Toward a European social topography: the contemporary relevance of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘social space’

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dieter Vandebroeck is an assistant professor of sociology at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). His research interests are situated somewhere in between the sociology of the body, the logic of socialization and social theory. He is the author of Distinctions in the Flesh (Routledge, 2016) and has previously published in the Routledge Companion to Bourdieu’s Distinction and Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales.

Notes

1 My sincere gratitude goes out to both Göran Therborn and Michalis Lianos for the opportunity to publish this special issue, but above all to Agnes Skambalis for seeing it through the editorial process with much patience and unwavering support. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers whose diligent and critical reading helped to improve the quality of the manuscripts. The papers contained in this issue originated in the workshop “Charting Social Space” organized in Brussels in September 2014 by the Network for the Study of Cultural Distinctions and Social Differentiation (SCUD). I am greatly indebted to Pim Te Braak for his organizational talent and to Annick Prieur for her invaluable work in coordinating and animating the network.

2 For a quite different theoretical use of the term ‘social space’, see the work of Donald Black (2014). For a ‘non-Euclidean’-conception of social spaces, see Andrew Abbott’s work on ‘linked ecologies’ (2005).

3 Social capital proves curiously and conspicuously absent from the model and while Bourdieu devoted several theoretical pieces to the concept (for instance, Bourdieu 1980, 1986), it never seems to have risen to the analytical status of the other two forms of capital.

4 The work of Leibniz, whose ‘Animadversiones’ Bourdieu would translate as part of his graduate training at the École Normale Supérieure, would play a central role in both the development of the concept of ‘social space’ and Bourdieu’s more overarching brand of field theory (see Pinto 2015).