Exploring the City with Bourdieu: Applying Pierre Bourdieu?s theories and methods to study the community Foreword by Loïc Wacquant

Exploring the City with Bourdieu is a study of social structures, lifestyles and socio-cultural change of Stavanger. The time period covered is the last thirty years when oil activities became the major economic venture. At the end of the 1960s, Stavanger was a poor city. Today it is prospering as a result of the impact of the oil industry. It has become the oil capital of Norway. The book examines this city using the analytic framework outlined by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction (1984). The study provides a practical illustration of how this approach may be applied to study complex social formations. It offers a theoretical chart and methodological instruments for readers wishing to understand social structures and change in today?s world. The study brings forth very different imageries of a society in change than dominating views of ?postmodern disorder?. Underneath the apparent flux there are social regularities to be revealed that encompass social positions, personal dispositions as well as spatial, geographical structures.