It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology. Bourdieu’s theory is a sociological theory of social stratification that examines a person’s economic and cultural capital. The topic of Bourdieu’s book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Bourdieus work emphasizes structural constraints and. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. Bourdieus conceptualization is grounded in theories of social reproduction and symbolic power.

Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. France’s leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu, is a sociological report about the state of French culture, based upon the.

Bourdieu theory of distinction