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p.1 As competent speakers we are aware of the many ways in which linguistic exchanges can express relations of power... We are experts in the innumerable and subtle strategies by which words can be used as instruments of coercion and constraint, as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescension and contempt.
p.7 The kind of competence that actual speakers possess is... a capacity to produce expressions which are appropriate for particular situations, that is, a capacity to produce expressions a propos.
p.12 Bourdieu's... alternative theory of practice is an attempt... to take into account of the need to break with immediate experience while at the same time doing justice to the practical character of social life... The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are 'regular' without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any 'rule'.
p.12-13 The dispositions which constitute the habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable - features that each deserve a brief explanation. Dispositions are acquired through a gradual process of inculcation in which early childhood experiences are particularly important. Through a myriad of mundane processes of training and learning... the individual acquires a set of dispositions which literally mould the body and become second nature. The dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the sense that they unavoidably reflect the social conditions within which they were acquired... Structured dispositions are also durable: they are ingrained in the body in such a way that they endure through the life history of the individual, operating in a way that is pre-conscious and hence not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification. Finally, the dispositions are generative and transposable in the sense that they are capable of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in which they were originally acquired. As a durably installed set of dispositions, the habitus tends to generate practices and perceptions, works and appreciations, which concur with the conditions of existence of which the habitus is itself the product.
p.13 The habitus... provides individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily lives. It 'orients' their actions and inclinations without strictly determining them. It gives them a 'feel for the game', a sense of what is appropriate in the circumstances and what is not, a 'practical sense' (le sens pratique).
p.14 when individuals act, they always do so in specific social contexts or settings. Hence particular practices or perceptions should be seen, not as the product of the habitus as such, but as the product of the relation between the habitus, on the one hand, and the specific social contexts or 'fields' within which individuals act, on the other.
p.14 A field or market may be seen as a structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or 'capital'.
p.14 One of the central ideas of Bourdieu's work, for which he is well known among sociologists of education, is the idea that there are different forms of capital... One of the most important properties of fields is the way in which they allow one form of capital to be converted into another - in the way, for example, that certain educational qualifications can be cashed in for lucrative jobs.
p.14 A field is always the site of struggles in which individuals seek to maintain or alter the distribution of the forms of capital specific to it.
p.14-15 The terms used by Bourdieu to describe fields and their properties - 'market', 'capital', 'profit', etc. - are terms borrowed from the language of economics, but they are adapted for the analysis of fields which are not 'economic' in the narrow sense.
p.16-17 While agents orient themselves towards specific interests or goals, their action is only rarely the outcome of a conscious deliberation or calculation in which the pros and cons of different strategies are carefully weighed up, their costs and benefits assessed, etc. To view action as the outcome of conscious calculation - a perspective implicit in some forms of game theory and rational action theory - is to neglect the fact that, by virtue of the habitus, individuals are already predisposed to act in certain ways, pursue certain goals, avow certain tastes, and so on. Since individuals are the products of particular histories which endure in the habitus, their actions can never be analysed adequately as the outcome of conscious calculation. Rather, practices should be seen as the product of an encounter between a habitus and a field which are, to varying degrees, 'compatible' or 'congruent' with one another
p.37 Every... action, is a conjuncture, an encounter between independent causal series.
p.38-39 It follows that style [JLJ - page 38, different ways of saying, distinctive manners of speaking] ... exists only in relation to agents endowed with schemes of perception and appreciation that enable them to constitute it as a set of systematic differences, apprehended syncretically [JLJ - combining disparate elements in one system].
p.51 There is every reason to think that the factors which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life. [JLJ - perhaps as Weick would say, through rich detail]
p.81 The definition of acceptability is found not in the situation but in the relationship between a market and a habitus, which itself is the product of the whole history of its relations with markets. The habitus is, indeed, linked to the market no less through its conditions of acquisition than through its conditions of use.
p.106 In the struggle to impose the legitimate vision... agents possess power in proportion to their symbolic capital
p.129 Heretical discourse must not only help to sever the adherence to the world of common sense by publicly proclaiming a break with the ordinary order, it must also produce a new common sense and integrate within it the previously tacit or repressed practices and experiences of an entire group, investing them with a legitimacy conferred by public expression and collective recognition.
p.166 Symbolic power is a power of constructing reality... Symbols are the instruments... of 'social integration': as instruments of knowledge and communication... they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order.
p.230 The active properties that are chosen as principles of construction of the social space are the different kinds of power or capital that are current in the different fields. Capital... represents power over a field (at a given moment) and, more precisely, over the accumulated product of past labour... and thereby over the mechanisms which tend to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and thus over a set of revenues and profits. The kinds of capital, like trumps in a game of cards, are powers which define the chances of profit in a given field
p.232 What exists is a space of relations which is just as real as a geographical space, in which movements have to be paid for by labour, by effort and especially by time... Distances can also be measures in time... And the probability of mobilization into organized movements... will be inversely proportional to distance in this space.
p.234 the schemes of perception and evaluation susceptible of being brought into operation at a given moment... are the product of previous symbolic struggles and express, in a more or less transformed form, the state of symbolic relations of power... the objects of the social world can be perceived and expressed in different ways because... they always include a certain indeterminacy and vagueness
p.235 perception in the social world implies an act of construction... the essential part of one's experience of the social world and of the labour of construction it implies takes place in practice, without reaching the level of explicit representation and verbal expression.
p.238 Distinction - in the ordinary sense of the word - is the difference written into the very structure of the social space when it is perceived in accordance with the categories adapted to that structure... Symbolic capital - another name for distinction - is nothing other than capital, of whatever kind, when it is perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the incorporation of the structure of its distribution, i.e. when it is known and recognized as self-evident. Distinctions... are the product of the application of schemes of construction which... are the product of the incorporation of the very structures to which they are applied
p.238 In the struggle for the imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world... agents wield a power which is proportional to their symbolic capital, that is, to the recognition they receive from a group.
p.242 The social world is, to a great extent, something which agents make at every moment; but they have no chance of unmaking and remaking it except on the basis of a realistic knowledge of what it is and of what they can do to it by virtue of the position they occupy in it.
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