Before answering how Pierre Bourdieu's theories could be used to analyse power and inequality in society, it is important to state his overall theoretical model. Bourdieu’s model aims to explain objective social phenomena – e.g. distribution of power and enduring inequalities – in the manner it meets the subjective strategies individuals deploy; this relationship then answers the question on how objective phenomena are produced and reproduced.
To analyse the relationship Bourdieu developed the idea of a ‘habitus’ as the meeting point between actors and the objective social fields they are located in. First, the social field is the institutionalised social setting that defines the different ways resources are configured and distributed between actors. It is this social setting that locates different actors and sets the rules that organise the nature of social activity (the social universe consists of different autonomous but relational fields e.g. art, literature, finance etc.). The resources in social fields are termed as ‘capital’ and, according to Bourdieu, come in different forms – social, economic and cultural. Actors, on the other hand, and in a bodily sense, are located in these fields of practice and it is the setting of a field that informs the manner actors improvise and regulate their behaviour. The actor is accorded with significant flexibility in defining their personal strategies but the rules of the games, inherited through the different forms of socialisation that prepare members to take up their roles, are pre-defined. This regulated improvisation of individual subjectivity, the conditions that define the functioning of actors, is termed, by Bourdieu, as the ‘habitus’.
Bourdieu’s theory, therefore, goes beyond mere observations on given patterns and asks the question on the nature of relationship between the subjective and objective dimensions of the social that generates given patterns of power distribution and inequality. The key in analysing power and inequality is to empirically identify the dialectic interplay between social fields, with their configuration of capital, and the manner it meets the practices of actors in the form of a socially acquired ‘habitus’.
Further Reading:
Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu
Sociological Theory by George Ritzer
Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts by Michael Grenfell
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist. His work had many facets, among them the idea that one's tastes are formed by the class in which one is born. He believed that a person's aesthetic taste marked them as from a certain social class and prevented the movement of people from lower classes to higher classes. The higher class is defined by aesthetic tastes and aesthetic dislikes that children acquire, and people retain these tastes for their entire lives. The acquisition of the likes and dislikes of the elite classes is referred to as "cultural capital," and it cannot be achieved by the later acquisition of capital (or money). Instead, cultural capital is acquired when one is a child, and it perpetuates the class system and inequality.
In addition, he believed that the social order is maintained by social agents who have an innate understanding of the cultural "game" and who understand the symbolic representations of their actions. Through what he called symbolic violence, people perpetuate the social order and inequality by pretending that these cultural barriers to social mobility do not exist. He also developed the theory of cultural deprivation, which stated that the elite class considered the lower class inferior and held them responsible for their children's failures in the educational system.
His theories help people understand the ways in which power is perpetuated in society and inequality is maintained. His work identifies the invisible cultural barriers that people use to assume superiority over others and keep others out of the elite classes. We should be attentive to the ways in which the culture and the educational system maintain systems of inequality, and prevent access into the elite classes for people born into other classes.
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