Pierre Bourdieu worked to understand the relationship between class, culture, and power by studying schools in France with the expectation of finding that social mobility was the result of meritocracy. What did he discover instead?

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Reed Skinner

Social Studies

7 November, 19:58

Pierre Bourdieu worked to understand the relationship between class, culture, and power by studying schools in France with the expectation of finding that social mobility was the result of meritocracy. What did he discover instead?

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Jeremy Trujillo · Answer 1

The main concepts of the theoretical concept of Pierre Bourdieu, which is called genetic structuralism - social space, social field, cultural and social capital, habitus.

For the analysis of social relations, Bourdieu proposes to use the concept of "habitus," which he defines as a system of acquired schemes that operate in practice as categories of perception and evaluation, or as a principle of distribution among classes, and at the same time as an organizational principle of action.

Bourdieu defines three types of "capital": economic capital (inherited or acquired), cultural capital, which primarily includes acquired educational capital, cultural goods, social capital, consisting of social relations that can be implemented within the framework of certain strategies.

Social space can be imagined as a place where social agents, each of which occupies a certain position, depending on the position of various types of "capital," struggle to maintain and improve their position through social mobility.