Forms of Capital: General Sociology, Volume 3

Lectures at the Collège de France 1983 - 84

Pierre Bourdieu author Peter Collier translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Published:14th May '21

£30.00

Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.

Forms of Capital: General Sociology, Volume 3 cover

This is the third of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collége de France in the early 1980s under the title General Sociology. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline; in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well known, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practised today.

In this volume, Bourdieu focuses on one of these key concepts, capital, which forms part of the trilogy of concepts – habitus, capital, field – that define the core of his theoretical approach. A field, as a social space of relatively durable relations between agents and institutions, is also a site of specific investments, which presupposes the possession of specific forms of capital and secures both material and symbolic profits. While there are many different forms of capital, two are fundamental and effective in all social fields: economic capital and cultural capital. These and other forms of capital exist only in relation to the fields in which they are deployed: the distribution of the forms and quantities of capital constitutes the structure of the field within which agents act and they confer power over the field, over the mechanisms that define the functioning of the field and over the profits engendered in the field – over, for example, the transmission of cultural capital in the educational system.

An ideal introduction to one of Bourdieu’s most important concepts, this volume will be of great interest to the many students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu’s work across the social sciences and humanities, and to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the twentieth century.

‘Capital exists and functions only in relation to the field in which it operates: like trumps in a card game, it exerts power over this field, in particular over the materialized or incorporated instruments of production and reproduction whose distribution composes the very structure of the field, and over the regular patterns (or mechanisms) and the rules (or institutions) that define the ordinary functioning of the field; and thereby over the profits engendered in the field (for example, the cultural capital and the laws of transmission of cultural capital, as mediated by the educational system).’
Pierre Bourdieu

ISBN: 9781509526703

Dimensions: 231mm x 150mm x 36mm

Weight: 748g

450 pages