Pierre Bourdieu’s career was exceptional but relatively uncomplicated. Born in 1930 in a rural low-status background in South-West France, he succeeded brilliantly in the French educational system. His experiences growing up were important sources for his thinking as a sociologist. During his education, common in French education, Bourdieu was exposed to the thinking of many philosophers. Sent to Algeria as part of his compulsory service, Bourdieu served in the French army (latterly in a clerical capacity and then as a lecturer in the University of Algeria, Algiers). During this period, he began to detach himself from philosophy and carried out local ethnographic research on the Kabyle Berbers of northern Algeria and wrote up studies of Algerian colonial situation which contextualized the French occupation.

On his return to Paris, Bourdieu was mentored by Raymond Aron (a French philosopher and sociologist) and researched at the European Sociology Center (CSE, Centre de Sociologie Européenne, which he had founded), where he was involved in a flurry of surveys. These surveys particularly addressed the role of education in reproducing society. He explained the ‘social sorting’ role of education as arising from a mismatch between the middle class (mainly women) teachers and the various class subcultures from which students were drawn. Steadily rising through the ranks of the French academic hierarchy (including being appointed Professor at the College de France, Paris), Bourdieu spent much effort in the 1960s and subsequently examining various cultural capital fields (including art, novels, philosophy, TV, and journalism). Alongside these there was some consolidation of his theoretical writings.

In his final phase of work, Bourdieu turned particularly to the analysis of the state (which he saw as a providing the classificatory systems through which the social world was constructed) and also to analytical depiction of the ravages of neo-liberal capitalism. Although in the 1980s he had participated in ministerial inquiries, especially on education, in this later period he intervened in public discussions in France concerning the dispossessed. He died in 2002, but his work has continued to have an escalating impact on scholarship across the social sciences.

Bourdieu worked within a network of collaborators who reinforced and extended his work, especially in the 1960s. Some later left his team, some even becoming critics. A long-standing colleague and vigorous interpreter of Bourdieu is Loic Wacquant (a French sociologist and social anthropologist) who has written with and particularly on Bourdieu in many places.

Bourdieu’s work includes some three dozen books (almost all quickly translated into English especially from the 1980s), but also many (some 300) journal articles, together with interviews and written-up teaching notes. He was also active in setting up and editing journals and book publication series. His best known book is ‘Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984), although his later ‘Weight of the world’ (Bourdieu, 1999) is also particularly important. He has a difficult writing style with long often doubling-back sentences. For non-French readers, Bourdieu’s work has to be glimpsed through translations, which are considered good, although Bourdieu often complained that those reading him in other languages did not entirely grasp his concepts.

A very considerable secondary literature has developed providing further commentary and extension of Bourdieu’s work. In the London School of Economics library, renowned for its collection of social sciences books, just over 100 volumes with ‘Bourdieu’ in their title can be found. Beyond this there is a large journal literature. Bourdieu’s influence is immense, particularly in sociology but also across all fields of the social sciences and humanities, and across the world. At the turn of the century, in an International Sociological Association poll (see https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/history-of-isa/books-of-the-xx-century/ranking-order) four of Bourdieu’s books were included in the top 100, and he scored highly with votes, being placed sixth. This volume of the secondary literature makes pinning down key material more difficult.

It is difficult to depict the ‘architecture’ Bourdieu’s set of concepts as they have been developed through engagement with various subject-matters, but also involve much doubling-back to re-examine older issues in the light of ongoing thinking. He resorts to a particularistic vocabulary, including some use of Latin terms. Bourdieu endeavors to overcome several of the fundamental dichotomies which challenge social theory: objective versus subjective, micro versus macro, static versus dynamic, and determinist versus agency driven. So, he is often tackling paradoxes. For Bourdieu, the development of conceptual analyses requires both consideration of available theory together with engagement with the subject-matter being investigated. Also, social analysis must always build itself into the picture, with the analyst analyzing their own social position, in order to achieve scientific objectivity.

It is widely held that the trio of Bourdieu’s key concepts are ‘field’, ‘capital’, and ‘habitus’. Wacquant (2005) lists an expanded set of seven concepts: ‘habitus’, ‘capital’, ‘social space’, ‘field’, ‘symbolic power’, ‘doxa’, and ‘epistemic reflexivity’. While particularly relating to an urban context, Wacquant (2017) argues that “the most potent and generative of the lot is indisputably ‘social space’. This is not only because it is anchored by a geographic metaphor, but because it is the ‘mother-category’ from which flow the more restricted concepts of ‘field’, ‘corps (body)’ and ‘apparatus’ as specific types of settings in which social action takes root and flows“. The key driver of the analytical apparatus is ‘symbolic power’ “the capacity for consequential categorization, the ability to make the world, to preserve or change it, by fashioning and diffusing symbolic frames, collective instruments of cognitive construction of reality” (Wacquant, 2017). Those people who are disadvantaged by social classifications - in the current era often perpetrated by the state - are seen as suffering ‘symbolic violence’.

Another treatment is that of Johan Heilbron who portrays Bourdieu as conceptualizing sociology as a science of social practices, concerned with partially structured regularities. In providing explanations of these practices: They “need to be understood as located in relatively autonomous social spaces (fields), which are defined by struggles over specific stakes between agents that are characterized by the volume and composition of their resources (capital), and by the dispositions by which they are inclined to use these resources (habitus). The indicated terms (practice, field, capital, habitus) are not the only concepts of Bourdieu’s approach; there are several others (domination, symbolic violence, illusion, doxa, strategy, homology, reproduction) but these can at least provisionally be seen as refinements of the basic model” (Heilbron, 2011). Heilbron goes to argue that Bourdieu’s approach differs from dominant paradigms which are centered on human action, rational choice, or social systems.

Some earlier-published classic treatments have been provided by Calhoun et al. (1993) and Swartz (1997) and an extensive literature, although given the ongoing development of Bourdieu’s work, let alone ever-advancing commentaries on it, it is not possible to rely solely on these. Grenfell (2014) is an edited volume focusing on particular concepts of Bourdieu. The concepts covered by chapters include: ‘theory of practice’, ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘social class’, ‘capital’, ‘doxa’, ‘hysteresis’, ‘interest’, ‘conatus’, ‘suffering/symbolic violence’, ‘reflexivity’, and ‘social space’. While most of the concepts covered in the book appear on the lists in this paper, several are not numerically significant and so were excluded.

Tracing the historical development of Bourdieu’s thought is not necessarily the best way of understanding its structure. For example, the concept of field was only elaborated in the middle and later years of Bourdieu’s work. It can be readily argued that Bourdieu’s scheme of analysis is founded on macro-level ‘field’ analysis - set within broader understandings - complemented by a closer look to social life as it is lived (micro) level that is shown to underpin this. The ‘fields’ Bourdieu has examined variously include the economy, politics, education, academia, science, art, media, and sociology itself. The wider social space is largely divided into various fields which operate with varying degrees of autonomy from the underlying ‘field of power’. In each field there are stakes (valued outcomes) which are the subject of struggle amongst the agents inhabiting the field, who are arrayed across a spectrum of positions in terms of their interests in the stake of the field, often taking the form of dominated fractions - with the former dominating the latter who nevertheless resist and attempt to change the stakes. Each field has various capitals produced in and circulated around the field. Actants possess varying volumes and compositions of capital with the dominating fraction having the largest accumulation. The participants and the groups in which they are placed are in an unending struggle as the field historically evolves.

Beneath the operation of each field lies the overall ‘field of power’ of the society (involving in particular the state, currently ‘neoliberal capitalism’ and also classes) which incorporates struggles between fields about the rates of exchange between particular forms of capital. Classes are particular configurations within the field of power - sharing common understandings and assumptions across a range of issues and situations, and whose strength is given by the volumes and types of capital they have access to. The social space in some smaller-scale societies is not divided into fields.

The more general capitals are: ‘economic’ (e.g., convertible into money), ‘cultural’ (e.g., educational qualifications), ‘social’ (e.g., connections, networks, titles), and ‘symbolic’ (e.g., social recognition/importance, social classifications). Capitals can take a variety of forms. For example, there are three forms of cultural capital: ‘embodied state’ (long lasting dispositions of the mind and body), ‘objectified state’ (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), and ‘institutionalized state’ (e.g., educational qualifications) (Bourdieu, 1986). Capitals can change between different forms: It can be possible for different capitals to transform into another, according to socially set exchange rates.

The everyday social life presents itself as arrays of practices which are ‘natural’ and not much queried, and so presenting to actants and audiences as objectifications which need to be stripped away to reveal the underling discourses and operations. Groups form with spokespeople articulating their interests and views.

Operating within particular fields, actors implement strategies including a temporal aspect usually based on their interests and dispositions and shaped by their decision-making including their ‘body language’-helix much of which is unconsciously given by their habitus or usual decisions. The habitus is built up over many years of experience within earlier milieu, but which often slowly changes to incorporate the lessons of later experiences. The habitus provides a ‘feel for the game’ through which the individuals’ involvement in practices is largely driven by what seems to them appropriate given their position within the frame of the relevant field.

Having established an account of the architecture of Bourdieu’s work, this empirical study is directed towards obtaining a picture of the extent to which various concepts are in fact used, including endeavoring to pinpoint in terms of different disciplinary areas, etc. This aggregated picture is intended as a useful starting off point for further investigation into why particular terms are taken up. It is useful to sketch out some theoretical thoughts about why particular concepts might be taken. As a Bourdieu-aligned theory would signal such an (‘explanatory’) investigation of the use of concepts would depend on various characteristics of the problematic being explored - one example might be whether the issue being examined seems more to lie at micro, meso, or macro levels.

There are many chapters and even book-length studies of Bourdieu’s scholarly influence, some including him within a broader array of French theorists. Three of the more formal citation studies each concern the reception of Bourdieu within information or communication studies, with another relating to the engagement of Bourdieu’s work in management and organizational studies. Cronin and Meho (2009) provide a broad bibliometric mapping of the citation impact of 16 French theorists and their more impactful works over the course of the previous four decades. They found Bourdieu to have been third most cited, with “Distinction” (Bourdieu, 1984) the most cited of his works with this book amongst the top ten items of the theorists in the study. Lee and Sohn (2016) examined how communication scholars have incorporated the concept of ‘social capital’, analyzing citation patterns among 171 social capital-related journal articles, book chapters, and books extracted from Communication Abstracts. They compared the citing patterns of the pioneering social capital scholars Robert Putnam, Pierre Bourdieu, and James Coleman, finding the work of Putnam to be most cited. Although the conception of social capital held by these theorists is broadly similar, the very popularity of the term means that Bourdieu’s unique contribution may not be separately identified.

Sallaz and Zavisca (2007, 2008) and an edited volume on the reception of Bourdieu (Medvetz & Sallaz, 2018) investigated Bourdieu’s impact and reception. They sought to measure how Bourdieu’s work has been “utilized practically” in American sociology across 1980 to 2004, by measuring its influence upon empirical research published in major journals. Nearly 6% of articles in this ‘population’ cited Bourdieu at least once (n=235) and this was increasing with a five-fold increase over the past several decades. About half cite Bourdieu ceremoniously - that is, they mention him but briefly (typically only once, rarely in the text itself, and often in a string of related citations) while about a fifth involved a substantial engagement. Maares and Hanusch (2020) examined the use by journalists of Bourdieusien concepts in 249 English-language articles. The authors compared uses in relation to the methods used in the study, and whether it appears in abstracts and/or keywords, and whether the usage is in-depth or merely ‘overall’. They found that a minority of studies use ‘field theory’ on its own, and use of ‘capital’ on its own was even rarer. Sieweke (2014) conducted a citation context analysis of nine leading management and organizational studies journals to investigate how citations to Bourdieu’s work have developed over time, which content from Bourdieu’s work is cited, and how comprehensively researchers have so far engaged with Bourdieu. He found that the depth of use of Bourdieusien concepts had steadily increased over time.

While the earlier citation studies are useful, this explorative study of Bourdieu provides a much wider coverage.

Working through some of Bourdieu’s books and also commentaries, a long list of potential concepts was drawn up with selection dependence on perceived theoretical importance. This list was edited to remove concepts which might be difficult to clearly identify. Possibilities of singular and plural forms were explored. In particular, some of Bourdieu’s concepts involve ‘paired terms’ which opens up the possibility of more generic concepts which remain, once shorn of their qualifiers.

The list of concepts deployed included:

· Capitals (economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital): Capital in general is accumulated labor which can generate social energy. Economic capital is money (and/or assets convertible to money) and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights. Social capital enables a person to exert power drawing on social assets as education, intellect, style of speech, or style of dress. Cultural capital is the accumulated cultural knowledge conferring social status and power, based on socially valued material and symbolic goods available on the basis of honor, prestige, or recognition: the experiencing of the natural and social world as self-evident. Symbolic capital is the culturally-relevant resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige, or recognition.

· Reproduction: the mechanisms through which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time.

· Reflexivity: Since social scientists are inherently laden with biases, it is only by becoming reflexively aware of those biases that they can free themselves from the biases and aspire to objective science.

· Distinction: Those with a high volume of cultural capital (non-financial social assets, such as education) are most likely to be able to determine what constitutes ‘taste’ or ‘distinction’ within any society.

· Habitus: Wacquant (2005) defines habitus as follows: “the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them”.

· Practice: the basic bodily, knowledge-based practices that interconnect to form more complex social entities like groups, lifestyles, social fields, or entire societies.

· Field: a system of social positions structured internally in terms of power relationships.

· Practical reason/Disposition: a sense of the game; a partly rational but partly intuitive understanding of fields and of social order in general, giving rise to opinions, tastes, tone of voice, typical body movements, and mannerisms.

· Illusio: It is the belief that the ‘game’ we collectively agree to play is worth playing, and that the fiction collectively held constitutes reality.

· Social space: relative positions occupied by individuals and groupings within it, broader than field.

· Hysteresis: dislocation of habitus by changing social conditions.

Upon examination of the distribution of the concepts some of the lower scoring concepts were not taken any further, since they are too infrequent to allow systematic comparisons.

In this explorative study, we used citation context data from Microsoft Academic (MA, see https://aka.ms/msracad; Wang et al., 2020). Unfortunately, MA has been retired at the end of 2021, but MA snapshots are still available (see https://zenodo.org/records/6511057). However, it should still be current enough for our study. Previously, other CCA studies were performed using MA regarding Robert K. Merton’s book “Social Theory and Social Structure” (Crothers et al., 2020) and classic books by Thomas S. Kuhn and Karl R. Popper (Bornmann et al., 2019, 2020). A description of MA can be found in Haunschild et al. (2018), Hug and Brändle (2017), and Hug, Ochsner, and Brändle (2017).

We searched for author names in the author table of MA that fit Pierre Bourdieu. We found the following variants: ‘pierre bourdieu’, ‘pierr bourdieu’, ‘p bourdieu’, ‘plerre bourdieu’, ‘par pierre bourdieu’, ‘pierrebourdieu’, and ‘pierre auteur du texte bourdieu’. Only the papers with the name variant ‘pierre bourdieu’ has citances associated with them. After a check of randomly selected titles which confirmed that these publications were authored by Bourdieu, we used all of those publications with the author name variant ‘pierre bourdieu’ that are associated with citances (n=201). We found 8,951 papers that cited 201 of Bourdieu’s papers with 15,227 citances indexed in MA. Of those, for 8,934 citing papers and 15,197 citances, a level 0 (the highest hierarchical disciplinary level) field of study (FOS) is available. Overall, 884 publications from the author name variant ‘pierre bourdieu’ are indexed in MA. These were cited 133,397 times. The numbers show that for most citing papers, citation context information is missing in MA. Citation context information is available for only 11.4% of the citing papers.

We searched in the citances for selected concepts that are associated with Bourdieu (see also the previous section). Punctuation characters (‘,’, ‘.’, ‘;’, and ‘:’) were removed from the citances, and all citances were converted to lower case characters. The concepts and the corresponding search terms are shown in Table 1.

A general problem with quantitative data collection of terms is that to some degree terms can reflect different concepts and understandings, and terms are context-specific. The issue is to what extent this happens. To check the extent we randomly checked selected citances that were retrieved by the search terms in Table 1. We did not find retrieved citances that did not belong to the corresponding concept. Nevertheless, some terms picked up by this analysis may be incorrect in various ways as the meaning of terms can vary by context, and some instances will have different meanings. We are confident that the number of terms with different meaning is small and may be random in occurrence.

We also measured uncertainty associated with concepts. Certain hedging terms, e.g., ‘may’, were proposed by Small et al. (2019) to measure uncertainty which might be used in citances. The authors explained that “hedging does not assert that the paper is wrong, but only suggests that uncertainty surrounds some aspect of the ideas put forward” (Small et al., 2019). Hyland (1996) proposed to distinguish between content-motivated (e.g., ‘generally’, ‘almost’, ‘might’, and ‘probable’) and reader-motivated (e.g., ‘believe’, ‘suggest’, and ‘analogy’) hedging terms. However, we measured uncertainty in general without further differentiation.

We used the hedging terms from Bornmann et al. (2019) that are in turn based on the hedging terms from Small et al. (2019). Bornmann et al. (2019) checked in the citances of their dataset how frequently the terms occurred and how frequently they were used to express uncertainty. The final set with the most frequent terms they focused on is as follows: ‘may’, ‘could’, ‘questions’, ‘might’, ‘potential’, ‘seems’, ‘perhaps’, ‘likely’, and ‘sometimes’. We used this final set in the current study; Crothers et al. (2020) used the same set of terms.

In this explorative study, we counted how often certain concepts (e.g., ‘social capital’) are mentioned in citances of citing publications. The statistical analyses considered the possibility that concepts are mentioned multiple times (i.e., more than one concept is frequently mentioned in a single citance). Since there is information in MA available about the FOS and publication year of publications, we analyzed differences between fields and periods in citing certain concepts: We analyzed the relationships between concepts and fields or concepts and publication years in contingency tables. In these tables, citations of concepts are dependent variables; fields and periods are independent variables.

We applied the Stata command mrtab (Jann, 2005) to analyze multiple mentions of concepts depending on publication year and FOS. In the interpretation of the results, we focused on two statistics: (1) As indications of effect sizes (Cumming & Calin-Jageman, 2016), we analyzed differences in percentages of concept mentions between different FOSs and publication years. (2) We calculated statistical significance tests in r x c tables. To investigate the overall relationship between concepts and FOSs (or publication years), we performed an overall chi-square test. In addition, we performed a series of separate chi-square tests for each concept. For these tests, the p values were adjusted to account for simultaneous calculations of many tests.

Table 2 presents how frequently the concepts have been cited in various FOSs in absolute and relative numbers. The row ‘Total’ in the table shows the total numbers of concept mentions in the citing papers’ citances (broken down by FOS). Each citance contains at least one reference to Bourdieu’s oeuvre. The row ‘Cases’ in Table 2 shows the total numbers of the citing papers’ citances (broken down by FOS). For many citing papers of Bourdieu’s publications, citation context information is available; the citance, however, does not contain any mention of Bourdieu’s concepts. The table reports column percentages based on the number of all citing papers with citances in the FOS containing concept mentions or not. For example, the concept ‘social capital’ appeared in 111 citances of citing papers published in business. Thus, around 50% of the citing papers in business (n=223) include the ‘social capital’ concept in their citances. In total, 300 citances occur across all concepts; 111 citances are located in business.

As Table 2 shows nearly half of the citances were assigned to the FOS sociology as might be expected since this was Bourdieu’s primary disciplinary affiliation. The flanking fields of psychology and political science yielded solid contributions while economics contributed a further solid bloc of citances. Many of the other FOS represent a limited number of users of Bourdieu’s concepts. There were a few inputs of Bourdieu’s concepts in areas such as biology or physics which have been excised from Table 2.

Several of the ‘science-appearing’ FOS (e.g., computer science, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) may well represent cross-disciplinary elements of these disciplines where social researchers are engaged. The table suggests limited penetration into the humanities (art, history, and philosophy) despite claims of Bourdieu’s aficionados. The extent to which a field engages with Bourdieu’s concepts may be shaped by the timing of which the field took up such a vocabulary. However, there are few differences: Social capital is particularly well-used in business, economics, medicine, and political science.

The most cited concept in Table 2 is ‘social capital’. About 34% of the citances in citing papers are related to this concept. The concepts ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’ follow with about 24%. The concepts ‘doxa’ and ‘reflexivity’ (about 1% each) are those with only a few occurrences (compared to the other concepts) in our dataset. The results of the chi-square tests for the single concepts reveal statistically significant results for most concepts. These concepts (e.g., ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’) seem to be differently used in the various FOSs. Only the results for ‘symbolic capital’, ‘social space’, ‘doxa’, and ‘reflexivity’ are statistically not significant. The concept ‘social capital’ seems to be important especially in business (49.8%), political sciences (42.6%), and medicine (40.2%), considering the low case numbers in certain FOSs such as geology. For ‘cultural capital’, this seems to be the case in psychology (31.7%) and for ‘habitus’ in sociology (27.1%).

Table 3 shows the results for concept mentions depending on time (i.e., publication year periods). The results show scarcely any time-dependent patterns; the chi-square tests for all concepts except two are statistically not significant. The exceptions are ‘practice’ and ‘distinction’. ‘Practice’ has been decreasingly mentioned in citances over time; the trend for ‘distinction’ is unspecific.

Table 3 shows that there is a gradual growth in the ratio of concepts to cases, but the use of most concepts does not reveal an over-time pattern. Deployment of ‘social capital’, ‘habitus’, ‘field’, and ‘economic capital’ have increased over time, while ‘practice’, ‘distinction’, and several less frequently appearing concepts have declined over time.

Uncertainty associated with concepts is related to truthfulness against the backdrop of current scientific knowledge. The epistemic status of concepts “may range from completely unknown to speculations and from hypotheses to facts” (Chen et al., 2018). To measure uncertainty with respect to concepts the existence of hedging terms such as ‘may’, ‘could’, or ‘might’ in citances can be studied. An overview of hedging terms can be found in Chen et al. (2018).

Table 4 focusses on the uncertainty which might be associated with Bourdieu’s concepts. The results reveal that ‘social capital’ seems to be the most ‘uncertain’ concept: 29% of the uncertainty responses account for this concept and 14.7% of the concept mentions reflect some kind of uncertainty.

Uncertainty mentions vary from a high of nearly 15% down to half that proportion. There is no apparent correlation with the number of concept mentions. There may be a pattern in which more general and abstract concepts (e.g., ‘social space’, ‘practise’, etc.) have low uncertainty whereas more focused terms which are deployable in detailed research have more uncertainty. In the close-in context of detailed reality, such concepts may be useful tools but their ability to grasp the contours of the realities confronting a researcher may be more wreathed in uncertainties and overwhelmed by complexities.