The Relevance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Social Theory for the Study of Scientific Knowledge Production

Of all the authors I have studied over the course of my PhD studies in sociology and my post-doctoral work, Pierre Bourdieu is by far the one who has exerted the strongest influence on my sociological approach and my research. I first experienced working with Bourdieu’s conceptual tools when I used his concept of “field ” to understand the relations between the political and economic spheres and knowledge production in two academic disciplines—sociology and economics. At the time, little did I know that in order to properly understand the concept of field, one also had to have mastered the other concepts developed by Bourdieu (including those of “habitus, ” “species of capital, ” “symbolic capital ” and “symbolic domination”). However, I rapidly realised that the systemic nature of Bourdieu’s social theory and the tight interweaving of its ensuing concepts require a complete understanding of the whole in order to fully grasp the scope of the constituent parts. In the following paragraphs, I shall describe how Bourdieu’s approach influenced my research, and how it led me to construct critiques of certain models that attempt to explain the transformations seen in university knowledge production over the past few decades. Applying the concept of field to the study of sociology and economics professors ’ research practices seemed to me to be a particularly productive way of proceeding. By considering the two discipline