The Application Of Cultural Capital To International Communication

Globalization is often used to refer to economic globalization, a process of increasing economic integration among countries. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces. But with the development of economic globalization, cultural globalization begins to stand out and play an increasingly important role. Meanwhile, communication technology, especially computerization, has made a great impact on cultural globalization:it turns the face-to-face intercultural communication into a mediated intercultural communication; local people have more opportunities than ever to contact and buy foreign cultural products in their local market. These cultural products include foreign TV programs, films, music, sports, newspapers and magazines, food, to name just a few. In a sense, local people are provided with more choices before them. Nevertheless, people from developing countries or national cultures are encountering challenges from western cultural products. That is, in the process of cultural globalization, western cultural products may dominate the global market, causing a series of communication problems: cultural hegemony, homogenization and losing of cultural identity.In order to solve all these problems, the term "Cultural Capital" is introduced to study "International Communication", the mediated intercultural communication. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of "Cultural Capital" in the field of sociology. His work used cultural capital to explain disparities in the educational attainment of children from different social classes in French society. Although there are some limitations in his cultural capital theory, they could not prevent people from remedying and perfecting the theory. This paper comes up with three characteristics of cultural capital to help clarify the process of international communication so as to throw light on how western transnational corporations succeed in selling cultural products, how national industry catches up with them, and how to promote cultural diversity of cultural globalization.The paper is organized in seven chapters. Chapter 1 states the significance and meaning of the study. Chapter 2 is an introduction, which begins with some basic information about culture for the further discussion. Compared with intercultural communication and cross-cultural communication, international communication is put forward as the research field. Then, the third section of chapter 2 elaborates Bourdieu's cultural capital theory in terms of important concepts and theoretical limitations. More importantly, based on Bourdieu's theory, the paper creatively proposes three characteristics of cultural capital—uniqueness, economic value and vitality—as its kernel.As the main part of this paper, Chapter 3 tries to apply cultural capital to international communication by incorporating cultural capital element (material, social and ideological element) into cultural objects (cultural products) in the form of cultural symbols, because it is the cultural objects that flow across boarders, rather than cultural capital. The utilization of three characteristics of cultural capital in the international communication lays a foundation for the next chapters.Chapter 4,5,6 belong to the practical application of cultural capital to international communication. Western transnational corporations like Hollywood have made full use of cultural capital. Encountering western dominant culture, the national culture should learn to employ features of the cultural capital, so that their cultures can also be an integral part of the world culture, contributing to cultural diversity and globalization at the same time. The last chapter is the conclusion of this paper.