1
Introduction
Pierre Bourdieuâs influence in sociology today is enormous. It might even be said, perhaps a little audaciously, that itâs enough to not only rival that of the traditional âclassicsâ of the discipline but maybe even, in some cases, surpass it. Part of the reason for his impact is the staggering number of core sociological topics that he researched and wrote on, from class, culture and education to gender and the family through law, politics and the state. The fact that he worked hard, and not so long ago, to foster a likeminded research community or âschoolâ that could continue his mission without his direct input may also have helped. But the main reason Bourdieu looms so large in contemporary sociology is quite simple: he developed an over-arching framework that is distinct, easily applied across diverse topics and shown time and again to be immensely productive. A coherent and recognisable set of concepts can be and has been drawn on to make sense of life in London or Lima, to consistently explain the tiniest of routine behaviours and the largest of social changes and to illuminate the general workings of contemporary society and the long-term historical processes that brought it into being. They generate endless hypotheses for rigorous investigation by research-oriented scholars while providing answers to some of the most profound and contentious questions concerning the nature of human existence.
If testament were needed of Bourdieuâs towering influence, other than the thousands of citations across the social sciences and humanities, then the sheer volume of introductions to his thought should do. They started appearing in the 1990s, while he was still alive, multiplied after the turn of the millennium, as his status grew, and still excite publishers looking for popular additions to their expanding catalogues to this day. Many more are surely in the pipeline as I write. Some of these introductions consider his work in relation to a specific topic area, especially ones he has been particularly influential on such as education and culture (e.g. Fowler, 1997; Grenfell and James, 1998; Robbins, 2000; Swartz, 2013a), while others try to be a little broader in scope (e.g. Harker et al. 1990; Robbins, 1991; Swartz, 1997; Webb et al. 2002; Grenfell, 2004, 2008; Schirato and Roberts, 2018). Some of them are largely appreciative (e.g. Swartz, 1997), others are openly and intensely critical (e.g. Lane, 2000; Jenkins, 2002). But all of them have one thing in common: they confine themselves to the thought of the man himself, to his arguments and ideas alone and the criticisms that can be or have been made of them. They often pay specific attention to his biography, the historical context and development of his ideas, the intellectual influences on his concepts and how his arguments compare with those of other strands of thought.
All very good. The thing is, however, that Bourdieuâs concepts and ideas have been taken up by so many sociologists after his death, extended and elaborated in relation to so many topics he never considered, updated to take account of so many changes he barely witnessed and pushed in such different directions by those claiming to be inspired by him that confining ourselves to the output of the man himself is no longer enough on its own. There is, I would argue, a style of sociology that is rooted in Bourdieuâs thought but not reducible to it, a tradition or strand of work with common starting points and shared language but diverse branches and interests, and a weighty body of work full of novel concepts and applications which potentially adds up to a wide-ranging view of the world but which is a little fragmented and occasionally self-contradicting. Just as no one would dream of reducing what goes under the label of Marxism today to the thought of Marx alone, as necessary as it still is to have a clear understanding of what the man himself wrote, so it seems increasingly difficult to justify sticking to Bourdieuâs works alone.
This book, then, is a little different from the introductions that have gone before. It is not an overview of Bourdieuâs sociology, but an overview of Bourdieusian sociology. Bourdieuâs own writings and analyses of 20th-century France are obviously the starting point because they are the source of the guiding philosophy, the core conceptual tools and the elementary theses about the world. These and their intellectual backstory will be outlined as clearly and comprehensively as possible, with his more notoriously difficult and misunderstood notions put into plain language and even minor concepts or themes given due consideration. Yet the task is also to document, clarify and examine the ways in which others have used and extended his ideas to make sense of new times, other nations or subjects he hardly tackled. If Bourdieuâs writings form the stout trunk of a style of sociology, then we need to trace not only the roots and features of the bole but the boughs and spurs it has sprouted too. Those coming to Bourdieu for the first time should hopefully be enlightened, and those critical of Bourdieu challenged, but I am especially keen to encourage those interested in using Bourdieuâs concepts to be aware of not just the assumptions grounding them, many of which are overlooked far too often, but also what is already going on among like-minded researchers working in their areas of interest. For this reason, I prefer to style the book as a guide rather than an introduction â a comprehensive tour of Bourdieu-sian sociology, its key procedural principles, its lesser-known notions and its various applications and developments that might just help others find their way through the dense thicket.
The account of Bourdieusian sociology I give is largely positive. This is no âcritical introductionâ aiming to use Bourdieu as a foil for launching an alternative perspective or flagging problems that seem unresolvable. I do, however, venture beyond bare exposition at various points to engage in four forms of analysis. First, and most basically, I seek to undermine some of the most popular critiques aimed at Bourdieu simply by putting as clearly as possible what he and others inspired by him have actually argued. Second, there is often some need to adjudicate between different applications and developments of Bourdieuâs concepts and arguments. Sometimes researchers claiming to use or test them have actually misread Bourdieu, or are unaware of the broader philosophy in which they are embedded, leading to questionable conclusions or conceptual confusion, and sometimes scholars have devised new concepts that are at odds with one another.1 Even Bourdieu sometimes seemed to contradict himself, in some cases because he changed his mind on something but in others because he simply fudged his argument â he was human, after all, and shouldnât be automatically assumed to have had the last word on anything. Some might be content with simply documenting the mess, but my impulse is to reframe and reconcile where possible so as to provide as coherent and unified an account as possible. This is done with a view to maintaining the integrity of the concepts and worldview at stake â to guard against vague, partial or mistaken uses of terms which threaten to undermine the fruitfulness of the framework by making it imprecise or muddled.
Third, there are a few places where I try to clarify the differences between Bourdieusian sociology and some other schools of thought and propose the limits of the latter. This is especially the case regarding the philosophical underpinnings of the enterprise since these are not always well known. These pointers are suggestive rather than definitive, and would undoubtedly need further demonstration and elaboration to satisfy the experts on the different thinkers or topics, but my priority is to clarify what Bourdieu and Bourdieusians have argued and only sketch the main points of divergence or disagreement because this should be more useful for those who want to actually take up the Bourdieusian toolkit.
Finally, I try to acknowledge some of the genuine gaps and limits of Bourdieuâs work and the work of those inspired by him. Some of these are theoretical, boiling down to Bourdieu exaggerating a few points or not having quite enough concepts to capture the rich tapestry of social life. Some of them are important substantive themes that neither he nor anyone influenced by him has yet fully addressed. Occasionally the theoretical and the substantive limits are entwined. In both cases, however, rather than simply note the holes, shrug and move on I make some effort to plug them â to offer workable solutions or provide a tentative account of what a particular theme might look like from a Bourdieusian point of view. I draw on the arguments of others to do so, but here, more than anywhere, is where the approach outlined in this book is coloured by my own interests and interpretation of Bourdieu â an interpretation which stems from a certain research trajectory, which emphasises certain influences on Bourdieu more than others and which uses that to look for compatible ideas from other traditions to fill in the blanks (see Atkinson, 2010a, 2016, 2018). This interpretation can be summed up in my characterisation of Bourdieusian sociology as a kind of ârelational phenomenologyâ.
There have been all kinds of efforts to label Bourdieuâs approach something other than simply âBourdieuâs sociologyâ, or even âBourdieusian sociologyâ, largely because it helps foster the idea that there is an intellectual framework separable from the individual who first devised it. Bourdieu himself suggested the terms âgenetic structuralismâ, or âstructural constructivismâ, but neither of those phrases has ever really taken off. Others sometimes refer to it as âsocial praxeologyâ, âpractice theoryâ, âcritical sociologyâ, ârelational sociologyâ or âreflexive sociologyâ, but those names are not quite specific enough since many other people could lay claim to them too. Still others, especially in the US, prefer to call it âfield theoryâ, but thatâs too reductive, since it foregrounds just one of Bourdieuâs concepts, and risks submerging it into a broader and vaguer movement of thought.
Lois McNay (2008: 12) first suggested the label ârelational phenomenologyâ to describe Bourdieuâs approach and it strikes me as apt. Phenomenology is a school of thought rooted in philosophy and interested above all in perception â how we see the world, that is. It was founded by Edmund Husserl, first brought into sociology by Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and has two major branches. âStaticâ phenomenology is concerned with what is going on in perception at any one time, covering things like the nature of attention, motivation and intuition. âGeneticâ phenomenology is the study of how we come to see the world as we do â by what process, in other words, do we come to know and evaluate, and therefore act toward, the objects, symbols and signs around us as we do? Biographical experience is the key, to put it simply, and the early sociological phenomenologists tried to flesh this out by tying that biographical experience to the collection of ârolesâ defining a society such as parent/child, expert/layperson and so on. Bourdieu, for his part, took a different tack. He drew on many sources of intellectual inspiration, as we will see, but phenomenology was central, and a broad understanding of phenomenology at that â covering not just Husserl but other major figures such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gaston Bachelard. It is, in short, one of the two pillars of Bourdieuâs thought.2 Unlike the early importers, however, Bourdieu roots the genesis of how we come to know and evaluate the world and its contents in a very specific understanding of social structures which he described as relational. Precisely what that means will become clear later, but for now we can note that Bourdieu saw it as the main insight of a school of thought known as structuralism, and it forms the other pillar of his thought. In my view, therefore, the term ârelational phenomenologyâ encapsulates the two fundamental elements of Bourdieuâs thought and forms the baseline for any additions or adjudications I offer in the pages that follow.
The path ahead
The book is split into three parts. In Part I we cover the often-neglected philosophical foundations of relational phenomenology, focussing on the three starting points that give it its coherence. The first of these is epistemology, which refers to the conceptualisation of how we can know the world, whether and in what ways we can talk of âtruthâ and whether objectivity is ever possible (Chapter 2). Here I will elaborate Bourdieuâs position of âapplied rationalismâ and clarify what it looks like in practice. The second is what is sometimes called philosophical anthropology, which refers to theories of human nature, including the ultimate drivers of our behaviour (Chapter 3), and here I will draw out the importance of recognition and relationalism to Bourdieusian sociology. The third is the philosophy of mind and action, revolving around the question of whether our endeavours are freely chosen or determined and covering the relationship between thought, the body and our activity in the world (Chapter 4). We will encounter Bourdieuâs famous notions of practice and habitus, break them down and think them through. In all three chapters I end up making the case that there is something elusive, the pursuit of which is beneficial. This wasnât the intention when I set out to write the book, but it emerged as I researched and reflected on the principles of relational phenomenology. In the case of epistemology the elusive thing is objective truth, in the case of human nature it is pure love, and in the case of human action it is freedom.
Part II begins to flesh out, step-by-step, the image of social relations and societies built on the foundations established in Part I. The starting point is the concept of field and all its associated terminology. I first introduce the notion in relatively abstract terms, walking the reader through its many elements (Chapter 5). We consider some of the ways in which fields can vary and relate to one another, and, drawing on the work of others, I suggest a couple of terms for making sense of clusters of fields and of how fields relate to our everyday interactions and networks. These are worlds, universes, circuits and social orders. After that, we move on to cover the substantive features of three large-scale fields or spaces examined by Bourdieu and others: the âsocial spaceâ relating to classes, the sexual field and the ethno-racial/national field (Chapter 6). This provides us with an opportunity to reflect further on Bourdieuâs slippery notion of market. Then we begin to add finer detail to the picture by considering the range of smaller fields and subfields that have been credibly identified in contemporary societies, how they work and how they hang together (Chapter 7). Bourdieuâs work on the âfield of powerâ is crucial here, though I also give some attention to the lesser-known and more contentious theme of âmicro-fieldsâ. Finally, I turn to consider something Bourdieu himself rarely mentioned but which others have raised either implicitly or explicitly â and here I should admit that I am one of those who has pushed it explicitly. This is the effect on individuals of being situated within multiple fields at the same time (Chapter 8). I will also rescue a term from the wilderness of Bourdieuâs writings to help conceptualise the effects of this, namely social surface, and mention a couple of my own too. Included here is discussion of the much-debated Bourdieusian conceptualisation of gender because, to my mind, it only makes full sense when we think systematically about lives being shaped by the demands and desires stemming from more than one field.
Part III focuses on the historical dimension of relational phenomenology, filling in the story of how contemporary societies came to be as they are and how lives unfold today. We start with a broad explanation of how the modern Western world emerged from feudalism, paying close attention to Bourdieuâs writings on the origins of the nation state and national fields along with it (Chapter 9). I also try to fill in some gaps by suggesting a tentative account of the rise of capitalism. This then leads into an overview of Bourdieuâs famous theory of education and how it ultimately serves to reproduce inequality over the generations in contemporary societies (Chapter 10). I aim to outline this difficult and misunderstood theory as clearly as possible, to show how it was designed to make sense of the persistence of inequality through dramatic social change and to detail some of the ways in which it has been criticised, updated and modified by the army of researchers influenced in one way or another by Bourdieu. We end with a topic that has become a major concern within sociology and politics in the last thirty years or so: globalisation (Chapter 11). Bourdieu himself addressed globalisation only briefly toward the end of his career, and in a way which was criticised and sometimes controversial, but others inspired by Bourdieu have since extended his concepts to the global level to make sense of the causes and consequences of worldwide interconnection. Themes include the circulation of ideas, objects and people across borders and the emergence of transnational fields.
But who was Pierre Bourdieu?
Iâve stressed that this book is about Bourdieusian sociology rather than Bourdieu alone; that itâs about a framework for research and analysis rather than one manâs specific contribution. We do still need to know a little about the man, however, because itâs important for appreciating where the basic orientation and concepts came from. A full sociological biography of Bourdieu would, in fact, be a valuable undertaking in itself, but thatâs for someone else. We will stick to the fundamentals instead, drawing from Bourdieuâs own self-analysis (esp. SSA but also IOW: Chap. 1) and some other sketches from people who knew him (Swartz, 1997; Robbins, 2000, 2002, 2012; Grenfell, 2004, 2006; Heilbron, 2015). Those who want more detail can chase up those sources.
Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a remote village in the BĂ©arn region of Southwest France and came from a fairly modest background. His father was of farming stock but became a postal worker and, by all accounts, had far-left political sympathies, a down-to-earth attitude and an empathy with the oppressed. His mother was part of a distinguished farming family in the area, but she was of a branch of âpoor relationsâ and was considered to have fallen even further in marrying Bourdieuâs father. She nevertheless maintained a concern for respectability and propriety in all things, including education, according to Bourdieu.
Bourdieu was schooled locally, where he excelled, and then at a prestigious and selective boarding school in Paris. In 1951 he entered the Ăcole Normale SupĂ©rieure (ENS), an elite higher education institution in Paris. The original function of the ENS was to train secondary school teachers, but it had long since become the typical route for many of Franceâs intellectuals and academics, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the last of whom was Bourdieuâs direct contemporary at the school. Most students there were from priv...
