Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. He is the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor of the 4-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series (2000) and of a 3-volume collection of articles on Lyotard in the same series (2004). His On Bourdieu, Education and Society was published by Bardwell Press in July, 2006, and he was the editor of the Special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Bourdieu which was published as 23 (6) in November, 2006. In 2007-8 he was in receipt of an ESRC award to study the work of Jean-Claude Passeron, and he has written an introduction to a translation of Passeron's Le raisonnement sociologique which will be published in 2011 by Bardwell Press, Oxford, as Sociological Reasoning. As Directeur associé in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Marseille in 2009-10 he gave courses on the comparative epistemology of the social sciences, and he is currently exploring the influence of Husserl on 20th Century French social theory, particularly in relation to the development of the thought of Lyotard and Bourdieu.

PART ONE: THE CAREER
An Insider/Outside Frenchman
PART TWO: THE CONCEPTS
The Socio-Genesis of the Thinking Instruments
Production, Reception and Reproduction
PART THREE: THE CASE STUDIES
Flaubert and the Social Ambivalence of Literary Invention
Courr[gr]eges, the Fashion System and Anti-Semiology
Manet, the Mus[ac]ee d'Orsay and the Installation of Art
PART FOUR: THE CRITICISMS
Evaluating Fragmented Responses
Meta-Criticism
Charting Interminable Territory
Conclusion
Commending the Bourdieu Paradigm: The Sociologist as Conceptual Artist

An accessible and readable introduction to Bourdieu's work, this book places him in intellectual and historical context, and shows how Bourdieu is best understood as a cultural analyst. It traces his development from his early work on education to his relationship to cultural sociology and cultural studies. The book also gives detailed examples, drawn from Bourdieu's own work, to show how he makes sense of contemporary culture.

Robbins guides the reader authoritatively through Bourdieu's wide-ranging body of theoretical and analytical work and offers a framework within which the most recent aspects of that work can be understood.