Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture: an introduction

The regulating mechanism Bourdieu proposes is the habitus (ibid.: 7295). This he describes as ‘the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations…a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to the analogical transfer of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems’. The habitus is not just a random series of dispositions but operates according to a relatively coherent logic, what Bourdieu calls the logic of practice.