Is Education Really a Meritocracy?
Is education really a meritocracy? This article explores how class, cultural capital, teacher expectations and unequal opportunities shape educational achievement.
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Tag: Pierre Bourdieu
How Do We Learn How to Behave?
How do we learn the unwritten rules of social life? This article explores socialisation, identity, family, education, peers, media and the ways society shapes how we behave.
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Why Does Where You Live Affect Your Opportunities?
Where you live can shape access to education, work, housing, transport and public services. This article explores how place becomes part of social inequality and why opportunity is unevenly distributed across different areas.
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What Do Sociologists Mean by Social Class?
Social class is about more than income. This article explores how Marx, Weber and Bourdieu help us understand class, life chances, cultural capital, social mobility and the unequal distribution of opportunity.
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Where Do Young People Belong Anymore? Skills for Life, Capital and the Social Spaces of Growing Up
We expect young people to reach adulthood with confidence, communication skills, resilience and leadership, but rarely ask where they were supposed to develop them. Drawing on Bourdieu, research on youth participation and the idea of opportunity structures, this article explores how skills, relationships and social capital are built, recognised and unequally distributed.
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Who Gets to Decide What Looks Classy?
A trend for bare-looking nails raises a bigger question: who gets to decide what counts as classy? Bourdieu helps us see how everyday judgements about taste can draw social boundaries, often without us noticing.
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Is Durkheim Still Relevant? Social Facts, Solidarity and Culture Wars
Durkheim never saw a social media pile-on, but he worried about what holds societies together and how they draw moral boundaries. This article introduces his ideas on social facts, solidarity, crime and anomie, and uses them to analyse contemporary “culture wars” over statues, values and offence – and to show where his framework now needs updating.
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Is Weber Still Relevant? Rationalisation, Bureaucracy and Algorithmic Power
Weber wrote about files and offices, not welfare portals, tickets and AI chatbots. Yet his ideas on rationalisation, bureaucracy and legal-rational authority still help make sense of why “the system” feels both neutral and overwhelming. This article introduces Weber for undergraduates and tests his relevance against contemporary forms of algorithmic power.
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Trading Places and the Myth of Meritocracy: A Sociological Analysis of Class, Race, and Capital
Watching Trading Places as a Christmas comfort film, it is hard not to see a ready-made sociological case study. The Dukes’ “experiment” looks like a simple nature-versus-nurture wager, but the life swap really turns on class, race and access to capital. This article uses Bourdieu’s framework to show how the film exposes—and then neatly smooths over—the myth of meritocracy.
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Symbolic Violence in Schools: How Class Inequality Hides in Plain Sight
What if the rules that govern school life aren’t neutral? This article explores how symbolic violence—subtle norms and expectations—rewards middle-class students while sidelining others.
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