Bourdieu-Chp. 7

Here are the points that I noted down...

Chp. 7: Social Classes and the Struggle for Power

"A central subject of Bourdieu's work is to show how culture and social class correlate. Cultural practices... are markers of underlying class distinction" (p. 143). 

"Social inequality is rooted in objective structures of unequal distributions of types of capital. He thus, rejects what he calls subjectivist approaches to the topic of stratification" (p. 145). 

"Social class is not defined solely by a position in the relations of production, but by the class habitus which is...associated with that position"  (p. 146).

"Social classes are not simply given in reality but are contested identities that are constructed through struggle over what is the 'legitimate vision of the social world and of its divisions'" (p. 147).

• Class boundaries: Objects of struggle; take shape only through the mobilization of individuals into groups (p. 148). 

• Class identity: A matter of perception and conception as well as being materially constituted collectively (p. 148).

• Situational properties: Life chances for basic living standards (p. 150)

• Positional properties: Emerge out of the dynamic of status competition (p. 151).

• Class position (i.e., status distinction) represents that form of class struggle emerging from ostensibly nonmaterial distinctions (p. 151).

• Class: "Similar positions in social space" that provide "similar conditions of existence and conditioning" and therefore create "similar dispositions" which in turn generate "similar practices" (pp. 153-154).

• Other stratifying factors along with economic factors include: Gender, race or ethnicity, and age (p. 154).  However, gender creates social divisions that occur within classes rather than cross-cut them (p. 155).

• Field of social classes: Structured by amounts and types of capital, "understood as the set of actually usable resources and power" (p. 158).

• Differences in the volume of total capital demarcate interclass divisions (e.g., French dominant class, middle class, and working class. The substantial possession of almost every kind of capital sets apart the dominant class...from all other groups in the stratification order) (p. 158). 

• Differences in the composition of capital holdings delimit several intraclass fractions (p. 159).

• Habitus reflects growth, decline, or status quo (p. 162).

• Three dimensions of stratification: Volume and composition of the forms of capital and social trajectory (p. 162).

• Lifestyles: practical expressions of the symbolic dimension of class relations (p. 163).

• Preferences express systematic opposition to those of other classes (p. 163).

• Consumer behavior is associated with level of income, and mediated by dispositions of habitus... Actors choose products for reasons of taste rather than because of careful cost-benefit analysis (p. 164).

"Differences in volume and composition of capital are two fundamental organizing principals that link cultural consumption and lifestyle to social-class conditions. These differences in class condition generate distinct and mutually differentiating class habitus that in turn produce lifestyle distinctions" (p. 165).

"The dominant class's freedom from material constraints permits it to stylize and formalize natural functions in order to invest them with a sense of distinction" (p. 167).

"The two habitus of distinction and necessity are dialectically related, as one finds its identity in contrast to the other" (p. 169).

• Social classes: Multidimensional components of class hierarchies (p. 182)

• Class struggle is the "exchange rate" between the different types of capital (p. 182).

"Differences need to be symbolically represented" (p. 187).