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This paper is a debate on why Bourdieusian scholars have never fully embraced the "Introduction/Literature review/Data & methods/Results/Discussion" (ILDRD) article format which is mainstream in North American Sociological publications. This paper attempts to argue that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean‐Claude Chamboredon, and Jean‐Claude Passeron developed a different writing format – inspired by Gaston Bachelard's "applied rationalism" ‐‐ and which became more influential among French scholars. The Bourdieu inspired different writing patterns and reasoning, I argue, can be traced in the flagship journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. This paper invites further debate on the differences in approaching article formats in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field‐theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other. In this context, this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy. It discusses different dimensions of variation in field structure: fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub‐ and transnational scale. Post‐national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields. A more fine‐tuned vocabulary for field variation can help us better describe particular fields and it is a precondition for generating hypotheses about the conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is from the beginning a sociology one can call political in the sense that it was developed in close relation to the great political questions that have shaken French society since the 1950s. With this article, which was deliberately published in an intellectual rather than a strictly scientific journal, Bourdieu wanted to struggle at once politically and scientifically against the belief, already highly prevalent in the press and in political circles, in the scientificity of the practice of opinion polling. He wanted to make it understood outside the scientific community that polling institutes not only do not measure true movements of opinion, but authorize all the misrepresentations of the responses to their questionnaires that arise because they were made in total ignorance of the facts by those surveyed. He finally recalled that the pollsters' public opinion obscures a much more real public opinion than the one they manufacture on their computer printouts.

Pierre Bourdieu's interventions since the mass strikes and demonstrations that rocked France in December of 1995 have been the object of oft-violent condemnations by the Parisian journalists and media intellectuals whose power he mercilessly dissected in his writings on television and journalism. This compressed recapitulation spanning three decades shows that Bourdieu's political interventions cannot be separated from his scientific writings, even if the reading of his works has too often been neutralized by their academic conditions of reception. Hence, resituating the engagements of the sociologist in their historical and intellectual contexts thus leads not only to displacing the boundary between scientific research and political action. It also reveals the work of controlled conversion of social pulsion into critical intellectual impulsion that endows sociology with the epistemological vigilance necessary to break with the preconstructed social and political problems of current affairs.

An unusually imaginative and productive thinker, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has, over the past three decades, produced one of the most ambitious and fertile bodies of sociological work of the postwar era, as of December 1, 1990. The sheer range and diversity of his investigations, however, have until recently hampered efforts of Anglo-American readers to grasp its overarching unity and therefore its full originality. Spanning the anthropology of colonial Algeria, the sociology of language and culture, the analysis of class and politics and the dissection of the theoretical and epistemological underpin flings of social science, Bourdieu's writings may, from the outside, seem eccentric and overly dispersed. They scarcely allow for easy entry, on the contrary, their scattered and daunting appearance has often encouraged superficial assimilation. Indeed, a quick survey of their reception in several areas of contemporary theory and research in the U.S. reveals a distinct pattern of fragmentation, misunderstanding and selective ignorance.

This article exposes the developments of qualitative methodology in French sociology with respect to methods proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine: `provoked and accompanied' self-analysis and the sociological intervention. In addition to the presentation of these two methods, the propose of this article is to describe and discuss the position of these two authors on certain problems such as representativeness, objectivity, status of data, epistemological rupture and lastly on the question of the writing by which sociological knowledge is formed from common sense knowledge contained In the data. This brings to a broader discussion on these questions. The strengths and weaknesses of these two methods are finally examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]