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.