Cultural Capital Diversification: the Development and Validation of a Scale

Although prominent in the sociology and education literatures, the concept of cultural capital (e.g., knowledge, skills, interests, hobbies, etc.) has also recently garnered interest from management scholars. Theory suggests that employees may rely upon cultural tools (e.g., behaviors and worldviews) acquired from experiences in various social class cultures, and that possessing these tools may have work-related benefits. However, to investigate this claim, it is necessary to first develop conceptual clarity around and a valid measure of this cultural “toolkit.” Thus, we introduce the term cultural capital diversification—defined as an individual’s developmental tendency to switch adaptively between social class contexts—and develop and validate a measure consistent with this definition. In particular, we first assess content validity of the measure among a sample of subject matter experts. Then, across two additional samples, we examine the measure’s psychometric properties including factor structure, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. Further efforts are underway to examine the nomological network of our scale. Together, these studies provide support for the validity of our nine-item cultural capital diversification scale.