Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) concept of cultural capital is popular among educational researchers in Europe and the U.S., but it has rarely been applied in Confucian societies such as Taiwan. Bourdieu frames education as an arena of cultural conflict in which social inequalities are reproduced through the unequal distribution of "capitals" both within and without the educational system. In contrast, educational researchers who study Asian societies often assume cultural homogeneity, social harmony, and limited inequality. Inspired by Bourdieu's theory, this study analyzed secondary data from first and second panel of junior high school students (n=12,527) in the Taiwan Educational Panel Survey (TEPS). The results show that parental cultural capital is strongly associated with parental economic capital (income) and has a significant effect on students' cultural capital, which in turn influences their academic achievement. While Confucian influences facilitate certain educational aspirations and practices across social classes, different levels of economic capital and cultural capital possessed by the parents and their children differentiate educational outcomes. By applying a Western-developed concept in a non-Western context, this study contributes to the theoretical and methodological development of research on cultural capital and demonstrates how social, cultural, and institutional contexts outside the West condition the process of educational stratification.
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