Defined neither by a well circumscribed subject-matter and a corresponding form of
professional expertise, like psychology or economics, nor by a shared point of view like
history and perhaps philosophy, sociology has traditionally aspired to be the most general
social science. Since notions as \u2018human society\u2019 or \u2018social processes\u2019 that are commonly used
to characterize the sociological perspective do not provide more than a terminological
minimum, the actual practice of sociologists is best understood in its intellectual context, that
is, first and foremost, in relation to other disciplines and sub-disciplines. Wolf Lepenies has
thus shown that sociology may be understood as belonging to a \u2018third culture,\u2019 one that is
uneasily situated between the humanities and the natural sciences, and within which
humanistic as well as scientistic orientations coexist and collide (Lepenies 1988). A similar
observation holds for sociology in relation to the other social sciences. For institutional
reasons, French sociologists have predominantly defined themselves in relation to philosophy,
traditionally the \u2018crowning discipline\u2019 (Jean-Louis Fabiani) in the Faculty of Letters.
Depending on the local and the national context, other sociologists have allied themselves
with history, anthropology, or economics. Sociology\u2019s claim of being the most general social
science is thus inseparable from its varied relations to other disciplines and domains of
knowledge.

As a consequence of this peculiar position in the division of academic labor, sociology has
been a discipline with a high degree of plasticity. What sociologists collectively produce tends
to have a low level of cognitive and professional codification, a high degree of pluralism,

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dispersion and context dependency, as well as a rather volatile intellectual status. Sociology
has historically fluctuated from being among the most prestigious intellectual pursuits to
constituting little more than a specialty of leftovers, as Albion Small had it. In addition to the
more general reasons that apply to all disciplines, even the most autonomous ones, there is
thus a specific reason, based on this particular position in the intellectual division of labor,
why knowledge making practices in sociology depend strongly on the conditions under which
they are exercised. An appropriate way, therefore, to understand knowledge making in
sociology is to examine the way sociologists have operated within and across the division of
intellectual work. Sociologists have broadly followed two strategies: they have either tried to
become recognized specialists in a certain domain and have there confronted other knowledge
specialists, or they have ventured to construct a perspective that claims a general validity of
some sort. Since the dynamics of specialization is relatively well known and hardly specific
for sociology, it is more interesting to consider sociologists who have been involved in
mobilizing concepts and ideas across different domains of knowledge in order to propose a
general understanding of the social world.

a creative scholar, he was just as innovative a teacher, publisher, and public intellectual.
Seeking ways to combine scholarly work with educational, civic and political commitments,
he experimented with new publishing genres and initiated various public enterprises.1
Although his scholarly work has provoked numerous comments, overviews, and debates,

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there have been very few attempts to reconstruct its actual development and to try and
understand its underlying dynamics.

In proposing to grasp central aspects of Bourdieu\u2019s sociological practice, I will in the
following try to show how he came to construct the general sociological model that underlies
all of his \u2018mature\u2019 work since the publishing ofDist inc tion (or. 1979/tr. 1984) and The Logic

formula, however artificial that may be, one might say, first, that Bourdieu conceptualized
sociology as a science of social practices, that is as a science concerned with structured
regularities, which are neither completely systemic nor entirely random, and the logic of
which is fundamentally at odds with the dominant paradigms in the social sciences, whether
centered on human action, rational choice or social systems. In order to account for these
practices, they need to be understood as situated in relatively autonomous social spaces
(fields), which are defined by struggles over specific stakes between agents that are
characterized by the volume and composition of their resources (capital) and by the
dispositions by which they are inclined to use these resources (habitus). The indicated terms
(practice, field, capital, habitus) are not the only concepts of Bourdieu\u2019s approach; there are
several others (symbolic violence,illus io,dox a, strategy, homology, position, reproduction),
but these could, at least provisionally, be seen as refinements of the basic model.

In analyzing the genesis of this sociological model, I will argue that it is best understood as
the product of a specific research practice. It was the immersion in a plurality of collaborative
research endeavours, and not theoretical speculation or textual exegesis, that eventually
produced Bourdieu\u2019s mode of sociological analysis. From his early studies on Algeria to the
last full-fledged monograph he published during his lifetime, The Social Structures of the