Bourdieu's class

Chris Wilkes

pp. 109-131

in: Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

In Bourdieu's forms of analysis, class is fundamental to that side of his argument concerned with objective conditions. But his analysis of class does not depend on objective economic or indeed political criteria alone for its foundation, but on a broad-ranging account of class practices which includes food tastes, clothing, body dispositions, housing styles and forms of social choice in everyday life, as well as the more familiar categories of economy and polity. This extended exposition of class along a range of parameters does not dissolve class into a Weberian account of "lifestyle" or reduce its power. Rather, it extends the force of class analysis, both in the range of its explanatory power, and in the subtlety of its classifications.