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The Social Structures of the Economy
Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality.
As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. And the individuals involved in the transaction are immersed in symbolic constructions which constitute, in a strong sense, the value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns.
The abstract and illusory nature of the assumptions of orthodox economic theory has been criticised by some economists, but Bourdieu argues that we must go further. Supply, demand, the market and even the buyer and seller are products of a process of social construction, and so-called ‘economic' processes can be adequately described only by calling on sociological methods. Instead of seeing the two disciplines in antagonistic terms, it is time to recognize that sociology and economics are in fact part of a single discipline, the object of which is the analysis of social facts, of which economic transactions are in the end merely one aspect.
This brilliant study by the most original sociologist of post-war France will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, anthropology and related disciplines.
As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. And the individuals involved in the transaction are immersed in symbolic constructions which constitute, in a strong sense, the value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns.
The abstract and illusory nature of the assumptions of orthodox economic theory has been criticised by some economists, but Bourdieu argues that we must go further. Supply, demand, the market and even the buyer and seller are products of a process of social construction, and so-called ‘economic' processes can be adequately described only by calling on sociological methods. Instead of seeing the two disciplines in antagonistic terms, it is time to recognize that sociology and economics are in fact part of a single discipline, the object of which is the analysis of social facts, of which economic transactions are in the end merely one aspect.
This brilliant study by the most original sociologist of post-war France will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, anthropology and related disciplines.
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
29 people are currently reading
567 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
353 books1,322 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
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April 8, 2015
I’ve come away from reading this book knowing far more about the French housing market than seems completely reasonable for someone living in Australia. But, in a sense, that is exactly the point that Bourdieu is making. This is a book that wants to show that homo economicus – the mythical being that makes economic decisions that are always consistent with its perceived economic best interests – is a fiction. To do this he provides an alternative model to explain the real actions and interactions of real participants in the world. To say all of this in another way – Bourdieu is seeking to bring economics back to the realm of the social and historical sciences.
To provide an understanding of the decisions people make in the economy, Bourdieu has analysed the housing market in France. Now, what you might normally do if you were going to analyse the economics of this market if you were a social scientist would be to go along to someone engaged in selling houses and to see what kinds of interactions they engage in with people wanting to buy houses. And, about half-way through this book, that is exactly what Bourdieu does. The kind of ‘normal’ analysis that this might involve would be a kind of ‘discourse analysis’ – that is, you might deconstruct the language used by each of the ‘players’ in this interaction, or you might look at the clothes they are wearing, or you might investigate how they each position their bodies in relation to each other as symptomatic of unspoken power relations. The point being that you will have recorded (perhaps even video-recorded) these interactions and then later deconstructed them so as to ‘understand’ them. This interaction, no matter how closely analysed, is, to Bourdieu, never enough to actually understand what is going on here.
I’m going to quote some Eliot:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
And the third in the case of this interaction between the seller and the buyer is the complexity of social fields and personal habits that make this interaction even possible in the first place.
And that is what Bourdieu spends the book mapping. He looks at how the various house building companies are structured so that they appeal to different portions of the market (different social classes, in effect) and how these portions of the market come to market with different financial, cultural, educational and social capitals which, in what Bourdieu refers to as their ‘habitus’, exerts a very strong ‘inertial’ drag on the kinds of choices they will make and the kinds of choices they simply will not consider.
He makes the interesting point that many of the ‘middle class’ will seek a house that is, as much as possible, ‘handmade’ – so they go to smaller building companies. And that this then becomes something that the lower classes in France at the time also sought, at least, the appearance of a house that has been customised to their ‘needs’. However, such houses would be outside of the price range of these people. This meant that how the organisations that were manufacturing for lower class clients went about advertising their properties also needed to change with this change in taste – despite the fact that they would still be selling essentially ‘prefabricated’ houses. The changes they made were ‘cosmetic’ - they stopped giving the various houses they produced ‘names’, they stopped producing ‘catalogues’ and so they tried to imply that there was a kind of infinite versatility available to purchasers. The individual and their tastes were all that mattered – long live freedom of choice.
Bourdieu’s point is that this freedom of choice is virtually always presented as being completely unrestrained – whereas, in reality it is almost completely ‘over-determined’ by a series of factors that have very little to do with ‘freedom’ and much more to do with necessity.
Not least is the regulatory structure that existed at the time. This structure consists of policies created and enacted by governments – but such policies are themselves the outcome of struggles between various fields. The builders, in particular, have a vested interest in making sure that certain things happen or don’t happen. It is definitely not in their interests, for instance, that governments provide reasonably cheap council housing. It is also not helpful if the government places too many restrictions on the kinds of houses builders build. Then there are also banks and their abilities to finance the building of housing stock – particularly ‘private’ stock for individual families. There is also a whole culture that presents the nuclear family, living in a separate household in the suburbs, as an item of desire. Each of these fields interact and intersect – they each apply forces on each other, each seeking some kind of advantage in this landscape of interactions.
There are also fields within building firms themselves – firms made up of marketing wings, tradespersons, finance and accounting areas and so on – all of which have separate and not necessarily consistent needs and interests. Competition, as such, exists at all levels of this structure, but not necessarily the kind of ‘competition’ that economists generally speak of. This, too, is a competition that might not even be noticed by the people engaged in this competition. It is one that brings to bare the weight of the history of each of the participants to each of their interactions – and these interactions are often facilitated or hindered on the basis of the ‘tastes’ of those interacting. To understand the actions and preferences of any actor, then, it is not enough to know what is in their ‘best interests’ at any given time in the sense of them ‘maximizing their utility’ within the marketplace, but rather what is the collection of dispositions they have accumulated over their lifetimes that make many of these ‘decisions’ virtually automatic?
Bourdieu talks of the ‘amor fati’ – the love of one’s fate – the idea that one ends up ‘choosing’ that which one has been allowed. There is a fascinating section of this where the interactions between a salesperson and a buyer are described and the first thing the salesperson does is assess how much money the buyer has – income minus debts plus ‘government assistance’ available – and then ‘limit the expectations’ of the buyer about the kind of house they will be able to afford. The salesperson needs to do this in two ways, firstly, they have to ‘pop’ the bubble of the buyer’s dream home, which is almost always going to be much more than they can actually afford, but also to do this in a way that doesn’t make the house they can afford sound too crap.
What was interesting here was the idea that buying your ‘dream home’ often involved you having to move away from the centre of the city to the arse end of no-where. This meant spending hours and hours each day communing, but also, because you left home before ‘sparrow’s fart’ (as they say in Australia – the idea being the first creature awake in the morning is a sparrow and the first thing it does once awake is to fart) and that you aren’t home again until well after dark, you virtually never end up really knowing your neighbours – so, one of the things lost in these semi-detached nightmares is a sense of community. All this is made worse by the fact that the houses aren’t quite as detached as you might have been promised, and so the owner has to put up with the noises coming from neighbours one hardly knows.
Bourdieu’s point in all this analysis is that to understand economic interactions it isn’t really enough to look at individual agents as if they had no life history or operated in a vacuum. Rather, one needs to understand all of the forces that are acting upon them – legal, social, cultural – and this is precisely the opposite of what economics normally does.
This is a really interesting book, but even for Bourdieu (someone who rarely goes out of his way to make his writing ‘convenient’ to the reader) it is quite a hard read. Many of the sentences are insanely long – and they whip about from sub-clause to sub-clause with a kind of abandon that can leave you wondering what the hell the start of the sentence had been about again? Still, if you want to get an insight into what Bourdieu means by ‘fields’ and how these help to structure the kinds of choices available to people, and how these might make a useful contribution to ‘social research’, then this book really is the book you need to read.
To provide an understanding of the decisions people make in the economy, Bourdieu has analysed the housing market in France. Now, what you might normally do if you were going to analyse the economics of this market if you were a social scientist would be to go along to someone engaged in selling houses and to see what kinds of interactions they engage in with people wanting to buy houses. And, about half-way through this book, that is exactly what Bourdieu does. The kind of ‘normal’ analysis that this might involve would be a kind of ‘discourse analysis’ – that is, you might deconstruct the language used by each of the ‘players’ in this interaction, or you might look at the clothes they are wearing, or you might investigate how they each position their bodies in relation to each other as symptomatic of unspoken power relations. The point being that you will have recorded (perhaps even video-recorded) these interactions and then later deconstructed them so as to ‘understand’ them. This interaction, no matter how closely analysed, is, to Bourdieu, never enough to actually understand what is going on here.
I’m going to quote some Eliot:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
And the third in the case of this interaction between the seller and the buyer is the complexity of social fields and personal habits that make this interaction even possible in the first place.
And that is what Bourdieu spends the book mapping. He looks at how the various house building companies are structured so that they appeal to different portions of the market (different social classes, in effect) and how these portions of the market come to market with different financial, cultural, educational and social capitals which, in what Bourdieu refers to as their ‘habitus’, exerts a very strong ‘inertial’ drag on the kinds of choices they will make and the kinds of choices they simply will not consider.
He makes the interesting point that many of the ‘middle class’ will seek a house that is, as much as possible, ‘handmade’ – so they go to smaller building companies. And that this then becomes something that the lower classes in France at the time also sought, at least, the appearance of a house that has been customised to their ‘needs’. However, such houses would be outside of the price range of these people. This meant that how the organisations that were manufacturing for lower class clients went about advertising their properties also needed to change with this change in taste – despite the fact that they would still be selling essentially ‘prefabricated’ houses. The changes they made were ‘cosmetic’ - they stopped giving the various houses they produced ‘names’, they stopped producing ‘catalogues’ and so they tried to imply that there was a kind of infinite versatility available to purchasers. The individual and their tastes were all that mattered – long live freedom of choice.
Bourdieu’s point is that this freedom of choice is virtually always presented as being completely unrestrained – whereas, in reality it is almost completely ‘over-determined’ by a series of factors that have very little to do with ‘freedom’ and much more to do with necessity.
Not least is the regulatory structure that existed at the time. This structure consists of policies created and enacted by governments – but such policies are themselves the outcome of struggles between various fields. The builders, in particular, have a vested interest in making sure that certain things happen or don’t happen. It is definitely not in their interests, for instance, that governments provide reasonably cheap council housing. It is also not helpful if the government places too many restrictions on the kinds of houses builders build. Then there are also banks and their abilities to finance the building of housing stock – particularly ‘private’ stock for individual families. There is also a whole culture that presents the nuclear family, living in a separate household in the suburbs, as an item of desire. Each of these fields interact and intersect – they each apply forces on each other, each seeking some kind of advantage in this landscape of interactions.
There are also fields within building firms themselves – firms made up of marketing wings, tradespersons, finance and accounting areas and so on – all of which have separate and not necessarily consistent needs and interests. Competition, as such, exists at all levels of this structure, but not necessarily the kind of ‘competition’ that economists generally speak of. This, too, is a competition that might not even be noticed by the people engaged in this competition. It is one that brings to bare the weight of the history of each of the participants to each of their interactions – and these interactions are often facilitated or hindered on the basis of the ‘tastes’ of those interacting. To understand the actions and preferences of any actor, then, it is not enough to know what is in their ‘best interests’ at any given time in the sense of them ‘maximizing their utility’ within the marketplace, but rather what is the collection of dispositions they have accumulated over their lifetimes that make many of these ‘decisions’ virtually automatic?
Bourdieu talks of the ‘amor fati’ – the love of one’s fate – the idea that one ends up ‘choosing’ that which one has been allowed. There is a fascinating section of this where the interactions between a salesperson and a buyer are described and the first thing the salesperson does is assess how much money the buyer has – income minus debts plus ‘government assistance’ available – and then ‘limit the expectations’ of the buyer about the kind of house they will be able to afford. The salesperson needs to do this in two ways, firstly, they have to ‘pop’ the bubble of the buyer’s dream home, which is almost always going to be much more than they can actually afford, but also to do this in a way that doesn’t make the house they can afford sound too crap.
What was interesting here was the idea that buying your ‘dream home’ often involved you having to move away from the centre of the city to the arse end of no-where. This meant spending hours and hours each day communing, but also, because you left home before ‘sparrow’s fart’ (as they say in Australia – the idea being the first creature awake in the morning is a sparrow and the first thing it does once awake is to fart) and that you aren’t home again until well after dark, you virtually never end up really knowing your neighbours – so, one of the things lost in these semi-detached nightmares is a sense of community. All this is made worse by the fact that the houses aren’t quite as detached as you might have been promised, and so the owner has to put up with the noises coming from neighbours one hardly knows.
Bourdieu’s point in all this analysis is that to understand economic interactions it isn’t really enough to look at individual agents as if they had no life history or operated in a vacuum. Rather, one needs to understand all of the forces that are acting upon them – legal, social, cultural – and this is precisely the opposite of what economics normally does.
This is a really interesting book, but even for Bourdieu (someone who rarely goes out of his way to make his writing ‘convenient’ to the reader) it is quite a hard read. Many of the sentences are insanely long – and they whip about from sub-clause to sub-clause with a kind of abandon that can leave you wondering what the hell the start of the sentence had been about again? Still, if you want to get an insight into what Bourdieu means by ‘fields’ and how these help to structure the kinds of choices available to people, and how these might make a useful contribution to ‘social research’, then this book really is the book you need to read.
February 20, 2025
The home living module movement was linked to the social infrastructure builders in France and, curiously enough, my parents were buying their first home in the outer suburbs of New York City in Rockland County NY in the year 1974, when I was only 2 years old. Only in the early 1970s did HLMs become popular and affordable to the middle class in France but, as Pierre Bourdieu notes in this book, at approximately the same time there arrived a new social movement on the right who were organized to control and head off the radical liberalism that they saw as a threat to their way of life and, he points out, they sought to do this by proposing a policy of moderate liberalism, combining personal assistance and building subsidies which allowed them to criticize and enact a reduction of the activities of the building societies that was henceforth to be excluded from the management and distribution of the loans of these new developments. The family allowance funds found it difficult to adapt to this new regime, but it fell to them to be responsible for personal housing assistance, so it was that the parties of the left, including the communist party, as well as local politicians of all persuasions associated with HLM boards that mounted a resistance, speaking as representative of a entire social housing sector. Eventually, it came about that members of a highly privileged social class came to vote for their own class interests that led to broader change in the scope of the housing crisis.
Housing policy was one of the first areas of conflict between the advocates of social policy and the defenders of radical liberalism. One on side were those who wanted to extend or maintain the social rights then in force, benefits including the right to work, health, housing, education, publicly recognized and provided by various forms of insurance, unemployment insurance, housing benefits and family allowance to be assessed and distributed by the principle 'according to his or her needs', the paradigmatic expression of which is minimal subsistence income. Despite the boost the housing policy of the late 1960s to mid-1970s gave to the middle class in France, the force favoring the defense of 'social' rights, who are definitely not Socialists, are still very powerful not only in France but in America too because they have been built into institutions over a long time, that is, into the objective (chiefly administrative) structure and cognitive structure these institutions have been producing.
Is buying or renting more affordable or the better choice, or, what's evidently true here, as is the sociology of limited choices in both Europe and America? What happened to the American dream, all we have left is a renter's paradise that was made-over to look like a European pied-a-terre? Is soaring rents the Americanization of Europe or the Californication of America? Baudrillard would have an answer for us, but unfortunately he's dead.
Symbolically, contemporaneously, Harvard's great authors course has changed from Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Marcel Proust to J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Frank O'Hara. There's a trio you can really sink your teeth into! Why J.D. Salinger doesn't translate into European commodification patterns, and why European nationalism doesn't take to America's consumerist culture of accumulation, the solution is it has to do with varying theories of law and jurisprudence. How is American law different from European law, where nations are confronted daily with their historical antecedents, whereas with America it's more equivalent to chasing ghosts from the past. Updike could write a dandy section of a novel on that subject, it would go well with a lobster roll and a Sunday sermon before a TV program of political strip-tease.
I suppose if you've lived in a prisoner of war camp in Algeria for a few years then you will be eager to spend your life savings for 74 square meters of living space in a neighborhood where all you can get for your hard-earned money is a basement apartment and the prospect of a aide a la pierre in your retirement years. Curiously enough, you find yourself surrounded by middlebrow readers of J.D. Salinger stories that epitomize the suburban life that you imagined was to cater to your fantasies of social advancement. Is this the life we dreamed of when we were young? I guess it all depends on your perspective. For me, there's plenty of room to live in - just don't ask me to share my space with my loved ones, although currently there are only two of them.
Housing policy was one of the first areas of conflict between the advocates of social policy and the defenders of radical liberalism. One on side were those who wanted to extend or maintain the social rights then in force, benefits including the right to work, health, housing, education, publicly recognized and provided by various forms of insurance, unemployment insurance, housing benefits and family allowance to be assessed and distributed by the principle 'according to his or her needs', the paradigmatic expression of which is minimal subsistence income. Despite the boost the housing policy of the late 1960s to mid-1970s gave to the middle class in France, the force favoring the defense of 'social' rights, who are definitely not Socialists, are still very powerful not only in France but in America too because they have been built into institutions over a long time, that is, into the objective (chiefly administrative) structure and cognitive structure these institutions have been producing.
Is buying or renting more affordable or the better choice, or, what's evidently true here, as is the sociology of limited choices in both Europe and America? What happened to the American dream, all we have left is a renter's paradise that was made-over to look like a European pied-a-terre? Is soaring rents the Americanization of Europe or the Californication of America? Baudrillard would have an answer for us, but unfortunately he's dead.
Symbolically, contemporaneously, Harvard's great authors course has changed from Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Marcel Proust to J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Frank O'Hara. There's a trio you can really sink your teeth into! Why J.D. Salinger doesn't translate into European commodification patterns, and why European nationalism doesn't take to America's consumerist culture of accumulation, the solution is it has to do with varying theories of law and jurisprudence. How is American law different from European law, where nations are confronted daily with their historical antecedents, whereas with America it's more equivalent to chasing ghosts from the past. Updike could write a dandy section of a novel on that subject, it would go well with a lobster roll and a Sunday sermon before a TV program of political strip-tease.
I suppose if you've lived in a prisoner of war camp in Algeria for a few years then you will be eager to spend your life savings for 74 square meters of living space in a neighborhood where all you can get for your hard-earned money is a basement apartment and the prospect of a aide a la pierre in your retirement years. Curiously enough, you find yourself surrounded by middlebrow readers of J.D. Salinger stories that epitomize the suburban life that you imagined was to cater to your fantasies of social advancement. Is this the life we dreamed of when we were young? I guess it all depends on your perspective. For me, there's plenty of room to live in - just don't ask me to share my space with my loved ones, although currently there are only two of them.
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May 25, 2015Just years before the housing bubble disintegrated, Bourdieu published perhaps the best analysis of the home-ownership aspect that fuels housing crises before they occur: "By embarking upon projects that are often too large for them, because they are measured against their aspirations rather than their possibilities, they lock themselves into impossible constraints, with no option but to cope with the consequences of their decisions, at an extraordinary cost in tensions, and, at the same time, to strive to content themselves, as the expression goes, with the judgement reality has passed on their expectations : they may thus spend their whole lives striving to justify misconceived purchases, unfortunate schemes and one-sided COntracts both to themselves and to their nearest and dearest; or, on another favoured terrain for their investments, the terrain of education, to j ustify their failures and semi-successes or, Worse deceptive successes leading to complete dead-ends which the education system often reserves for its favoured sons and daughters the most noteworthy of which is surely a career in teaching itself doomed as it is to structural decline. voting patterns, with p arties that regard themselves as socialist.Though they are, ostensibly, the great beneficiaries of the general process of embourgeoisement, they are shackled by credit to what is often an unsaleable house, if not indeed unable to meet the costs and
commitments, p articularly in terms of lifestyle, that tacitly formed
part of an initial decision that was often obscure even to the decision-maker. 'In a contract not everything is contractual,' said Durkheim. 1 Nowhere does this formula apply so much as in the purchase of a house, in which an entire life-plan and style of life is often implicitly engaged. If the act of signing contract is so harrowing, this is because there is always something fateful about it: the person signing the contract brings down a largely unknown destiny on himself or herself and, like Oedipus, unleashes a host of hidden consequences (hidden, largely, by the action of the salesperson) , consequences built into the web of legal rules to which, without the signatory realizing it, the contract refers, and also all those consequences which he or she, with the connivance of the salesperson, refuses to see: these latter, contrary to what is feared, have less to do with the 'hidden defects ' of the product and more with the implicit commitments into which he or she is entering and which will have to be seen through to the end, that is to say, far beyond the last due date for the last payment. [It is all a] gamble on the stability and permanence of things and persons, and of the relations between
things and persons. The family unit, centred on the upbringing of the children, which is seen as a path of individual social ascent, is now the site of a kind of collective egoism that finds its legitimation in a cult of domestic life permanently celebrated by all who live directly or indirectly by the production and circulation of domestic objects"
commitments, p articularly in terms of lifestyle, that tacitly formed
part of an initial decision that was often obscure even to the decision-maker. 'In a contract not everything is contractual,' said Durkheim. 1 Nowhere does this formula apply so much as in the purchase of a house, in which an entire life-plan and style of life is often implicitly engaged. If the act of signing contract is so harrowing, this is because there is always something fateful about it: the person signing the contract brings down a largely unknown destiny on himself or herself and, like Oedipus, unleashes a host of hidden consequences (hidden, largely, by the action of the salesperson) , consequences built into the web of legal rules to which, without the signatory realizing it, the contract refers, and also all those consequences which he or she, with the connivance of the salesperson, refuses to see: these latter, contrary to what is feared, have less to do with the 'hidden defects ' of the product and more with the implicit commitments into which he or she is entering and which will have to be seen through to the end, that is to say, far beyond the last due date for the last payment. [It is all a] gamble on the stability and permanence of things and persons, and of the relations between
things and persons. The family unit, centred on the upbringing of the children, which is seen as a path of individual social ascent, is now the site of a kind of collective egoism that finds its legitimation in a cult of domestic life permanently celebrated by all who live directly or indirectly by the production and circulation of domestic objects"
December 28, 2019
Abre camino a una importante duda. ¿Qué tanto se relaciona la teoría de campos de Bourdieu con la teoría de juegos en economía?
Parece que el mismo autor esboza una conexión al entender los juegos como un experimento de conocimiento común para entender cómo 'trucar' al adversario. Contrario al habitus en donde los agentes tienen un vestigio histórico que los compromete a la hora de tomar acción.
Libro denso pero interesante, especialmente sus comentarios respecto al abandono de la economía como ciencia social en los últimos años. A fin de cuentas, la economía se encuentra inmersa en un vericueto de culturas, historia e interacciones sociales (pasiones, gustos, etc) que no puede desestimar con su racionalidad (que no es razonable).
Parece que el mismo autor esboza una conexión al entender los juegos como un experimento de conocimiento común para entender cómo 'trucar' al adversario. Contrario al habitus en donde los agentes tienen un vestigio histórico que los compromete a la hora de tomar acción.
Libro denso pero interesante, especialmente sus comentarios respecto al abandono de la economía como ciencia social en los últimos años. A fin de cuentas, la economía se encuentra inmersa en un vericueto de culturas, historia e interacciones sociales (pasiones, gustos, etc) que no puede desestimar con su racionalidad (que no es razonable).
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May 23, 2020In the book, Bourdieu employs his sociological theory to study the economy. There are three reasons why I did not like the book. First, the title is a bit misleading, because the bulk of the book is interested only in the market and firms, leaving out many other things which form the economy. Second, it is mainly an analysis of the French housing market. If you are not interested in this topic, then you will find the book rather boring. Last, by the end of his book, Bourdieu enunciates some crucial principles of his economic anthropology, but he states these principles more clearly in other books.
August 18, 2025
La démarche est très prometteuse et une partie de l’analyse est intéressante. Toutefois la critique sur la théorie économique se base sur des approximations et des connaissances très sommaires de ce champ disciplinaire, ce qui nuit au discours général. Par ailleurs, les quelques pages allouées aux banques témoignent d’une absence totale de recherche sur les théories financières et les pratiques de contrôle des risques bancaires. Dommage.
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April 20, 2015Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews