Rosenlund, L. (2009). Exploring the city with Bourdieu: applying Pierre Bourdieu's theories and methods to study the community. Saarbrücken, VDM.
This book is testimony to what can be achieved in a Ph.D project, and comes complete with remarks from Loïc Wacquant, who examined the thesis. The research project, called 'Cultural traditions, cultural encounters and cultural change in an oil capital', focuses on the urban community Stavanger on the South West coast of Norway (around 200,000 inhabitants) which underwent significant changes from one of the poorest urban communities in the Norwegian periphery at the end of the 1960s to one of the most prosperous by the 1990s, when the fieldwork was undertaken. The research uses the methodological and analytical framework of Bourdieu (from his work 'Distinction') to investigate socioeconomic as well as cultural changes in the 'local social space' of Stavanger, including the method of multiple correspondence analysis. The author claims that multiple correspondence analysis is different from the Anglo-Saxon statistical tradition of confirming, verifying or rejecting pre-conceived hypotheses, and instead follows the French statistical tradition which is concerned with exploring, describing and discovering. The research in Stavanger involved telephone interviews with a representative sample of 1305 inhabitants of Stavanger, followed up by 911 questionnaires completed by people between the ages of 16-68 years. The author presents the findings of the multiple correspondence analysis in graphs, relating lifestyles and cultural interests to different incomes and professions, amongst other variables. The book also includes photographs. The aim of this research is to conduct a similar study of cultural and economic capital in Stavanger as Bourdieu did in France in the 1970s, while recognising differences in the diversity of classes and class fractions between the two cases. It demonstrates that Bourdieu's methods are transferable, countering criticism that they do not travel beyond France.