Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre-Félix Bourdieu (August 1, 1930-January 23, 2002) was a French sociologist. In his obituary, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom said he "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan". His book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, was named as one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. Although he has a formidable reputation amongst sociologists in the English-speaking world, he is much less well-known among the general Anglophone intelligentsia than Foucault or Jacques Derrida.

Bourdieu's critical conflict theory

Bourdieu argued strongly against the view among some Marxists (and thereby shares Weber's view) that society can be analyzed simply in terms of classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people manoeuvre and struggle over desirable resources. A field is a system of social positions, structured internally in terms of power relationships. Different fields can be quite autonomous and more complex societies have more fields.

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There are four fundamental types of capital:

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• Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
• Social capital: resources based on group membership; relationships; networks of influence and support; people can tap into by virtue of their social position.
• Cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education. Parents provide children with cultural capital, the attitudes and knowledge that makes the educational system a comfortable familiar place in which they can succeed easily.
• Symbolic capital: accumulated prestige; honour

Bourdieu's theory is one of class reproduction: of how one generation of class ensures that it reproduces itself and passes on its privileges to the next generation. The main source of modern success is education. What is necessary for educational success is a whole set of cultural behavior. Children of middle- and upper-class families have learned this behavior, their working class peers have not, therefore the former are able to succeed within the educational system and reproduce their class position.

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Bourdieu sees the legitimation of cultural capital as crucial to its effectiveness as a source of power. It is seen as symbolic violence, violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity. What this means is that people come to experience systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate; there is a process of misunderstanding or misrecognition of what is really going on. So it comes that working class children see it as legitimate that their middle-class peers have more success in the educational system as based on their objective performance. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's cultural habits or economic positions into symbolic capital that has legitimacy and is seen as real. Symbolic capital is nothing more than economic or cultural capital which is acknowledged and recognized and then tends to reinforce the power relations which constitute the structure of social space.

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Habitus can be defined as a system of durably acquired schemes of perception, thought and action, engendered by objective conditions but tending to persist even after an alteration of those conditions. Bourideu sees Habitus as the key to reproduction because it is what actually generates the regular practices that make up social life. It is the product of social conditioning and so links actual behavior to class structure.

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Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, and in particular their own set of internalized structures.

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Bourdieu's sociology in general can be characterized as an investigation of the pre-reflexive conditions that generate certain beliefs and practices that are generated in capitalist systems.

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