David W. Park
Critical Concepts: Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Habitus’ and the Political Economy of the Media

Abstract

Few scholars have been cited in scholarly work as much as Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Bourdieu’s ideas have left a vigorous legacy in sociology and in anthropology, and have received ongoing, if more fitful, attention in fields as far flung as English, art, and communication. Famously described as a theorist who was “good to think with”,1 Bourdieu’s ideas occasionally suffer for not lending themselves very directly to specific scholarly approaches. Many of his major ideas are so sweeping and all-inclusive as to become difficult to implement in a program of research. For those who, like me, argue in favor of adopting Bourdieu’s ideas for the study of communication, it is important to address how his ideas can be applied to particular problems in the field. This is what I attempt to do here: to connect one of Bourdieu’s most widely-adopted ideas—that of habitus—with contemporary developments in the political economy of the media, with an emphasis on how habitus can help us to conceptualize much of what remains largely missing from political economy, without leading us down the road of mere scholasticism.