Pierre Bourdieu's recasting of the question of class exemplifies the major features of his sociology and the way he extends, melds, and mends classical views into a distinctive framework. The article traces the impetus behind the key conceptual shifts Bourdieu effects, from class structure to social space, from class consciousness to habitus, from ideology to symbolic violence, and from ruling class to field of power. It also points to recent studies that have tried, tested, and refined the core tenets of his model and it offers a bibliography of Bourdieu's publications on class documenting a twofold empirical and analytic shift towards a sociology of the realization of categories that spotlights the constitutive power of symbolic structures.
Pierre Bourdieu; class; symbolic power; group formation
