Search

This paper outlines a sociological model of the conditions of possibility of the UK's decision to withdraw from the European Union in 2016. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu and those inspired by him, it synthesises and goes beyond the partial and fragmentary accounts offered so far to offer a more comprehensive narrative implicating the interrelation of multiple fields, with agents' evolving strategies within the different fields being the major fulcra. To be specific, the conditions of possibility for the referendum result were provided by mutations within the global field of nation states ricocheting through the UK's political field, ethno-racial field and class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria, comparatively less work has examined the shared perspectives on colonialism from which they both draw and where the discontinuities emerge. This paper explores the differences between these two thinkers, namely in their conceptualizing of the potential for a revolutionary consciousness to emerge from colonial populations during anticolonial actions. I argue in this article that where Bourdieu conceives of the horror of colonialism as a violent clash of cultures producing 'hysteresis' and a level of socio-political alienation from the most dispossessed sectors of society, Fanon conceives of a revolutionary consciousness emerging from the threat of racialized violence genocide and colonial subjection. Bourdieu however suggests that anticolonial revolutionary fervor cannot emerge from populations most dispossessed by the violence of colonization. While Bourdieu's analysis drew solely from the Algerian case, Fanon recognized anticolonial struggle to be a fundamental type of revolution that could be theorized. In this, Fanon analyzed the Algerian revolution in the context of other anticolonial actions taking place across Africa and the world. Fanon thereby lays out a theory of the role of racism in structuring colonialism and fostering a revolutionary consciousness that is distinct. This cleavage of perspectives from two seemingly similarly inclined theorists emerges from a divergent view of the role of racism in dehumanizing and structuring colonial subjectivities and the effects of colonialism on those most aggrieved by it to spur political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists. All 182 function as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu's analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that while elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology are increasingly employed in American sociology, it is rare to find all three of Bourdieu’s master concepts—habitus, capital, and field—incorporated into a single study. Moreover, these concepts are seldom deployed within a relational perspective that was fundamental to Bourdieu’s thinking. The article “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis” by Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson is a welcomed exception, for it draws on all three of Bourdieu’s pillar concepts to propose a relational approach to the study of organizations. It both reframes existing thinking about organizations, particularly from the neo-institutional and resource dependence schools, and indicates new directions for research in organizations to move. This paper evaluates their contribution calling attention to its many strengths and suggesting a few points that need future clarification and elaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite some promising steps in the right direction, organizational analysis has yet to exploit fully the theoretical and empirical possibilities inherent in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. While certain concepts associated with his thought, such as field and capital, are already widely known in the organizational literature, the specific ways in which these terms are being used provide ample evidence that the full significance of his relational mode of thought has yet to be sufficiently apprehended. Moreover, the almost complete inattention to habitus, the third of Bourdieu’s major concepts, without which the concepts of field and capital (at least as he deployed them) make no sense, further attests to the misappropriation of his ideas and to the lack of appreciation of their potential usefulness. It is our aim in this paper, by contrast, to set forth a more informed and comprehensive account of what a relational – and, in particular, a Bourdieu-inspired – agenda for organizational research might look like. Accordingly, we examine the implications of his theoretical framework for interorganizational relations, as well as for organizations themselves analyzed as fields. The primary advantage of such an approach, we argue, is the central place accorded therein to the social conditions under which inter- and intraorganizational power relations are produced, reproduced, and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper places the model of the media field in the context of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, capital and habitus. It illustrates the media field approach by analyzing several field case studies. Through systematic comparison with other approaches to media research, it highlights the unique contributions offered by the field theory while pointing out some still unresolved difficulties. Bourdieu and associates developed a new paradigm for the sociology of journalism centered around the concept of the media field. Their basic thesis is that as journalism has become less autonomous from the economic field, its influence and pervasiveness have also increased. The news media serving as an agent of dominant power are undermining the autonomy of other spheres of cultural production and thus the optimal social conditions for the production of scientific knowledge and artistic innovation. In service of this intellectual project, Bourdieu and associates contribute to the Anglo-American tradition of news media research in various ways.

While cultural sociology has recently made a comeback in research on social inequality both in the context of poverty studies and studies of immigrant integration, it has rarely investigated how particular constructions of the problem of socioeconomic mobility are themselves culturally situated. The article addresses this neglect by investigating the problematization of disadvantaged lives within the relational framework of Bourdieu's cultural theory of the state. Here, the state exercises symbolic violence by transforming one arbitrary cultural standpoint in social space into a universal standard, or a taken-for-granted "doxa," against which other cultural positions can only come off as deficient. The article extends this perspective by addressing the role of official statistics in this process. Taking Germany's official monitoring of the socioeconomic integration of immigrants as its case and drawing from document analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, and data from the German General Social Survey, the article shows how such statistical instruments of the welfare state in fact tacitly universalize a model of the good life particular to civil servants, the very constructors of the monitors, as a benchmark for immigrant integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a history of concept formation focused on Pierre Bourdieu's probabilism to provide the groundwork for a probabilistic sociology. We argue that not only was Bourdieu a probabilist, but that reframing probability along heterodox lines holds empirical promise when it is also linked to new concept formation, as evident in the case of Bourdieu. For the anglophone sociological field, probability is of primary significance for method and epistemic commitment. Sociological theory continues to react to the integral role of probability used for the purposes of sociological knowledge but finds very little in the way of concept formation that does not adopt the same commitments as the methodologists. The history we outline retrieves a different approach, one which finds Bourdieu aligned with objective probability borrowed from the sociology of Max Weber. This version of probabilism locates probability directly in the world and makes it a source of concept formation without the intervention of the methodologists. This article follows Bourdieu as he recognizes objective probability in the work of Weber (around 1973) and then engages in novel concept formation on these grounds. Ranging between spaces of objective probability (fields), spaces of randomness (games of chance), and spaces of determinism (apparatus), Bourdieu's mature probabilism reveals the conceptual and meta-methodological differences that come with making probability objective. Probabilistic expectations derive from the world itself, rather than existing as part of explanation or method. Specifically, this history of concept formation reveals a looping relation between objective probability (chances) and learned probability (expectations) that, as Bourdieu himself appreciated, holds wide-ranging implications for best knowledge practices and empirical sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I enter a debate about state-socialism elite's reproduction and higher education to propose an implementation of Bourdieu's hysteresis effect. I argue that the intelligentsia and the interwar university shaped biographical paths of academics stronger than the political factors, which are usually brought to the forefront by contemporary researchers. I analyse academic biographies shaped by the socialist university and reconstruct a model academic biography in the post-WWII period, in particular, in Poland. I compare it with biographies of professors from working-class and peasant backgrounds, and arrive at the conclusion that the differences are minor. Those who formed a seemingly perfect new intelligentsia were socialized by the traditional academic habitus. A few who entered the new academic world from working class or peasant backgrounds had to embrace the interwar university ethos in order to justify their own merits in belonging. I propose a model of opposite hysteresis vectors to explain tensions between academia and political field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the study of art was his analysis of the autonomization of modern art fields. His model of autonomy and legitimacy in modern art was based on a study of the genesis of an avant-garde in French art in the late nineteenth century. I argue that a similar autonomization of art occurred in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. I present studies in music and film to demonstrate the genesis of an American avant-garde during this period. This general process of autonomization until now has been neglected in the work of sociologists and historians on American art. My analysis shows that the genesis of principles of autonomy in the United States, unlike France, developed in what were considered the high and popular arts. These case studies reveal a failure in Bourdieu's model to account for the role of culture industries and popular artists in the autonomization of modern art fields. I show how the American art field generated a subfield of autonomous art that included both avant-garde high art and independent popular art. This permanent subfield of avant-garde and independent art became central to future struggles over autonomy and innovation in American art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of habitus and incorporating insights from feminist and critical race and legal scholarship on the creation of 'subjugated knowledge,' this article investigates the dispositional production of perceptions of injustice, politics, and morality among differently situated members of a subordinated population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within and across the West Bank and the Israeli city of Lod, I track how the political rhetoric that Lod Palestinians use to describe key issues in their lives-for example, drug use and dealing, and poor formal education-differs from the moral judgments through which West Bank Palestinians, who have moved to the city and remain there precariously, interpret the same issues. This article traces this interpretive divergence to two dispositional formations: one that has emerged under protracted conditions of denigration, criminalization, and surveillance in Lod and the other that has been produced over time by military rule in the West Bank and imported to Lod by West Bank Palestinians who moved there. It concludes by calling attention to the role of dispositions in studies of identity-formation and boundary-work as well as issues of submission and resistance in contexts of subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the failure to grasp fully the paradigmatic case of European security after the Cold War as an example of how International Relations (IR) would benefit from reformulating not only its empirical research questions but also several of its central conceptual building blocks with the aid of Bourdieusian sociology. The separation between theory and practice and the overemphasis on military power and state actors blind IR from seeing the power struggles that reshaped European security. Instead, a Bourdieusian reformulation adds new types of agency, focuses on the social production of forms of power, and stresses the processual rather than the substantive character of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When something serves a function, it is easy to overlook its origins. The tendency is to proceed directly to function and retroactively construct a story about origin based on the function it fills. In this article, I address this problem of origins as it appears in the sociology of knowledge, using a case study of the publication of the 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980. The manual revolutionized American psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness, because it served the function of classification that had become critical to the field of mental health by this time. But this function must be bracketed in order to reveal the 'extra-functional' origins of the DSM-III. Using field theory, I argue that the manual was necessary for reasons other than the function it filled as a classification. Specifically, its origin lies in a series of conflicts among psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and clinical psychologists within the field of mental health, which followed in the wake of the collapse of psychoanalysis as the dominant treatment type for mental illness. I reveal the generative formula behind the production of the DSM-III, capturing a variety of social processes that influenced the format of the manual and made it a useful classification, but which are not reducible to function. In this way, I reproduce its raison d'etre in a manner similar to how the DSM-III appeared for the people who produced it. This focus on generative formulas offers the sociology of knowledge a way to capture the epistemic importance of a range of different social processes. Most importantly, it avoids the functional fallacy of reducing origin to function, and ignoring the idea that innovations might appear necessary even without clear recognition of their functional consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines individuals' lay understandings of moral responsibilities between adult kin members. Moral sentiments and practical judgments are important in shaping kinship responsibilities. The article discusses how judgments on requests of support can be reflexive and critical, taking into account many factors, including merit, social proximity, a history of personal encounters, overlapping commitments, and moral identity in the family. In so doing, we argue that moral responsibilities are contextual and relational. We also analyze how class, gender, and capabilities affect how individuals imagine, expect and discuss care responsibilities. We also offer a critique of social capital theory of families, suggesting that their versions of morality are instrumental, alienated, and restrictive. Although Bourdieu's concept of habitus overlaps with our proposed moral sentiments approach, the former does not adequately address moral concerns, commitments, and evaluations. The article aims to contribute to a better understanding of everyday morality by drawing upon different literatures in sociology, moral philosophy, postcommunism, and development studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in collective categories of identity are at the core of social transformation. The causal linkages among identity change, institutional change, and change in modes of practice are, however, complex. Developing and adapting ideas from Pierre Bourdieu's work, this article shows the coexistence in tension of a plurality of elements within each collective identity category. On this basis, it proposes a typology of responses at the level of identity to socio-political change. This allows an explanation of patterns of identity change in terms of wider social processes and resource distribution, while remaining open to the sense and complexity of the individual's experience and the moments of intentionality that arise when individuals face choices as to the direction of change. The worth of the model is shown by analysis of modes of identity change in a society now experiencing radical change in socio-political structures, namely post-1998 Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore what Bourdieu’s political sociology could bring to the study of European integration. I first present, very briefly, some of the traditional approaches in European integration studies. Then I move to my interpretation of Bourdieu’s structural constructivist theory of politics through a discussion of political capital and political field, drawing parallels between these concepts and some of Max Weber’s ideas. In the third part, while discussing the works of some scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, I present some structural constructivist studies of European integration. Structural constructivism provides theoretical tools for a critical analysis of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “fields,” this article proposes a model of analysis of the forms of politicization in the literary field based on the French case. In France, during the first half of the twentieth century, the writer has embodied the figure of the “Intellectual.” The first claim is that the politicization of the French literary field resulted from three factors: the autonomy it gained in the nineteenth century, its lack of professional development, and the competition with the newly emerging professions. These factors, joined to the specific features of the literary activity, account for the writers’ most typical mode of politicization: prophesying. This analysis adapts the Weberian concepts of “charismatic power” and of “prophetism” to the intellectual field, in the way suggested by Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretation of Max Weber’s theory of religion. The second claim is that the forms of politicization of writers depend on the position they occupy in the literary field: the way of being a writer conditions the way one engages in the political sphere. Four figures of committed writers are distinguished: the “notabilities,” the “aesthetes,” the “avant-garde,” and the “writer-journalists.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a general problem in media sociology – how to understand the media both as an internal production process and as a general frame for categorizing the social world, with specific reference to a version of this problem in recent work on media within Bourdieu’s field-based tradition of research (work previously reviewed by Rodney Benson in Theory and Society 28). It argues that certain problems arise in reconciling this work’s detailed explanations of the media field’s internal workings (and the interrelations of that field’s workings to the workings of other fields) and general claims made about the “symbolic power” of media in a broader sense. These problems can be solved, the author argues, by adopting the concept of meta-capital developed by Bourdieu himself in his late work on the state, and returning to the wider framework of symbolic system and symbolic power that was important in Bourdieu’s social theory before it became dominated by field theory. Media, it is proposed, have meta-capital over the rules of play, and the definition of capital (especially symbolic capital), that operate within a wide range of contemporary fields of production. This level of explanation needs to be added to specific accounts of the detailed workings of the media field. The conclusion points to questions for further work, including on the state’s relative strength and the media’s meta-capital that must be carried out through detailed empirical work on a global comparative basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to integrate identity-oriented and strategic models of collective action better by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of classification struggles. On the one hand, the article extends culture to the realm of interest by highlighting the role collective identity plays in one of the key processes that strategic models of collective action foreground: the mobilization of resources. The article extends culture to the realm of interest in another way as well: by challenging the notion that labor movements are fundamentally different from or antithetical to the identity-oriented new social movements. On the other hand, the article also extends the idea of interest to culture. Rather than viewing collective identity as something formed prior to political struggle and according to a different logic, I show that collective identity is constructed in and through struggles over classificatory schemes. These include struggles between movements and their opponents as well as struggles within movements. The article provides empirical evidence for these theoretical claims with a study of the demise of the Workers Alliance of America, a powerful, nation-wide movement of the unemployed formed in the United States in 1935 and dissolved in 1941. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pays tribute to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

This article focuses on the phenomenological habitus and its construction. The concepts "habit" and "habitus," having almost disappeared from the sociological lexicon during the earlier part of the post-war period, are currently enjoying renewed interest in the social sciences. This is due, in large part, to the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His work draws out the significance and relevance of the concept of habit for sociological purposes and in doing so makes a very appealing case for a habit or disposition based theory of agency. This is not intended as a phenomenological critique of Bourdieu, a call to replace his conception of habit with a phenomenological one nor a call for a full scale "marriage" of phenomenology with Bourdieu's sociology. Bourdieu formulates his concept of the habitus in the context of a critical engagement with structuralism and "social physics," on the one hand, and "social phenomenology" on the other. Against social physics and structuralism, he argues for a notion of competent and active agency.

The article presents information on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu related to feminism and social order. Bourdieu's epistemological and methodological approach to social science research parallels and enhances feminist positions on this important subject. He recognizes that theoretical narratives and political programs are themselves embedded in social relations, no matter how relevant and applicable are they to their empirical referents. This article employs a rich body of feminist research in order to present, critique and then develop Bourdieu's sociological, epistemological and methodological writings with respect to gendered social life. Bourdieu clearly represents a social theorist and researcher who has reconceptualized social life and the study of social life. It is in this respect that his work parallels feminist efforts to grapple with epistemological and methodological concerns for progressive ends. He too is motivated by skepticism of objectivist methods of inquiry especially as they misrepresent subject/object relations. While he does not explicitly call into question the gendered bias of scientific practice, his epistemological experiment into a reflexive sociology does offer an opportunity to expose gendered subtexts of such practice. Finally, it is these motivations and characteristics of his research that suggest promising overlap between his habitus and that of feminists.