The Bourdieusian Conception of Social Capital: A Methodological Reflection and Application

This paper is on social capital and the meaning that Bourdieu has given to this concept in his Notes provisoires, published in 1980. He considered social capital as one of the most important forms of capital, along with economic capital and cultural capital. Even though he did not propose an explicit measure of social capital, so it remained in a conceptual state, he promoted an innovative research programme. Our contribution is to propose a generic method to empirically measure and test hypotheses on social capital, based on Bourdieu's work. We aim at creating an analytical framework that places this concept at the centre of the Bourdieusian theoretical approach. For this purpose, we combine two sociological tools that relate to two different sociological traditions, namely social network analysis and multiple correspondence analyses. Thus, our paper describes the ways to combine field and network analyses, and illustrates this with an empirical study.