This paper explores Bourdieu's account of a relational social space, and his relative neglect of social interaction within this framework. Bourdieu includes social capital as one of the key relational elements of his social space, but says much less about it than economic or cultural capital, and levels of social capital are rarely measured in his work. Bourdieu is reluctant to focus on the con...

At the time of his death in January 2002, Pierre Bourdieu was perhaps the most prominent sociologist in the world (see Calhoun and Wacquant 2002). As the author of numerous classic works, he had become a necessary reference point in various “specialty” areas throughout the discipline (including education, culture, “theory,” and the sociology of knowledge); he had also achieved canonical status ...

Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes,...

This article looks at official international aid through the conceptual lenses of gift theory, with a case study of how the power of the gift shapes the meanings and social practices of aid, including the new aid modalities that involve budget support rather than projects. In so doing, I draw on Bourdieu’s argument that social actors draw on the vocabulary of one set of rules and norms to expla...

Achievement gaps among college students from different social class, racial, or ethnic backgrounds are ubiquitous and a persistent problem in the United States (Bowen, Kurzweil, & Tobin, 2005; Steele, 2010). Students who are low-income, first-generation, or underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities receive lower grades, take longer to graduate, and drop out at higher rates than high-income, ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the information phenomenon through the means of informational practice – the way of acting that gives identity to a group – in a social field and knowledge domain. Design/methodology/approach – By relating Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to the domain analysis approach of Birger Hjørland, the intention was to achieve a comprehensive in...

S capital has gained wide acceptability as a fruitful theoretical perspective for understanding and predicting the norms and social relations embedded in the social structures of societies. It is these patterns of social interrelationships that enable people to coordinate action to achieve desired goals (Putnam, 1993). Bourdieu, a French sociologist, was one of the first authors to analyze syst...

bourdieu had the help of two concepts of “habitus” and “field” to explain his theory and to show social distinctions, he argues that the social world is made up of different fields. each field has its own certain habitus and they can change depending on the field`s change. he believes that modern world is based on distinction. this distinction is clear in structural concepts such as space, clas...