A sociological study of how universities sort, sustain, and reproduce social advantage
What the Work Is
Students and Their Studies is a sociological work by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The source material identifies it by title but does not specify its original French title, its date or place of first publication, its language of composition, or its precise form. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to Bourdieu’s body of work on the sociology of education — the field in which his contributions, alongside his work in sociological theory and the sociology of aesthetics, achieved wide influence across anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts. Bourdieu (1930–2002) was primarily associated during his career with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
What the Book Is About
The work concerns students and the studies they pursue — that is, the sociological study of education and of the student experience. Its subject sits within Bourdieu’s broader preoccupation with the dynamics of power in society, and in particular with the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations.
The central concern that animates Bourdieu’s educational sociology is the way social classes — especially the ruling and intellectual classes — preserve their privileges across generations. This persistence occurs despite what Bourdieu called a myth: the belief that contemporary post-industrial society offers equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education. His work observes the role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of human agency, and it treats education as one of the principal arenas in which advantage is transmitted rather than dissolved.
Key Ideas and Themes
The ideas that inform this work are drawn from Bourdieu’s wider theoretical apparatus, which he developed to explain how social hierarchies endure without requiring conscious intent or overt coercion.
Cultural reproduction and symbolic violence. Bourdieu’s anthropological work was dominated by the analysis of how social hierarchies reproduce themselves. He criticized accounts that gave primacy to economic factors alone in explaining social order and change, stressing instead that actors’ capacity to impose their cultural reproductions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in reproducing dominant social structures. This is the work of symbolic violence: the self-interested capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is either ignored or presented as natural, thereby justifying existing social structures as legitimate. In the educational setting, this concept explains how the advantages conferred by schooling can appear to be the neutral reward of merit.
Capital beyond economics. Bourdieu extended the idea of capital to include social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital alongside financial capital. For Bourdieu, each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; a person is not defined only by social class membership but by every kind of capital he or she can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality. Cultural capital, in particular, encompasses subtleties of language — accent, grammar, spelling, and style — which his empirical work identified as a major factor in social mobility, such as in getting a higher-paid, higher-status job.
Habitus. Bourdieu developed a theory of action around the concept of habitus, which exerted considerable influence in the social sciences. The theory holds that social agents develop strategies adapted to the structures of the social worlds they inhabit — strategies that are unconscious and operate at the level of a bodily logic. Each relatively autonomous field of modern life (economy, politics, arts, journalism, bureaucracy, science, or education) engenders a specific complex of social relations in which agents engage their everyday practice. Through this practice they develop a disposition for social action conditioned by their position in the field. Combined with dispositions developed through engagement with other fields, this forms a system of lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought, and action — the habitus.
A crucial feature of habitus is its embodiment: it does not function primarily at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. Its internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical, often pre-reflexive way. Bourdieu’s empirical results showed that, despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people’s artistic preferences — classical music, rock, or traditional music — strongly tie in with their social position. The dispositions comprising habitus are conditioned responses to the social world, becoming so ingrained that they occur spontaneously, rather like knee-jerk opinions. The habitus developed by an individual typifies his or her position in social space.
Doxa and the reproduction of order. Doxa refers to learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent’s actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, privileging the dominant and treating their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. In a doxic state, the social world is perceived as natural, taken-for-granted, even commonsensical. Bourdieu sees habitus as an important factor contributing to social reproduction because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life. Individuals learn to want what conditions make possible for them, and not to aspire to what is not available. The conditions in which a person lives generate dispositions compatible with those conditions — including tastes in art, literature, food, and music — and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are excluded as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity: to refuse what is categorically denied and to will the inevitable.
Field. A field can be described as any historical, non-homogeneous social-spatial arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources — any setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each agent in the field results from interaction between the specific rules of the field, the agent’s habitus, and the agent’s capital. Fields interact with each other and are hierarchical, most being subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations. Social struggle occurs within fields hierarchically nested under the economic antagonisms between social classes, and the conflicts within each field have specific characteristics arising from that field, involving many social relationships that are not economic. Social agents act according to their “feel for the game,” where the “feel” refers roughly to the habitus and the “game” to the field.
Reconciling structure and agency. Bourdieu used habitus and field to resolve a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. He sought to unite social phenomenology and structuralism, making an epistemological break with the objective–subjective divide. The individual agent develops dispositions in response to the objective conditions encountered, so that objective social structures are inculcated into the subjective, mental experience of agents. The field places requirements on its participants for membership; having absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of cognitive and somatic dispositions, the agent’s subjective structures of action become commensurate with the objective structures and exigencies of the field, and a doxic relationship emerges. Habitus and field exist only in relation to each other: the field exists only insofar as agents possess the dispositions and perceptual schemata necessary to constitute it and imbue it with meaning, while by participating in the field, agents incorporate into their habitus the know-how that allows them to constitute the field. Bourdieu argued that proper research requires two “minutes”: an objective stage examining the relations of social space and the structures of the field, and a subjective analysis of agents’ dispositions to act and their categories of perception and understanding.
Structure and Approach
The source material does not describe the internal organization of Students and Their Studies — its chapters, sections, or arrangement. What can be said is that Bourdieu routinely sought to connect theoretical ideas with empirical research, and his work can be seen as a sociology of culture or, as he described it, a “Theory of Practice.” His contributions to sociology were both evidential and theoretical, calculated through both systems. His empirical results included demonstrating the strong tie between artistic preferences and social position, and identifying language — accent, grammar, spelling, and style, all part of cultural capital — as a major factor in social mobility. This combination of theoretical concepts with empirical data characterizes his approach to the sociology of education.
Significance and Influence
Bourdieu’s contributions to the sociology of education achieved wide influence in several related academic fields, including anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts. His work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth of equality of opportunity and high social mobility through formal education. The concepts he introduced — cultural reproduction, habitus, field, symbolic violence, and the several forms of capital — became influential investigative frameworks and methods. His best-known book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), was named the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association. Bourdieu was a prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English.
Bourdieu was born in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in southern France, to a postal worker and his wife; the household spoke Béarnese, a Gascon dialect. He was educated at the Lycée Louis-Barthou in Pau before moving to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, from which he gained entrance to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), also in Paris, where he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser. After getting his agrégation, he worked as a lycée teacher at Moulins for a year before his conscription into the French Army in 1955. His biographers write that he chose not to enter the Reserve Officer’s College like many of his fellow ENS graduates, as he wished to stay with people from his own modest social background. Deployed to Algeria in October 1955 during its war of independence from France, he served in a unit guarding military installations before being transferred to clerical work. After his year-long military service, he stayed on as a lecturer in Algiers. During the Algerian War in 1958–1962, he undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples of the Amazigh, laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation; the result was his first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958; The Sociology of Algeria), which became an immediate success in France and was published in the United States in 1962. He later drew heavily on this fieldwork in his 1972 book Outline of a Theory of Practice, a strong intervention into anthropological theory.
In 1962, Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons, Jérôme, Emmanuel, and Laurent. In 1960, he returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the University of Lille, where he remained until 1964. From 1964 onwards he held the position of Professor (Directeur d’études) in Section VI of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and from 1981 the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, held before him by Raymond Aron and Maurice Halbwachs. In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, founded by Aron, which he directed until his death. In 1975, with the research group he had formed at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the “Médaille d’or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique” (CNRS); in 1996 he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He died of cancer at the age of 71.
Influences and Theoretical Sources
Bourdieu’s work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology, which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained an emphasis on the dominance of symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu from a sociology of religion into a theory of fields. From Marx he gained his understanding of “society” as the ensemble of social relationships — “what exist in the social world are relations – not interactions between agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist ‘independently of individual consciousness and will'” (grounded in the mode and conditions of economic production) — and of the need to dialectically develop social theory from social practice. (Arnold Hauser earlier published the orthodox application of Marxist class theory to the fine arts in The Social History of Art (1951).) From Émile Durkheim, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he inherited a certain structuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification; however, he critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders, and he furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu’s focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions, which found their primary manifestation in his theory of habitus. He was also influenced by Wittgenstein (especially with regard to his work on rule-following), stating that “Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He’s a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress”. His work is built upon an attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which he thought characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism) of his time; his concepts of habitus, capital, and field were conceived with the intention of overcoming such oppositions. Another notable influence was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Habitus, Disposition, and the Critique of Rational Choice
Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Choice Theory because he believed it was a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. According to Bourdieu, agents do not continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria; rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic — a practical sense — and bodily dispositions. Instead of confining his analysis of social relations and change to voluntaristic agency or strictly in terms of class as a structural relation, Bourdieu uses the agency-structure bridging concept of field.
“Disposition” — a key concept in Bourdieu’s work — can be defined as a sense of the game: a partly rational, partly intuitive understanding of fields and of social order in general, a practical sense, a practical reason, giving rise to opinions, tastes, tone of voice, typical body movements and mannerisms, and so on. The dispositions comprising habitus are therefore conditioned responses to the social world, becoming so ingrained that they come to occur spontaneously, rather like “knee-jerk” opinions; thus the habitus developed by an individual will typify his position in the social space. Consequently social agents will often acknowledge, legitimate, and reproduce the social forms of domination (including prejudices) and the common opinions of each field as self-evident, obscuring from conscience and practice even the acknowledgment of other possible means of production (including symbolic production) and power relations. Though not deterministic, the inculcation of the subjective structures of the habitus can be observed via statistical data — for example, when its selective affinity with the objective structures of the social world explains the continuity of the social order over time. As the individual habitus is always a mix of multiple engagements in the social world through the person’s life, while the social fields are put into practice through the agency of the individuals, no social field or order can be completely stable; in other words, if the relation between individual predisposition and social structure is far stronger than common sense tends to believe, it is not a perfect match.
Sociologists very often look at either social laws (structure) or the individual minds (agency) in which those laws are inscribed, and sociological arguments have raged between those who argue that the former should be sociology’s principal interest (structuralists) and those who argue the same for the latter (phenomenologists). When Bourdieu instead asks that dispositions be considered, he is making a very subtle intervention in sociology, asserting a middle ground where social laws and individual minds meet and arguing that the proper object of sociological analysis should be this middle ground: dispositions.
The concept of habitus was inspired by Marcel Mauss’s notion of body technique and hexis, as well as Erwin Panofsky’s concept of intuitus. The word habitus itself can be found in the works of Mauss, as well as of Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz, as reworkings of the concept as it emerged in Aristotle’s notion of hexis, which would become habitus through Thomas Aquinas’s Latin translation. The origins of this concept in Bourdieu’s writings is sometimes ascribed to his interest in cognitive psychology, in general, and the work of Jean Piaget, in particular. Habitus is somewhat reminiscent of some preexisting sociological concepts, such as socialization, though it also differs from the more classic concepts in several key ways; most notably, a central aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness, and the internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical, often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the “muscle memory” cultivated in many areas of physical education: consider the way we catch a ball — the complex geometric trajectories are not calculated, it is not an intellectual process; although it is a skill that requires learning, it is more a physical than a mental process and has to be performed physically to be learned. In this sense, the concept has something in common with Anthony Giddens’s concept of practical consciousness.
Field Theory and Cultural Production
For Bourdieu, social activity differences led to various, relatively autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis — with economic power usually governing — wherein the dynamics of fields arise out of the struggle of social actors trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. Bourdieu embraces prime elements of conflict theory like Marx. Social struggle also occurs within fields hierarchically nested under the economic antagonisms between social classes, and the conflicts which take place in each social field have specific characteristics arising from those fields and that involve many social relationships which are not economic.
Bourdieu’s most significant work on cultural production is available in two books: The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996), in which he builds his theory of cultural production using his own characteristic theoretical vocabulary of habitus, capital, and field. David Hesmondhalgh writes that by “cultural production” Bourdieu intends a very broad understanding of culture, in line with the tradition of classical sociology, including science (which in turn includes social science), law, and religion, as well as expressive-aesthetic activities such as art, literature, and music; however, his work on cultural production focuses overwhelmingly on two types of field or sub-field of cultural production: literature and art. According to Bourdieu, “the principal obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of the value of cultural goods” is the “charismatic ideology of ‘creation'” which can be easily found in studies of art, literature, and other cultural fields. In Bourdieu’s opinion, this charismatic ideology “directs the gaze towards the apparent producer and prevents us from asking who has created this ‘creator’ and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the ‘creator’ is endowed.” For Bourdieu, a sociologically informed view of an artist ought to describe: (1) their relations to the field of production (e.g. influences, antagonisms, etc.); and (2) their attitudes to their relations to the field of consumption (e.g. their readers, enthusiasts, or detractors). Further, a work of literature, for example, may not adequately be analysed either as the product of the author’s life and beliefs (a naively biographical account), or without any reference to the author’s intentions (as Barthes argued). In short, “the subject of a work is a habitus in relationship with a ‘post’, a position, that is, within a field.” According to Bourdieu, cultural revolutions are always dependent on the possibilities present in the positions inscribed in the field.
Science, Objectivity, and the Public Intellectual
Bourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity only when certain necessary historical conditions are met. The scientific field is precisely that field in which objectivity may be acquired. Bourdieu’s ideal scientific field is one that grants its participants an interest or investment in objectivity; further, this ideal scientific field is one in which the field’s degree of autonomy advances and, in a corresponding process, its “entrance fee” becomes increasingly strict. The scientific field entails rigorous intersubjective scrutinizing of theory.
During the 1990s, Bourdieu became more and more involved in political debate, becoming one of the most important public faces of intellectual life in France. While a fierce critic of neoliberalism, he was also critical of the “total-intellectual” role played by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he dismissed Sartre’s attempts to intervene in French politics as “irresponsible” and “opportunistic.” Bourdieu saw sociology not as a form of “intellectual entertainment” but as a serious discipline of a scientific nature. There is an apparent contradiction between his earlier writings against using sociology for political activism and his later launch into the role of a public intellectual, with some highly “visible political statements.” Although much of his early work stressed the importance of treating sociology as a strict scientific discipline — “La sociologie est un sport de combat” (transl. “Sociology is a Martial Art”) — his later career saw him enter the less academic world of political debate in France, raising the question of whether the sociologist has political responsibilities extending to the public domain. Although he earlier faulted public intellectuals such as Sartre, he had strong political views which influenced his sociology from the beginning; by the time of his later work, his main concern had become the effect of globalisation and those who benefited least from it, and his politics then became more overt and his role as public intellectual was born, from an “urgency to speak out against neoliberal discourse that had become so dominant within political debate.”
Bourdieu developed a project to investigate the effects — particularly the harm — of neoliberal reforms in France. The most significant fruit of this project was the 1993 study The Weight of the World, although his views are perhaps more candidly expressed in his articles. The Weight of the World represented a heavyweight scientific challenge to the dominant trends in French politics; since it was the work of a team of sociologists, it also shows Bourdieu’s collaborative character, indicating that he was still in 1993 reluctant to accept being singled out with the category of public intellectual. Nevertheless, his activities as a critical sociologist prepared him for the public stage, fulfilling his “constructionist view of social life” as it relied upon the idea of social actors making change through collective struggles. His relationship with the media was improved through his very public action of organizing strikes and rallies that raised huge media interest in him, and his many books became more popular through this new notoriety. One of the main differences between the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm. It is notable that, in his later writings, Bourdieu sounded cautionary notes about such individuals, describing them as being “like the Trojan Horse” for the unwanted elements they may bring to the academic world; again he seems wary of accepting the description “public intellectual,” worrying that it might be difficult to reconcile with science and scholarship. Research is needed on what conditions transform particular intellectuals into public intellectuals.
Distinction and the Broader Corpus
Bourdieu’s best-known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), in which he argues that judgments of taste are acts of social positioning. The argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from quantitative surveys, photographs, and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures; in the process, Bourdieu attempts to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual. The book was named “the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century” by the International Sociological Association (ISA). Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society. His work emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics, in conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods and introduced such influential concepts as cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, symbolic violence, as well as cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital (as distinct from traditionally recognized economic forms of capital). Bourdieu was opposed to the intellectualist tradition and stressed that social domination and cultural reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the society.
