Cultural capital and the place of sport

It is not unusual now to talk about the culture of the body, or to see routine and organized physical activity, as well as sport, as part and parcel of cultural life. In recent decades body management techniques have become a very conspicuous aspect of self-presentation and have been served by the expansion of the supply of commercial services to deal with diet and health, physical training and cosmetic improvement to appearances. The professionalization and commercialization of sport have also accelerated. Bourdieu interpreted measures for body management and maintenance in terms of the accumulation and display of cultural capital. He distinguished three types of cultural capital: institutionalized, objectified and embodied. This article considers some of the elements of the very complex and extensive property, embodied cultural capital. The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) survey included questions on sporting activity, sports spectatorship and physical exercise routines, important elements in the mosaic of contemporary cultural activities. This article teases out the patterns of participation and taste in this area, examining differentiation by class, gender, education, ethnic and age groups in particular. While showing that all these factors matter, gender is the most important source of differentiation, though this is more the case for sport than for exercise per se. In addition, it is shown that educational qualification is particularly important in predicting participation in exercise, whereas occupational class makes more difference to the choice of sport, whether playing or watching.     

The musical field

This article examines musical taste, as revealed by the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey. It shows that musical taste is highly divided and contentious, with large numbers of people intensely disliking certain genres of music. It shows the existence of two distinctive musical taste communities, one linking taste for rock, electronic, urban, world and heavy metal music, and the other linking classical music and jazz. Tastes for specific musical works do not easily map onto musical genres, and are less closely correlated with each other. Using logistic regression, it is shown that age and ethnicity in particular, and gender, educational qualifications and occupational class, strongly condition taste for both musical genres and works.     

NEW LAW ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Federal Assembly of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic approved, on 10 April 1980, the new law (Nr.39/80) on higher education. This law was under preparation nearly three years by the Czech and Slovak ministries of education and representatives of universities and other institutes of higher education as we'll as experts in charge of economic and social development. Starting from 1 September 1980 it will replace the previous law on higher education (Nr. 19/66) that has been in effect since 1966.

The following article, written for “Higher Education in Europe” by Professor Jiri M#akeri?ka, Director of the Research Institute on Engineering Studies in Prague, presents the main elements of this new law.