The Application of the Concept of Cultural Capital in the cope of Experimental Research by Emphasizing the ducational Sociology

Cultural capital is a much used term in contemporary ultural theory and sociology of education. It was first proposed y the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and experimented after im in many researches. He believes it to be a determining factor f an individual’s social status. Experimental researches utilize cultural capital to explain the role of educational systems in distributing and increasing that among students with different social backgrounds. Apart from sociology of education, the concept of cultural capital is functional in other fields such as sociology of culture, cultural consumption and also economics and culture, and modern technology. This concept after entering experimental researches especially in the Anglophone world was interpreted in combination with Weber’s theory of social status and in the framework of non-economical factors affecting educational and social progress, getting farther away from Bourdieu’s concept. In the first part of the article various experimental researches are introduced by using the concept of cultural capital divided into three groups: traditional approaches, those tending towards conceptual development and critical approaches. In the second part, the application of this concept in educational research is considered in detail. Then some few researches using this concept of cultural capital in Iran are presented in order to bring into focus the extensive possibilities provided by this concept for doing research with various social and cultural dimensions.