The second edition of this book has afforded us the opportunity to review, revise and extend our coverage of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Each chapter has been reconsidered by the contributing authors with a view to bringing the bibliography up to date, developing discussion and clarifying points from the first edition. However, we have also added an entire new part entitled “Applications”. Having completed the first edition of the book, I felt there was a need to include something about actually using these concepts in practice, which I then did in the form of a postscript on methodological principles. Here, I set out a framework for conducting research from a Bourdieusian perspective in terms of key elements to be adopted by the would-be researcher. This postscript has now been extended to an entire chapter, which is complemented by two other chapters on “Social Space” and “Politics”. The first of these develops methodological concerns when constructing and representing social contexts, and offers examples and guidance on how to think of space in these terms. The chapter on politics reminds us of the radical intent behind much of Bourdieu's work, and considers the way these ideas may impact in the political arena and society at large.

A new edition also allows us to respond to our critics. On the whole, the book has been well received by reviewers, and it has been popular among researchers and students interested in working with Bourdieu. From the outset, I knew that to deal with each concept one by one was a hazardous project. In much of my own writing, I insisted that all of the concepts had to be viewed in an integrated form, not cut up and used discretely on their own. Nevertheless, I did feel there was something to be gained by taking each one by one and, in a way, looking at the others through that individual lens. Some reviewers have been keen to point out the dangers of such an enterprise. For one, even to talk about subjectivity and objectivity was tacitly to approve a dichotomy that would be divisive.

Introduction

Part III contains four chapters, all looking at features of the way fields operate. Here, we subordinate particular considerations of habitus and field to aspects of their interrelationships and workings. Field operations are often played out in terms of social class, and Chapter 5 considers what we mean by this term and how Bourdieu employed it. For example, fields such as education, culture and politics are often transversed with strata characterized by their participants social origins. Here, issues of status and power are at stake, as well as cultural and economic standing. Groups often form in ways representative of their social derivation, and Bourdieu's field theory suggests how this comes about. However, fields also need a medium for operating, and Chapter 6, on capital, discusses their “currency”; in other words, the means by which field participants position themselves and affect change. This chapter considers capital in its various forms: symbolic, economic, cultural and social. However, fields are never “value-free” and homogeneous. Chapter 7, on doxa, discusses how orthodox values, practices and beliefs typify both fields and habitus, and how the configuration of such aspects makes up the unique typography of particular fields. Here, a number of fields are considered as exemplars, including the scientific or academic fields themselves. The implications of doxa for them are drawn out. Finally, we address the issue of change within fields and its impact on those operating in them. Bourdieu's field theory is a dynamic one, partly constructed to show how social phenomena evolve. The “complicity” between habitus and field, written about above, is never complete, and there is always a tension between individuals and the social environments in which they find themselves.

Introduction

Part I of this book is entitled “Biography, theory and practice”. It comprises two chapters, which span these three principal strands in Bourdieu's work.

Chapter 1 begins with a brief outline of Bourdieu's life and works. This sets a framework for what follows. It is emphasized how important it is to read Bourdieu's ideas primarily in terms of the current practical problems and issues of the day before any contemporary use is made of them. A sketch is subsequently offered of the events which surrounded Bourdieu's life and impacted on his thinking. This account includes the social, cultural, historical, political and economic. Bourdieu was active professionally for almost exactly the fifty years of the second half of the twentieth century. This section details some of the salient trends in this time period; in particular, with respect to France. In the final section of Chapter 1, Bourdieu is located within the intellectual tradition of which he formed a part. This tradition is linked to the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment and the French philosophes who were its key thinkers. As noted earlier, Bourdieu originally trained in philosophy before embracing sociology as the focus for his writing. This section begins to unpick the various strands in his theory of practice, with reference to the founding fathers of sociology – Marx, Durkheim and Weber, French Catholic intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, the European tradition of phenomenology, and the leading intellectual figures of his formative years, namely Sartre and Lévi-Strauss. The ideas within this background are also contrasted with those of other writers on the history of the philosophy of science, such as Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.

Introduction

As noted in the introduction to this book, it is rather unusual to deal with Bourdieu's concepts as discrete entities. Nevertheless, in doing so, each chapter has enabled an in-depth consideration of each term from a theoretical and practical perspective. It is has been stressed on various occasions how Bourdieu's “theory of practice” is essentially a “theory of research practice”. His key concepts only make sense, therefore, when applied to practical research and the whole raison d'être of the approach is that they should be used in new projects. This chapter considers the relationship between the concepts and empirical research, and then draws out methodological principles at three levels: the construction of the research object; three-level field analysis; and participant objectivation. There is a “moral” commitment at the heart of Bourdieu's philosophy that demands a certain vigilance concerning the act of researching and being a researcher, which itself involves a socio-political engagement. What is the nature of this vigilance and engagement? This chapter also attempts to answer this question.

The language of concepts: the symbolic and the actual

Bourdieu often distinguishes between a theorist's and a researcher's respective viewpoints: a theorist is interested in developing hypotheses to account for the particularities and functioning of an object of study, whereas a researcher collects empirical data and analyses it in order to obtain a picture of how the “real world” is constituted.

Introduction

Bourdieu's use of the term interest is a good example of the way a particular concept arose and developed over the course of his professional career. In this chapter we see the way it almost haunts his early work. Subsequently, it emerges as a key feature in his empirical analyses. Later, it is expressed as a fully fledged concept and joins his other “thinking tools” as a major instrument of analysis. Later still, the concept evolves into different forms; Bourdieu renamed it as illusio or libido. Finally, the implications and ramifications of “interest” are considered theoretically, which leads to a philosophical exploration of its significance. The concept itself is present in the relationships which Bourdieu investigates in his early studies. In this way, we see how practice serves theory for Bourdieu. It is named and then its theoretical significance elaborated. This chapter shows this process at work.

An interest in practice

In earlier parts of this book, we referred to the background to Bourdieu's intellectual worldview as well as to the climate that surrounded him as he set out on his academic career, and juxtaposed this with the strong personal experiences he had at this time in Algeria and the Béarn. Attention was drawn to predominant intellectual trends in France; most noticeably, existentialism and structuralism.

Introduction

At one point in his work, Bourdieu refers to the “opposition” between subjectivism and objectivism as dividing the social sciences and as being “the most fundamental, and the most ruinous” (1990c: 25). He goes on to refer to subjectivism and objectivism as “modes of knowledge”, and declares a necessity to go beyond their mutual antagonism while preserving what has been gained from each. Both are essential, yet both offer only one side of an epistemology necessary to understanding the social world. The world cannot be reduced to phenomenology or social physics; both must be employed in order to constitute an authentic “theory of practice”. This part of the book sets out the key base concepts for the project.

As we saw in Part I, Bourdieu's “theory of practice” can be taken back to the intellectual tradition and contemporary climate in which he found himself. It can also be connected with his early field work experiences. In the previous chapters, we addressed the way that dominant French intellectual thought, in the 1940s and 1950s at least, was characterized by two opposing traditions – structuralism and existentialism – which respectively might be seen as representing the objectivist and subjectivist traditions. The former came from a background of anthropology and was exemplified in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and was preoccupied with the workings of diverse, often exotic cultures. The latter subjectivist tradition was more philosophically grounded, rooted in the German philosophy of Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, and was more concerned with issues of personal freedom – a theme intensified by what French men and women had experienced in the Second World War.

Introduction

In 1993, at the end of La Misère du Monde, Pierre Bourdieu writes of the need “to go beyond appearances”, “to get to the real economic and social determinants” of attacks on individuals' freedom to be happy and self-fulfilled, and to break through the “odious projections” which mask social suffering. He then offers his own “method” as a way for individuals to understand the social causes that feed their malaise; knowledge which itself might contribute to “undoing” what the world has “done”. Indeed, any political programme, he argues, that does not make use of what science has discovered is guilty of “non-assistance to a person in danger”. In other words, and contrary to many who argue for the opposite, the intervention of social science into politics is a necessary part of its whole raison d'être. He counterposes “dogmatic rationalism” at one extreme and “nihilistic irrationality” at the other (two dominant intellectual trends), to argue a place for the “partial and temporary truths” that can secure the “only rational means for using fully the margin of maneuver left to liberty, that is political action” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1999a: 629).

That statement could have been written at any stage of his career, and that claim itself is rather ironic given that, for much of it, he was seen as the distant Parisian academic, content to research and publish with little regard for the “real world”. When he intervened in the mass strikes that swept though France in 1995, he was accused of “coming late” to politics.

Introduction

While giving an account of concepts which, on the face of it, seem highly abstract in character, the various contributors to this book have sought to stress that Bourdieu's approach is based on a theory of practice. In other words, complex though the underlying epistemological perspective is, it only has value to the extent to which it is put to practical ends. Numerous practical examples have been offered across the chapters in order to illustrate each concept. In this last part, we ask what the method amounts to as a whole. Here, we turn our attention to methodological features as a way of guiding would-be researchers interested in adopting, or at least incorporating, aspects of Bourdieu's method in their own projects. The part is therefore entitled “Applications”.

Chapter 13 is all about methodology. The chapter addresses the relationship between the actual social world and the language/terminology used to express and represent it. In particular, we consider how Bourdieu's concepts were formed in the light of deep empirical enquiry and the limits of representation. Social class is used as an example. The chapter then sets out an approach to Bourdieusian research in terms of a “three-level methodology”. The first level concerns the construction of the research object and how this shapes the entire undertaking. Level 2 is field analysis, expressed in terms of three stages: fields within the field of power, the structure of the field itself, and the habitus of those relatively positioned within it. Level 3 then concerns participant objectivation, in which we return to the all important reflexive dimensions to working with Bourdieu's method.

Pierre Bourdieu is now regarded as one of the foremost social philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in a small village in the French Pyrenees, his extraordinary academic trajectory took him to the leading academic training schools of Paris. Eventually, he was nominated as “Chair” at the Collège de France, that most prestigious of institutions, which groups together fifty-two of the leading French academics, philosophers and scientists.

Bourdieu's output was voluminous. Beginning with ethnographies of the Béarn and Algeria, he went on to offer extensive studies of education, culture, art and language. For much of this time, Bourdieu was regarded as a sociologist, and he had a major influence in this academic field. However, his was a very particular type of sociology. His academic training was as a philosopher. It was only after personal experiences “in the field” in Algeria and the Béarn that he abandoned the traditional academic route of philosophy for sociology. This was in the 1950s, a time when sociology had not yet acquired its contemporary popularity or academic credibility. Certainly, his early works can be read as anthropologically orientated, a perspective he never really lost over the subsequent fifty years of his career.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu seemed very much the private academic, sharing the Parisian intellectual world with other leading French writers such as Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Lyotard, Althusser and Lacan.

Introduction

Throughout this book, the integrated nature of Bourdieu's key concepts has been stressed. They are not single features of social systems but particular foci of the same thing; two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, it is possible to alight on each individual concept for a particular view of social phenomena, especially with respect to individual aspects of them. Part III addressed four concepts under the title of “Field mechanisms”, and the intention here was to examine terms which highlighted the structure of fields and how they operate according to Bourdieu's theory of practice. The focus here was towards objective mechanisms: the structures, medium of operation and features which arose from their procedures. Part IV of this book now turns towards the more subjective dimensions of fields. Accepting that the objective and subjective are always mutually implicated and expressed, it is nevertheless possible to move our orientation from one side to the other. The four concepts in the present part all deal with the more individual or subjective nature of field conditions; in other words, how fields are present in individuals and their repercussions.

Chapter 9 deals with interest. Here, we consider the way field conditions make for the emergence of particular interests, whether these be class-based or otherwise. The chapter draws out the implications of “interested” actions for both the researched and the researcher, and asks the question, “Can there be such a thing as a disinterested act”? Interests often express the most personal and deeply private, which raise issues of motivation and aim.

In the course of the five parts and fifteen chapters of this book, a selection of Bourdieu's key concepts has been put under the microscope. In Part I, the key words were biography, theory and practice. Chapter 1 gave a sketch of Bourdieu's own life trajectory and related personal events to both the socio-historical environment which surrounded him throughout his career and the intellectual currents of which he formed a part. The emphasis here was on the ways Bourdieu's ideas must be understood in terms of his own personal background and the very real world events that presented themselves to him. It is worth insisting again that Bourdieu's work needs to be understood in terms of its socio-genesis and as attempts to comprehend practical social phenomena. Chapter 2 extended this discussion by showing how issues of theory and practice were ever present in Bourdieu's method. His own theory of practice can be traced back to both the radical tradition from which he emerged and the particular philosophical currents which resonated most with his personal and intellectual impulses.

In these concepts, issues of subjectivity and objectivity emerge, and these were confronted directly in the Introduction to Part II. Here, it was necessary to draw attention explicitly to Bourdieu's philosophical approach to the primary foundations of human experience. Structure provided the key concept in linking the subjectivity of individual lives with the objectivity of what they shape and are shaped by. Phenomenology and anthropological structuralism provided the main focus for this discussion, together with other philosophers in the philosophy of the history of science.