Pierre Bourdieu

Different from Marxist view of class, Pierre Bourdieu concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors, especially, in modern society, the importance of formal educational institutions. Bourdieu uses the concept "field" to analyze the society.

Field, is a social arena in which people maneuver, develop strategies, and struggle over desirable resources. He stated:

"A field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupations....by their situation in the structure of the distribution of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field.

A field, is a system of social positions, structured internally in terms of power relations.

Capital, in Bourdieu, also represents in three types :- economic, social and cultural. The first involves command over economic resources, and second command over relationships- networks of influence and support people can tap into by virtue of their social position; third, in which Bourdieu devoted the most attention, is associated with his most original contributions to sociological theory.

Cultural capital, and its transformation into advantage in educational terms.

Cultural Capital is comprised of three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986:47). Bourdieu distinguishes between these three types of capital:

* an embodied state. This is where cultural capital is embodied in the individual. It is both the inherited and acquired properties of one’s self. Inherited not in the genetic sense, but more in the sense of time, culture, and traditions which bestow elements of the embodied state to another usually by the family through socialization. It is not transmittable instantaneously like a gift. It is strongly linked to one's habitus - a person's character and way of thinking.
o Linguistic capital, defined as the mastery of and relation to language (Bourdieu, 1990:114), in the sense that it represents ways of speaking and can be understood as a form of embodied cultural capital.
* an objectified state. This refers to things which are owned, such as scientific instruments or works of art. These cultural goods can be transmitted physically (sold) as an exercise of economic capital, and “symbolically” as cultural capital. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning a painting, one can only "consume" the painting (understand its cultural meaning) if they have the correct type of embodied cultural capital (which may or may not be transmitted during the selling of the painting).
* an institutionalized state. This is institutional recognition of the cultural capital held by an individual, most often understood as academic credentials or qualifications. This is mainly understood in relation to the labor market. It allows easier conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by guaranteeing a certain monetary value for a certain institutional level of achievement.

Reproduction and Habitus

Class reproduction, Bourdieu's theory helps in explaining that how one generation of an economic class ensures that it reproduces itself and passes on its privileges to the next generation.


The legitimation of cultural capital is crucial to its effectiveness as a source of power and success and in term of "symbolic violence", defined as "the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity" It means that people come to experience systems of meaning (cultural) as legitimate, as natural.

Habitus is a system of durably acquired schemes of perceptions, thought, and actions, engendered by objective conditions, but tending to persist even after an alternation of those condition. It is the key to reproduction because it is what actually generates the regular, repeated practices that make up social life. It is the product of social conditionings. so links actual behavior to the class structure.

Education, is such a potent and effective mechanism not simply because it involves learning technical skills or acquiring knowledge, but also because the accompanying general culture.

According reproduction theory, whenever there is a big increase in the numbers holding a qualification, the major losers are those who do not have the social capital to extract the full yield from it.

Idea of Practice,

Bourdieu suggests the reflexive sociological researcher should be with conscious attention to the effects of their position, and in particular their own internalized structures.

Most people, most of time, he argues, take the social world and its way of looking for granted. Sociologists are not free from this, for them too, perceptions and actions are shaped by a habitus and they must be aware of this. Reflexive sociology requires them to examine the most essential bias, the individual determination inherent in the intellectual position itself, in the scholarly gaze.

Bourdieu insists that human action and practice must be understood in the way, as a dialectical process involving both the dispositions produced by the habitus and objective conditions that individuals encounter in the fields where they operate.

Distinction--Pierre Bourdieu

"The social space and its transformations"

Question raised in this article:

- the aesthetic consumption, cultural consumption,taste affects competition in relation to logic of supply ie productions vs logic of demand i.e taste

- Habitus + field = practice

Field: a network, configuration of objective relations between social agents'positions that objectively defined in existing deposition of agents.

Field structure habitus, give habitus structure
Habitus is product of embodied, necessities of field; Habitus attribute the condition of field as a meaningful with sense and value in practice.

-Construct class by systems of variables.

Capital:
-economic capital
-social capital
-cultural capital
-symbolic capital: resources available to a person related to prestige, honour, position and respect etc

- social class and class trajectories, the initial and present position, statistical influence on social agents? unpredictable?

-three dimensional social space:volume of capital, composition of capital, and changes in these two properties over time (class trajectories)

Pierre Bourdieu--social space and symbolic space

The difference of people in society is a set of distinct and coexisting positions which can be defined in relation to one another. Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according o their position in statistical distributions based on two principles of differentiation: economic and cultural capitals. The closer they are to one another in those two dimensions, he more they have in common; he more remote they are from one another, the less they have in common.

In his work, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu tried to represent social space, agents are distributed in the first dimension according to the overall volume of the different capital they possess, and in the second dimension according to the structure of their capital, that is, according to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital, economic and cultural, in the total volume of their capital.

The space of social positions is translated into a space of position takings through the mediation of the space of dispositions (or habitus). The system of differential deviations which defines the different positions in two major dimensions of social corresponds to the system of differential deviations in agents' properties, that is in their practices and in the goods they possess. To each class of positions there corresponds a class of habitus or taste, produced by he social conditioning associated with corresponding condition and through the mediation of the habitus and its generative capability, which leads an affinity of style.

Habitus are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices. Also habitus are classificatory schemes, principles of classification, principles of vision and division, different taste. They make distinctions between what is good and what is bad; right and wrong; but the distinctions are not identical.

Logic of classes: to construct class is to create as homogeneous as possible from the point of view of the two major determinants of practices and of all their attendant properties.

Theoretical class defined by researchers sometimes does not corresponding with the reality. The mode of Distinction defines distances that are predictive of encounters, affinities, sympathies, or even desires. That means that people located at the top of the space have little chance of marrying people located at the bottom, first because, they have little physical chance to meet each other, secondly, they will not really understand each other. On the other hands, proximity in social space predisposes to closer relations.

Here, Bourdieu did not constructed class as Marx did. In his opinion, social class does not exist, what exist is social space, a space of difference, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done.

Therefore, in social reality, the social agents have to construct individually and collectively, in cooperation and conflict. These actions do not happen in void, but in the structure of the distribution of different kinds of capital, which also commands the representations of this space and the position taking in the struggles to conserve or transform it.

The intricate relation between objective structures and subjective construction is shown in social space, which is the first and last reality, which represents and commands that a social agent can have of it.