The Bourdieusian Conception of Social Capital: A Methodological Reflection and Application

Abstract

This paper is on social capital and the meaning that Bourdieu has given to this concept in his Notes provisoires, published in 1980. He considered social capital as one of the most important forms of capital, along with economic capital and cultural capital. Even though he did not propose an explicit measure of social capital, so it remained in a conceptual state, he promoted an innovative research programme. Our contribution is to propose a generic method to empirically measure and test hypotheses on social capital, based on Bourdieu's work. We aim at creating an analytical framework that places this concept at the centre of the Bourdieusian theoretical approach. For this purpose, we combine two sociological tools that relate to two different sociological traditions, namely social network analysis and multiple correspondence analyses. Thus, our paper describes the ways to combine field and network analyses, and illustrates this with an empirical study.

Keywords:

• social capital
• social network
• social resources
• field theory
• Bourdieu

JEL classifications:

• A14
• D85
• L26
• Z13

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his thanks to Asimina Christoforou and two anonymous referees for useful insights and constructive comments.

Notes

¹ For instance, in an earlier article on the French ‘patronat’ (1978), he evokes the importance of the social capital that is both ‘inherited’ from family and accumulated during professional career within the French State bureaucracy. And he invariably insists on the link between social capital and social group membership.

² This list should be established before the interviews begin.

³ For Bourdieu and for other researchers after him, social capital is considered as an attribute of ‘the dominants’, of the upper class, of the field of power. For instance, Cousin and Chauvin (2012) focus on the existence, within the Milanese upper society, of different conceptions of social capital, which imply different ways to acquire it (ties stemming from family inheritance, sociability of institutions of higher Education, cooptation within clubs, etc.) and, correlatively, a hierarchy of these forms of acquirement.

⁴ Though we believe our methodology can be adapted to other forms of capital.

⁵ To illustrate, some individuals possess more cultural capital than economic capital (teachers), and conversely (entrepreneurs).

⁶ Axis 1 is chosen because, in a MCA, the first axis is always the dimension which resumes the most important share of the information within the data. This argument is reinforced by our choice to make two independent MCA with, on the one side, variables relating to cultural capital and, on the other side, variables relating to economic capital. Obviously, other choices can be tested depending on the analysis model considered.

⁷ Pajek (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/) is one of the software programmes used to conduct SNA which allows us to transform an adjacency matrix into a graph (i.e. a map with vertices and arcs).

⁸ The content of the interpersonal ties depends on the choice of the name generator in the second step.

⁹ The three degree centrality measures are: degree, indegree and outdegree. For a more detailed and technical treatment, we refer the reader to Wasserman and Faust (1994). To give a simple example based on a country's trade networks: ‘A country with high outdegree is a heavy exporter, and a country with high indegree is a heavy importer’ (p. 127).

¹⁰ For instance, Bourdieu and de Saint-Martin (1978, p. 27) give the example of the Debré French family. Because its members were embedded in a multiplicity of fields, at prestigious positions, this group accumulates diverse forms of capital: academic, political, cultural, economic, etc. The authors remark that membership in such a family ensures access to symbolic profits.

¹¹ The particular MCA is composed of 18 active variables (61 items) and 5 supplementary variables (20 items). The active variables are used to measure cultural capital (9 variables, 30 items) and economic capital (9 variables, 31 items). The supplementary variables are related to culinary style (1 variable, 7 items) and symbolic capital (4 variables, 13 items).

¹² Details about results and analysis are provided in Eloire (2014).

¹³ Symbolic capital hierarchy is objectified through professional rewards, including references in and awards from gastronomic ‘Guides’, as well as peer co-optations for entry in ‘honorary associations’ of Chef.

¹⁴ Due to limited space, details of these results can be provided by the author upon request.

¹⁵ The social resources identified during the pilot-survey were: informal discussions about economic conditions, transmission of interesting information, sending over customers and mutual support.

¹⁶ We use data on the net margin rate of the company to measure monetary profit.

¹⁷ We use data regarding gastronomic reputation, i.e. any recognised gastronomic awards and honours that restaurant owners had received (see also footnote 13).