The paper examines Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive writings on the production of scientific knowledge. The study shows that Bourdieu offered not one but two - significantly different - approaches to scientific knowledge production, one formulated in his theoretical, or programmatic, writings on the subject, the other developed in his empirical writings. Addressing the question as to the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for science studies, the analysis argues that the former of these two approaches is at once very visible in Bourdieu’s work (...) but characterized by limitations from the standpoint of scholarship in STS, whereas the latter approach is less conspicuous but of broader empirical value. (shrink)

This article argues that new sites of knowledge production, increasingly cultivated by the mass media, are threatening the role of academics and universities as traditional sources of expertise. Drawing upon the conceptual categories of Pierre Bourdieu, the article suggests an alternative way of understanding this ‚crisis of legitimacy’.

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 paper examines how scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity in the German-speaking territories in the first half of the nineteenth century define scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit). I will argue that antiquity studies in this period of its foundation as a discipline is an instructive case to examine with regard to questions as to how scientific knowledge is established as different from other forms of knowledge, how scientific fields establish relative autonomy from other fields and what forms scientific autonomy can take. Widely (...) recognised as important for the history of the modern research university, the case is not only interesting because it is influential. It is also interesting because the discussions in this period are so different to discussions in the later nineteenth century in the social sciences and the humanities, which have shaped debates about scientificity in sociology and cognate disciplines: We find here a notion of social and cultural research as a scientific endeavour, discussed not primarily with reference to or in defence against the natural sciences, but rather defined against imitative learning and the expectation that research provide moral support for the emerging Germany by idealizing the Greeks. The case highlights moralization as a source of heteronomy in cultural fields in addition to the more widely discussed forces of the market and the influence of the state. (shrink)

This study examines how news factors in press releases influence journalists’ decisions and the journalistic treatment of press release information after its initial selection for the news agenda: These journalists can transform press releases into a news story, which involves little journalistic capital investment, or use these releases for a unique news production, which requires significant journalistic capital investment. The data elicited from the content analysis show that the more profound the presence of certain news factors in press releases, the (...) higher the chance that journalists will choose to invest their journalistic capital in these press releases. This result means that journalists will only invest journalistic capital in press releases that contain specific news factors. (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)