![handle is hein.cow/anamacp0573 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE
The origin of this special issue of The Annals on cultural capital and devel-
opment lies in a June 1999 conference on the interaction between economics
and other disciplines held under the auspices of the Society for the Advance-
ment of Behavioral Economics at San Diego State University. One example of
fruitful interaction between economics and other disciplines is found in the
study of economic development and cultural institutions such as language,
prescribed gender roles, and ethnic identity. This preface and the following
articles offer fresh perspectives on the possible effects of cultural institutions
on economic performance and politics. Many of the articles also investigate
reasons why particular institutions arise and, in particular, how economic
development affects cultural institutions.
To the extent that a cultural institution, such as a particular language or a
division of labor between the genders, generates future benefits to a society,
and that creating or maintaining this institution is costly, that institution can
be viewed as a form of cultural capital. We are following sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu in viewing culture as a form of capital in which people and societies
invest their time and material resources. However, we tend to use the word
culture in a broader sense than Bourdieu, as broadly as anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski. In his article on culture in the Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences (1931), Malinowski stated that culture comprises inherited
artefacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits, and values.' Our concept
of cultural capital incorporates and expands on Bourdieu's concepts of cul-
tural capital (Bourdieu 1979, 1998) and symbolic capital (Bourdieu [1980]
1990). Among the groups most likely to invest in their cultural capital are
business firms, whose cultural capital is similar to what John Tomer (1987)
has called organizational capital. Whenever firms consciously change their
rules or procedures, or invest in their workers' identification with the firm's
culture, they can be viewed as investing in cultural capital.
Even if they do not perform well according to widely accepted indicators
such as per capita income, nations tend to be slow at changing their cultural
institutions. We hope that by pointing out some of the benefits of particular
cultural institutions and some of the mechanisms influencing culture, the
articles in this volume will encourage policymakers to think further in the
direction of alleviating poverty via investments in cultural capital.
THE EVOLUTION OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
From the beginnings of the separate field of economic development, most
scholars recognized that important institutional and cultural differences
existed between the advanced industrial countries and the underdevel-
oped countries. However, although a few economists in the 1950s and 1960s
thought seriously about cultural differences as an explanatory factor in
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