A Critical Review of the Applicability of Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital Forms in Chinese Vocational Education

As the core theory to explain the mechanism of educational inequality and social reproduction, cultural capital has been widely used in various fields of education, but its applicability in specific institutional fields is still controversial. China's vocational education system poses a major challenge to the adaptation of cultural capital theory due to the intertwining of the 'competence-based' policy with the reality of the 'hierarchy of qualifications'. Although the existing research involves the relationship between cultural capital and vocational education, most of them focus on family background, generalize the concept of cultural capital, or explore the social identity and status structure of the vocational education system. There is an overall lack of a structured analytical framework based on the three forms of cultural capital. To respond to this theoretical gap, this paper adopts a critical review methodology to systematically integrate 60 core studies in English and Chinese, focusing on embodied, objectified and institutionalized cultural capital, and to sort out its manifestation mechanisms, legitimacy boundaries and transformation dilemmas in the vocational education system. The study points out that it is difficult to realize the stable identification and smooth transformation of the three forms of cultural capital in this institutional structure, showing a high degree of contextual dependence and structural tension. The contribution of this study is to construct a framework for the analysis of cultural capital fitness in the context of vocational education in China, to promote the localized contextual updating of the theory, and to provide a structural fulcrum for the subsequent measurement design and empirical research.