Search

Today Pierre Bourdieu is well known as one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data (his ‘sociological gaze’). In this paper, we attempt to retrace the development of an extraordinary way of doing social research and show the benefit of Bourdieu's visual sociology for his empirical fieldwork and sociological theory. The article particularly stresses the significance of his photographic archive, which has long been ignored within the appreciation of Bourdieu's work. Studying Bourdieu's photography gives access to his œuvre in several new ways: not only can we understand how Bourdieu became an unconventional sociologist practicing his craft in the midst of a colonial war. Bourdieu's visual anthropology also offers an insight into the status nascendi of Bourdieu's sociology in all its elementary forms and contents. Through his photography Boudieu demonstrated the concepts of ‘habitat and habitus’, the material and symbolic living conditions of the Algerian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative study of the social mobility of women in France and Sweden. One question which will be central to this and to subsequent papers will be that of how far analyses of the mobility of women tend to support, or to require qualification of conclusions that have been drawn with respect to the mobility of men. On the basis of absolute rates of intergenerational mobility for women, Sweden would appear to have markedly more mobility overall than France. The total mobility rate is consistently higher than in France, whether mobility is assessed in terms of our nine-class schema or various collapses of this. The composition of the various occupational classes of women as regards social background is somewhat more similar in Sweden than it is in France. But the striking contrast is that the differences in origin distributions of women by occupational category are much greater as compared to men in Sweden than they are in France. It is in the case of women's outflow mobility patterns-and thus chances of mobility according to social background--that our two societies show the most marked differences, in contrast to results obtained when comparing men's mobility.