ABSTRACT
During his academic career, Pierre Bourdieu has produced theoretical and empirical work in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education, culture and politics. His work has been viewed as an innovative transposition of a relational conception of the natural sciences to the social sciences that is philosophically in a tradition of realism. Bourdieu is probably best known by educators for his articulation of how the educated social groups use cultural capital as a social strategy to hold or gain status and respect in society. His reflexive sociology offers an approach to understand intellectual practice, whether it is in sociology, the natural sciences, or education. Central to this theory is the approach that he calls epistemic reflexivity and the concept epistemic individuals. Key concepts in the notion of epistemic reflexivity are habitus and social strategies. Bourdieu uses the idea of social strategies to explain the way in which individuals engage themselves in the struggles over symbolic capital.
