ABSTRACT
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was perhaps the preeminent sociologist of the late twentieth century. The impact of his work is evident in social theory, sociology of art, culture and the media, sociology of education and in respect of important issues of research methodology and epistemology in the social sciences.1 In this chapter we consider Bourdieu’s oeuvre and draw implications for education researchers today. Specifi cally, Bourdieu’s work seeks a way through some of the central conundrums facing all social science researchers and we are thinking of educational research here as framed within social science research. Bourdieu’s work also provides a way through a range of sticking points that present themselves in the form of conceptual dualisms, such as the structure and agency relationship, and micro and macro binaries. At a broader level, Bourdieu presents a social science that rejects ‘theoreticism’ (theory not informed closely enough by empirical data and not open to challenge) and ‘methodologism’ (a narrow concern with methods and techniques to the neglect of epistemological and ontological issues about data collection and knowledge claims) (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). In practice, Bourdieu emphasised the necessity of putting both theory and data to work together, and his accounts emphasise the social world as being the product of social constructions, yet also more than such constructions. The effects of social science were, for Bourdieu, located both within the relative autonomy of the academic fi eld, and more broadly within the polity, including other social fi elds such as education, journalism and politics. Bourdieu also rejected what might be seen as a substantialist account of social phenomena that were the focus of social science research; as such, he rejects individualism and holism. Instead, Bourdieu recognised the relational workings of the social arrangement, seeing all social phenomena in relation to their location in a given fi eld and in relation to others in the fi eld.
