Bourdieu’s Field Theory and the Social Sciences

Operationalising and extending Bourdieu’s field analysis

James Albright, Deborah Hartman, Jacqueline Widin, James Albright, Deborah Hartman, Jacqueline Widin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9789811053849
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811053856
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Highlighting the conceptual work at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, this cutting edge collection operationalizes Bourdieusian concepts in field analysis. Offering a unique range of explorations and reflections utilizing field analysis, the eighteen chapters by prominent Bourdieusian scholars and early career scholars synthesize key insights and challenges scholars face when going 'beyond the fields we know'. The chapters offer examples from discipline contexts as diverse as cultural studies, poetry, welfare systems, water management, education, journalism and surfing and provide demonstrations of theorizing within practical examples of field analysis. One of the foremost social philosophers and sociologists of the twentieth century, Bourdieu is widely known in cultural studies and education and his approaches are increasingly being taken up in health, social work, anthropology, family studies, journalism, communication studies and other disciplines where an analysis of the interplay between individuals and social structures is relevant. With its unique interdisciplinary focus, this book provides a useful guide to doing field analysis and working with Bourdieusian methods research, as well as key reading for methodology courses at post-graduate level.

© The Author(s) 2018

James Albright, Deborah Hartman and Jacqueline Widin (eds.)Bourdieu’s Field Theory and the Social Scienceshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5385-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: On Doing Field Analysis

James Albright¹ and Deborah Hartman¹

(1)

University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia

Keywords

BourdieuField TheoryField AnalysisMethodsReflexivity

End Abstract

Adopting Bourdieu’s reflexive approach to any object of study carries with it certain risks. His reputation as one of the pre-eminent sociologists of the latter half of the twentieth century invites disputation, which has risen, at least in part, from how his theorising matured over this time , the range of research he undertook, and how his work had been translated and appreciated in Anglophone circles. In this book, contemporary researchers will find productive, “generous” and, equally, “generative” interpretations and applications of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology that engage and build upon it. Interpretations and critical appraisals of Bourdieu’s work continue to provide constructive openings for research across many fields of inquiry.

Attending to how researchers employ Bourdieusian field analysis is instructive (Albright 2006). As outlined in our Forward, this book’s contributors provide descriptions of their work in operationalising Bourdieusian concepts within field analysis. This introduction provides readers with an understanding of field with specific reference to the mature Bourdieu’s conceptual and analytical moves in The social structures of the economy (2005), On the state: Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992 (2014), and elsewhere. In the first, he argues and demonstrates through a meticulous examination of the buying and selling of houses how field analysis uncovers the unexamined assumptions of traditional economist explanations of the market. Bourdieu reveals how the State constructs the market through housing policy that favours dominant actors over others the market, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. He describes how the State consecrates symbolic constructions, which constitute, in a strong sense, for buyers and sellers the relative value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns.

Field emerged in Bourdieusian reflexive sociology as conceptual armature that attempts to overcome inhibiting binarisms of objectivity and subjectivity , resistance and agency , structuralism and phenomenology . Bourdieu’s project was to ground a reflexive analysis and critique constituted within his concept of social fields to construct a science with an attitude (Ladwig 1996). His reflexive sociology places a methodological obligation on its practitioners to address their own positionality within the field and social space in general. Theorising “science” as historically and socially constituted practice , field analysis admits no a priori epistemologically privileged positions to claims about knowledge and the construction of knowledge.

Of particular relevance in undertaking field analysis is Bourdieu’s critique of the scholastic disposition . He argued that the freedom and privilege to indulge in scholarly language games and contempt for ordinary language, largely invisible to scholars, to the extent that the gulf between the logic of practice and the logic of scholarly fields is justified and perpetuated in intellectual fields that purport to neutrally and scientifically analyse practice (Bourdieu 2000). Bourdieu long posited that the efforts of the enquiring subject to negate himself as an empirical subject , to disappear behind the anonymous record of his operations and his results, are doomed in advance to failure (Bourdieu 1988, p. 25).

For Bourdieu, actors in any field employ two types of knowledge of the field: the first is a logic of practice , or a practical feel for the game—an ability to understand and negotiate one’s cultural field. The second is a reflexive relation to that field and one’s own practices within it. For Bourdieu, the logic of practice, although allowing people to be quite successful in a field, can also be quite limiting, as it is formed largely by the constraints of the field itself. While a player may have a good feel for what is happening in his or her field, and know the written and unwritten conventions governing it, and what is appropriate in certain circumstances, what is possible is largely determined by these constraints. Yet, the field is constantly being transformed by the agents’ actions. Bourdieu reflexive stance requires researchers to examine their social and cultural origins and categories, positions in the field, and a move away from an “intellectual bias” or tendency to see practices as ideas to be contemplated rather than as conceptual complications to be resolved. For Bourdieu, reflexivity is “the systematic exploration of the unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and pre-determine the thought” (Webb et al. 2002, p.75). One of the clearest examples of Bourdieu commencing an investigation in this manner can be found in his first lecture on the State (Bourdieu 2014, pp. 3–22). He begins by examining the the values, assumptions, questions and approaches to understanding what may be understood as the state, as an “unthinkable object”.

Further, Bourdieu (1990) argued that Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy assists in overcoming researchers’ tendencies to unquestioningly reproduce the common sense of the field. In this regard, in his “Lecture 28”, illustrated by how the French Revolution may be understood in the development of the modern state , Bourdieu posits that the division between sociology and history is not justified and that all sociology should be historical (Bourdieu 2014, pp. 322–353). Bourdieu’s (1993) sociology is reflexive when radical doubt is combined with genealogical analysis.

Through self-reflexivity and genealogy , researchers construct the properties of fields, understand how they emerged, and name how they affect agents’ relational positions, actions and interests . Yet, in order to practice this kind of methodology , researchers walk a fine line between the logic of discovery and the logic of validation. Often discovery is seen as a matter of chance, based on intuition, while validation is considered scientific, distinct from interest and intuition. Yet for Bourdieu, the discovery moment is every bit as scientific as the validation processes. Discovery comes out of social philosophy —it is the basis of speculation which leads to the hypothesis and therefore the research project or program. Furthermore, empiricism is not necessarily scientific, unless the theorising that grounds it is sound. Researchers can easily forget the importance of different contexts and rely on untested assumptions. Bourdieu’s relational approach to social research takes pains to show how invention and validation, collectives and individuals, and systems and individual agents are related to and dependent upon each other, rather than privileging one over the other (Webb et al. 2002).

Field analysis broadly consists of three methodological moves. First, the field being studied needs to be related to the broader field of power . Second, the structure of relations between positions taken up by individuals and groups as they contest for legitimating needs to be identified. The forms of economic and cultural capital that are up for grabs and the distribution of capitals within the field need to be described; that is, dominant and subordinate positions within the field are sketched. The difficulty here is that these relations can shift from site to site within the field. Third, the class habitus that individuals bring to the positions they take up in the field and the social trajectories they take up in it need to be identified (Swartz 1997, pp. 141–142).

First Move: Relations to the Broader Field of Power

Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology does not totalise its objects of analysis. Identifying the positions, values and discourses in a field does not mean that everything is known about that field. Indeed, Bourdieu’s original concept of field is as a conceptual heuristic , existing only relationally, as a set of possibilities that could be made by people or institutions engaged in a particular activity (Grenfell and James 2004; Nash 1999). He defined a field as a meta-theoretical open concept that circumscribes the structure of a space within which agents operate. As a metaphor for social space , Bourdieu’s concept of field grew out of his work on French intellectual and artistic worlds as a way of drawing attention to specific interests governing those cultural worlds (Bourdieu 1984; Swartz 1997; Webb et al. 2002). In two of his early studies, he applied the concept to the French education and higher education systems (Bourdieu 1988, 1996; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Concisely, a field is

[A] network or configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations, they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology , etc.). (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 97)

In earlier work, Bourdieu and Nice (1980, p. 147) described practices as being over-determined. Struggles within fields produce cultural distinctions that are at the same time social distinctions, (re)producing social patterns and conflict from one field to another. Bourdieu contended these effects are more structural than intentional. Inequitable systems of difference for individuals and groups are inscribed in the practical logic of habitus that underlies the connection across fields “…[s]ince fields vary historically in their degree of autonomy from the economy, the polity, and class structure , no universal classification system connecting the various fields can be established” (Swartz 1997, pp. 134–135).

Bourdieu’s genealogical approach contends that there is an historical tendency for fields to increase their autonomy from the field of power , which is played against the dominance of econ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: On Doing Field Analysis
• 1. Field as Both a Conceptual and Empirical Object of Analysis
• 2. Positionality, Struggle and Legitimation
• 3. Explorations utilising Bourdieu and Other Methodological Approaches
• Backmatter