International audience Despite its international stature, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology has been the subject of constant controversy for forty years: its main concepts are said to suffer from deterministic biases that obscure the ability of actors to think and act autonomously in relation to their primary socialization. Social environment of origin, school and State would converge in the production of agents attached to their social position through their habitus, thus legitimizing and participating in the reproduction of society and the mechanisms of domination. Yet these debates ignore Bourdieu’s role in work andemployment, if they are not mistaken. While the sociologist’s contribution is still often reduced here to another demonstration of domination, a careful examination of his studies as a whole reveals that work constitutes a theoretical tipping point: while it constitutes a space in which economic exploitation and symbolic violence are articulated, wage labour also represents a support capable –and unique– for agents to have a different relationship to their social destiny and thus offers, unlike school and culture, the conditions for real emancipation.