Bourdieu on Status, Class and Culture

Abstract

If social class is defined by relation to the means of production, this still does not tell us how classes are constituted as classes, nor how the complex status hierarchies of capitalist societies are articulated and internalised by individuals or how other systems of status subordination are integrated within a class system of domination. On its own, possession of greater or lesser title to means of production (“economic capital”) in fact explains very little about the dynamics of bourgeois society.