“Social Space” of Pierre Bourdieu: History of Concept Construction

The article deals with the history and interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “social space”. With the help of the concept, Bourdieu described a set of interrelated social phenomena that support and reflect each other. He defined social space as a multidimensional distribution of agents (individual or collective) over objective positions determined by the distribution of effective resources or capitals — economic, cultural, social and symbolic. Capitals conceptualize the nature of social space by introducing different dimensions into it. According to Bourdieu, social space is the result of a complex interplay of various relations that give social positions their properties. Social positions within this space do not exist separately from or prior to these relationships — they are constituted by them. The study of social space is a search for invariants. Sociology according to Bourdieu is a social topology — the understanding of spatial relations between social positions in different variations. Bourdieu’s social space not only structures sociological knowledge, but also provides methods for obtaining it.