ABSTRACT
Although the influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s work for the study of class and stratification has been profound (see e.g. Skeggs 1997; Bennett et al. 2009; Atkinson 2015; Savage et al. 2015), the significance of his thinking for the study of social mobility is much less evident. There are several reasons for this. His own research rarely addressed the topic of mobility head on (although see Bourdieu 1987 and 1996b for partial exceptions) and he was not involved with research communities which focused directly on this topic. Within the dominant quantitative arena of mobility research he is often characterised as a sociologist of ‘reproduction’ and ‘inheritance’ who denies the significance of mobility (see e.g. Goldthorpe 2007a). And, although his own emphases on the significance of ‘trajectory’ (especially in Bourdieu 1984) are well known, they have not been fully elaborated into a sustained contribution on mobility.
