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This paper is part of a larger research project which investigates the emergence and professionalisation of the first generations of Spanish interpreters in the European Union, from a sociologicaland historical perspective. The interest in describing the professionalisation of this group is closely related to Contemporary Spanish History, since its creation runsparallel to Spainjoining the EU and the socio-political modernisationof the country. Our purpose is to gain a better understanding of the social background and the creation and evolutionof this professional group, while at the same time providing relevant historical and cultural information. This paper explores the socialand professional trajectories of a group of pioneer Spanish interpreters who, returning to Spain after some years in Belgium, still follow the interpretation practices in the EU. This research combines a quantitative and qualitative method respectively based on questionnaires and interviews. Bourdieu’s concepts(habitus, fieldand capital)and the sociology of professions, are applied in the discussion of the findings in the study,. The paper aims at illustrating the importance of understanding and studying interpreting as a socially embedded practice, given that interpreters act as historical and social agents in the processes in which they are involved. The findings,likewise,suggest that the concept of habitusis a key concept in the emergence of a profession, since it is socially and historically conditioned.

The paper develops the conceptual device of forms of Mafia capital as an original cultural-sociological contribution to the literature on Mafia expansion in the so-called non-traditional areas. The proposed framework draws on some results of an empirical research project on the territorial expansion, practices and public perceptions of Mafias in northern Italy, specifically in the Emilia-Romagna region. In particular, the analysis of a few case studies (i.e. the relationship between local entrepreneurs and professionals such as business consultants and journalists on the one side, and supposed or recognized Mafia members on the other side) sheds light on a set of elective affinities between the local territorial culture (internationally known through the label of Emilian model) and some structural features of Mafia organizations and their culture. In the end we propose to capture this set of affinities through the notion of cultural resonance as a mechanism underlying the expansion of Mafia groups and their mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the concept of habit from a sociological point of view. My aim, in part, is to consider the ways in which sociologists and social philosophers could use and have used ‘habit’ in their analyses and explanations. In particular the concept of habit can contribute to our understanding and explanation of the behavioural regularities involved in social structure. In addition, however, I am interested in the limitations of the concept of habit, within a sociological context, when compared against other concepts which are used to do similar work. In particular I contrast the concept of habit with the concepts of ‘rule’ and ‘convention’, drawing out the strengths that it has relative to those competing concepts but also identifying important aspects of behavioural regularity which they bring to light and which habit ignores. In the conclusion to the paper I consider ways in which these various concepts might overlap and might be used in conjuction with one another.

How is social creativity linked to habitual dispositions? This paper critiques Bourdieu’s answer to this question, which is related to his theory of habitus, against the background of its phenomenological evidences. His concept of habitual dispositions seems to be linked both to an internalisation of the performativity of habits as a form of Kantian schematism (in Husserlian terms: ‘noetization’), and to a static concept of the social environment, which is never analysed in its own dynamic structural relation to the life of the bearer of habits. Through the genetic-phenomenological distinction between habits as noetic dispositions and types as noematic schemes, the paper seeks to show that the social environment cannot be presupposed as a given field of social objectivities and norms that are stabilized by internalized habitual dispositions, but should instead be seen as an enactively framed habitat. When we further distinguish between passive and active habitualities, their intertwining comes to the fore, showing how in taking a position in relation to its own cultural environment the subject finds in the hiatus between disposition and the disposed leeway for a relative framework of spontaneity and personal cultivation, a space allowing for individual and, ultimately, social creativity that is absent from Bourdieu’s account.

The article discusses the use of test / trial as a research tool proposed by different versions of sociology, namely by genetic structuralism owing to Pierre Bourdieu and by pragmatic approach assembled around the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. The inquiry is contextualized in the author’s study of civic mobilization in Russia taking into consideration sustainability and contingencies of institutional frameworks which shape different types of test. A series of publications produced by both sociological currents and employing the concept of trial is examined in order to retrace its actuation in several research contexts. A special attention is granted to a problem of social structures in which test results are resumed. For this purpose, a more attentive reading is offered to Patrick Champagne’s and Dominique Marchetti’s paper on the affair of ‘contaminated blood’, and to the book by Nicolas Dodier on outcomes of AIDS epidemic. The results let conclude on the compatibility of pragmatic approach with the Foucauldian concept of dispositive, as well as on methodological implications of field theory in study of trials. Making use of examples from Russian protest movement, the article proposes to complete the typology of tests and to account radical tests which target the abnormal reality and the problematic self together with more conventional public trials and controversies mediated by sustainable institutions.

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis (CA) and the multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics.