Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies

such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital (In The Forms of Capital), and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life.

Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English.

Bourdieu studied philosophy with Louis Althusser in Paris at the cole Normale Suprieure. During the Algerian War in 1958-1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples, of the Berbers laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation. In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Europenne, the research center, which he directed until his death. In 1975, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. He died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 72.

Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in everyday life. He rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet," or the "total intellectual". He was not a proponent of revolutionary transformations in culture. According to him such moments are always dependent on the possibilities present in the positions inscribed in the field.

During the 1990s Bourdieu became more and more involved in political debate, turning himself into one of the most important public faces of intellectuality in France.

In 2001, a documentary film about Bourdieu Sociology is a Martial Art "became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of mile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do."

For him Sociology is a fighting sport, not an intellectual technical tool for the elite to validate their choices. People need sociology to understand the growing inequalities and fire back, find their way out of the alleconomic fatalism.

For three years (1998-2001) Pierre Carles followed to make the documentary on Bourdieu, who was working to have his research understood and prompting people to action. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in dialogue and opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; he or she is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he or she can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed, could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education. The term cultural capital refers to non-financial social assets; they may be educational or intellectual, which might promote social mobility beyond economic means.

For Bourdieu, capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange, and the term is extended to all the goods material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation and cultural capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange that includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers power and status. Social capital refers to connections within and between social networks. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a university education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups. His work tends to show how it can be used practically to produce or reproduce inequality, demonstrating for instance how people gain access to powerful positions through the direct and indirect employment of social connections.

Bourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g., prestige, honor, attention) as a crucial source of power. Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence.

Symbolic Violence We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered unsuitable by her parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the message that she will not be permitted to continue this relationship, but which never make this coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate. Hence, the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken demand, regardless of her suitor's actual merits. She has been made to misunderstand or misrecognize his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate, she is complicit in her own subordination - her sense of duty has coerced her more effectively than explicit reprimands could have done. Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporation of unconscious structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The dominated then take their position to be "right." Symbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the specter of legitimacy of the social order.

In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of economics to analyze the processes of social and cultural reproduction, of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, formal education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behavior, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait, dress, or accent. Privileged children have learned this behavior, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege therefore fit the pattern of their teachers' expectations with apparent 'ease'; they are 'docile'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' abilitydistinctionas in fact the product of a great social labor, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider social system.

Cultural capital (e.g., competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Therefore working class children can come to see the educational success of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g., accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g., university qualifications) - a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent. Structure and Agency The debate concerning the primacy of either structure or agency with regard to human behavior is a central issue in sociology, political science, and the other social sciences. In this context, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure", by contrast, refers to the recurrent patterned arrangements which seem to influence or limit the choices and opportunities that individuals possess.

The structure versus agency debate may therefore be understood simply as the issue of socialization against autonomy. Contemporary sociology has generally aimed toward a reconciliation of structure and agency as concepts. The term "reflexivity" is used to refer to the ability of an agent to consciously alter his or her place in the social structure; thus globalization and the emergence of the 'post-traditional' society might be said to allow for "greater social reflexivity". Social and political sciences are therefore important because social knowledge, as self-knowledge, is potentially emancipatory.

Bourdieu's work attempts to reconcile structure and agency, as external structures are internalized into the habitus while the actions of the agent externalize interactions between actors into the social relationships in the field. Bourdieu's theory, therefore, is dialectic between "externalizing the internal", and "internalizing the external."

Reflexivity Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity. The sociologist, according to Bourdieu, must engage in a sociology of sociology" so as not to unwittingly attribute to the object of observation the characteristics of the subject. She/he ought to conduct their research with one eye continually reflecting back upon their own habitus, their dispositions learned through long social and institutional training. It is only by maintaining such a continual vigilance that the sociologists can spot themselves in the act of importing their own biases into their work. Reflexivity is, therefore, a kind of additional stage in the scientific epistemology. It is not enough for the scientist to go through the usual stages (experiment, repetition, falsification, peer review, etc.); Bourdieu recommends also that the scientist purge their work of the prejudices likely to derive from their social position. In a good illustration of the process, Bourdieu chastises academics (including him) for judging their students' work against a rigidly scholastic linguistic register, favoring students whose writing appears 'polished', marking down those guilty of 'vulgarity'.

Without a reflexive analysis of the snobbery being deployed under the cover of those subjective terms, the academic will unconsciously reproduce a degree of class prejudice, promoting the student with high linguistic capital and holding back the student who lacks it - and all not because of the objective quality of the work but simply because of the register in which they write. Reflexivity should enable the academic to be conscious of their prejudices, e.g. for apparently sophisticated writing, and impel them to take steps to correct for this bias. Language Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one's relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions are manifestations of the participants' respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a "right" to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and to what degree. Cultural Production According to Pierre Bourdieu the principal obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of the value of cultural goods is the charismatic ideology of creation which can be easily found in studies of art, literature and other cultural fields. In Bourdieus opinion charismatic ideology directs the gaze towards the apparent producer and prevents us from asking who has created this creator and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the creator is endowed.

The key concepts in Bourdieu's work are habitus, field, and capital. The agent is socialized in a "field" (an evolving set of roles and relationships in a social domain, where various forms of "capital" such as prestige or financial resources are at stake). As the agent accommodates to his or her roles and relationships in the context of his or her position in the field, the agent internalizes relationships and expectations for operating in that domain. These internalized relationships and habitual expectations and relationships form, over time, the habitus. Influence of Bourdieu on further studies Erotic Capital Sexual capital or erotic capital is a form of social worthiness granted to an individual, as a result of his or her sexual attractiveness to the majority of his or her social group. As with other forms of capital, sexual capital is convertible, and may be useful in acquiring other forms of capital, including social capital and economic capital, as when actors parlay erotic capital into financial capital or social capital (e.g. Marilyn Monroe), or when attractive employees get raises and social connections from bringing in more customers by virtue of their looks.

Gender The emergence of sexual capital is linked to gender relations, e.g. when poor young men build sexual capital by grooming their looks and improving sexual performance in order to satisfy female partners and in competition with middle class peers and older so-called 'sugar-daddies'. Thus sexual capital reinforces masculinity in the face of male disempowerment, and it often develops as a response to conflict between dominant and subordinated masculinities.

Class Sexual capital and other forms of bodily power become important resources among disenfranchised young men when their access to economic capital and jobs is diminished. Race Several studies suggest that sexual capital is closely associated with race or racial stereotypes of sexual attractiveness. In colored societies, whiteness is associated with modernity, sexual openness and mobility. Regardless of income, in US, white men enjoy higher levels of sexual capital than black men, black women and white women, allowing them more sexual opportunities and more latitude for sexual experimentation.

In extension, Catherine Hakim's theory of Erotic Capital argues that erotic capital is a valuable fourth personal asset, alongside economic capital, cultural/human capital and social capital; that erotic capital is increasingly important in affluent modern societies; and that women generally have more erotic capital than men because they work harder at it.

She has shown that erotic capital is important in the media, politics, advertising, sports, the movies, and in everyday social interaction, and includes: Beauty Sexual attractiveness Social attractiveness Vivaciousness Presentation Sexuality Fertility

Academic Capital Academic Capital should not be confused with Academic Capitalism, where universities are profit-seeking organizations that market the knowledge to students, who are clients.

A persons academic capital affects his or her career opportunities and ultimately his or her career decisions. Academic capital doesn't influence only one's final career choice, but also influences a persons social standing and clout.

It will affect where a person lives (due both to financial opportunities and social networking) and, ultimately, where his or her children go to school, creating a cyclical, interwoven relationship between schooling and social status.

In France, Bourdieu was seen not as an ivory tower academic or "cloistered don" but as a passionate activist for those he believed to be subordinated by society. For Bourdieu, sociology was a combative effort, exposing the un-thought structures beneath the physical (somatic) and thought practices of social agents. He saw sociology as a means of confronting symbolic violence and exposing those unseen areas where one could be free.