On Pierre Bourdieu

() - Paul DiMaggio

Journal: AmericanJournal of Sociology
Link::
DOI::
Links::
Tags:: #paper #SocialClass
Cite Key:: [@DiMaggio]

Abstract

The encyclopedicefforts of Pierre Bourdieu, the prolific directeur d'etudes at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, are beginning to reach readersin the Anglo-Saxonworld. Two of Bourdieu'smost importantworks-Outline of a Theory of Practice (hereafter, Outline) and Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (hereafter, Reproduction)-have recently been translatedinto English; an early work, The Algerians,was publishedin the 1960s; and a fourth volume, The Inheritors (Bourdieu 1979), is due out soon. Add to this the availability in translationof at least 15 of his articles as well as references to his writing in a growing number of British and Americanworks, and it is clear that Americansociologists now have access to a prodigiousand promisingtheoretical and empirical enterprise

Notes

"delineate the mechanisms of symbolic domination and control by which the existing social order is maintained in both preindustrial and modern social systems." (DiMaggio :15)

"Bourdieu identifies these relationships as basic to all social organization: Different classes and class fractions are engaged in a specifically symbolic struggle to impose the definition of the social world most in conformity with their interests. The field of ideological positions reproduces in transfigured form the field of social positions. They may carry on this struggle either directly in the symbolic conflicts of everyday life or indirectly through the struggle waged by the specialists in symbolic production (full time producers), in which the object at stake is the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence-that is to say, the power to impose (and even indeed to inculcate) instruments of knowledge and expression of social reality (taxonomies), which are arbitrary (but unrecognized as such). The field of symbolic production is a microcosm of the struggle between the classes. It is by serving their own interests in the struggle internal to the field of production (and to this extent alone) that these producers serve the interests of groups external to their field of production. [1977d, p. 115]" (DiMaggio :16)

"Since Bourdieu takes as the fundamental problem of sociology the means by which systems of domination persist and reproduce themselves without conscious recognition by a society's members, it follows that any social science based on the subjective perceptions of participants, or on commonsense classifications of social groups or social problems, can only reinforce and confirm the very domination he regards as problematic" (DiMaggio :16)

"By setting as his goal the acquisition of "praxeological knowledge" (1973b)-knowledge about the interaction of individual actors and objective structures-Bourdieu attempts to avoid the pitfalls of a "philosophy without subject" (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967), structural explanation resting on little more than the interpretative skill of its purveyor" (DiMaggio :17)

"Bourdieu's social system is one in which both society and the relatively autonomous fields that it includes are founded on hierarchies which obey similar laws. Hierarchies depend on the social arrangements that sustain and reproduce them. The persistence of these arrangements, says Bourdieu, itself depends on the systematic misrecognition of their oppressive nature by both dominators and dominated. This misrecognition is inculcated, in advanced societies, by differential socialization of children of different social classes;" (DiMaggio :17)

""Field" is a critical metaphor in Bourdieu's work. Inspired, at least in part, by the vector psychology of Kurt Lewin (Bourdieu 1971a)" (DiMaggio :17)

"field re-" (DiMaggio :17)

"fers to both the totality of actors and organizations involved in an arena of social or cultural production and the dynamic relationships among them." (DiMaggio :18)

"Every field, for Bourdieu, is an arena of conflict; social life itself is a constant struggle for position, as actors seek (consciously and unconsciously) to weave around the formidable constraints that social structure sets against them." (DiMaggio :18)

"capital need not be strictly economic." (DiMaggio :18)

"Bourdieu was among the first sociologists to identify the stratified system of mass higher education as a fundamental institution in the reproduction of class inequality from generation to generation" (DiMaggio :18)

"Transmitting knowledge in codes accessible only to those who, upon entering, already possess the linguistic and cultural capital required to appropriate it, school communication consigns the poor to failure and ensures the success of the well to do" (DiMaggio :19)

"habitus: "A system of lasting, transposable dispositions -which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems" (1971a, p. 83). The habitus is a kind of theoretical deus ex machina by means of which Bourdieu relates objective structure and individual activity" (DiMaggio :19)

"The tendency for working-class children to drop out of school, to have low educational aspirations, is seen as the product, not the cause, of the low statistical probability of their academic success" (DiMaggio :20)

""the causality of the probable" (1974a), is not unique to the school. The habitus, for example, governs the use of language in everyday interactions, "defining for a determinate agent the linguistic strategy that is adapted to his particular chances of profit, given his specific competence and his authority" (1977b, p. 655). By the same token, within the scientific field, a scientist's choice of problems and strategies-whether to build incrementally upon the work of others or to essay bold and risky investigations-is determined by calculations, conscious and unconscious, of the likely symbolic profit (1975, pp. 27-28)." (DiMaggio :20)

"Bourdieu is concerned with class struggle. But the struggles that concern him most are not battles between workers and capitalists but conflicts within the dominant class-between sectors rich in, respectively, economic and cultural capital." (DiMaggio :20)

"Increasingly, however, the children of the upper classes-managers and captains of industry-are also forced to rely on the school for the "credentialled cultural capital" which, supplemented by their social capital of networks and connections, can be reconverted into a high class position." (DiMaggio :20)

"In part, it is a consequence of the French literary tradition and of the fact that Bourdieu, like other' French sociologists of his generation, is a product of the philosophical training that engenders what (in another context) he refers to as "an almost obsessional preoccupation with epistemological problems" (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967, pp. 197-98)." (DiMaggio :21)

"A second problem has to do with Bourdieu's approach to explanation. In an ongoing polemic against empiricism's insensitivity to the systemic nature of objective social structure, Bourdieu rejects correlational analysis in favor of explanations that are thoroughly systematic. For these he posits a twofold test: that they be consistent with empirical findings; and that they be coherent, circular, inclusive, and, in effect, overdetermined (Bourdieu 1968b). Such a satisfactory system of proofs, he confesses, "inevitably appears as a vicious circle, inspired by the spirit of the system, to a positivist epistemology" (1968b, p. 687)." (DiMaggio :22)

"Most readers will find his method more useful in generating hypotheses than in confirming them." (DiMaggio :22)

"Bourdieu asserts that it is inculcated primarily by early childhood experience and that differences in habitus are based, in societies like France-, primarily on social class. Yet the habitus is also transformed by subsequent experience and is influenced by all aspects of the family setting. We are told that the initial habitus is durable but, since it is also transformable, we are never sure just what difference this durability makes, or under what circumstances it makes a difference for what phenomena." (DiMaggio :22)

"If the concept of habitus is promising but underdeveloped, Bourdieu's notion of "the causality of the probable" is even more problematic" (DiMaggio :23)

"Bourdieu seems to posit an almost exact correlation between individual intention and aspiration and the statistical probability for the group of which the individual is a member (Bourdieu 1974c; Reproduction" (DiMaggio :23)

"other points, he acknowledges that an actor's expectations are never synchronized precisely to objective probabilitie" (DiMaggio :23)

"There is a similar problem with Bourdieu's idea of "relative autonomy" of institutions (e.g., the school) or of fields (e.g., art or science). The insight itself-that institutions or fields are structured by their own histories, internal logic, and patterns of recruitment and reward as well as by external demands-is an important, if not a novel one. But the analysis of the determinants of the degree of "relative autonomy" of a field and the limits to that autonomy, which Bourdieu carries out in a comparison of the social contexts of the social and physical sciences (1975), needs to be extended to other realms. Such a specification, indeed, is crucial for any kind of Marxist or functionalist theory" (DiMaggio :23)

"Bourdieu criticizes the narrowly economic view of interest and calls for a "general science of the economy of practices, capable of treating all practices, including those purporting to be disinterested or gratuitous, and hence non-economic, as economic practices directed towards the maximizing of material or symbolic profit" (p. 183). What is more, he illustrates how this might be accomplished with a masterful analysis of symbolic and material exchange in Algerian Kabyle society. Yet in much of his other work, capital becomes less a potent and precise analytic tool than a weak figure of speech" (DiMaggio :23)

"very Marxist indeed" (DiMaggio :24)

"the "increase in the quantity of cultural capital that is objectified in machines, implements, or instruments . . . and hence the quantity of embodied cultural capital necessary to reproduce this objectified capital and to make it productive"" (DiMaggio :24)

"Bourdieu refers to the owners of capital as the "dominant fraction of the dominant class"; pursuit of cultural capital is seen as a means to economic ends. Although he is imprecise in his causal language, he seems to locate the cause of transformations in class reconversion strategies (and the consequent expansion of schooling) in the economic sector (ibid.)" (DiMaggio :24)

"analysis of the Kabyle, where he argues against a vulgar notion of homo economicus, the raison d'etre of the peasant's pursuit of symbolic capital (honor, prestige, respect) is its convertability into material assistance at plowing and harvest time. Thus, while Bourdieu confirms the reality of nonmaterial interests, the engine of change is in the material sphere (see Outline, pp. 182-83)." (DiMaggio :24)

"if Bourdieu is ultimately a materialist, his is a non-Marxian materialism." (DiMaggio :24)

"Class, for Bourdieu, is only roughly based on relationship to the means of production. The conflicts in which he is most interested are not between classes at all but between fractions of the dominant class" (DiMaggio :24)

"seems to lie in the divi" (DiMaggio :24)

"sion of labor. Class, for Bourdieu, is both a Durkheimian category of groups sharing experiences and collective representations, and a Weberian notion of sets of actors attempting to monopolize markets for different goods and services. Marx's influence appears more in the argument's style than in its substance" (DiMaggio :25)

"Classes do not seize power. In fact, there is no theory of the state. Instead we have aggregates of optimizers, united by habitus, pursuing parallel strategies toward similar, but not collective, ends" (DiMaggio :25)

"Constrained by habitus and objective reality, individuals are consigned to dart in and out between the cracks of social structure, never questioning the rules, seeking only to manipulate them: "Only a virtuoso with a perfect commanid of his 'art of living' can play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate in each case, to do that of which people will say 'There was nothing else to be done,' and do it the right way" (Outline, p. 8)." (DiMaggio :25)

"Bourdieu's is the world, and the problematic, of an anthropologist, not a revolutionary; of a Durkheimian, not a Marxist. All cultures are largely "arbitrary" in the sense that their members could adhere to a variety of different beliefs and practices and get on very well" (DiMaggio :25)

"When Bourdieu speaks of the "arbitrariness" of the dominant culture, he refers not to false consciousness but to the essential conditions of social order" (DiMaggio :25)

"More generally, the theory of cultural capital calls attention to the importance of studying the role of noncognitive traits in school experience." (DiMaggio :26)

"Bourdieu's choice of the family, rather than the individual, as the appropriate unit for analysis in mobility studies deserves elaboration in the American context, particularly in studies of the upper class." (DiMaggio :26)

"Methodologically, it suggests the importance of refined occupational categories and finer distinctions among aesthetic genres than those used thus far (see DiMaggio and Useem 1978b)." (DiMaggio :27)