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Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
the chain between production and consumption. We thus investigate the ‘fashion as fast’ and ‘textiles as slow’ opposition by examining where and how the material artefacts are produced; the interactions between textile producers and fashion designers; and how and where the symbolic capital of textiles and fashion is manifest and maintained. After a brief description of the textiles, we explain our framework using the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, especially his concept of capital, following this with a description of the methods used in this
ensure profitability and thereby to ensure continuity of product from the cultural producers. For the artist, another kind of reward is also important: what Bourdieu calls the ‘accumulation of symbolic capital’, which may involve becoming a recognised name. In the case of film the film-maker could achieve this by being the object of critical approval or attracting the commendation of one’s peers. For a short time, as we shall
. Furthermore, increased competition among the parish churches, cathedrals, and pilgrimage sites of medieval England meant that sanctity was increasingly valuable as a form of symbolic capital that could improve a church’s social as well as sacred status in the world. Sacred spaces such as Canterbury Cathedral were a multimedia project and a community concern. They were constructed out of a fusion of architecture, iconography, material culture, and narrative practice. Master builders and artists worked together to create sacred spaces from stone, stained glass and sculpture
, cultural, and symbolic capital, and how the expression of habitus via their propaganda exists in a dialectical engagement with the political-economic field of neoliberalism in which it operates. Extending the outline of Bourdieusian concepts provided in Chapter 1, the habitus is taken to constitute the ‘learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the social world’, entailing ‘a system of durable, transposable, cognitive “schemata or structures of perception, conception and action”’ (Bourdieu 2002, 27, cited in Edgerton and Roberts 2014 , 195
This chapter presents a wealth of new archival evidence on nobles’ actions and attitudes during the French Revolution. Various forms of property and evidence of ownership were destroyed or removed from nobles’ possession, which threatened nobles’ capacity to transmit economic, cultural, and symbolic capital to the next generation. Letters, wills, receipts, account books, certificates, passports, and petitions reveal how the effects of multiple decrees played out in personal and familial histories. For the nobility the rapid evolution of legislation meant that the consequences of any one revolutionary law became entangled with the consequences of another. Documentation of noblewomen’s experiences brings fresh insights and understanding to issues often over-looked in historical writing weighted toward aristocratic male military and political involvement.
actors operating within them (Bourdieu 1996 ). Both social and symbolic forms of capital are objectified human labour that determine the success of strategies aimed at the future acquisition of a position, job, or reputation. Even though they are not directly expressed in monetary form, they are potentially convertible to financial gains. As Hans van Maanen suggests, social and symbolic capital operate on three different levels: first, on that of embodied knowledge and social skills; second, on that of field-specific reputations and social contacts
embedded in what Cynthia and Harrison White termed as the critic-dealer system, and what Luc Boltanski analysed as the domestic mode of circulation (Boltanski 2014 ; White and White 1993 ). In this mode, artists produce art works in their studios, and after a while these works are ‘discovered’ by critics, put on sale by dealers and finally bought by collectors. The exchange of money is secondary to the rhythms of symbolic appreciation, and everything takes a long time. This was mapped into the social architecture of symbolic capital, as analysed by Pierre Bourdieu who
, because in the process of acquiring social and symbolic capital, entrepreneurial individuals not only capitalise on their own labour, but also – or even especially – on the labour of others. The trajectories of successful entrepreneurs of the self are rarely directly related to the exploitation of any individual projectarian by the means of wage labour. Their careers are underpinned by the general social labour of artistic → dark matter . The social and symbolic capital is of a contextual nature; it cannot be quantified nor monetised directly
illustration of the point that the struggle between groups characterised by distinct class habitus is never only about accumulating dominant symbolic capital but also pursuing the power to determine what that dominant form is. The last quote can thus be seen both as an expression of genuinely felt outrage and a delegitimising practice. The interviewee’s opinion that audacity and relishing danger amount not to courageousness but recklessness may be experienced as authentic while still being, in phenomenological terms, a structured strategic practice determined by a sub