ABSTRACT
These interactions can result in new foci and in attempts to create adequate instruments for capturing emerging social realities (for example, through a ‘hybridization’ between Bourdieu and other theoretical traditions). This particular outcome of his work is consistent with Bourdieu’s conception of sociological theory as a collective patrimony or as an intellectual ‘toolbox’ at the disposal of the researcher (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992): for him, one should take from and leave in this universal toolbox according to the stakes, the sociological problems, the interpretative needs of empirical research, the limits of existing theoretical conceptions, and so on. After years of various synthetic publications following his death (in French, see especially the synthesis by Mauger, 2005), as Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde show in the introduction, Bourdieu still generates scientific controversy and can hardly be ignored in a large number of sub-fields where his theory is discussed, applied and criticized.
