Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital.

The aim of this paper is to address the dynamics of contemporary cultural capital by interrogating what counts for young people as valuable cultural resources. Considerable support is given in later scholarship for Bourdieu's model of the social space, as the overall volume of economic and cultural capital combined is regularly found to be the most important axis of opposition, just as in Bourdieu's work Distinction. Yet, while Bourdieu found the second axis to be structured by an opposition between those with cultural rather than economic capital, and vice versa, many later studies instead find oppositions between the young and the old to structure the second axis.

The discreet charm of the children of the bourgeoisie: economic capital and its symbolic expressions at an elite business school.

We address a largely neglected issue in contemporary research on cultural class divisions: economic capital and its associated lifestyles and symbolic expressions. Using qualitative interviews, we explore how adolescents from wealthy elite backgrounds, namely students at Oslo Commerce School (OCS), traditionally one of the most prestigious upper-secondary schools in Norway, demarcate themselves symbolically from others. They draw symbolic boundaries against students at other elite schools in Oslo, more characterized by backgrounds with high cultural capital, accusing them of mimicking a 'hipster' style.

Class and status: on the misconstrual of the conceptual distinction and a neo-Bourdieusian alternative.

In this article, we address the classical debate about the relationship between the economic and cultural aspects of social stratification, typically cast in terms of Weber's distinction between class and status. We discuss in particular Chan and Goldthorpe's influential, yet largely unchallenged, attempt to reinstate a strict version of the class-status distinction, mounted as an attack on 'Bourdieusian' accounts. We argue that this is unconvincing in two respects: There are fundamental problems with their conceptualization of status, producing a peculiar account where one expression of status honour explains the other; in addition, their portrayal of the Bourdieusian approach as one-dimensional is highly questionable.

A struggle on two fronts: boundary drawing in the lower region of the social space and the symbolic market for 'down-to-earthness'.

In this article we use qualitative interviews to examine how Norwegians possessing low volumes of cultural and economic capital demarcate themselves symbolically from the lifestyles of those above and below them in social space. In downward boundary drawing, a range of types of people are regarded as inferior because of perceived moral and aesthetic deficiencies. In upward boundary drawing, anti-elitist sentiments are strong: people practising resource-demanding lifestyles are viewed as harbouring 'snobbish' and 'elitist' attitudes.