Publication type
Journal Article
Author
Publication date
August 18, 2026
Summary:
A wealth of qualitative literature on the ‘class ceiling’ highlights how cultural capital plays a role in the social origin pay gap. However, no study has quantitatively examined this association. This paper uses data from Understanding Society, measuring cultural capital via respondents’ engagement in five ‘highbrow’ cultural activities: attending the opera, ballet, a classical music performance, visiting a museum or gallery, and performed drama theatre. I find cultural capital slightly reduces the social origin pay gap for all social origin groups, with significant effects observed for some cultural activities. Respondents who engage in one or more of the five cultural activities report higher wages, but this benefit is primarily for individuals from managerial/professional origins. The paper extends Bourdieusian theorising on cultural capital and offers a methodological contribution to the literature through offering a quantitative insight on the association of cultural capital and the social origin pay gap in the UK.
Published in
Sociology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385261456917
ISSN
380385
Subjects
Notes
Online Early
© The Author(s) 2026
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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