An Introduction To The Work Of Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu has been making a distinguished contribution to European sociology for the past 25 years. He is Professor of Sociology at the Collge de France in Paris and author of many influential books including, most recently, Distinction and Homo Academicus, which have both been translated into English. This book serves to introduce this important body of work to the Anglo-American world. In a cross-disciplinary collaboration Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes provide the reader with the necessary tools to understand this complex and rewarding body of French sociology. Post modernist sociology has already been influenced by the French theorist Foucault; it is likely that the generation to come will be reading Bourdieu.

This short critical introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's thought is a model of clarity and insight. Where Bourdieu's own writings are often complex, even ambiguous, Richard Jenkins is direct, concise and to the point. He emphasizes Bourdieu's contributions to theory and methodology while also dealing in detail with his substantive studies of education, social stratification and culture. His book provides the best short English-language introduction to Bourdieu's work. 'As Jenkins points out in the final pages of his book, criticism can be the sincerest form of flattery. I particularly relished his critical approach to the work of Bourdieu and believe that he has written a timely introduction which both undergraduates and experienced teachers will find stimulating and enjoyable.'- Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen

Bourdieu and Literature is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works. One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy. This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.

Preface by Pierre Bourdieu Preface by Loic J.D. Wacquant I Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Beyond the Antinomy of Social Physics and Social Phenomenology 2 Classification Struggles and the Dialectic of Social and Mental Structures 3 Methodological Relationalism 4 The Fuzzy Logic of Practical Sense 5 Against Theoreticism and Methodologism: Total Social Science 6 Epistemic Reflexivity 7 Reason, Ethics, and Politics II The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Sociology as Socioanalysis 2 The Unique and the Invariant 3 The Logic of Fields 4 Interest, Habitus, Rationality 5 Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence 6 For a, Realpolitik of Reason 7 The Personal is Social III The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu 1 Handing Down a Trade 2 Thinking Relationally 3 A Radical Doubt 4 Double Bind and Conversion 5 Participant Objectivation Appendixes, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 How to Read Bourdieu 2 A Selection of Articles from, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3 Selected Recent Writings on Pierre Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.

This study of the work of the influential French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu places his work firmly in the context of developments both in the French post-war intellectual field an din post-war French society as a whole. Set against the background of rapid change and upheaval that has characterised post-war French society, culture and politics, Bourdieu's work can be seen as offering a peculiarly perceptive analysis of France's problematic transition to an era of late capitalism. Proceeding thematically, this study traces the development of Bourdieu's thought, elucidating the relationship between the anthropological and sociological aspects of his work, examining his debt to Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, and highlighting his antagonistic relationship with a series of contemporary intellectual figures and movements - Barthes, Lefebvre, Touraine, Sartre, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida, structuralism and post-structuralism.

“The wide range of subjects . . . provides a glimpse of the extent to which Bourdieu’s theories of culture have gained widespread currency in the humanities.” —David Eick, SubStance The work of Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century, has had an enormous impact on research in fields as diverse as aesthetics, education, anthropology, and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on the contribution of Bourdieu’s thought to the study of cultural production. Though Bourdieu’s own work has illuminated diverse cultural phenomena, the essays in this volume extend to new cultural forms and to national situations outside France. Far from simply applying Bourdieu’s concepts and theoretical tools to these new contexts, the essays in this volume consider both the possibility and limits of Bourdieu’s sociology for the study of culture. “Worth the attention of those who seek to become familiar with Bourdieu or to engage with a more well-rounded familiarity with the usefulness of his social theory.” —Christopher Lindsay Turner, MFS Modern Fiction Studies “This sparkling and unusually coherent collection of essays emphasizes the American reception and adaptation of Bourdieu’s work. It shows how Bourdieu has been resisted and embraced and discusses how his terms and methods might be both used and modified by American academics. Theoretical reflections are productively complemented by empirical investigations of non-canonical and popular artistic expressions and by discussions of the position of women in Bourdieu’s thought.” —Marshall Brown, University of Washington

Through Pierre Bourdieu's work in Kabylia (Algeria), he develops a theory on symbolic power.

The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu was a key thinker about education and educational processes in the second half of the twentieth century. He made his name in seminal texts such as The Inheritors and Reproduction in which he analysed academic discourse and showed how differences in cultural capital led to different outcomes for those who passed through school and university. His concepts of Habitus and Field have since been used extensively in educational research. This book begins by setting his intellectual development within his own biography and then discusses each of his major works on education in turn: from the early studies of students and their learning to later analyses of the French academic space and the elite training colleges. There is also critical discussion of a range of commentators' views on this approach. The book concludes with a series of applications of Bourdieusian thinking on various educational topics: teacher education, classroom discourse, higher education and policy. No educational discussion is complete without consideration from a Bourdieusian perspective. This book shows how and why.

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He argued for, and practiced, rigorous and reflexive scholarship, interrogating the inequities and injustices of modern societies. Through a lifetime’s explication of the ways in which schooling both produces and reproduces the status quo, Bourdieu offered a powerful critique and method of analysis of the history of schooling, and of contemporary educational polices and trends. Though frequently used in educational research, Bourdieu’s work has had much less take up in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration. Educational Leadership and Pierre Bourdieu argues that ELMA scholars have much to gain by engaging more thoroughly with his work. The book explains each of the key terms in Bourdieu’s thinking tool kit, showing how the tripartite concepts of field, habitus and capitals offer a way through which to understand the interaction of structure and agency, and the limits on the freedom of an individual – in this case an educational leader – to act. Educational Leadership and Pierre Bourdieu offers an analysis of dominant trends in ELMA research, examining the kinds of questions asked, projects undertaken and methods used. It provides alternative questions and methods based on a Bourdieusian approach, further readings and a range of exemplars of the application of these tools. The book will be of interest to those whose primary focus is the utility of Bourdieu’s social theory.