Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)

Power, particularly in the form of domination, stands at the core of the work of one of the most important sociologists of the late 20th century, Pierre Bourdieu. Widely recognized for his original contributions to the ethnology of Algeria; to the sociology of education, literature and art, taste, class, language, science, politics, and religion; and to social theory, Bourdieu authored more than 25 books and more than another 30 edited collections of his more than 400 articles, many of which have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He established a network of highly productive scholars around his Center for European Sociology; founded and directed an innovative journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales; and was elected to the chair of sociology at the scholarly prestigious Collège de France in 1981. An International Sociological Association survey ranked Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) as the sixth most important social scientific work of the 20th century. Bourdieu is arguably the most influential and [Page 75]original French sociologist since Émile Durkheim, and at the time of his death, Bourdieu was a leading European public intellectual.

For Bourdieu, the analysis of and debunking of power relations should be the central goals of sociology. Bourdieu analyzes power in three overlapping but analytically distinct ways: (1) power in valued resources (capitals), (2) power in specific spheres of struggle (fields), and (3) power in legitimation (symbolic violence).

Bourdieu conceptualizes valued resources as capital when they function as social relations of power by becoming objects of struggle. Capitals can be created, accumulated, exchanged, and consumed. His concept of cultural capital is most widely known—particularly in the sociology of education and culture—but his work includes a wide array of capitals, such as social capital, economic capital, academic capital, and statist capital. His view of capital extends the analysis of power to more subtle expressions beyond that of material advantage and physical coercion.

Capitals as forms of power exist not in isolation but relationally in what Bourdieu calls fields. Fields denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize different kinds of capital. Field struggle, for Bourdieu, has two distinct dimensions: struggle over the distribution of capitals (i.e., struggle to accumulate the more valued forms of capital or to convert one form into another more valued form) and struggle over the very definition of the most legitimate form of capital for a particular field.

One particular power arena Bourdieu emphasizes in his sociology of modern societies is the field of power, which is that arena of struggle among the different power fields (particularly the economic field and the cultural field) for the right to dominate throughout the social order. Bourdieu identifies different subfields within the field of power, such as the artistic field, the administrative field, the university field, the political field, and the economic field. Leaders of particular subfields compete to impose their particular type of capital as the most legitimate claim to authority. For example, artists, writers, and professors compete in the field of power against business leaders to impose their respective capitals (cultural capital vs. economic capital) as the most legitimate.

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