ABSTRACT
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most widely read and studied authors in France and all over the world. This chapter reviews his key concepts, such as habitus, practices, representations, field, capital and reflexivity. Objective power relations structure and determine the relations among the subjects who hold them because they establish the possibilities of access to social positions. Cultural capital presents itself in the institutionalized form of acknowledged educational or academic qualifications formally accessible to anybody, and therefore, formally independent of those who are in possession of them, but in fact achievable at the highest levels only by the ruling class. Both cultural and social capital may be transformed into economic capital, which is the ultimate cause of the effects produced by the other types of capital. Bourdieu pays great attention to the conditions in which those who work in the area of social sciences, particularly contemporary sociologists, use to think and act.
