ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes process of assessing whether something is “a good something.” When people encounter something – whether it is new, or a version of something already known – it has to be qualified: people assess simultaneously what something is, and whether this something has quality. The study of quality as a social construct with real consequences received an important impetus from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu argued that seemingly disinterested taste-based evaluations, for instance in music and arts, are shaped by power struggles. Bourdieu’s concept of quality is rooted in the Durkheim-inspired notion of culture as classification system, as it was developed in twentieth century French anthropology and linguistics. Classification was taken up mainly by institutional and cognitive sociologists. Institutionalists study how classification systems are produced and embedded in social institutions and fields.
