills for the Knowledge Society . This development brings questions of social justice and democracy at the top of the educational agenda. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on theoretical assumptions made during the use/operationalisation of the concept of cultural capital, in order to study the cultural basis of students’ social differentiation and explain cultural reproduction and unequal school achievement. It explores alternative scenarios on how cultural capital operates in different settings and proposes alternative research methodologies. Specific examples shed light in the analysis. As per Bourdieu, cultural capital exists in three forms: an embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and the body; an objectified state, in the form of cultural goods that can be appropriated both materially, presupposing economic capital, and symbolically, presupposing cultural capital in its embodied state; and an institutionalized state, in the form of educational qualifications . In previous work , based on large-scale surveys, certain variables, such as students’ mother education, language used at home, number of books at home, students’ residence etc, emerged as expressions of students’ cultural capital, differentiating them on the basis of achievement in a specific moment. However, during the selection of variables as possible expressions of cultural capital, theoretical assumptions were made. Just to give an example, it was assumed that parents’ cultural capital would relate to students’ cultural capital. The importance of some variables reflects specific structural characteristics of the educational field. The importance of residence for example is due to the fact that students are assigned to schools according to residence, as parental choice is exercised only under certain circumstances. Thus, school location and students’ residence are intertwined with the possibilities of access to cultural goods (whose geographical distribution is unequal in many settings) and to social actors’ chances for differential cultural appropriation.

In order to better understand the ways in which cultural capital operates in the educational field, the development of a more elaborate methodology would be helpful, as large scale surveys are a “snapshot in time”. The combination of date from at least two surveys at different points in time would enable us to isolate variables that keep operating as cultural capital, decisive for school achievement. Or, the development of a longitudinal qualitative database would enable observation of students, assumed as bearers of a certain level of cultural capital according to their achievement. This would allow us to examine what educational choices were made overtime and how cultural capital was converted in skills that favour school success. Finally, the study of the structure of the educational field will allow us to understand the practices of the bearers of high cultural capital in order to reproduce their position in the social hierarchy.

The expected outcome of this paper is the proposal of alternative research designs that would help achieve a deeper understanding of the multidimensional role of cultural capital in school success. The implementation of this research design would put forward the study of the operational characteristics of cultural capital (or: of the ways cultural capital operates) in a different social and educational setting. The initial focus would be on the Greek context but the principles proposed could foster the emergence of similar issues in other contexts too, on the basis of systematic analysis of the interplay between theory and research practices. The understanding of the mechanisms that result in the reproduction of socio-cultural inequalities is of importance in the effort to promote social justice and a democratic school.