ABSTRACT
The symbolic refers to the human capacity to use signs in order to express ideas, while the material refers to that which is concrete, or 'real', in the social world, like bodies and buildings. The symbolic economy can be defined as follows: Linguistic exchange – a relation of communication between a sender and a receiver, based on enciphering and deciphering, and therefore on the implementation of a code or a generative competence. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the symbolic economy is constituted of a set of fields, and the 'field' serves as a metaphor for a structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or 'capital'. Bourdieu's work has shown that 'the field of the neoliberal economy progressively establishes itself on a world scale and reduces the autonomy of other fields'.
