Feminists are starting to look to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in the hope that it might provide a useful framework for conceptualizing the tension between structure and agency in questions of gender. This article argues that Bourdieu’s analysis of gender can indeed be useful to feminists, but that the options Bourdieu offers for change are problematic. The article suggests that Bourdieu’s anal...

For or Against Pierre Bourdieu PIERRE BOURDIEU died in Paris on 23 January 2002. He left some 40 book-length essays and over 200 articles. Unpublished texts are being brought out, and much more is to come. Even before his death, sociology textbooks presented his genetic structuralism (which he sometimes also called structuralist constructivism in opposition to Bloor’s or Latour’s relativist con...

We are arguing that, through three practical domains (see p. 679), these students have acquired a significant amount of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984), capital that is now wasted rather than systematically developed. In fact, the “boot camp” mentality of the early Ph.D. training years seems to have had the impact of purging much of that capital from the students’ psyche (Montealegre and Truex...

The injustices of “allowing certain people to succeed, based not upon merit but upon the cultural experiences, the social ties and the economic resources they have access to, often remains unacknowledged in the broader society” (Wacquant, 1998, p. 216). Cognizant of this, we argue that education requires researchers’ renewed examination and explanation of its involvement in the construction of ...

This article examines Pierre Bourdieu's canonical status among the sociologists of second half 20th century. Particular attention is given to his own work, and other work inspired by approach, on European integration post-communist transition.