Formalizing Bourdieu. Formulating the Law of Capital Attraction.

During the last decades we have seen an impressive progress of rational action theory (RAT) in the social sciences, which produced models with high explanatory and predictive power for different instances of human behavior. RAT, however, presents serious limitations when it comes to integrate the influence of social structure on its models, as it sees human behavior merely as the outcome of utility maximization equations rationally calculated by individuals. Departing from Bourdieu’s view of social structure as a force that orients practice, this paper introduces a new mathematical model designed to measure that force; we called it the law of capital attraction.