This volume presents a critical appraisal of Bourdieu's work, spanning the fields of sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. The essays show how Bourdieu's voluminous work forms a distinctive intellectual approach, compare Bourdieu's analytic approach to others current in Anglo-American sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, and raise a variety of crucial theoretical questions that are important to understanding Bourdieu.

Contributors include Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, Charles Taylor, Aaron Cicourel, James Collins, William Hanks, Beate Krais, Nicholas Garnham, Scott Lash, Rogers Brubaker and Loic Wacquant as well as the editors. In an essay written especially for this volume, Bourdieu describes his own 'mode of intellectual production' and the reasons for its common misunderstanding.