Bourdieu: The Next Generation

The Development of Bourdieu's Intellectual Heritage in Contemporary UK Sociology

Jenny Thatcher, Nicola Ingram, Ciaran Burke, Jessie Abrahams, Jenny Thatcher, Nicola Ingram, Ciaran Burke, Jessie Abrahams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138596351
• eBook ISBN: 9781317436232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book will give unique insight into how a new generation of Bourdieusian researchers apply Bourdieu to contemporary issues. It will provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In each chapter, individual authors discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author to reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu's work, why it speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking. Many of the authors were introduced to Bourdieu's works after his death. The research problems which the individual authors tackle are contextualised in a different time and space to the one Bourdieu occupied when he was developing his conceptual framework. This book will demonstrate how his concepts can be applied as "thinking tools" to understand contemporary social reality. Throughout Bourdieu's career, he argued that sociologists need to create an epistemological break, to abandon our common sense – or as much as we can – and to formulate findings from our results. In essence, we are putting Bourdieu to work to provide a structural constructivist approach to social reality anchored through empirical reflexivity.

Foreword

Derek Robbins

A.H. Halsey and professional sociology

In 2004, A.H. Halsey (1923–2014) published his A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature and Society (Halsey, 2004). Chapter 4 offered an account of ‘British Post-war Sociologists’, a first version of which had been published in the European Journal of Sociology in 1982 (Halsey, 1982). Halsey begins by imagining what an American social scientist might have observed in respect of the condition of the social sciences in Britain after the Second World War. At the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the visitor's eye

might have been caught by about a dozen students of sociology, similar in age but of a style and outlook very different from that of their Oxford contemporaries. They took their degrees, and busied themselves around Houghton Street with a novel aspiration. They wanted to become professional sociologists.

(Halsey, 2004, p.70)

Supposing that this imaginary observation occurred at about 1950, Halsey proceeds to recall his encounter at Nuffield College, Oxford 15 years later (i.e., c.1965) with Raymond Aron, who was visiting from Paris. In an exchange about the condition of British sociology, Halsey reports that Aron commented: ‘The trouble is that British sociology is essentially an attempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of the Labour Party’ (Halsey, 2004, p.70). A further 15 years later (i.e. in c.1980), Ernest Gellner suggested that Halsey should write an account of what happened to ‘what turned out to be the first group of career sociologists in Britain’ (Halsey, 2004, p.70). According to Halsey, the questions that Gellner wanted him to attempt to answer were sociological or socio-historical: ‘What had been their political and intellectual concerns? What formed their unprecedented and unlikely occupational ambition? And what happened to them and their intentions?’ (Halsey, 2004, p.70).

Halsey knew that Gellner was prompting him to write an account of those who had graduated with him in sociology at ‘“the School” in the early 1950s’ (Halsey, 2004, p.70). Besides himself, Halsey listed 12 graduates between 1950 and 1952 who went on to become professors in departments of sociology in British universities. As he puts it, his article/chapter was about ‘an LSE group that became a significant part of the sociological establishment by the mid-1960s’ (Halsey, 2004, p.71). Halsey tried to characterise the group. His first comment is that ‘most were provincials: provincial in social origin, provincial in political preoccupation, and provincial in their early jobs’ (Halsey, 2004, p.72). He proceeded to elaborate, offering a series of rather cryptic assessments: ‘The ten natives were born in the slump years between the Wars on the periphery of English society’ (Halsey, 2004, p.72); ‘Most, if not all, had ‘won the scholarship’. There was only one woman (Olive Banks). There were no ‘“public” school boys among them. They went to their grammar schools’ (Halsey, 2004, p.73); ‘Few, if any, of them had any notion while at school of going on to a university’ (Halsey, 2004, p.73); ‘None of the group was active in the student union or LSE Labour club politics’ (Halsey, 2004, p.75); and ‘They all read Max Weber's two essays on Science and Politics as vocations and chose the former for themselves while in no way abandoning their political enthusiasms’ (Halsey, 2004, p.75).

Halsey explained the aspirations of the cohort of students by reference to the influence of David Glass and Edward Shils. The first was committed to the analysis and eradication of social inequality while the second ‘presented classical European sociology to his students in an American voice which simply assumed that undergraduates would become graduate students and subsequently professionals’ (Halsey, 2004, p.78). Halsey presents this as a dual influence, which combined, for the group, to reconcile political dispositions and professional aspirations. As Halsey summarises: ‘Ambition seemed therefore to fit both their political outlook and their personal intellectual abilities’ (Halsey, 2004, p.76). In the 1960s, 28 new university departments of sociology were created in the UK. Opportunities matched aspirations for the LSE cohort. Halsey proceeded to make some comments on the correlation between the social backgrounds of his contemporaries and their intellectual affiliations. Some of his generalisations seem rooted in personal autobiography. He contends, for instance, that ‘the LSE post-war sociologists were committed to a socialism that had no need for Marxism and no time for communism precisely because it was so deeply rooted in working-class provincialism’ (Halsey, 2004, p.84). He concludes that ‘the work of the LSE group in the 1950s added significantly to knowledge of the changing social structure of Britain’ (Halsey, 2004, p.87). He argues that this work had three main characteristics. It was, first, ‘a sociological expression of autobiographical experience – a projection of the country they had learned in their families, schools, work places, and local communities’ (Halsey, 2004, p.87). Second, as Aron had suggested, it was ‘a sociology of the programme of Labour Party reform’ (Halsey, 2004, p.87), and, third, ‘it was the assimilation of international sociology and its application to the understanding of British society’ (Halsey, 2004, p.87).

Underpinning these three characteristics was one so fundamental that Halsey took it for granted. His account of the LSE group is redolent of a tacit acquiescence in a particular conception of the social function of academics or, especially, professional sociologists, which is never questioned sociologically. Halsey operated throughout his career with a model of society that supposed the function of the professional sociologist is to provide ‘knowledge of the changing structure of Britain’ generated within academic institutions that are ring-fenced, or themselves protected from the identified symptoms of change. In spite of his ‘leftwing’ political allegiance, his model of society was conservative. Whether or not it is strictly true, as he claims, that the ‘LSE group’ had all read Weber's essays on science and politics as vocations, it is certainly the case that he attempted to keep the two spheres distinct in his practice. It was as a professional sociologist that he advised Anthony Crosland, the Labour Secretary of State for Education, on the introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960s, and that, for many years, he edited Social Trends, which endeavoured to provide social facts for the guidance of policy-makers. The nature of his stance can be illustrated by reference to the analyses of his contemporary, the social historian Harold Perkin (1926–2004). Perkin followed his account of The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (1969) with a sequel, published in 1989 as The Rise of Professional Society. England since 1880. This, in turn, was followed in 1996 by The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World. In The Rise of Professional Society, Perkin represented the period between 1880 and 1914 in England as ‘the zenith of class society’. Perkin's interpretation of the historical period from 1910 when there were two general elections and 1926, which was the year of the General Strike, is that English society was in the process of choosing between a structure that would sustain the class conflicts of the end of the previous century and one that would reach an accommodation between these class rivalries in generating a new social consensus. He called the new social consensus ‘corporatism’, which, he claimed, was the ‘institutional vehicle’ of professional society. The establishment of the Welfare State was, for Perkin, indicative of the emergence in the post-1945 period of both a ‘corporate state’ and a ‘corporate society’. He claimed that ‘Between 1945 and the early 1970s professional society reached a plateau of attainment’ (Perkin, 1989, p.405), but he also realised that within the same period there were the seeds of decay: ‘the professional ideal split into two rival camps which then began to attack each other’ (Perkin, 1989, p.437). The split was an opposition between ‘private’ and ‘public’ ideals. A key focus of disagreement was in relation to ‘equality’. On the one hand, the public sector professionals advocated an equitable distribution of the nation's wealth throughout the population. On the other hand, the private sector managerialists were in favour of equal opportunities for all based on merit. This latter programme would not secure the equal distribution of income promised by the former. Perkin's final chapter was entitled ‘The backlash against professional society’. What he perceived was not so much a reaction against professional society but, rather, a domination, which was becoming entrenched, of the private sector over the public sector. He observed the collapse of the ‘Keynesian-Beveridgean consensus’ (Perkin, 1989, p.474) and identified the growing influence of ‘free market ideology’ emanating from the Institute of Economic Affairs suggesting economic remedies the Conservatives proceeded to apply ‘when they won office, on a minority of the popular vote, in 1979’ (Perkin, 1989, p.474)¹.

This was an immanent analysis of the context within which Halsey undertook his social research. Halsey and Martin Trow began in 1963 the study that was to be published in 1971 as The British Academics. The Report of the Committee on Higher Education of 1963 (the ‘Robbins Report’) contained an appendix (III) entitled ‘Teachers in higher education’, produced by Sir Claus Moser, which provided a statistical analysis of the profession at the time. Halsey and Trow set themselves the task of taking this enquiry further ‘in order to provide a sociological portrait of the academic professions, describing and analysing their collective self-conceptions in relation to the programme of institutional expansion in which the Robbins Report would involve them’ (Halsey & Trow, 1971, p.26). The Robbins Report inaugurated an expansion in student numbers in UK higher education but, in Perkin's terms, it made its recommendations on the basis of ‘private sector’ ideals. What has come to be known as the ‘Robbins principle’ was precisely one of equality of opportunity – that, as Perkin summarises it, ‘everyone who was qualified and wished to enter higher education should be provided with a place’ (Perkin, 1989, p.452). The question Halsey and Trow asked themselves at the outset of their research was, ‘How would academic men in Britain adapt themselves and their institutions to a period of expansion and redefinition of higher education?’ (Halsey & Trow, 1971, p.25). In other words, their problematic presupposed the structural functionalist necessity of the existence of a class of academic professionals. The account of their findings in The British Academics reinforces this presupposition. They begin with an a priori definition of the British university – ‘It could be described as an organisation for community where the community is that of scholars’ (Halsey & Trow, 1971, p.28) – and they analyse the characteristics of this predefined group of ‘scholars’ on the assumption that they share a common social identity as professionals. They introduce their findings on the political attitudes of this professional group in Chapter 15 by summarising the cumulative effect of their previous discussions in the following way: ‘We have described the academic professions in Britain as having a distinctive class (Chapter 9) and status (Chapter 10) position which has evolved out of changes in the social and institutional circumstances of intellectual work in the course of modernisation’ (Halsey & Trow, 1971, p.399).

Thirty new ‘polytechnics’ were established in 1969/70. The British Academics included an annex that considered the situation of the Colleges of Advanced Technology in the process of receiving university charters, but the emergence of the public sector of higher education escaped the attention of Halsey and Trow. Halsey endeavoured to remedy this deficiency in his Decline of Donnish Dominion. The British Academic Professionals in the Twentieth Century, published in 1992. This new book was based on ‘three surveys of the British senior common rooms² in 1964, 1976, and 1989’ (Halsey, 1992, vii). Whereas The British Academics examined the attitudes of staff in post towards the proposed increase of student numbers, Decline of Donnish Dominion attempted to analyse the views of staff at historical moments during the process of institutional expansion. Writing in 1992, Halsey reported that the total number of students in British higher education approached one million and that 55 per cent of these were in polytechnics and colleges, 9 per cent in the Open University and 36 per cent in the universities (Halsey, 1992, p.3). In 1971, Halsey and Trow had specified that they chose to analyse the academic profession even though they ‘could have tackled the problem of the changing role of the intellectual in modern society’ (Halsey & Trow, 1971, p.25). They argued that their consideration of the profession would inevitably answer questions raised in respect of the alternative question. In responding to the expanded university system, Halsey, in 1992, fatally persisted in continuing his analysis of the profession, failing to acknowledge the new situation demanded that the alternative question should now become dominant. He was ideologically sympathetic to the move towards mass participation in higher education but, in the end, he was not willing to accept that a democratisation of social knowledge was a necessary corollary of such a movement. In his conclusion, he makes fun of Noel Annan's representation of the ‘golden age of the don’ (Halsey, 1992, p.267), and he recognises the programme of expansion of the 1960s ‘assuaged the guilt of exclusion of the mass of working-class compatriots’ (Halsey, 1992, p.267) by giving a select minority of that mass (the ‘LSE group’) unpre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Index