ABSTRACT
You do not have to be a devotee of Pierre Bourdieu to acknowledge the awesome influence of his work on the social sciences across the globe over the last half century. The enormous impact of Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas is a little surprising in one respect. Over the same period, sociologists (at least) have started to move away from so-called grand theory: namely, big theories that attempt to understand the whole of social life. Disquiet has been expressed about the relationship between theoretical developments and the seemingly growing distance from empirical research on everyday life. Theorists stand accused of engaging in grand speculative thinking and making predictions about epic social change uninformed by past empirical research (Goldthorpe, 2007a, 2007b; Savage and Burrows, 2007; Smart, 2007; see also Devine and Heath, 2009). Bourdieu is a big theorist albeit one mostly interested in stability rather than change. Yet, his theoretical ideas have inspired a vast amount of empirical research that has extended way beyond his native France and continental Europe to include the UK (Bennett, et al., 2009); America (Lamont, 2000, see also Lamont’s contribution to this collection (Chapter 10)); Australia (Bennett, et al., 2001), and, more recently, Latin America (Mendez, 2008). This is why Bourdieu, as Lamont suggests in chapter 10 (pp. 128-41), is one of the ‘very small pantheon of individuals who have determined the shape of the social sciences’.
