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In this article, based on ethnographic research conducted in Perth, Western Australia and Madrid, Spain, we consider how community is understood and enacted for Russian-speaking migrants and its role in cultural (re)production. Studies often overlook the important role of struggle, contestation and power relations in everyday practices of community making. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, we describe the Russian-speaking migrant community as a structured social space in which community leaders and migrant institutions compete for the right to represent the community. As a result of power differentials, contested ideas about what Russian-speaking culture is and how it should be transmitted, maintained and produced are established, (re)produced and revised. The community is perceived by its own members as disunited and/or consisting of members with whom migrants do not want to identify, forming a 'community of unbelonging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the core of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory lies the notion of 'social space', which in Distinction is embodied under the headings 'the space of social positions' and 'the space of life-styles'. Social space is not a product of correspondence analysis, and yet it is deemed to be a true representation of a national society with 'universal validity'. Contemporary sociology has not tested the scientific foundation of the Bourdieusian social space, or challenged it using contemporary factorial plans for culture practices. The purpose of this article is therefore to examine social space in four steps: (1) review the supposedly factorial character of the 'social space' diagram, and basic concepts, such as 'lifestyle' and 'relative structure of the capital'; (2) analyse the representativeness of the ad hoc cultural survey; (3) critique the interpretation of the two 'variants of tastes'; and (4) rethink the 'variant of dominant taste'. What we suggest from our findings is that social space should no longer be considered as a well-founded representation of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By reconsidering Simmel's concept of space, this article introduces space into the epistemological field of relational sociology to construct a relational spatiality based on relational sociology, demonstrating the continuity between spatial and relational approaches in the study of modernity. It first explains Simmel's relational epistemology and the metropolis, and then constructs the relational spatiality vis-a-vis the two main viewpoints of contemporary relational sociology. Space is relational in nature because it is defined by iterative interactions between actors, which go beyond visible geographical cognition to sociologically express the living process people experience in fragmentary forms of social space. Furthermore, this relational spatiality, combined with Michel Foucault's discourse, reveals the process attribute of space from the perspective of relational sociology, showing the possibility of a spatial epistemology based on relational sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the 'death of class'. The ensuing 'cultural turn' in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between 'old' politics related to economic issues and 'new' politics related to 'post-material values' follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The correction to the article "Social Space as a Theory of Society: Scientific Arguments Regarding the Figuration of the Social in Bourdieu's Distinction."

This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure. It employs a modified version of Michele Lamont's promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries -- the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life. Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees. It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions. The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation. Though fundamental to Bourdieu's model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in detail in contemporary cultural-stratification research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state is often viewed as part of the impersonal public sphere in opposition to the private family as a locus of warmth and intimacy. In recent years this modernist dichotomy has been challenged by theoretical and institutional trends which have altered the relationship between state and family. This article explores changes to both elements of the dichotomy that challenge this relationship: a more fragmented family structure and more individualised and networked support for children. It will also examine two new elements that further disrupt any clear mapping between state/family and public/private dichotomies: the third-party role of the child in family/state affairs, and children’s application of virtual technology that locates the private within new cultural and social spaces. The article concludes by examining the rise of the ‘individual child’ hitherto hidden within the family/state dichotomy and the implications this has for intergenerational relations at personal and institutional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to identify the internal divisions within the ‘upper class’ of Norway, defined as comprising different types of property owners, top executives and business managers. Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and forms of capital are applied to construct a social space of the Norwegian economic upper class by subjecting 12 indicators of capital to Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Central issues in the sociology of elites and upper classes are addressed, including the role of educational credentials in upper class reproduction, and the salience of divisions by social origin. The article reveals a maintained division between owners and employees (managers, executives, business professionals) in an age of ‘financialisation’. Furthermore, the divisions established are related to the segmentation of the upper class by occupation and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses homologies of social space by considering the coherence of elective affinities identified in research on cultural capital when the same person was asked for similar sorts of information in both a survey questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. It shows the methodological complexities of situating individual lives within social contexts, by considering the processual and fluid accounts of social space emerging in the study. The discussion challenges Bourdieu's views of homogeneous social worlds, considered as 'spaces of lifestyles'. The coherent pattern he envisaged is not always found because significantly dissonant cases exist. Moreover; different affinities can be emphasized depending on the research methods and contexts. Consequently, the article also engages with the argument that different research methods contribute to different sorts of knowledge about the social world, stressing the influence of ontological politics in research findings and the privileged perspective of a multiple-methods approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the class legacy has had profoundly negative consequences for accounts of material gender inequality, and that even where gender theorists have attempted to move beyond class, they have been hampered by the fragments of class theory. It will be argued that whilst gender has posed a fundamental challenge to class analysis, the reconstructions which have been attempted have not escaped the central assumptions of class theory. The weakness of such reconstructions--hindered by flaws inherited from both the Marxian and neo-Weberian traditions of class analysis--has led some post-modern writers to question the very idea of a determinate, structural account of gender. At the time of writing, deconstruction--rather than reconstruction--is in the ascendent. However, whilst a structural account of gender can and should be defended, past attempts show that this cannot be achieved by clinging to the assumptions of class analysis, or by developing additive class-plus-gender explanations. Only those approaches which reject the economistic assumptions of class, by placing emphasis on the social space as a differentiated and determinate social whole, can overcome the limitations of current accounts of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street homelessness (and associated activities such as begging) has become a prominent issue in recent years. This article provides a critical commentary on this phenomenon, informed both by theoretical debates concerning social space, and the author's own fieldwork with street homeless people in Manchester (England). An analysis is provided of temporal and spatial ordering of the homelessness circuit; of survival strategies such as shadow work and sleeping rough engaged in by people living in Cardboard City; and of policing responses to street homelessness and begging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the concept of social space, from its use by Sorokin in his analysis of social mobility to present work on the judgment and evaluation of occupations, is described as an example of the substitution of statistical refinement for sociological understanding. It is argued that potentially valuable sociological approaches have been displaced, by the methods which have been chosen, and suggestions are made as to how the concept might be sociologically rehabilitated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]