Bøker av Pierre Bourdieu

Illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. This book argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.

Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. Bourdieu's subject is the study of culture, and his objective is most ambitious: to provide an answer to the problems raised by Kant's Critique of Judgment by showing why no judgment of taste is innocent.

This is the third of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collége de France in the early 1980s under the title General Sociology. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline; in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well known, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practised today. In this volume, Bourdieu focuses on one of these key concepts, capital, which forms part of the trilogy of concepts - habitus, capital, field - that define the core of his theoretical approach. A field, as a social space of relatively durable relations between agents and institutions, is also a site of specific investments, which presupposes the possession of specific forms of capital and secures both material and symbolic profits. While there are many different forms of capital, two are fundamental and effective in all social fields: economic capital and cultural capital. These and other forms of capital exist only in relation to the fields in which they are deployed: the distribution of the forms and quantities of capital constitutes the structure of the field within which agents act and they confer power over the field, over the mechanisms that define the functioning of the field and over the profits engendered in the field - over, for example, the transmission of cultural capital in the educational system. An ideal introduction to one of Bourdieu's most important concepts, this volume will be of great interest to the many students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu's work across the social sciences and humanities, and to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the twentieth century.

A contribution to epistemology in social science, this book focuses on a basic problem of sociological research: the necessity of an epistemological break with the preconstructed objects social practice offers to the researcher. It is accessible not only to academics and experts of epistemology, but also to advanced students of social science.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into beingand what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of powerthat has come to play such a central role in the shaping of allspheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addressesthese fundamental questions.

An outcome of the author's preoccupation with reflexivity, this book is an application of his theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory. It also offers insights into the distinguished French intellectuals of the time - including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir.

In this second edition of this classic text the authors develop an analysis of education. They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the social system.

Aims to provide an accessible but challenging introduction to Bourdieu's ideas. The issues developed include the sociology of culture, leisure and taste; the intrinsic reflexivity of social science; and the role of language in society and in social sciences.