Transmutations of capitals refer to processes whereby one form of capital gets converted into another. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu extensively theorized capital conversions in a book chapter entitled “The forms of capital” and empirically investigated them in his magnum opus, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Bourdieu's perspective on conversions between capitals has since proven to be extremely influential in related research around the globe. Bourdieu explicitly adopted a relational, field-theoretic approach to causality rather than a linear one. Statistical techniques such as regression modeling that complement a linear-causal perspective, however, do not complement a relational worldview, implying that much of the research inspired by Bourdieu is not truly consistent with his theoretical approach. By applying relational statistical techniques to survey data from Canada I attempt here to produce a rare analysis of capital conversions that is analytically faithful to Bourdieu's relational perspective, eschewing linear modeling and consideration of independent and dependent variables and linear relations of causality between them.
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© 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V
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Veenstra, G. (2009). Transmutations of Capitals in Canada: A ‘Social Space’ Approach. In: Robson, K., Sanders, C. (eds) Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdieu. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9450-7_5
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