Today, a sociology lesson...

I have just spent the afternoon reading in the Mitchell Wing of the State Library of New South Wales. (I know I've gone on about how much I love studying there, so I'll spare you a rehash of the details.) Anyhow, while in the library today I finished another Bourdieu book (titled The Inheritors:...). I fell in love with Bourdieu's writings when I was undertaking my first Master's degree at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. (To those of you who don't know, my M.Sc. is in Social and Cultural Theory. )

While I do adore Bourdieu's descriptions and the tenets underpinning his work, I am not too keen on his heavily empirical approach. In other words, I don't like that he feels quantitative data (or numbers/statistics) yields the truest account of social phenomena. In social theory, we would say this gives him a rather positivistic slant (with positivism being the belief in the superiority of scientific results and/or a scientific methodology). Granted, I do acknowledge the importance of quantifiable data in many instances; however, I tend to think that if you want to get down to the meat and potatoes of an issue or given social phenomena, you've got to get a subjective account from the folks who are operating in situ,the rank and file, the people on the front lines, the folks who are in the know. You've got to talk to them and suss out what the concerns are and what affects their behaviors, etc. Numbers will tell you a lot, but the words and non-verbal cues of an interviewee can sometimes yield a hell of a lot more.

Back to the topic... The proponents of a positivist stance in sociology (a la Auguste Comte) battled for the acceptance of social research as a recognized scientific endeavor. At the time these guys were writing sociology (which got its name from Comte) was (and still is to a degree) in its infancy and struggling for credence beyond it's unfortunate label of "soft science". In fact, it wasn't really allowed to use "science" in its description, as the academic elitists felt it wasn't scientific enough.

At any rate, Bourdieu is a good writer, he's a great social theorist, and he did a lot to popularize sociology through the French media. He was something of the poster boy for contemporary French social thought for a time.


If you're interested in checking out Bourdieu's contribution to theory, try keying these words into a search engine: habitus; linguistic capital; cultural capital; field.


I think I like his work because there are a lot of parallels between the aforementioned concepts and phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, epistemology and, to an extent, Foucauldian (post-)structuralism.

So, there it is...why I *heart* Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu

Not quite the man of my dreams, but pretty damn close.