The transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology of education

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction (Bourdieu, 1979 Bourdieu P 1979 La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, Ed. De Minuit) [Google Scholar], 1986 Bourdieu P 1986 Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London‐New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul) [Google Scholar]), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as ‘cultural capital’. The English Preface to Homo Academicus (Bourdieu Bourdieu P 1984 Homo academicus (Paris, Ed de Minuit) [Google Scholar], 1988 Bourdieu P 1988 Homo academicus (Cambridge, Polity Press) [Google Scholar]) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason (Bourdieu, 1994 Bourdieu P 1994 Raisons pratiques. Sur la the´orie de l'action (Paris, Ed. du Seuil) [Google Scholar], 1998 Bourdieu P 1998 Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action (Cambridge, Polity Press) [Google Scholar]) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinction to Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971 Young MFD (Ed.) 1971 Knowledge and control. New directions for the sociology of education (London, Collier‐Macmillan) [Google Scholar]) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblesse d'e´tat/State nobility (Bourdieu, 1989 Bourdieu P 1989 La noblesse d'e´tat. Grandes e´coles et esprit de corps (Paris Ed. De Minuit) [Google Scholar], 1996 Bourdieu P 1996 The state nobility. Elite schools in the field of power (Cambridge, Polity Press) [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and La mise`re du monde/The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al., 1993, 1999 Bourdieu P et al. 1999 The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society Cambridge, Polity Press [Google Scholar]) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les he´ritiers/The Inheritors (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964 Bourdieu P with Passeron J‐C 1964b Les he´ritiers (Paris, Ed de Minuit) [Google Scholar]b; 1977 Bourdieu P with Passeron J‐C 1977 Reproduction in education, society and culture (London–Beverley Hills, Sage Publications) [Google Scholar]) and La reproduction/Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970 Bourdieu P with Passeron J‐C 1970 La Reproduction, Ele´ments pour une the´orie du syste`me d'enseignement (Paris, Ed de Minuit) [Google Scholar], 1977 Bourdieu P with Passeron J‐C 1977 Reproduction in education, society and culture (London–Beverley Hills, Sage Publications) [Google Scholar]). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death.