Keywords

Introduction

In the last 20 years, we have seen a growing interest internationally in Bourdieu’s scholarship within the field of educational research. Many researchers who are concerned with educational disparities have found Bourdieu’s sociological advances useful to think with, as his tools carry a certain analytical purchase in deciphering the inequities that are present and persistent in the social world. Bourdieu’s reflexive and relational sociological armory provides insight into how structural inequalities are established and maintained, ripple through education, and can be attenuated or disrupted. As his work originated in the 1960s, his focus was to establish a methodological approach “which tries to lay bare structures of domination and idealist illusions of liberation” (Mahar et al., 1990, p. 2). According to Webb et al. (2002), for Bourdieu the point of sociology is “not to gather information about how society is organised, but to critique the discourses and practices that stand for us as ‘truth’” (p. 66).

Over the course of his career, Bourdieu’s priority was to develop tools to investigate the ways that “social and cultural differences are inseparable and that, through time, the social, which is synonymous with natural or indigenous culture, is modified by degrees of initiation into artificial, acquired culture” (Robbins, 2005, p. 23). A continual theme running through his early work in Algeria up until his final monograph The Weight of the World is that he designed his tools to explore how not only “the body is in the social world but the social world is in the body” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 2). His conceptual tools (e.g., habitus, capital, field, practice) provide not only a theoretical orientation, but a language to articulate experiences. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual toolkit, the skills of researchers are honed with a sensitivity regarding the processes of capital mobilization and acquisition. This conceptual toolkit has allowed educational researchers to capture the ways in which individuals navigate their education and how education can serve as a powerful socializing force.

While his work is multifaceted – and quite varied even within education – Bourdieu’s overarching focus was various forms of socialization and how these forms produce dispositions and behaviors, which have significant implications for educational attainment. Methodologically, Bourdieu worked in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, and conducted research that revealed how social reality exists in social relations, how the relational social world is organized as a matrix of oppositions and classifications, how the differentiating social structures are internalized in the social body, and how the social body struggles for mobility within the space of forces. Epistemologically, Bourdieu prodded and probed the social positions and dispositions of the subjects of his analyses; he also bequeathed us the reflexive tool of participant objectivation to engage with a self-socio-analysis to objectify the objectifier – the ever-present researcher-self. As educational research continues to be inspired by his call, we have seen Bourdieu’s tools adapted and stretched, resulting in debates regarding how to do justice to Bourdieu (see Stahl, 2016). Arguably, Bourdieu tends to bring forth strong opinions. He resonates intensely with social justice scholars and those who have experienced class practices in full operation.

Influences and Motivations

In 1930, Bourdieu was born in Béarn in the southwest of France. Brought up “in a rural milieu” (Reed-Danahay, 2005, p. 2), he spent his “primary school days … amongst the children of peasants, factory workers, and small shopkeepers” (Wacquant, 2002, p. 550) before he went to lycée (senior high school) in Pau. As the son of a postman, and grandson of a sharecropper, Bourdieu’s background was a humble one. He was the first in his family to finish secondary school, and he was fortunate to attain a place as a “scholarship boy” at the elite École Normale Supérieure where reportedly he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser. In reflecting on his journey as a learner, he described himself in this way: “As far as the education system was concerned I was half ‘in’ – I had its blessing and recognition and was shaped by its ideals, and half ‘out’ without knowing why” (Honneth et al., 1986, p. 39).

This experience of being an “exceptional outsider” informed Bourdieu’s scholarly agenda. Indeed, some of his most developed and pointed scholarship concerns education as not simply a transfer of knowledge, but as a powerful site of cultural transmission and status. As Bourdieu entered French academia – eventually becoming the prestigious Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France – he struggled with the pressure to distance himself from his working-class childhood. He felt class disparity and wrote explicitly about these feelings, never fully reconciling his present with his past. Differing from other intellectuals of his day, he consistently shunned “the distractions of media stardom” and saw them as an infringement upon his intellectual autonomy (see Wacquant, 2002, p. 554). Furthermore, Bourdieu’s own journey of social mobility led to significant tensions – upon entering elite forms of education he was compelled to change his accent, his posture and, to a certain degree, his dispositions. What is important to note here is how Bourdieu’s subject both as a person and as a researcher was shaped through the contrasting social milieus he experienced during the course of his lifetime. He wrote: “I learned a lot from two research projects, carried out in very different social milieux – the village of my childhood and the Paris universities – which enabled me to explore some of the most obscure areas of my subjectivity as an objectivist observer” (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 4).

As others have noted, Bourdieu’s biography was marked by the end of colonialism and the aftermath of World War II. In France, it was a time of modern economic expansion and dramatic social change (Grenfell, 2022; Reed-Danahay, 2005). He would have witnessed the expansion of mass education as well as the influence of the postwar baby boom, which led to greater numbers of students matriculating from university than ever before in French history. Regarding Bourdieu’s fascination with education, it is also worth noting that formal education is a central aspect of French society where the practices associated with education oftentimes function as a delineation of social class. Perhaps, because he witnessed dramatic social change in French society, Bourdieu founded his conceptual tools on a rejection of the idea that humans are autonomous individuals, instead foregrounding how individuals are bearers of a shared habitus deeply influenced by social class. Bourdieu was writing in an era of French intellectualism which was dominated by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology – both of which Bourdieu took issue with. Differing from these theories, Bourdieu’s conceptual work aimed to bring together the individual and society, thus subverting structuralism’s overemphasis on rules, models, and structures, and phenomenology’s foregrounding of experiential meaning (see Dalal, 2016 for more detail).

In Bourdieu’s efforts to show how the social world is in the body and how the body is in the social world, much of his educational research focused on the point of contact between the primary habitus and secondary socialization through the school system. Providing a conceptual overview of the foundational underpinning of Bourdieu’s work, Reed-Danahay (2005) explains that the “primary habitus inculcated through the family (which will differ according to the social position of the family) comes into contact with schooling which inculcates a secondary habitus, the ‘cultivated habitus’ … [of] the dominant social class” (47). Schools, as institutions of socialization, contribute to the construction of the habitus of children and young people, which favors certain cultural practices:

The habitus is thus the means through which the values and relations of the school are inculcated and reproduced within the child. The child will take to school the habitus they have acquired in their early years within the home, and that habitus will be acted on by their experiences at school. (Webb et al., 2002, p. 116)

Paramount in Bourdieu’s approach to education is cultural inculcation and status transmission and his tools are centered around deciphering how this inculcation works – or how it

draws out those institutional processes and structural relations that lurk behind every action made within the educational field, from the clever turn of phrase uttered within a lecture to the dress sense, hairstyle and walking manner of a professor or student. (Webb et al., 2002, p. 141)

It is useful to focus briefly here on the genesis of Bourdieu’s deep conceptual work regarding education. His early work sought to analyze the taken-for-granted educational practices present in French society, noting not only the severe inequality but the implications of such inequality. Deeply connected to his own biography, in an early collaboration with Passeron, Bourdieu (1964/1979) contended that one’s social origin “defines totally different opportunities, living and working conditions” and that, as a key determiner, it “extends to all areas and all levels of students’ experience, and first and foremost to their conditions of existence” (p. 12). Yet, while these conditions of existence are powerful, they are not all-encompassing. After all, Bourdieu himself was able to go against the grain and to attain a high level of prestige professionally, or, as Raymond Arum said, Bourdieu was the exception to what he so heavily documented in his early work (cited in Wacquant, 2002). As Dalal (2016) writes, Bourdieu’s “career trajectory was extraordinary considering the tight, hierarchical and centralised nature of French society, where children from privileged backgrounds are trained from an early age for entry into the elite institutions of higher education” (p. 231). This reminds us of how much of an “exceptional outsider” Bourdieu truly was and, ultimately, what this meant for his contribution to educational research.

Key Contributions

The influences on Bourdieu are abundant, with the most notable being Durkheim, Weber, Pascal, and Marx, and to a lesser degree Sartre and Goffman. Some seminal works of social theory prompted Bourdieu to dissolve the “meaningless oppositions” (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 628) between different schools of thought. For example, Sartre’s voluntaristic approach to unlimited human freedom and Levi-Strauss’ structuralist approach to social forces informed Bourdieu’s scholarship. Bourdieu developed his work on reflexivity from other significant pieces of scholarship including Bachelard’s (1938/2002) psychoanalytical question of common sense and Durkheim’s (1964) critique of prenotions. On class analysis, Bourdieu disagreed with the Marxist materialist approach to capital; he instead favored Weberian notions of charisma, legitimacy, and ideal goods and interests. From there, Bourdieu demystified the correspondence between taste and distinction, and expanded notions of capital into symbolic forms. Bourdieu also disagreed with the Marxist objectivist view of class; rather, he foregrounded class struggles within a space of classifications. Brubaker (1985) provided a powerful panorama of the building of Bourdieu’s work:

The risk of crude oversimplification, it may be suggested in summary that Bourdieu attempts to systematize Weber’s thought in a quasi-Marxian mode and to “subjectivize” Marxian thought by incorporating the Durkheimian concern with symbolic forms and the Weberian concern with symbolic power and symbolic goods in its systematic view of the social world as a structure of class-based power and privilege. (p. 749)

One of Bourdieu’s most important conceptual advancements was undermining the dualism of objectivism and subjectivism – as well as structure and agency. His conceptual tools offer ways to decipher how individuals are socially embedded and shaped by their location within social fields and access to capital. In his writings, which are vast and impressive, Bourdieu foregrounds a dialectical relationship between structures and practices, in which “objective structures tend to produce structured subjective dispositions that produce structured actions which, in turn, tend to reproduce objective structure” (MacLeod, 2009, p. 15). Provocative for his time, Bourdieu was staunch in his refusal to “establish sharp demarcations between the external and internal, the conscious and the unconscious, the bodily and the discursive” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). This led to his conceptualization of habitus as both a tool and an object of study (Reay, 2004). Operating largely below the conscious and at the corporeal level, the habitus “expresses itself in the innumerable mundane practices” as bodies move through social spaces and interact with institutions (Webb et al., 2002, p. 113).

In assessing Bourdieu’s contributions to educational research, it is important to remember that, for Bourdieu, “The school is not a culturally neutral zone, as it embodies the culture of the dominant group, endorsing it as legitimate and naturally given” (Dalal, 2016, p. 237). Bourdieu made many advancements which inform educational research today, and this chapter focuses on three main areas: education and social reproduction; education and cultural capital; and education and symbolic violence. This is followed by a discussion of two of Bourdieu’s early works written with Passeron: Les Heritiers (1964/1979) and Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society (1977). These two works represent important junctures in the formation of Bourdieu’s later thinking concerning not only education as an inculcating force but how inequality is manifested and maintained at all levels of education.

Education and Social Reproduction

For Bourdieu, education is a “mechanism for consolidating social separation” (Robbins, 2008, p. 29) which contributes significantly to social reproduction. Bourdieu asserts: “Among other functions, the educational system is required to produce individuals who are selected and arranged in a hierarchy once and for all, for their whole lifetime” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964/1979, p. 68). Another dimension of this argument is Bourdieu’s conception of education as “a central ideological and cultural site of socialization that … was often more likely to reproduce, rather than challenge, social inequality in the state” (Dillabough, 2004, p. 490). The collusion between school and state is what Bourdieu (2014) means by “a school nationalism” (p. 158). Education has the capacity to be integral to the acquisition of cultural capital. Furthermore, as the cultural capital tied to schooling becomes socially legitimated and valued ways of knowing, “knowledge becomes a marker distinction and social privilege” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 110).

For Bourdieu, education as an ideological site of socialization, also contributes to how individuals are socialized to certain norms, whether they be societal or institutional. Over the course of his scholarship, Bourdieu used his theory of human action – his conception of praxeology – to stress that dispositions are generated in individuals through the internalization of societal structures. Or, more specifically, Bourdieu’s interest was in how dispositions are (re)produced in relation and in response to the field that they interact with (see Stahl, 2016). In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (1997) writes of the “propensity of families to invest in education” and how this

depends on the degree to which they depend on the educational system for the reproduction of their capital and their social position, and on the chances of success for these investments in view of the volume of the cultural capital they possess – these two factors combining to determine the considerable differences in attitudes towards schooling and in success at school (those for example which separate the child of a university teacher from the child of a manual worker, or even the child of a primary teacher from the child of a small shopkeeper). (217)

As a cultural reproduction theorist, Bourdieu was often criticized for positioning class structures to be overly deterministic of life choices (see Levinson & Holland, 1996; Jenkins, 1992; Throop & Murphy, 2002). However, in reflecting on Bourdieu’s contribution to education, Harker (1990) notes “the reproduction is not mechanical as in a photocopy.” In surveying Bourdieu’s work, he calls attention to the “time-lag between structures and habitus, the source of which lies in the dialectic between changes in the production apparatus and changes in the education system” (p. 103). Despite the critiques Bourdieu faced, his methodological agenda – which foregrounded breaking down agency/structure – has resonated with scholars and significantly informed educational research. Bourdieu called attention to the necessity for a thorough understanding of how social inequalities and power imbalances are sustained through education (and vice versa) and how this is integral to the work of social justice scholars who seek to disrupt social reproduction through educational inventions and interventions.

Education and Cultural Capital

As Reed-Danahay (2005) writes, the majority of Bourdieu’s work was concerned with articulating the ways in which a person’s social position (and the “cultural capital” or values and resources connected to this) affects the choices he or she makes in life – “from that of choosing a suitable marriage partner, to educational and career decisions, to deciding how much time should elapse before repaying a gift” (p. 2). In his early work on education, Bourdieu wrote about the capacity of education to accentuate aspects of cultural capital. Cultural capital – in the form of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and qualifications associated with the dominant class, or what Bourdieu called “the cultivated classes” (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964/1979, p. 21) – is believed to have exchange value where cultural capital can be converted to other forms of capital (e.g., economic, symbolic), thus granting privileged access to better jobs, income, and status. Furthermore, for Bourdieu, cultural capital (e.g., linguistic competences, manners, preferences, and orientations) underpins the “subtle modalities in the relationship to culture and language” which may further one’s social mobility beyond the economic means available to the individual (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 82). Intergenerational transmission of economic capital can be immediate, but that transmission can also be affected by direct intervention, for example, through taxation. Cultural capital differs as its transmission is never immediate but unfolds along a temporal dimension – it is subtle but “safer” (Bourdieu, 1986).

Schooling experiences are shaped by the possession of capitals – economic, symbolic, etc. – and the ability to operationalize them, ensuring those individuals with the most capital can make the system work in their favor (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Inspired by Bourdieu, Lareau and Weininger (2003) highlight how, within educational contexts, cultural capital becomes institutionalized, therefore denoting social and cultural inclusion/exclusion. They explain that “as a result of their location in the stratification system, students and their parents enter the educational system with dispositional skills and knowledge that differentially facilitate or impede their ability to conform to institutionalized expectations” (p. 588). Furthermore, by endowing cultural capital with legitimate value, institutionalization further safeguards the transmission of cultural capital. A case in point is the distinction between a self-trained cultural literatus without any official qualification and someone institutionally accredited with a degree. In this vein, the educational system legitimates the entire process of cultural reproduction, first by parlaying cultural capital into superior academic performance, and second, “by dealing in the currency of academic credentials” (MacLeod, 2009, p. 14).

Another dimension of Bourdieu’s thinking on cultural capital was his view of education as a trading post, where the cultural capital of the middle and upper classes is rewarded, while the capitals associated with the lower classes in their local field of production are devalued, informing social reproduction in wider society. Emphasizing how the bourgeoisie are advantaged, Bourdieu highlighted that they experience no cultural dissonance on entering the education system:

Not only do the most privileged students derive from their background of origin habits, skills, and attitudes which serve them directly in their scholastic tasks, but they also inherit from it knowledge and know-how, tastes and a “good taste” whose scholastic profitability is no less certain for being indirect. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964/1979, p. 17)

Finally, students’ identities play a significant role in how schooling reproduces social inequality as they are formed in relation to the individuals’ perception of their own cultural capital as well as the labels placed upon students in the forms of schooling they encounter. In simple words, there is a structural homology between schooling as a field of differentiation and streaming, and the wider social space of classification and distinction.

Education and Symbolic Violence

For Bourdieu, pedagogy is nearly always authoritative and tied to symbolic violence as students are required, through schooling practices, to orientate themselves to and to comply with idealized ways of being aligned with the institutional demands (Stahl & McDonald, 2021). Symbolic violence, for Bourdieu, refers to the violence imposed upon a social agent with his or her complicity: “social agents are knowing agents who, even when they are subjected to determinisms, contribute to producing the efficacy of that which determines them insofar as they structure what determines them” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 167). As symbolic violence is based on constraint by consent, Bourdieu suggests that its subtlety makes it both more brutal and more effective.

Reflecting his interest in the internalization of the social world, Bourdieu used the concept of symbolic violence to describe the “mode of domination in which the oppressed contribute to their own subjugation through processes of socialization and self-formation” (Giroux, 1981, p. 9). Extending this one step further, Bourdieu foregrounded that, in his view, a prominent part of schooling is “to make students believe that the existing social relations are just and natural and in their interests” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 113). As the habitus becomes a site where individuals “fit between determinants and the categories of perception” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 167), symbolic violence encourages:

Students to believe that some of their peers achieve higher results because they work harder or are naturally good at those subjects. It may encourage low achieving students to believe that they are just not “cut out” for school and that they can compensate by pursuing opportunities in other areas, such as sport. (Webb et al., 2002, p. 113)

The complex and varied processes of symbolic violence often cause working-class students not to aspire highly because they have internalized the “limited opportunities that exist for those without much cultural capital” (Swartz, 1997, p. 197). Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual work, Zipin et al. (2013) articulate how symbolic violence compels researchers to think more deeply regarding disadvantage:

When such verdicts take an individualist–psychological cast (as is typical), ignoring or underweighting social–structural barriers, this insinuates … a lack of inventive cleverness compared to those who succeed. This can further imply that they suffer deficiencies in intelligence, resilience and/or wholesome lifestyles … and [might need to] so adjust themselves to “lower level” aspirations. Such simplistic judgments fail to read the complex, but not easily articulated, emotional labors at work beneath what may appear as unrealistically ambitious expressions of aspiration. (p. 7)

Foundational to his study of education was Bourdieu’s analysis of the ways in which forms of schooling reflect the wider systems of power present in French society. His focus on stratification emphasized how education “worked largely to legitimatize bourgeois values and to reinforce, rather than eliminate, regional and class-based boundaries” (Reed-Danahay, 2005, p. 40). Bourdieu was familiar with the French school system during a time when it was “relatively closed, elitist and intensely competitive in its structure” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 105; see also Dalal, 2016). As Mahar et al. (1990) note, the Parisian students Bourdieu studied would “face job prospects which are highly dependent upon the quality of their degrees, and the rank (symbolic and objective) that the schools have within the educational field” (9). While not discounting how this may have influenced Bourdieu, his points about stratification and symbolic violence have gained a certain currency within education research.

The foregoing sections have briefly discussed Bourdieu’s contributions regarding educational and social reproduction; education and cultural capital; and education and symbolic violence. In the next section, Bourdieu’s earliest works on education are explored, both in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron. First, Les Heritiers is considered. Published in 1964 (translated into English in 1979), that work addressed university students. Second, Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society is introduced. It was published in 1970, and translated into English in 1977.

Les Heritiers

The main argument of Les Heritiers (1964/1979), a mixed-methods study, is that education produces a social hierarchy that undermines the tenets of a truly democratic society. Focusing on French higher education, Bourdieu and Passeron discovered that the chances of university entrance were “forty times greater for a senior executive’s son than for a worker’s son” (p. 26). This inequality, of course, begins long before the transition to higher education, with students succeeding or failing in the education system largely because of their social origins and the types of cultural capital present in their family. Bourdieu and Passeron highlight that students are the products of their education and that the close alignment between bourgeois culture and formal education places the non-bourgeois at a severe disadvantage:

But the culture of the elite is so close to the culture taught in school that a child from a petit-bourgeois background (and a fortiori from a peasant of working-class background) can only laboriously acquire that which is given to a child from a cultivated class – style, taste, sensibility, in short, the savoir-faire and art of living that are natural to a class because they are the culture of that class. (p. 24)

Bourdieu and Passeron focus on the role of economic capital, a basis of accumulation of cultural capital, and how it continues to be converted into educational credentials. As a secondary argument in the text, they address working-class exclusion and the ways the system serves to eliminate students who may not have the proper dispositions and cultural habits to engage with their education. In this scholarship on higher education, Bourdieu and Passeron were interested in symbolic capital and attempted to decipher the ways in which it is ascribed to certain institutions as well as the rituals that are embedded in higher education. Webb et al. (2002) further elaborate on this:

Through such ritualized games as the lecture, the university teacher speaks from the position of a distinguished club whose membership the student desires to join. The price of this membership is measured in the cultural capital the students are able to generate through immersing themselves in the sacred texts and learned discourse of that academic discipline. They will then reproduce this learned discourse in their essays, aiming for that effortless mastery of language that distinguishes the good student. (p. 131)

While Bourdieu and Passeron did not mention symbolic violence explicitly here, we can see in Les Heritiers the genesis of their thinking, which they expanded on in subsequent work. When discussing the aspirations of students and the internalization of possibilities, Bourdieu and Passeron (1964/1979) write:

Lower-class students, forced to entertain more realistic occupational projections, can never completely abandon themselves to dilettantism or fall for the occasional glamor of studies which remain, for them, essentially an opportunity to be seized of rising in the social hierarchy. (p. 62)

Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society

Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) extends Les Heritiers through focusing on pedagogic action and how this contributes to sorting children, with a particular focus on the role of working-class failure. Taking the time to delineate this process, Bourdieu and Passeron draw on empirical data to show that children from privileged backgrounds “have tended to ascend to similar positions, while the children of those who lack this privilege have tended to remain in relatively dominated positions” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 11). While the text makes many points, much of the data and analysis centers upon the argument that working-class students fail at school and internalize their failures, coming to think of themselves as less able. This is done in reference to pedagogic authority, which functions as a contributing factor to symbolic violence – an “imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (p. 5). They explain that “pedagogic communication … can produce its own, specifically symbolic effect only because the arbitrary power which makes imposition possible is never seen in its full truth” (p. 11).

In Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society, Bourdieu and Passeron dissect the power relations present in schooling, showing how students are streamed in relation to their social origin. Large aspects of the text focus on the role of cultural capital in contributing to student success. Bourdieu and Passeron take time to describe how the educational system conceals its “social function of legitimating class differences behind its technical function of producing qualifications” (1977, p. 164, italics in original). Bourdieu and Passeron contend that “working-class children pay the price of their access to secondary education by relegation into institutions and school careers which entice them with the false pretences of apparent homogeneity only to ensnare them in truncated educational destiny” (158). Throughout the book, Bourdieu and Passeron reveal the dark, dehumanizing agenda of education. However, this work – with its poignant propositions and convincing analyses – cannot be read as deterministic or pessimistic. Rather, it is the authors’ intent to bring to light the deeply hidden inner workings of social reproduction through education. They reject the cultural inertia of romanticizing education as a productive environment that can “override almost everything else in the lives of children” (Edmonds, 1986, p. 103). They instead call for a democratization of education through “rational pedagogic work” that explicitly inculcates in every child “the practical principles of the symbolic mastery of practices which are inculcated by primary PA [pedagogic action] only within certain groups or classes” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 53).

Interestingly, while The Inheritors saddles “rational pedagogy” with the task of reducing inequalities (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964/1979, pp. 74–76), in Reproduction, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, pp. 53–54) critique “the Utopian character” of such pedagogic work. This is because the exposure of the dominated group to the cultural capital primarily inculcated in the dominant group, despite its good intention, risks further cloaking “the built-in inertia of every educational institution” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 53). This implies that the authors are never satisfied with capital endowment at the individual level but advocate transformative change at the field level.

New Insights

Among the revisionist takes on Bourdieu’s scholarship, we have seen a proliferation of new approaches and debates regarding what Costa and Murphy (2015) call “the art of application.” As educational research has engaged with habitus, many adjectives have been placed in front of habitus (e.g., vocational habitus, institutional habitus, colonial habitus). Many of these researchers have taken the opportunity to think differently but also to engage more deeply with Bourdieu’s original work where empirical research balances conceptual tensions. What seems to have been forgotten is that Bourdieu himself began this trend with “economic habitus” (see Reed-Danahay, 2005). He observed “a complete transformation of the old Algeria” where “the setting up of a capitalistic economy” (Bourdieu, 1961, p. 190) – one of the fundamental social changes – greatly altered “the economic and social structures, the system of values, and the categories of thought” (p. 191).

In Bourdieu-informed research on learner identities, habitus offers explanatory potential to demonstrate how class is internalized and individual aspirations are mediated in relation to forms of schooling. For example, the identities and aspirations of migrant children in China (Mu & Hu, 2016) and white working-class boys in England (Stahl, 2015) highlight how power relationships are internalized in the habitus as “categories of perceptions” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 167). In considering how Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit has shaped educational research, we see many examples of educational researchers using habitus as a method of working with data, rather than applying it to data (Reay, 2004). Indeed, habitus, as a multifaceted analytical tool, is powerfully structured and structuring – a complexity which continues to highlight the complex identity work of students and staff. Habitus, as a collection of socialized dispositions “is embodiment, agency, a compilation of collective and individual trajectories, fluid/restrained, and an intricate interplay between past and present” (Stahl, 2015, p. 25). Furthermore, by incorporating agency, and not being fully determined by structure, habitus represents a constant interaction between structure and agency where both reside within the habitus, mutually shaping one another.

Legacies and Unfinished Business

Two decades after Bourdieu’s death, his conceptual tools continue to be read and cited, extended and contested at both the conceptual and epistemological levels. For example, the concept of institutional habitus was crafted to better understand the collective strategies and decision-making surrounding educational choices and pathways (Reay, 1998). But that concept was criticized as “a baggy, anthropomorphic label” (Atkinson, 2011, p. 338) that lumps together heterogeneities and differences. At the epistemological level, Bourdieu’s work has been castigated by many as deterministic (e.g., Jenkins, 1992; Swartz, 1997) and later critics of his work sought to problematize the role of cultural capital in educational contexts (Sullivan, 2001). Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s work offers scholars some analytical purchase in terms of revealing the principles of social and educational reproduction where, for Bourdieu (1989), “to change the world, one has to change the ways of worldmaking” (p. 23) and what is problematic, for Bourdieu (1994), “is the fact that the established order is not problematic” (p. 15). Without a deconstruction of the underlying principles of the social structures, it is rather difficult to reconstruct the social world. This view has been taken up by some recent Bourdieusian educational research, specifically regarding Chinese education (Mu, 2020).

Social change is at the heart of Bourdieu’s work although he never developed a theory of it. Interestingly, reformist impulse became less apparent in Bourdieu’s later writings but more visible in his political engagement (Weininger & Lareau, 2018). He shifted from a critical sociologist to a public intellectual later in his career, coinciding with the release of La Sociologie est Un Sport de Combat (Carles, 2001), where he struck out against neoliberalism. Bourdieu (2002) also encouraged all intellectuals to sortie from the ivory tower and use the “symbolic sword” and “theoretical sword” at their disposal “to affirm their own values and their own authority over important issues” (p. 4).

Conclusion

To understand Bourdieu’s conceptual framework on classification, social reproduction, and education, it is necessary to examine how he conceptualized power and agency. Structures, according to Bourdieu, both constrain and construct – they inform an individual’s sense of agency, their subjectivity. And, over time, these structures become internalized. In comparing Bourdieu’s agenda to post-structuralism, Dillabough (2004) writes:

Some post-structuralists do not seize the opportunity to advance a theory of identity that might explain how it is that some individuals appear to assert greater levels of “freedom” and “agency” than others, and are therefore in a social position precisely to articulate and assert their “freedoms.” Bourdieu’s point, I believe, is that no one is ultimately free. Individuals are certainly bound by the conditions of their political, economic and cultural circumstances. (p. 498)

Therefore, to understand the social milieu and how individuals operate and interact, it is necessary to examine the social space and to locate the object within their social milieu while at the same time thinking critically about relations between structures and the individual (Grenfell, 2008).

Returning to how Bourdieu’s biography influenced his scholarship, despite his prestigious position, Bourdieu was adamant in his critique of the French higher education system. As Reed-Danahay (2005) notes: “He worked within this system, being a product of it as well, while criticizing it to the core. He has been both social actor and observer within French academia” (p. 44). His continual critique, which arguably dates back to his early work with Jean-Claude Passeron, is central to Bourdieu’s work – specifically what has been described as his ongoing “self-reflexive project.”

This entry has set out to address what doing Bourdieu justice means in contemporary sociology, highlighting what has endured in Bourdieu’s scholarship and what Bourdieusian scholars have capitalized on, finding ways to use his toolbox in provocative ways. Bourdieu’s tools remain highly relevant in contemporary educational research. The intention here is that this entry will contribute to the reflexive project Bourdieu held in great esteem, where social theorists consider the “intellectual unconscious embedded in analytical operations surrounding research” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 37). The Friday Morning Group (1990) contend that “not only has Bourdieu shown, along with many others, that inequalities, in education and elsewhere persist,” but “he has also shown, in a thorough, sophisticated and evocative way, how difficult it is to transform such complex systems” (p. 212). Yet, for Bourdieu, social transformation is not something to wait for but something to fight for. With Bourdieu’s conceptual tools at the disposal of scholars, those interested in sociology of education are equipped to engage in the fight against social and educational inequalities.