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This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l' État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a 'meta'-ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well-ordered object of study, vis-à-vis which it can posit itself as 'meta-meta'. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta-social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to a paper by Bob Carter and Alison Sealey about the Layder theory of social domains. It is assumed that in engaging in situated activity, people articulate together diverse elements of the social, physical activities, broadly sociological elements such as social procedures and forms of organization, broadly psychological elements including beliefs, knowledges, feelings and values and semiosis. Articulating them together means bringing them into a more or less stabilized combination. These articulations are partly pre-given, the more-or-less stable and durable cumulative effects of past activity. Semiosis figures in two interconnected ways as a moment of a social practice, as a mode of producing social life and in the representation of the world, including the reflexive self-representations which are an inherent part of a social practice. Representations are always positioned and there are no representations which transcend social positionality. Representations are constantly being evaluated against each other in terms of epistemic gain. If the goal is to work theoretically across disciplines and theories, a theoretically coherent view of what it means to put the logic of one theory to work within another is needed.

This paper considers the application of Foucauldian perspectives within sociology. While Foucault's epistemology has generated novel historical and philosophical interpretations, when transposed to sociology, problems arise. The first of these concerns the association of knowledge and power, and the concept of 'discourse'. Foucault suggested that there are 'rules' of discursive formation which are extraneous to the 'non-discursive' realm of 'reality'. This formulation is consequently both deterministic and incapable of supplying explanations of why some practices become discursive which others do not. This determinism is reflected in some sociological analyses of embodiment, offering a model of the 'body' which is passive, and incapable of resisting power/knowledge. Secondly, Foucault's notion of the 'self' moves to the other extreme, inadequately addressing the constraints which affect the fabrication of subjectivity. Sociological accounts do not always recognize the ambiguities which consequently result from efforts to use Foucauldian positions. It is argued that post-structuralists other than Foucault may offer more to sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]