A summary of issues related to symbolic capital, authorial presences, and intellectual property rights, and the necessity of finding a way out of 500-600 years of capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons.

In contrast to industrial markets based on mass-production of material goods, postindustrial markets hinge on images, experiences, and emotions produced and exchanged on screens and in real life. Because postindustrial markets tend to be highly concentrated and technology-driven, they pose a threat to small businesses and low-skill workers in both advanced industrial economies and the Global South, where a large share of the population makes a living in the informal economy. Using the 2014 World Cup as a case of postindustrial (...) economic activity hinged on spectacle, emotional experience, and intellectual property, I analyze the income-making strategies used by street vendors in São Paulo, Brazil. I show that organizers’ control of fan markets was limited by local conceptions of ownership over national symbols as well as informal workers’ flexible relation to legal norms and enforcement-dodging practices. Circumventing market barriers required risky and sophisticated strategies, however, which were more readily available to the more marginal section of the street vending population. (shrink)

The article contributes to the theorisation of collective memory involved in building the international representations of a nation, and examines how strategic responses to the legacy of the totalitarian past have been deployed to shape the image of the nations’ remembering agency via the connections with other actors within the global memory field. Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of symbolic capital, the article develops a concept of the symbolic capital of mnemonics in order to uncover the (...) role of memory in enhancing international standing and prestige, a crucial preoccupation for semi-peripheral states emerging on the global arena. While recent scholarship on traumatic memory as a category of social analysis underlines the role of memory in bolstering the collective identity of nations, the article demonstrates how memories of the communist past provide a platform for connections between nation-states through shared meta-narratives. Through an empirical case study that uses an ethnographic approach, participant observation and analysis of media accounts, the article examines how the official commemorative practices of Kazakhstan have served to realign the country’s mnemonic agenda with that of the global memory of communism and to redeploy the symbolic capital gained through a shared mnemonics to reassert its legitimacy both abroad and at home. (shrink)

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in (...) a framework drawn from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

Sexual Orientation as Symbolic Capital and as the "Object" of Symbolic Violence Sexual orientation is currently understood to be an innate disposition. Heterosexually oriented people are perceived to be in the majority and homosexually oriented people as the minority. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic power, symbolic violence and symbolic capital, this paper aims to show how symbolic power and symbolic violence contribute to determining which sexual orientation is associated with the (...) majority and minority populations, and establish what role is played by the symbolic capital derived from sexual orientation. (shrink)

Ever since the first elite business schools were founded in Europe and the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they have enjoyed an intimate relationship with economics. Despite some notable analyses of economics’ importance for the successful institutionalization of business schools, an understanding of the relation between economics and elite business schools requires further development. As such, this paper focuses on ‘economics as symbolic capital’ for the consecration of business schools as elite settings, with particular (...) emphasis on the symbolic aspects of economics’ cultural and social capital. Consecration can be seen as critical to the institutionalization of elite business schools; in contrast to the primary focus of previous studies on the material significance of economics in business schools, my chief concern is the discipline’s symbolic power and importance for business schools’ status as elite institutions in many countries today. Data from a study on Sweden’s elite business school, The Stockholm School of Economics, were based on both historical and contemporary sources, including archival material, biographies, statistics, participant observations, and interviews with faculty and students. The SSE is one of the world’s oldest elite business schools where economics has played a critical role ever since its establishment; the SSE’s economics faculty has a unique relation to the ultimate source of capital for contemporary global economics, namely, The Nobel Prize in Economics, which exerts a significant influence on the discipline’s general standing and status today. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory relies on concepts of four kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. The anthropologist Pnina Werbner raises the issue of whether the concept of symbolic capital faces a paradox, because within some social groups one can only gain such capital by denying its value. There is a question of how best to clarify the paradox and I offer a clarification.

Intergroup competition over resources is attested since the dawn of history. Written and archaeological evidence go back to at least the fourth millennium BC. According to accepted views, evolution has favored humans because of their ability to have cumulative cultures, which has made flexible adaptation possible. One major aspect of this adaptation has been the ability to handle power contests without engaging physical force. Instead, increasing prestige dynamics has allowed contest management by displaying symbolic assets. These have growingly been (...) instrumental in deterring external assaults, thus guaranteeing the possession – or expansion – of a group’s resources. However, while material assets are believed to create status by the evidence of their tangible usefulness (such as foods, husbandry and tools), symbolic assets are by definition subject to ongoing negotiation, entirely dependent on being socio-semiotically recognized as types of capital. Symbolic stock exchanges thus appear to have been determinative since antiquity in hierarchizing ethnic and political groups fighting over resources, prioritizing ones over the others. They have culminated in repertoires of more solid tangible and intangible assets, from impressive buildings, city gates, gardens and temples, to ideas such as freedom, quality of life and wealth, justice, personal security, or whatever values that have gained universal recognition. The article discusses the creation and expansion of such symbolic repertoires and their uncertain position in recent times. (shrink)

This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu’s field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a (...) substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better. (shrink)

Although capital punishment has been gradually disappearing from liberal democracies, philosophers remain divided as to its permissibility. The first part of this chapter considers arguments in favor of retention and abolition, with particular attention to recent contractualist arguments. I then consider the United States Supreme Court’s incrementalist approach, under the rubric of “evolving standards of decency.” On this view, the Constitution is limited to sweeping up stragglers; like Minerva’s owl, the Constitution announces a philosophy of punishment only in hindsight. (...) The final section draws on Feinberg’s suggestion that punishment reflects a society’s particular “symbols of infamy.” A society may come to rethink its symbols of infamy, such as capital punishment, but that is unlikely to be because philosophical argument has silenced all reasonable doubt. (shrink)

In this study of an economic field and its relationships to a cultural field, we apply Pierre Bourdieu’s central concepts of economic capital, cultural capital, symbolic capital and field, and thus follow in a tradition that at the outset was considered to be post-structuralism, but which by Bourdieu later has been brought into the realm of realism. We have mapped relationships between the actors and thus the field structures that these relationships entail. The fields in which (...) a segment of an art world is operating is represented in multi-dimensional figures which illustrate relationships and bonds between the different categories of organizations. Some of the business actors we have studied are engaging in cultural activities with a great deal of autonomy, others are connected to the cultural field in less active ways. In participating in the cultural field they are in different ways and to different extents accumulating symbolic capital including prestige and honor. The method we have applied is multiple correspondence analysis which was frequently used by Bourdieu. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of (...) the symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of (...) the symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

The paper takes a Critical Discourse Analysis angle and joins Social Media Studies and Religious Studies perspectives of Computer Mediated Communication material to examine such strategies of online interpersonal communication as may foster civic solidarity on social networks sites over local incidents with national and international media coverage. Computer mediated discourse is often underpinned by ideological antagonism especially when tackling social, political, cultural and even religious issues. Our topic choice was occasioned by an infelicitous episode – a fire in a (...) local venue hosting a rock concert that resulted in a high number of casualties and fatalities. The tragic episode triggered some polarized and highly opinionated positioning in the social media, both independent of and/or in retaliation to media sourced accounts and personal posts. We analyzed qualitatively authentic CMC material as well as edited media inputs in order to establish if and how the networked, yet generationally diverse, public achieve symbolic solidarity through reactive and correlated digi-participation where sociocultural identities become tangent to such ecclesiastic issues as became salient and were up-cycled in the local political conjecture. (shrink)

Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power suggests that conventional theories of capitalism, Marxist and liberal alike, are unable to answer the question: what is capital? They argue that the basic units of Marxist economics, abstract labour and value, are unobservable and immeasurable, and hence ‘non-existent’ and ‘fictitious’. Against Marxists, they argue that capital is not an ‘economic’ entity, but a symbolic quantification of power.This review contends that what Nitzan and Bichler present as a critique of Marxism (...) as such pivots on an incomprehension of dialectical thinking, and thus misses the mark. Furthermore, this absence in their readings of Marx is strictly correlative to the limits of their own theory-building. Capital as Power simply inverts the vulgar economism it finds in Marxist theories, presenting us with a theory in which capital is financial rather than productive, and symbolic rather than material. In doing so, it reproduces the one-sidedness it criticises, while discarding the possibility of analysing capitalism dialectically as a totality consisting of contradictory, but mutually presupposing, moments. (shrink)

This essay is a think piece that takes a labor and capital perspective on science to discuss two chief concepts: credit and exploitation. Credit, as the symbolic currency of science, has been central to how we understand the moral workings of science in the twentieth century. But our lived experience of changes in the political economy of science also alerts us to the notion that credit may not be applicable to a robust analysis of science in the past (...) and in the present. Scientific exploitation, the evidence of which usually prompts an effort to redistribute credit, may offer only a partial picture of the labor structure of science. Self-exploitation, an implicit understanding of how scientists may approach their work, has never been fully articulated but is nevertheless a useful descriptive notion. (shrink)

This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their ‘multicultural capital’. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document Report of the Working Party on Multicultural Education as well as drawing on interview data provided by two important agents who helped to implement Leicester’s/Leicestershire’s moment of multicultural education. This moment generated a symbolic, ideational, and conceptual shift within Leicester’s (...) education provision toward a more culturally inclusive position that began to recognise the cultural capital of non-white students. However, this moment was to be lost in the ‘neoliberal epoch’. It is argued in this paper that neoliberal education policy/practice has become an enabling mechanism for renascent colonial ideology. By re(dis)covering this vision for the official recognition of non-white cultural capital, this paper demonstrates the possibilities for alternative directions within Leicester’s schools and colleges that can challenge neoliberal and colonial conceptions of education. It suggests that there are still spaces and structures that can be re(dis)covered in order for this vision to be enabled. (shrink)

Indigenous ecologies in industrial societies need immediate attention in light of the ongoing debate on indigenous resource rights and decreasing biodiversity. This paper examines the functions and meanings of hunting, fishing, and gathering activities among contemporary Nez Perce Indians in Idaho, USA. The collected data were analyzed with Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of “symbolic capital” and “practice” within the framework of political ecology. The results clearly demonstrate that hunting, fishing, and gathering practices play significant roles not only in social (...) and religious but also economic and political senses within the contemporary Nez Perce society. This study suggests that investigation of indigenous ecologies in industrial societies take a synthesized approach between idealist and materialist perspectives. (shrink)

At the time of its introduction in the end of the 1980s, the concept of natural capital represented new, more ecologically aware thinking in economics. As a symbol of novel thinking, the metaphor of natural capital stimulated a debate between different disciplinary traditions on the definitions of the concept and research priorities and methods. The concept became a means to control the discourse of sustainable development. In this paper, I focus on the power/ knowledge implications of the use (...) of the concept, and I follow the career of the concept of natural capital in ecological economic publications between the years 1988 and 2000. The main interests are in the use of the concept to affect the rules according to which claims concerning sustainable development can be made and in the constitution of objects of environmental knowledge. (shrink)

Sociology was obviously created for studying images, symbols or values related to social action, which is its main purpose. However, the imaginary field was very lately called up in sociology studies. Across the emergence of a sociology of the imaginary from Émile Durkheim to Gilbert Durand and Pierre Bourdieu. Jean-Pierre Sironneau draws and distinguishes several fields of this sociology: religion, beliefs, tradition, mythology and cultural expressions (literature, art and media). Social imaginary has become a fundamental issue as far as contemporary (...) sociology is concerned. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social, and symbolic capital have not only enriched sociological theory; they have also clearly established themselves in interdisciplinary and transdiscipli...

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries. The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in (...) this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe;b) a matter of interpersonal bond;c) a caring society;d) consisting of a niche of belongingness;e) a hostile place. These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios. (shrink)

The Confederate Battle Flag (CBF) is in the news again. On January 16th, 2000, 46,000 people came to Columbia, South Carolina, to protest its display over the state’s capital dome. On July 1st, the CBF was removed. But on the same day, it was raised in front of the Statehouse steps. The controversy has received a great deal of media coverage and was a factor in the 2000 presidential primaries. CBF displays raise a philosophical question I wish to address: (...) What determines whether a symbol or symbol-display is racist? I will focus on the CBF because of its contemporary relevance. But the discussion will shed light on the general issue of when a symbol or symbol-display has a particular meaning and when it does not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Animadversions:Tekhne After Capital/Life After WorkJennifer Bajorek (bio)The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary moment of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.—Karl Marx, Capital1For a long time we have been used to thinking the relation, on the one hand, between language and tekhne and, on the other, between capital and the technical or technological. And (...) yet, for all the parallels that might be drawn between these two projects, it seems to me quite clear that they remain to be articulated in a way that does justice to either one. It is, moreover, entirely symptomatic of the failure of this articulation that almost all the parallels that have been drawn, in decades past, between capital and language—in the name of "political economies of the sign," for example, or of "symbolic economies"2—have been drawn without regard, precisely, to technical implications, and thus to the implication of capital and of language in and by the technical.What we might call, for purposes of exposition, the missing link—the term that would make this articulation possible—is, I will argue, labor and therefore, by extension, life. That this extension can be made with reference to Marx is by now axiomatic. Wasn't the point of all the charges of "economic determinism" and "class reductionism" that there is, in the end, "more to life" than work? That this extension must be made with reference to Marx is, however, a very different proposition and one that deserves a closer look. How does the notion that, for Marx, labor and life are coextensive stand up to close reading of his text?I shall begin with a fairly programmatic exposition of what I call Marx's two codefinitions of labor in Capital, the first being his definition of labor as a function of the human, the second being his definition of labor as a function of the living body. Each definition is a codefinition insofar as its converse is also true—insofar as, for Marx, the humanity of man and the life of his body are each, in turn, a function of work. [End Page 42] We will be surprised to find that these codefinitions are not equivalent, nor even necessarily consistent, and that the trajectory described by Marx's text is actually that of a radical divergence of humanity and life, whose consequences are serious, I will suggest, not only for any alleged "humanism" of Marx, but for the assumption that can be found almost everywhere—still, today—of an essential humanism of politics. At the same time, a more precise understanding of the labor-life relation we find in Marx, and of the concept of productivity that underwrites it, will give us some first indications as to why politics must of necessity pass through technics, as well as, therefore, through an essentially capitalist—or, at the very least, capitalizing—moment.1Codefinition (the Original Human Instrument)For the Marx of Capital, what distinguishes "man" from animal and, at the same time, defines labor is at least in part what we might call ideation. The essence of man is not simply that he effects a change of form in the materials of nature with the aim of fulfilling his needs—for animals do this, and some apparently more effectively than man—but rather that he is able to form an idea of those needs, and so to project or imagine their fulfillment. Thus Marx writes:A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of every labor process emerges a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and so already existed in ideal form.[Capital 1: 284]3Conversely, the essence of labor is that it is something human: the mediation, by way of an exertion of force, of the "material... (shrink)

For decades, debates over medical curriculum reform have centred on the role of science in medical education, but the meaning of ‘science’ in this domain is vague and the persistence of the debate has not been explained. Following Bourdieu, this paper examines struggles over legitimate knowledge and the forms of capital associated with science in contemporary UK medical education. Data are presented from a study of two UK medical schools, one with a traditional, science-oriented curriculum, another with an integrated (...) curriculum. Constructions of legitimate knowledge were explored at both schools through six months participant observation, interviews with faculty members (n=15) and students (n=37) and documentary analysis. Findings show that medical schools compete for both scientific and clinical capital, but ultimately science has greater legitimacy. ‘Science’ is defined in accordance with the structure of the traditional curriculum and has become a symbolic resource – a mark of distinction for both medical schools and medical students – which is equated with clinical competence. The significance of science is circumscribed by the medical education field, yet the struggles for scientific capital there have ramifications beyond medical education itself. It is argued that Bourdieu’s concepts are particularly useful tools for studying the meanings that science takes on outside of the scientific field. (shrink)

Religião e capital simbólico: um estudo do “Projeto Social Pequeno Samuel”, situado em Rio Grande da Serra, no Grande ABC Paulista (Religion and symbolic capital: study of the “Pequeno Samuel Social Project”, located in Rio Grande da Serra) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2010v10n28p1414 Resumo No presente estudo nos propomos a discutir a relação entre religião e capital simbólico com o objetivo de avaliar a capacidade das redes sociais e práticas associativas , em torno de grupos religiosos, em agregar (...) benefícios aos seus participantes, sobretudo, em sua dimensão simbólica. Para esse intento, analisaremos atividades realizadas pelo “Projeto Social Pequeno Samuel”, uma associação ligada à Igreja Batista Central , especialmente as que se referem às práticas de educação sócio ambientais. As informações, para tal análise, foram obtidas através do site e estatuto da entidade, além de participação presencial em seus trabalhos. Levando em conta que a cidade possui os índices sociais menos favoráveis da região do Grande ABC, e por sua importância ambiental para a mesma região – pois constitui-se de uma Área de Proteção de Mananciais –, consideramos que o conjunto de práticas realizadas pelo projeto contribui, em grande medida, para o aumento do “capital simbólico” da comunidade. Palavras-chave: Religião. Capital Simbólico. Grande ABC paulista. Rio Grande da Serra. Projeto Social Pequeno Samuel.The present study aims to discuss the relation between religion and symbolic capital and evaluate the capacity of the social networks and associative practices within religious groups, to aggregate some benefits to their members, especially those related to symbolic dimensions. For this purpose, we will analyze the activities done by the “Pequeno Samuel Social Project”, an association of the Central Baptist Church, especially those activities related to social, environmental and educational practices. The information for this analysis were obtained from the website, from the constitutional document of the Entity, and as well from the author´s participation in the social works of the Social Project. Taking into account that the city has the least favorable social indicators in the region of “Grande ABC Paulista”, and also considering its environmental importance to the same region – a Watershed Protection Area - we consider that the set of practices performed by the project contributes largely to the increase of "symbolic capital" of the community. Keywords: Religion. Symbolic Capital. Grande ABC Paulista. Rio Grande da Serra. Pequeno Samuel Social Project. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work-- _the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon ; the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work-- _the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon ; the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Old age is often described from the perspective of losses, deficits, and risks. This chapter rejects such a way of thinking. It focuses on the potentials of older adults. The main aim of this chapter is to describe different resources that can be interpreted as positive contributions of older people and the ageing population in society and the economy. Notions of the human capital, the social capital, the cultural capital, and the symbolic capital of older (...) people will be briefly discussed and compared. (shrink)

Architecture of ancient Egypt is criss-crossed by a series of giant projects whose aim was to celebrate the divine nature of the Pharaohs and their rights to eternal afterlife. In many of such projects a complex interplay between idealization of symbols in hieroglyph writings and shaping of built objects and cultural landscapes can be seen. Since the afterlife destination of the Pharaohs was in the sky, astronomy plays a relevant role in understanding this interplay, as it occurs, in particular, in (...) the Khufu project at Giza and in the planning of Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna. (shrink)

This paper explores how English language has gradually become a linguistic form of cultural capital in China’s zigzag journey to modernization. It situates English’s status in flux in historical context, with an analysis at both the international and intra-national level. It showcases the necessity to embed cultural capital within Bourdieu’s full framework, and evidences the arbitrary nature of this form of cultural capital for its intimate tie to power and politics. By revealing how English has been officially (...) consecrated as a global lingua franca and then socially recognized for material and symbolic benefits, this paper implicitly problematizes the officially validated cultural hierarchy, argues that the value of a cultural capital is context-dependent, politically and socially constructed, inseparable from the field where it is produced. The present-day English manifests its symbolic power in classification and social stratification, entrenching the already entrenched inequality within and without the national state. (shrink)

Approaches to self‐management traditionally focus upon individual capacity to make behavioural change. In this paper, we use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital to demonstrate the impact of structural inequalities upon chronic illness self‐management through exploring findings from 28 semi‐structured interviews conducted with people from a lower socioeconomic region of Adelaide, South Australia who have type 2 diabetes. The data suggests that access to capital is a significant barrier to type 2 diabetes self‐management. While many participants described having (...) sufficient cultural capital to access and assess health information, they often lacked economic capital and social capital in the form of support networks who promote health. Participants were often involved in social networks in which activities which are contrary to self‐management have symbolic value. As a consequence, they entered relationships with health professionals at a disadvantage. We conclude that structural barriers to self‐management arising from habitus resulting in the performance of health behaviours rooted in cultural and class background and limited access to capital in the form of economic resources, social networks, health knowledge and prestige may have a negative impact on capacity for type 2 diabetes self‐management. (shrink)

The present paper has as its theme the sociological aspect of the use of slang in a socio educational environment. Its main purpose is to describe and analyze the social distance in a learning environment, according to Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus. In order to develop the classwork, some workshops about a slang dictionary have been held. The qualitative data provided by the pedagogical practice are presented, based on the reports of the meetings so that we have (...) been able to analyze the concepts presented by the young people. From this, it has been verified the symbolic character of words and expressions as a vector of social distancing by the incorporated cultural capital. (shrink)

In _The Immaterial_,_ _French social philosopher André Gorz argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consumption of symbols and ideas, as capitalism tried to overcome the crisis of the formally industrial regime by throwing itself into a new, so-called knowledge economy. In this, the last full-length theoretical work Gorz completed before his death, he argues instead for the creation of (...) a true knowledge economy. This economy would be based on zero-cost exchange and pooled resources, and knowledge would be treated as humanity’s common property. Currently, in order to exploit knowledge and turn it into capital, the capitalist enterprise privatizes specialized knowledge and claims ownership through private licenses and copyright. But as Gorz shows, the traditional foundations of such capitalist economics have begun to crumble because of the immaterial nature of this new form of product, which makes it almost impossible to measure in monetary terms. The knowledge economy, Gorz declares, _is_ the crisis of capitalism. Thought-provoking and divisive, _The Immaterial _is the perfect book for our time, as we begin to reimagine the structures of our economic system in order to rebuild and move forward. “It is to Gorz... that readers should turn for a compelling combination of sharp analysis, well-wrought polemic, and suggestions for the future.”—_Red Pepper_ “A great figure of the intellectual Left.”—Nicolas Sarkozy “Gorz’s intelligence strikes you at the very first glance: it is one of the nimblest, acutest intelligences I know.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu’s social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, (...) where researchers’ behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers’ individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital. In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence. (shrink)

A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various (...) antinomies, are shown to vacillate between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies. (shrink)

In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries’ symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the perspectives of system actors located at the institutional, national and international levels to assess the perceived importance of eight systemic factors in contributing to the comparative advantage of social-democratic regimes, namely Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. A deductive thematic analysis performed on 56 transcripts and a one-way repeated-measure ANOVA performed on 324 questionnaires confirmed the (...) hypotheses regarding the positive influence of academic traditions and internationalization. This study contributes to the development of a varieties of academic capitalism approach to apprehend how political-economies condition higher education systems’ comparative advantage. (shrink)

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a (...) sample of environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

Elite domination is recognized as a significant downside of “linking social capital,” but its remedies are under-theorized and scarcely documented. Addressing this gap, we argue that bonding or bridging ties characterized by strong reflexivity, awareness of the state’s symbolic violence, and rich cultural resources for cross-fertilization serve as countervailing mechanisms against unresponsive linking ties. If bonding and bridging ties lack these characteristics, even when those ties are numerous, they are unlikely to challenge unresponsive linking ties. Our theoretical argument (...) is substantiated through a three-village comparison in Taiwan during the post-Typhoon Morakot reconstruction period, where linking ties among most disaster areas, state agencies, and large NGOs were deployed to promote elite agendas. Based on forty-five in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that in Namaxia, where all three features identified in our framework were absent in bonding and bridging ties, grassroots resistance against unresponsive linking ties largely failed. In Jialan, bonding networks displayed strong social reflexivity, but neither bonding nor bridging ties cultivated awareness of the state’s symbolic violence or cultural resources for cross-fertilization. The village only partially succeeded in challenging unresponsive linking ties. In Ali, where local bonding and bridging networks developed all three features mentioned above, the village successfully transformed unresponsive linking ties. The conceptual delinking of network homogeneity/heterogeneity and exclusivity/inclusivity in this study bears broader implications for social capital theories. (shrink)

The article demonstrates that post-Soviet academic debates about theoretical concepts and visions of truth can be usefully interpreted in terms of different “class positions” of knowledge producers. One academic faction is interested in academic freedom, autonomy, and corporate solidarity, as the social and cultural capitals of its members are involved with the global symbolic market. The capitals of the other group are invested into the slightly modified Soviet academic system and local symbolic fields. Intellectuals necessarily are aligned with (...) more powerful social actors and thus become involved in divisions and struggles that they cannot escape. (shrink)

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

The sociology of symbolic power, as put forth by Pierre Bourdieu, treats the relations between behavior and socio-cultural structure. Bourdieu comprehends culture as a form of capital that follows certain laws of accumulation, exchange, and operation, and emphasizes that its symbolic form plays an important role in establishing and maintaining power structures.1 Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital comprises a variety of resources such as language capabilities, general cultural consciousness, aesthetic symbols, educational information, and level of education.2 (...) His analysis of cultural capital reveals three different processes of its formation.3 First, education fosters its formation, internalizing it through the.. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the role of the Four Heavenly Kings in Silla. The Four Heavenly Kings first created in Silla were all enshrined in the royal memorial temples. The temples are also those situated respectively in the four directions, with Silla royal capital at the center. The fact that they were all enshrined in the royal memorial temples, especially in the stupa, proves that the Four Heavenly Kings had their own special implications. The role of the Four (...) Heavenly Kings in Silla was not only to protect the temple, but also, more importantly, to protect the whole nation. (shrink)