Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan-a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his.

Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to...

"An unremitting assault on the impact and pretensions of television [that] demolishes conventional arguments".

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Levi-Strauss--a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Bourdieu's final book, The Bachelors' Ball, sees him return to Bearn, the region where he grew up, to examine the gender dynamics of rural France. This personal connection adds poignancy to Bourdieu's ethnographic...

No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.

In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different...

"There is in modem society a structural change that underlies many of the social changes with which the conference was concerned. My argument here will be that this is a qualitative change in the way society is organized, a change with many implications. I will call this a change from primordial and spontaneous social organization to constructed social organization (see Coleman 1990, Chapters 2, 3, and 24 for an extended examination of this change). The common definitions of these terms contain some hint of what I mean, but I will describe the change more fully to ensure that it is clearly...

Kniha (1997) patří k nejdůležitějším teoretickým pracím francouzského sociologa Pierra Bourdieua (1930-2002). Autor se v ní pokouší pohlédnout z odstupu na celek svého díla a výslovně rozpracovat základní principy, jimiž se ve svém bádání řídil. Východiskem knihy je kritika scholastického rozumu, tedy snaha odkrýt sociální podmínky umožňující veškerou intelektuální práci; nejdůležitější z těchto podmínek pak je samotná situace scholé, volného času osvobozeného od praktických tlaků. Profesionální myslitelé v čele s filozofy si však...