Theory as Method in Research

On Bourdieu, social theory and education

Mark Murphy, Cristina Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138900332
• eBook ISBN: 9781317479444
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

While education researchers have drawn on the work of a wide diversity of theorists over the years, much contemporary theory building in these areas has revolved around the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory as Method in Research develops the capacity of students, researchers and teachers to successfully put Bourdieu's ideas to work in their own research and prepare them effectively for conducting Masters and Doctoral scholarships.

Structured around four core themes, this book provides a range of research case studies exploring educational identities, educational inequalities, school leadership and management, and research in teacher education. Issues as diverse as Chinese language learning and identity, school leadership in Australia and the school experience of Afro-Trinidadian boys, are covered, intertwined with a set of innovative approaches to theory application in education research.

This collection brings together, in one comprehensive volume, a set of education researchers who place Pierre Bourdieu's key concepts such as habitus, capital and field at the centre of their research methodologies. Full of insight and innovation, the book is an essential read for practitioners, student teachers, researchers and academics who want to harness the potential of Bourdieu's core concepts in their own work, thereby helping to bridge the gap between theory and method in education research.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Bourdieu and education research

Mark Murphy and Cristina Costa

Introduction

Over the years, education has developed a long and fruitful relationship with theory of all stripes, in particular the work of the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. The impact of Bourdieu on the field of education research has been significant and sustained, his contribution to educational ideas arguably stronger than that of any other social theorist of the late twentieth century. This can be explained to some degree by his own research interests in the power of schooling and education, but it also reflects the strength of conceptual analysis that offers fertile ground for theoretically engaged researchers. Ideas developed and disseminated through his many and varied works – such as habitus, cultural capital, field and symbolic violence – have inspired countless education researchers over the years, a situation that shows no sign of abating. Within the sociology of education, for example, Bourdieu’s work has been utilized to enhance our understandings of the ways in which the curriculum, both overt and hidden, along with pedagogies, and their implicit taken-for-granted cultural capitals, contribute to both the reproduction of inequality and its legitimation through the misrecognition of social experiences and cultural inheritance as individual capacities.

Given the breadth of his influence on education research it can be a challenge to understand how to explore the relevance and reach of his core concepts in specific settings – how does an education researcher successfully put Bourdieu’s ideas to work in their own research? What are the mechanisms via which theory can translate into method? The objective of this book is to provide the reader with pathways to achieving such forms of ‘application’, while contextualizing his key concepts within the broader oeuvre of Bourdieu’s theoretical approach. This contextualization will assist the reader in their efforts to build connections between the various theories.

Central to fulfilling the objective of this book is an exploration of the ways in which the work of Bourdieu has been applied in research contexts such as:

• educational identities
• inequality and schooling
• leadership and management
• teacher education.

How the concepts of Bourdieu have been applied in these contexts is illustrated via a set of case studies, each of which critically examines the challenges faced when ‘bridging the gap’ between theory and research method. The content of these case study chapters is designed so that the emphasis is on the practice of research; in doing so they exemplify the numerous inventive ways in which Bourdieu’s core concepts, such as habitus, can be brought to life in research settings.

As a preface to these contributions, this chapter provides an overview of Bourdieu’s work in the field of educational research, illustrating how educational issues weaved their way in to many aspects of his oeuvre and conceptual thinking. In particular, the chapter seeks to explore the ways in which Bourdieu himself attempted to overcome the theory/method dichotomy, and the ways in which he operationalized/developed his own concepts in research. The chapter also provides an overview of the chapters featured in this collection, illuminating in particular the fundamental question that this book aims to address: the application of Bourdieu as both theory and method in education research.

It should be noted that such theory/method challenges are not the exclusive domain of educational researchers grappling with Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus – most variants of social theory present challenges of application for scholars wishing to bring intellectual depth to their fieldwork. The case studies included in this collection could be seen as a sample of a much wider research agenda geared towards bringing theory and method closer together (see Murphy, 2013). Bourdieu’s ideas have been put to work in numerous interdisciplinary contexts, with habitus, for example, helping scholars across a range of disciplines make sense of issues like inequality, crime, mobilities and migration (see Costa and Murphy, 2015). These wider applications have to some extent been explored via the website www.socialtheoryapplied.com, a site co-edited by this collection’s co-editors. The developing interest in the website and its contributions is further testimony to the significance attached to the art of application by scholars keen on exploring the power of ideas, but uncertain as to how to realize their potential in the field of research. We see the production of books such as this edited collection and the website as overlapping parts of an ongoing project to make a focus on ‘application’, an essential component of research agendas such as those in education, while helping to raise its status in the binary world of theory/method distinctions.

Bourdieu and education research: a brief history

Bourdieu’s considerable research output is a reflection of his desire to bridge theory and practice through method. Through a process of conceiving and apprehending the nature of the social world, Bourdieu aimed to depart from the classic dilemma of the object/subject divide. His contribution, in this sense, has resulted in an open framework of macro concepts that support the analysis of the interplay between structure and agency in specific contexts. This framework was not, however, conceived of in a vacuum nor established via a single study or research approach. Concepts such as field, habitus, capitals, doxa and symbolic violence were developed iteratively, reflecting his career-long endeavour in refining both his theoretical understanding of the social world and the methods through which he could arrive at such understandings. This is explicit in the evolution that marks his work, starting with his departure from classic ethnography (Bourdieu 1977, 2004a) – which he employed in his first sociological work in Algeria – through to more daring methodological approaches such as a variant of narrative inquiry, which he used in one of his later projects documented in The weight of the world (1999). Bourdieu was committed to methodological explorations that result in richer sociological explanations. Bourdieu’s approaches to knowledge constructions theoretically and methodologically thus imply a knowledge of praxeology. They also involve an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the objective and subjective dimensions of the social world by combining and distilling both through a practice of reflexivity. In other words, in order to overcome such antinomies, Bourdieu’s research concerns were directed at devising mechanisms that would balance the distance as well as the proximity between the researcher and the researched.

More than anything else, Bourdieu’s theorizing of the social intended to serve the purpose of critical inquiry. To achieve this goal Bourdieu was constantly engaged in the re-creation, re-examination and re-application of his own concepts with each new empirical work. His research translated into contributions across the social sciences, which have since been taken even further afield. Thematically speaking this translated into a vast and varied programme of research in which a social gaze was possible and necessary. Bourdieu himself explored a wide range of topics including social suffering, media, politics, the arts, taste and education.

Education was an area of study that cut across many of the topics to which Bourdieu devoted his research interest, thus occupying a special place in his research legacy. This is most likely because of his fascination in identifying the mechanisms of domination that prevailed in each and every social context he studied – a thread consistent across his work – and in which the education system plays a vital part.

Although Bourdieu centred most of his work and research on the French context, the theoretical critiques he put forward throughout his career have been applied to other contexts, giving his work a global dimension. This is particularly the case with regard to the study of educational issues, as educational researchers have demonstrated through the application of the Bourdieuian lens in the most varied contexts. This is so because Bourdieu’s concepts are ‘primarily social and metaphorical, not geographical’ (Nowicka, 2015, p. 97). This is equally true because Bourdieu’s key concepts are malleable (rather than vague), and therefore receptive to multiple and original applications. What Bourdieu offers us through his empirical work is the true essence of social theory, i.e. the construction of methodological and analytical frameworks through the application of one or more concepts to explore and understand social phenomena (Murphy, 2013, p. xxiii).

The appeal of Bourdieu’s work to an international audience interested in educational research thus derives from the universality of his concepts in helping to unearth engrained educational issues, such as inequalities regarding access to education or educational trajectories of the social classes, and the ramifications of the different opportunities derived from such differ entiations. The Bourdieuian community have a lot of examples from which to draw. In The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture (1964 [1979]), Bourdieu and Passeron disclose the paradox of formal education by focusing on the French system, which although attempting to provide a democratic pathway to education through open competition fails to acknow ledge the impact of individuals’ economic, social and cultural capitals on their scholastic success or lack of it. Individuals with higher levels of capitals possess a ‘natural’ competitive advantage in relation to individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is because students from privileged social classes acquire ‘knowledge and know how, tastes and a “good taste”’ (p. 17); this is an inheri tance of a refined habitus, the skills and attitudes that benefit them indirectly in the cultural system education aims to reproduce.

Bourdieu, in collaboration with Passeron, continued to study the French educational system. In Reproduction in education, society and culture (1979 [1990]) they again concluded that the transformative purpose of education is often overshadowed by its capacity to reinforce social inequalities – a topic that became prevalent in most of Bourdieu’s work. For Bourdieu, cultural capital – especially in its embodied state – is of paramount importance with regard to school achievements. Cultural capital is, to a great extent, a family legacy that the school as a system fails largely to influence. As such, the values and attitudes individuals bring with them to school have a determining impact on how they approach and experience school(ing), with their expectations and achievements being more often than not linked to their unconscious interpretation of their position in the field in relation to their social class.

Bourdieu and Passeron also established relevant links between education, society, and culture not only through the notion of capitals – specifically cultural capital – but also through the concept of habitus, and the dispositions individuals acquire throughout their life trajectories, which orient their strategies towards social and professional practices. They describe the difference between primary and secondary habitus. According to them, the ‘habitus acquired in the family [primary] forms the basis of the reception and assimilation of the classroom message, and the habitus acquired at school [secondary] conditions the level of reception and degree of assimilation of … any intellectual message’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979 [1990], pp. 43–4). Hence, the Bourdieuian perspective understands education mainly as a system of reproduction of social practices and social privileges, with social classes being defined not only in relation to the position they occupy in the field, but also, and above all, through the cultural capital and habitus associated with that very same position. This is naturally converted into forms of symbolic power, such as distinction and the sense of identity individuals confer on their position in the field.

Later in his career Bourdieu studied distinction in taste, attitudes and social positions of social agents. In his book Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (1984), he reflects on the economies of practices and cultural goods through ‘the role played by the education system in mediating the relations between the status hierarchies associated with different tastes and cultural preferences on the one hand, and the organization and reproduction of the occupational class, on the other’ (p. xx).

At the core of Bourdieu’s argument is the idea that individuals’ dispositions are (re)produced in relation and in response to the social, economic and cultural structures on which agents operate and with which they identify themselves or detach themselves from. As Bourdieu concludes, ‘social identity is defined and asserted through difference’ (ibid., p. 172), with education playing a role in reproducing such differences.

In Homo academicus (1988), Bourdieu once again makes education his field of study, only this time he sets out to investigate his own ‘tribe’. Methodologically challenging, given his inevitable connection with the university that stages such a study, Bourdieu endeavours to observe the principles of reflexivity, ‘the principal weapon of epistemological vigilance’ (p. 15), in order to provide a sociological account of the French academy during and after the May revolution of 1968. He examines the field of academia, and its different faculties, as a space of struggle for forms of capital and power. But here he surprises us with his observation that the positions of dominant and dominated forces shift as the field undergoes transformations (p. 77) or faces moments of crisis (p. 189); this is an issue all too present not only in France, but also more globally in the period in which the study was conducted.

Indeed, as Bourdieu’s work progresses, so does his work and thinking. Although his interpretation of field as a reproductive system persists throughout his career, with every new text Bourdieu also starts to account for change, even if in more implicit ways.

In The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (1996), Bourdieu looks at distinction through a perspective of deviant trajectories (p. 183). His argument is that the social mechanism of academic aggregation and segregation and the inevitable contention between the field and the habitus – the school and the students – is a determinant factor of change and transformation of both the field of power and the individual, and their distinctive identities through the opposite doxic approaches that each party represents and embodies.

In short, although the Bourdieuian interpretation of education has traditionally been associated with the institutionalization of a system of cultural reproduction, through which the dominant values and ideas become a form of domination and symbols of superiority of one social class over another, education, as a field, may also encourage change or transformation. Bourdieu himself was no stranger to such transformative experiences – see his self-portrait in Sketch for a self-analysis (2008).

What is probably most fascinating in Bourdieu’s work, however, is that although he invites us to think relationally about theory and method to arrive at a robust understanding of (social) practice, he was more evasive about the processes through which theory can be applied to method. His most explicit explanation of this link can be found in An invitation to reflexive sociology (1992) where in conversation with Wacquant he outlines two different stages for examining the social world: the first deals with the surveying of the field and the spaces of positions it provides – the objective structures – by pushing aside any mundane construction (p. 11). The second consists of the re-introduction of agency, the lived experience that is (re)constructed intersubjectively. Additionally (and a constant in Bourdieu’s work), there is a need to observe the principles of reflexivity, of being vigilant in attuning oneself to the relation between the researcher and the phenomenon at hand (see also Bourdieu, 2004b). Just like his research toolkit, his methodological approaches have been left open to experimentation, something that can be both daunting and liberating when trying to apply his key concepts to different contexts. Bourdieu himself did not follow one single line of inquiry, but experimented with many different ways of capturing and understanding the social world.

The organization of this book

A key objective of this collection is to illustrate the diversity of contexts within which Bourdieu’s ideas have been put to work. For the purpose of organization, these contexts have been grouped under the following headings:

• Part 1: Researching educational identities
• Part 2: Researching equity in education
• Part 3: Researching educational leadership and management
• Part 4: Researching teacher education.

Each of the four parts comprises a number of chapters that explore Bourdieu’s ideas and their applications from a range of theoretical and methodological angles, while also covering areas as distinct as digital scholarship, academic development, race and educational achievement, Chinese identity and English language teaching. The research included in the book has been carefully selected so that as wide an understanding of Bourdieu and his applicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction: Bourdieu and education research
• PART 1 Researching educational identities
• PART 2 Researching equity in education
• PART 3 Researching educational leadership and management
• PART 4 Researching teacher education
• Index