The fiercest struggles for cultural legitimacy are conducted between the social groups which border one another. In this way, cultural capital contests the dominance of economic capital through strategies of distinction. These strategies focus on issues of taste. Tastes make distinctions between things and practices and endow those who adopt them with distinction. In addition tastes, which are in fact socially constructed, are identified through apparently individual attributes (e.g. the ability to appreciate quality). It follows then, that the working classes do not take part in these struggles but they nevertheless play a role for the classes above them. These classes, especially the middle classes, seek to demonstrate through their practices and judgements of taste a distance from the vulgarity and tastelessness (as defined by the dominant classes) of the working classes.

High cultural capital is relatively rare, and those who possess it battle to protect its exclusivity. After all, if a group"s distinction is challenged by more and more people acquiring the objects, skills or knowledge peculiar to it, then its position is threatened. When the class fraction possessing high cultural capital is threatened in this way, for example, by wider educational opportunities, a drop in price of previously expensive goods, etc. then it changes its signifying objects and tastes in order to retain the distinguishing distance from other class fractions. Thus the signs and symbols which signify distinction and the practices which demonstrate taste, are open to constant change and redefinition. This...