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How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data

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 Chapter 2
How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu:
The Geometric Modelling of Data*

Frédéric Lebaron

Abstract There is an essential aspect of Bourdieu’s work that has been somewhat
neglected by those who have written about Bourdieu’s theory, that is his constant
concern for quantifying his data material and for putting his thinking in mathemati-
cal terms. The first purpose of this chapter is to provide landmarks for this aspect,
and to outline the solution that was retained by Bourdieu, at least from La distinc-
tion onward: namely the geometric modelling of data. In a first part, this chapter
describes Bourdieu’s lifelong commitment into statistics (quantification and formali-
zation), which lead him to the choice of geometric modelling of data through the use
of correspondence analysis (CA) and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). In a
second part, examples of Bourdieu’s modelling of the data are successively presented
and analysed. Bourdieu’s program for quantification and formalization is not an arbi-
trary result of historical contingencies: it is the logical consequence of a critical expe-
rience and reflection about the shortcomings of dominant quantitative approaches in
social sciences, which led him to a conscious and systematic move toward a geometric
frame-model more adapted to his conception of the social world.

2.1 Bourdieu and Statistics: A Lifelong Commitment

As early as the “Algerian times” (the second half of the 1950s, with a first book
Sociologie de l’Algérie published in 1958), Bourdieu cooperated with statisticians
of the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (the French
National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies). He did it particularly during
the collection of large-scale labour force surveys undertaken during the period of
the liberation war in Algeria (until 1960 when he had to come back to France).
Bourdieu applied his anthropological perspective to the sociological interpretation
of survey data, especially the statistics of unemployment (Bourdieu Sayad, Darbel,
& Seibel, 1963).

* This chapter is the result of a collective work undertaken since 1998 with Henry Rouanet and
Brigitte Le Roux. Part of the ideas presented here was presented at the Correspondence Analysis
and Related Methods (CARME 2007) conference of Rotterdam in June 2007.

K. Robson and C. Sanders (eds.), Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdiue, 11

© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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 12 F. Lebaron

This collaboration continued in the 1960s at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne

through multiple scientific exchanges, as reflected in the contribution to Les
héritiers (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964) by the statistician Alain Darbel, who is asso-
ciated with the epoch-making calculation of the chances of access to university for
the various social class categories. In L’amour de l’art, Bourdieu and Darbel (1966)
develop the equations of the demand for cultural goods, where cultural capital,
measured according to the level of diploma, appears as the central variable helping
to explain inequalities in access to museums.
Between 1966 and 1971, Bourdieu elaborated theoretically the concept of field
(Bourdieu, 1966, 1971); at the same time, he was becoming aware of the shortcom-
ings of the traditional “quantification” tools, namely regression analysis, which he
already makes clear in a chapter of Le partage des benefices (Darras, 1966) written
with Darbel (under the title “La fin d’un malthusianisme”).
As he would firmly state in Distinction, “the particular relations between a
dependent variable (political opinion) and so-called independent variables such
as sex, age and religion, tend to dissimulate the complete system of relations that
make up the true principle of the force and form specific to the effects recorded in
such and such particular correlation” (Bourdieu, 1979: 103).
To Bourdieu, social causality amounted to the global effects of a complex struc-
ture of interrelations, which is not reducible to the combination of the multiple
“pure effects” of independent variables. The structural vision, which appears to be
central for Bourdieu as for other social scientists in this period, relates to the strong
influence of “structuralism” in French social sciences in the 1960s, especially with
the models of linguistics and anthropology (around Levi-Strauss, who was a central
reference for Bourdieu).
Bourdieu’s strong interest for a new formalization also relates, though not explic-
itly, to the dynamics of mathematics under the influence of a well-known group
of French mathematicians called “Nicolas Bourbaki”, which was also an implicit
reference-frame for sciences in general, and for specialists of the human and social
sciences in particular. During this period, attempts for both formalizing and quan-
tifying social sciences were numerous and largely inspired by various fields of
modern mathematics (particularly algebra). Bourdieu himself often referred to the
need for scientific instruments which would be capable of grasping the relational
dimension of social reality.
Meanwhile, the geometric approach of data analysis developed by Jean-Paul
Benzécri and his school around Correspondence Analysis was emerging (see Le Roux &
Rouanet, 2004; Rouanet, 2006). At the end of the 1960s,1 Bourdieu turned to this
approach as being the method most in “elective affinities” with his own theory (Rouanet,
Ackermann, & Le Roux, 2000). In Distinction (“A three-dimensional space”),
Bourdieu develops the idea that if “quantification” is to take place in sociological
research, it has to be multidimensional and aim as a first step at operationalizing each

1
A first empirical attempt with CA is evoked in a footnote of Un art moyen (Middle-Brow Art), a book
which presents the results of a survey about photography. It seems clear that Bourdieu was not
completely convinced by this first application, but he remained eager to find a model of the multi-
dimensional social aspects of taste, which were not made visible with a series of contingency tables.

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 13

of the basic dimensions of social space, namely the various types of capitals (e.g.,
economic, cultural, social and symbolic). The next step would be to combine them
so as to provide a geometric model of data. Bourdieu stated “I use Correspondence
Analysis very much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose
philosophy fully expresses what in my view constitutes social reality. It is a procedure
that ‘thinks’ in relations, as I try to do with the concept of field”.2
A breakthrough in Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) was accomplished when
Correspondence Analysis was applied to tables representing individuals by vari-
ables, synthesizing many contingency tables by two fundamental clouds: the cloud
of properties and the cloud of individuals. More specifically, for categorized
variables, Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) emerged as a standard tool
that was applied in “Le Patronat” (1978), Homo Academicus (1984), La noblesse
d’Etat (1989b), Les structures sociales de l’économie (1990, 2000b), and, in a new [Au1]
variant called specific MCA, “Une revolution conservatrice dans l’édition” (1999),
Bourdieu’s last quantitative empirical work.
Since the late 1970s, geometric modelling has been the basis of all empirical
work conducted along Bourdieu’s line. It has allowed Bourdieu to explore the major
hypotheses of his theory such as: “the positions [in a field] command the position-
takings” (Bourdieu, 1992). In his last lecture at College de France, in 2001, Bourdieu [Au2]
reiterated: “Those who know the principles of multiple correspondence analysis will
grasp the affinities between this method of mathematical analysis and the thinking
in terms of field” (Bourdieu, 2001: 70).
This tradition of geometric modelling to quantify the basic dimensions of social
space and explore sociological hypotheses, has been pursued in recent work directly
inspired by Bourdieu’s thinking: Sapiro (1999), Rosenlund (2000), Lebaron (2001),
Duval (2004), Hjellbrekke et al. (2007), etc.

2.2 Bourdieu and the Geometric Modelling of Data

Bourdieu very soon developed a multidimensional perspective, which was already

present in his early writings of the 1960s when he referred to diverse species of
capital (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic). His scientific objective had been
to counter-balance a purely economic vision of society (then becoming more popular
under the influence of rational choice theorists like Gary Becker) and, at the same time,
to contest a purely idealistic vision of the cultural domain by introducing an economy
of symbolic goods (regarding this double move, see Lebaron, 2003). He tried to inte-
grate both dimensions in the perspective of a “general economy of the practices” as he
would write in 1972 in a theoretical essay, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
As early as in the middle of the 1960s, Bourdieu formulated the concept of “field”,
which systematically addresses the relational aspects of social reality (Bourdieu, 1966).
He more completely developed his “theory of fields” in the beginning of the 1970s

2
Preface of the German edition of Le métier de sociologue, 1991.

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 14 F. Lebaron

(Bourdieu, 1971). A field is a small locus inside the global social space, which is
defined by its relative autonomy, and where its proper structure is related to a specific
configuration of agents. Agents in a field, even without any direct interaction (in con-
tradiction with Weber’s vision of the religious universe), are put into objective relations,
defined by the distribution of their specific resources and by a corresponding process of
domination (distinct from the global process of social domination between classes).
The “geometric modelling of data” was a practical way to combine objectifica-
tion through quantitative data in a synthesis of statistical information (which is rela-
tively close to the classical use of factor analysis), and the notion of field, inserted
inside the global social space.

2.3 L’anatomie du goût (1976) and Distinction (1979)

L’anatomie du goût (Bourdieu & de Saint-Martin, 1976) is the first published appli-
cation of geometric data analysis methods in Bourdieu’s work, republished in 1979
in Distinction. It was realised (like other applications in the 1970s and 1980s) with
the help of Salah Bouhedja, Bourdieu’s statistical technician, and (even if it was
not mentioned in the text of the article) after some interactions with mathematicians
and statisticians, who, for example, reacted to the first presentation of the results.
The data were collected through a survey on two complementary samples, using
the same basic questionnaire, which was passed in 1963 (“Kodak survey”, as it was
called in the Centre de Sociologie Européenne) and 1967 (“taste survey”). This
procedure aimed at producing a general sample able to give an appropriate picture
of the French population.
The scientific objective of L’anatomie du gout was first to provide a synthetic
vision of the social space as a global structure (which is presented on a “hand-
made” figure described as resulting from many successive correspondence analy-
ses, hereafter CA). A second objective was to study two sub-sectors inside the
social space more in-depth: the space of the dominant classes and the space of the
middle-classes (“petite-bourgeoisie”), each study being based on the analysis of an
Individuals by Variables table (from the respective sub-population).
The main elements of the geometric modelling of data were already present in
this work, as Henry Rouanet, Werner Ackermann and Brigitte Le Roux have shown
(Rouanet et al., 2000). Bourdieu and de Saint-Martin applied CA to Individuals by
Variables tables, which was a common practice at the time, when the use of multi-
ple correspondence analysis (hereafter MCA) was not yet developed.
The choice of active and supplementary variables3 was subtle: questions on tastes
and cultural practices were taken as active questions of the analysis; socio-demographic
and occupational questions were used as supplementary questions, and figured on a

3
Active questions (or variables) are questions which participate to the creation of the distance in
the two spaces: space of modalities, space of individuals. Supplementary questions (variables) are
projected onto the resulting space.

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 15

Fig. 2.1 Schema 3 “Les variants du goût dominant”

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 16 F. Lebaron

transparent which could be superposed to the first principal plan resulting from the
CA. This technique of visualisation gives a strong intuition of the sociological rela-
tions between the space of tastes (lifestyles) and the space of social positions.
The cloud of individuals was present in the analysis: for specific fractions of the
dominant classes, the dispersion of individuals was made obvious through the contours
of various sub-clouds (“cadres”, or “patrons”) drawn by hand. This is what later will
be called “structuring factors”, the cloud of individuals being systematically structured
by external factors in structured data analysis (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2004).
Species of capital are “fundamental dimensions” of the space to investigate;
their combination (the first principal dimensions which are interpreted) is a specific
result of the analyses. The resulting global social space in L’anatomie du gout is
three-dimensional: the first three dimensions are interpreted in terms of the volume
of capital, composition of capital, and seniority in the class. When referring to the
space of the dominant classes or the “petite-bourgeoisie” (bi-dimensional), the first
axes are interpreted in terms of capital composition and seniority in the class. The
analysis results in a strong sociological statement about the existence of a structural
homology between the “space of lifestyles” and the “space of social positions”,
[Au3] both being interpreted as two aspects of the same reality (Fig. 2.1).
Among today’s research questions following this classical analysis is the prob-
lem of the universality of these two results in other (national or historical) contexts.
For scholars like Lennart Rosenlund (2000), this configuration seems to be an
invariant in developed capitalist societies, where the opposition between economic
capital and cultural capital has become more pronounced.

2.4 “Le patronat” (1978) and La noblesse d’Etat (1989)

The second occurrence of a use of GDA by Bourdieu is a well-known article where

Bourdieu and de Saint-Martin studied a population of economic elites (heads of
enterprises, CEOs) with the help of MCA. In this article (republished in Bourdieu’s
State Nobility), the authors justify the central use of MCA as a way to discover a
hidden relational reality which is not conscious, but nevertheless “more real” than
the partial and practical perceptions of the agent. They refer to programs and pub-
lications from the statistician Ludovic Lebart.
The novelty of the analysis probably first lies in the type of data which were
used. Biographical data were collected in various directories and biographical
sources, in a collective process (“prosopography”) directly inspired by growing sci-
entific practices in social history (coming from ancient and medieval history). Here
again, the main elements of the scientific practice of GDA were present in Bourdieu
and de Saint-Martin’s text. Active modalities were selected from a set of biographi-
cal data, defining the various species of capital at stake. These modalities were
grouped into different “headings” (groups of questions), with an important number
of modalities referring to social properties (from demographic characteristics to
educational trajectory) and some of them to more specific assets in the economic

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 17

Fig. 2.2 Cloud of individuals, plane 1–2, p. 10

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 18 F. Lebaron

field (positions in boards, distinctions, etc.). In particular, the following characteristics

were considered:
• Demographic properties: place and date of birth, number of children, place of
residence
• Social and familial origin: profession of the father, seniority in class, presence
in the Bottin Mondain (a directory of social elites)
• Educational trajectory (i.e. “grand lycée parisien”)
• Professional (career): (i.e. “grand corps”)
• Specific positions in the field: economic power positions, membership to coun-
cils, etc.
• Indicators of symbolic capital: official distinctions, decorations, etc. and
• Indicators of membership to mobilised groups (like associations)
The cloud of individuals was explicitly given, with the names of elites helping the
reader who “knew” some agents to have a direct intuition of the social structure of
[Au4] the field (Fig. 2.2).
The interpreted space is two-dimensional, with a first axis opposing “public” to
“private” positions and trajectories (the field then being dominated by technocratic
managers, coming from Ecole nationale d’administration or Polytechnique) and a
second axis opposing “newcomers” and “established”. This analysis provides a strong
view of the structure of the field of economic elites as being defined by the relation to
the State (bureaucratic capital) and by a process of dynamic competition between frac-
tions, first defined by their seniority in the field and correlated specific properties (the
new “generation” in the field being more often trained in private business schools).
An explanatory perspective was clearly present in the analysis, which aimed at
understanding the space of managerial strategies (for example, human resources,
studied specifically in another MCA) in relation to their positions in the field. In
La noblesse d’Etat, this analysis was combined to a general study and interpretation of
structural homologies, especially those existing between the field of power in which
the elite is included, and the field of “grandes écoles” (higher education institutions).4

2.5 Homo Academicus (1984)

In a prosopographical study – i.e., an analysis of the biographical properties of

the members of a specific historical group – that began right after May 1968,
Bourdieu and his group began to collect systematic information about academics
in France. Their intention was to explain the specific crisis which took place inside
the academic field during the May events (a general strike and student protests
which had important political consequences), especially in the humanities and social
sciences. This important amount of biographical information led to the construction

4
The field of “grandes écoles” in the 1980s is studied with the help of CA in La noblesse d’Etat.
The table is a contingency table crossing schools and professions of the father.

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 19

of two spaces resulting from two different analyses (MCA) published in 1984 (in
Homo academicus): (1) a space of academics of all disciplines and (2) a space of
specialists in humanities and social sciences (“lettres et sciences humaines”).
Active questions were selected in both general social properties and specific
position variables (indicators of symbolic capital, career, etc.). Position-takings
(like public support to the director of Ecole normale supérieure, Robert Flacelière)
were taken as supplementary questions. A cloud of individuals from “humanities
and social sciences” was published with the initials of the names in French (and the
full names in the English version).
Here again, an explanatory perspective was based on a close qualitative look at
the cloud of individuals: position-takings in May 1968 (for or against the student’s
movement, the worker’s strike, etc.) were related to specific positions in the field,
with an opposition between traditionally established (orthodox) and modernist
newcomers (heretics) as a central polarisation inside French universities.

2.6 “L’économie Domestique” (1990) and The Social

Structures of the Economy (2000)

In the analysis of an economic field (the field of individual house in France),

undertaken in the 1980s and first published in 1990, two analyses were presented:
one described the “field of producers”, and the other the “field of efficient agents”
involved in the making of a public policy in this sector. Both were based on prosopo-
graphical data, the first about real estate enterprises and the second about individuals
from different sectors of the field of power related to this sector of public action.
In the analysis of the “field of producers”, the first axis is interpreted as an
opposition between large national and small local companies, and the second as
an opposition between two juridical structures of intermediary enterprises (with
two related styles of production). This structure is used by Bourdieu to interpret
economic strategies, largely depending on the positions in the field, especially the
way the companies both anticipate and adjust to sectors of demand (or to sectors
of the social space).
In both analyses, one finds again the clouds of individuals with names, sub-clouds
of individuals with drawn geometric contours (as in Distinction) and an explanatory
perspective (with as explanandum, respectively economic strategies and position-
takings in the public policy debate). In The Social Structures of the Economy,
Bourdieu insisted on this explanatory perspective made possible by GDA (Fig. 2.3). [Au5]

2.7 “Une Revolution Conservatrice dans l’édition” (1999)

This article was the last publication using GDA methods by Bourdieu himself,
written in collaboration with Brigitte Le Roux and Henry Rouanet (following
the Köln conference on the empirical investigation of social spaces in 1998, after

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 20 F. Lebaron

Fig. 2.3 Field of single-family housebuilders, The Structures of the Economy, p. 46

which a co-operation between both groups of researchers began). The analysis

was based on prosopographical data collected about a small population of com-
panies publishing literary books in French, including translations from foreign
languages. The method used was specific MCA, invented by Brigitte Le Roux and
Jean Chiche, which allows the analysts to determine certain modalities of active
questions as “passive” modalities of active questions (for example, no-information
or “junk” modalities) without destroying the symmetry properties of the method.
With this technique, only active modalities of active questions create the distance
in the constructed space.

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 21

As active questions, Bourdieu took indicators of capital (i.e. symbolic, economic,

etc.). Principal component analysis was used in order to create an index of impor-
tance to reduce the redundancy of size variables. A Euclidean classification, based
on the distance of the specific MCA, was utilized in order to characterize sub-groups
of publishers, and to raise questions about the future dynamics of the market (for
example the concentration processes). The sociological interpretation by Bourdieu
insisted on the “chiasmatic” structure of the field of publishers, with a first opposi-
tion between big and small companies, and a second one between a commercial
and a literary legitimate pole, which appears to be in homology with the classical
composition axis found in previous analyses. Sociological interpretations assessed
the relations existing between positions and position-takings (editorial choices) by
qualitative comments based on the cloud of individuals (Fig. 2.4). [Au6]

[Au7] Fig. 2.4

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 22 F. Lebaron

Fig. 2.4 (continued)

2.8 GDA in Bourdieu’s “School”

To be complete, one should add that Bourdieu’s colleagues and followers have
made intensive use of GDA methods since the middle of the 1970s. Luc Boltanski
(on “cadres” or “dénonciation”), Remi Lenoir (demographers, family policy),
Patrick Champagne (French peasants), Monique de Saint-Martin (nobility), Annie
Verger (artists), etc., have published chapters of books or articles based on MCA
during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 23

Fig. 2.4 (continued)

A new generation of research based on GDA was made visible through an

article by Gisèle Sapiro about the field of French writers under German occupa-
tion published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1996. In parallel,
Swedish sociologists of education Donald Broady and Mikael Börjesson, inspired
by Bourdieu’s work, were intensively using CA and MCA in the 1990s. Lennart
Rosenlund was simultaneously replicating Bourdieu’s results about lifestyles in
Stavanger in the 1990s as well. In 1998, a conference in Cologne, Germany gave
way to a strong new alliance between Bourdieu, sociologists referring to Bourdieu’s
sociological theory and statisticians interested in Bourdieu’s theory like Henry

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 24 F. Lebaron

Fig. 2.4 (continued)

Rouanet and Brigitte Le Roux. Among the outcomes of this cooperation was the
analyses published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales about the field
of publishers mentioned and illustrated above (see Fig. 2.5), and an article by
Hjellbrekke and others (2007) putting into practice recent theoretical and technical
[Au8] innovations in GDA (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7).
One can add several articles by Lebaron (2001), Duval (2004), and recent
theses by Denord (2003), Börjesson (2005) and Hovden (2008) among many other
applications (which could be the object of another chapter about Bourdieu’s school
and quantification in recent years). Very recently, an article about lifestyles in the
UK using specific MCA, concentration ellipses, etc., was published by a group of

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 25

Fig. 2.5 [Au9]

sociologists including Mike Savage and Alan Warde, in cooperation with Brigitte
Le Roux (Savage, Warde, Le Roux, & Rouanet, 2008).

2.9 Conclusion

Bourdieu was conscious of the shortcomings of the dominant quantitative methods

in social sciences (especially regression methods), which he discovered with Alain
Darbel as early as in the beginning 1960s. He consciously found an alternative to

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 26 F. Lebaron

Fig. 2.5 (continued)

these methods with the geometric modelling of data, which he practised around
30 years, from the beginning of the 1970s (with the exploitation of the “taste
survey”) until the late 1990s (with prosopographical data on publishers).
In his various texts based on the use of GDA, one also finds various research
strategies:
• Discovering and showing the structure of a field
• Showing structural homologies between fields
• Explaining (e.g. positions and position takings) through in-depth studies of the
cloud of individuals and the cloud of modalities and
• Analysing the possible dynamics of a field – i.e., through classification

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 27

Fig. 2.5 (continued)

Bourdieu did not approve nor practice the usual rhetoric of scientific publica-
tions, presented in terms of hypotheses, empirical data and results confirming
or failing to confirm hypotheses. Neither did he always clearly separate between
sociological and statistical interpretations, nor did he completely formalize his
theory of fields and his sociological interpretation of statistical analyses. Probably,
the way his statistical practice was integrated into his sociological writing did not
encourage dialogue with other quantitative traditions and the clear understanding
of what he did from a statistical point of view. Many researchers may find this to
regrettable. Inferential procedures, which could have completed and strengthened

Robson_Ch02.indd 27 11/6/2008 6:08:26 PM

 Fig. 2.6 Plane 1–2. Interpretation of axis 1: 20 categories with highest contributions to axis.
FM = Father/Mother, BM = Board Member. The sizes of markers are proportional to the frequen-
cies of categories

Fig. 2.7 Concentration ellipses around subgroups of interest in plane 1–2

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 2 How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data 29

his conclusions were not present. But Bourdieu was clearly always in search of a
general geometric frame-model; he was enthusiastic about the possibility of future
integration of regression into the framework of geometric data analysis. As such, it
is clear that Bourdieu’s adoption of the geometric modelling of data has opened a
very large space for a strong empirical sociological research program.

Author Queries:
[Au1]: Please specify if it is Bourdieu 1990a or b.
[Au2]: Bourdieu (1992) is not in the list.
[Au3]: Please confirm if citation for Figure 2.1 here.
[Au4]: Please confirm if citation for Figure 2.2 is correct.
[Au5]: Please confirm if citation for Figure 2.4 is correct.
[Au6]: Please confirm if citation for Figure 2.4 is correct.
[Au7]: Please provide legend for Figure 2.4.
[Au8]: Please confirm if citation for Figures 2.6 and 2.7 are correct.
[Au9]: Please provide legend for Figure 2.5.

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 Robson_Ch02.indd 30 11/6/2008 6:08:28 PM

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