THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PIERRE BOURDIEU
Edited by THOMAS MEDVETZ and
JEFFREY J. SALLAZ
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Medvetz, Thomas, editor | Sallaz, Jeffrey J , 1974– editor
Title: The Oxford handbook of Pierre Bourdieu / edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017031151 (print) | LCCN 2017041846 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199357208 (updf) | ISBN 9780199357192 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190874612 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930–2002. | Sociology. | Social sciences Philosophy. Classification: LCC HM479.B68 (ebook) | LCC HM479.B68 O94 2018 (print) | DDC 301.092 dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031151
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
1. Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu, a Twentieth-Century Life
THOMAS MEDVETZ AND JEFFREY J. SALLAZ
PART I REGIONAL PATTERNS OF APPROPRIATION
2. Bourdieu’s International Circulation: An Exercise in Intellectual Mapping
MARCO SANTORO, ANDREA GALLELLI, AND BARBARA GRÜNING
3. On the Reception of Bourdieu’s Sociology in the World’s Most Equal Societies
JOHS HJELLBREKKE AND ANNICK PRIEUR
4. Bourdieu’s Uneven Influence on Anglophone Canadian Sociology
JOHN MCLEVEY, ALLYSON STOKES, AND AMELIA HOWARD
5. Reading Bourdieu in South Africa: Order Meets Disorder
KARL VON HOLDT
6. Bourdieu in the Post-Communist World
LILIANA POP
PART II TAKING BOURDIEU GLOBAL
7. Field Theory from a Transnational Perspective
GISÈLE SAPIRO
8. Transnational Social Fields
NIILO KAUPPI
9. Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations
ANTONIN COHEN
PART III DISCIPLINES AND SUBFIELDS
10. The Scientific Method and the Social Hierarchy of Objects
PIERRE BOURDIEU
11. Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Education: Institutional Form and Social Inequality
ELLIOT B. WEININGER AND ANNETTE LAREAU
12. Bourdieu and Organizations: Hidden Traces, Macro Influence, and Micro Potential
TIM HALLETT AND MATTHEW GOUGHERTY
13. Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion: Recent Developments, Directions, and Departures
TERRY REY
14. The Transdisciplinary Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the Study of the Academic Field and Intellectuals
CHRISTOPHE CHARLE
PART IV BOURDIEU’S CONCEPTS EMBEDDED
15. Bourdieu’s Capital(s): Sociologizing an Economic Concept
ERIK NEVEU
16. The Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu
MICHAEL BURAWOY
17. Bourdieu and Schutz: Bringing Together Two Sons of Husserl
WILL ATKINSON
18. Pierre Bourdieu and the Unthought Colonial State
FRANCK POUPEAU
19. Bourdieu’s Unlikely Contribution to the Human Sciences
JOHN LEVI MARTIN
20. Bourdieu and the Sociology of Intellectual Life
THOMAS MEDVETZ
PART V BOURDIEU’S CONCEPTS AS GENERATIVE AND OPEN-ENDED
21. Is a Bourdieusian Ethnography Possible?
JEFFREY J. SALLAZ
22. Bourdieu and Geometric Data Analysis
FRÉDÉRIC LEBARON AND BRIGITTE LE ROUX
23. Correspondence Analysis and Bourdieu’s Approach to Statistics: Using Correspondence Analysis within Field Theory
JULIEN DUVAL
24. A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus
LOÏC WACQUANT
25. Habitus and Beyond: Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant Looking at the Seams
CLAUDIO E. BENZECRY
26. Bourdieu and the Body
CATHERINE CONNELL AND ASHLEY MEARS
27. Tensions, Actors, and Inventions: Bourdieu’s Sociology of the State as an Unfinished but Promising Research Program
JENS ARNHOLTZ
28. Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology
G
EORGE
STEINMETZ
29. The Relevance of Bourdieu’s Concepts for Studying the Intersections of Poverty, Race, and Culture
KERRY WOODWARD
30. Four Transversal Principles for Putting Bourdieu to Work
LOÏC WACQUANT
Index
LIST OF FIGURES
2.1 Number of translated titles by Bourdieu per language, 1958–2008
2.2 Translations of Bourdieu’s books (and collections) in four central languages, 2008–2015 (September)
2.3 The leading countries in Bourdieu’s reception through book translations, 1958–2008
2.4 Number of articles on Bourdieu by continent, 1979–2013
2.5 Distribution of articles indexed in Scopus on Bourdieu, by countries (world map)
2.6 Use of the concepts of field, habitus, capital, and practices in the world
4.1 Citations of Bourdieu in articles by Canadian sociologists
4.2 Multiple correspondence analysis of how Canadian sociologists have engaged with Bourdieu
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Jens Arnholtz, University of Copenhagen
Will Atkinson, University of Bristol
Claudio E. Benzecry, Northwestern University
Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley
Christophe Charle, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris 1, CNRS, ENS)
Antonin Cohen, University of Paris, Nanterre
Catherine Connell, Boston University
Julien Duval, European L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Andrea Gallelli, University of Bologna
Matthew Gougherty, Eastern Oregon University
Barbara Grüning, University of Bologna
Tim Hallett, Indiana University
Johs Hjellbrekke, University of Bergen
Karl von Holdt, University of the Witwatersrand
Amelia Howard, University of Waterloo
Niilo Kauppi, University of Jyväskylä
Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania
Brigitte Le Roux, Paris Descartes University
Frédéric Lebaron, University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
John Levi Martin, University of Chicago
John McLevey, University of Waterloo
Ashley Mears, Boston University
Thomas Medvetz, University of California, San Diego
Erik Neveu, Sciences Po-Rennes
Liliana Pop, Director, Liliana Pop Consulting Ltd.
Franck Poupeau, Centre Nationnal de la Recherche Scientifique
Annick Prieur, Aalborg Universitet
Terry Rey, Temple University
Jeffrey J. Sallaz, University of Arizona
Marco Santoro, University of Bologna
Gisèle Sapiro, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales George Steinmetz, University of Michigan
Allyson Stokes, University of Waterloo
Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley and Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Paris
Elliot B. Weininger, State University of New York at Brockport
Kerry Woodward, California State University–Long Beach
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Pierre Bourdieu, A Twentieth-Century Life
THOMAS MEDVETZ AND JEFFREY J. SALLAZ
IN this Oxford Handbook we consider the writings and influence of the great social scientist Pierre Bourdieu, who was born in 1930 and passed away in 2002. The catalogue of Bourdieu’s key concepts and major works is well known and has been widely discussed (see, for instance, Wacquant 2004). Some have argued that many of Bourdieu’s ideas were embedded in debates and theoretical traditions stretching back centuries; others contend that they represent novel, even revolutionary, contributions that have spawned entirely new research programs. We endorse both of these perspectives, and many chapters in this Handbook extend these themes.
We would like to begin, however, by following a line of biographical interpretation articulated by the historian Jonathan Sperber (2014) in his recent biography of Karl Marx. Sperber’s argument is that we can best understand the writings and influence of the great critical theorist Marx by situating him in the context of what was a quintessentially “nineteenthcentury life.” We in turn commence with a few notes considering how Bourdieu himself, as a person and a scholar, embodied a very twentiethcentury life.
To begin, there is the story of Bourdieu’s trajectory through social space. Bourdieu grew up in a remote region of southern France. He was the grandson of peasants, and his father became a postman around the time of Pierre’s birth. A gifted and hard-working student, Pierre Bourdieu left his home region to attend the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the traditional breeding
ground of major French intellectuals, from Durkheim to Sartre to Foucault. From the latter he would graduate with a degree in philosophy, then the most prestigious of disciplines in France. Many commentators have described this trajectory as an unexpected and even miraculous one, given what we assume about the rigidity of class boundaries and the limits of intergenerational mobility in modern societies. Bourdieu himself, in his attempt at a sociological analysis of his own conditions of production, described upwardly mobile students such as himself as “oblats miraculés,” or dedicated servants of the academic cult, who achieve a miraculous trajectory but nonetheless feel like outsiders to the consecrated educational elite. While not denying that Bourdieu’s trajectory was unusual, the fact that he himself coined a term to describe it suggests that it was not entirely idiosyncratic. In his work The State Nobility, Bourdieu (1998 [1989]) argued that the twentieth century witnessed a transformation from a “direct mode” of reproduction to a “school-mediated” one. The former allowed the powerful (the landed elite, long known in France as the Second Estate, along with the emergent bourgeoisie) to transfer their wealth and privileges across generations via direct inheritance. The latter requires the offspring of wealthy families to first convert their material capital into cultural capital, whose display is then rewarded by success in the system of elite schools. While the informal varieties of cultural capital that the children of the upper class acquire at home early in life (such as a particular accent or knowledge of the arts) serve them well in the school system, true hard work is required of these inheritors, and many in fact fail to reconvert their family’s cultural capital into material capital (via prestigious degrees leading to top jobs in the state or private sector). A figure like Bourdieu, in this framework, is not a miracle, but rather the outcome of an inherent “contradiction of the scholastic mode of reproduction” (Bourdieu 1998: 287). This modern scholastic mode of reproduction entails sacrificing some members of the dominant class who fail to inherit their inheritance, but also permits some precocious and ambitious members of subordinate classes into the upper echelons of the social structure individuals such as the “scholarship boy” Bourdieu.
Weininger and Lareau, in Chapter 11 of this volume, flesh out Bourdieu’s argument about this emergent school-mediated mode of reproduction. They argue that its “underlying cause is undoubtedly the need to come to grips with the massive expansion of tertiary education in France [and indeed, worldwide] during the [mid-twentieth century], and the consequent dramatic
increase in the representation of working-class students in colleges and universities” (Weininger and Lareau, this volume). As with Marx’s famous argument about contradictions within the capitalist mode of production, Bourdieu’s work illuminates contradictions within the school-mediated mode of reproduction. The twentieth-century mass expansion of tertiary education produced just such a contradiction, and hence the very possibility for the emergence of a social scientist like Bourdieu.
Following Bourdieu’s graduation from the École Normale Supérieure, he taught for a year at a lycée in Moulins, a small town in provincial France, before being conscripted into the French army in 1955 and deployed to Algeria. Here Bourdieu found himself in the midst of another twentiethcentury global development rebellions by the colonized people of the Western empires against their colonizers. France, like other European powers, had over the past four centuries established colonial holdings around the world. These included territories in the Americas (present-day Haiti, Grenada, Martinique, and parts of Mexico and Brazil), Asia (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), and Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Mali, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Gambia).
Bourdieu would stay in Algeria as a teacher and researcher until 1960, midway through the ultimately successful Algerian war for independence that took place from 1954 to 1962. Algeria was among the last of France’s major foreign colonial holdings, and France’s attempt to suppress the revolutionary movement there was especially violent and oppressive. During his time in Algeria, Bourdieu conducted extensive fieldwork among the Berber-speaking Kabyle, introduced to them by his student and field collaborator Adbelmalek Sayad. Upon returning to France, his writings on the effects of colonialism upon the Kabyle were widely read and discussed.
Several contributors to this Handbook argue that Bourdieu’s experiences in Algeria were foundational to his overall theoretical project for his theory of history, of power, and of symbolic violence. None is as provocative as Franck Poupeau in Chapter 18, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Unthought Colonial State,” which argues that Bourdieu’s eventual elaboration of a comprehensive theory of the state derived indelibly from his early and firsthand witnessing of the French state’s futile attempt to maintain colonial rule in Algeria.
A defining feature of Bourdieu’s trajectory after his return to France was a commitment to empirical research, in opposition to the philosophical
tradition in which he had been trained. In this regard, he was a key protagonist in a larger struggle of the twentieth century to establish and legitimize the social sciences and sociology in particular as a valid domain of scientific knowledge (Abbott 2010). In France in particular, because of philosophy’s long history as the “queen of disciplines” (Bourdieu 2007: 5), sociology remained a suspect field. Dating back to Durkheim’s attempt to establish sociology as an independent discipline through efforts such as the founding of the journal L’Année Sociologique in 1898, the idea that society needs a special discipline to study itself has been constantly advanced, contested, and defended.
Bourdieu described this struggle in the paper “Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967). The task of proving sociology’s status as a scientific field was a difficult one in France, as it was in the United States and elsewhere worldwide (Burawoy 2008; Ross 1992). In this regard, Bourdieu’s unrelenting work to re-establish the existence of “social facts” was a remarkable achievement of the late twentieth century.
Two specific achievements in his life stand out as moments in the legitimation of twentieth-century sociology as a whole. In 1975, he established Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, a journal notable not only for its scientific rigor but also for its formal and stylistic experimentalism. Alongside research articles of the standard academic variety, Actes routinely published (and continues to publish) raw field notes, short reviews and essays, interview excerpts, photographic spreads, and other nontraditional pieces aimed at pushing the limits of academic discourse. By opening the research and writing processes to sustained scrutiny, the journal’s formal innovations put into action its founder’s commitment to methodological reflexivity (for more on Actes, see Wacquant 1999).
Then, in 1979, Bourdieu published La Distinction (published in English as Distinction in 1984), a work that would become known jokingly as Bourdieu’s “suicide.” This was because the structure of its argument was homologous to that of Durkheim’s seminal study of suicide, which showed that even the most personal of all acts that of taking one’s own life was not immune to sociological analysis. Durkheim instead argued that suicides are both patterned and correlated with various indicators of social isolation and rapid social change. He thus established that sociology could delineate and study a new range of phenomena known as social facts, which were to be
granted a sui generis stature vis-à-vis any individual case.
In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu would make a parallel argument regarding similarly personal and private decisions. He argued that many of the seemingly personal choices of everyday life what to wear, to eat, to display on one’s walls, or to make of the latest blockbuster movie could be explained through reference to the overall class structure (in particular, the overall volume of one’s capital and the relative composition of cultural and economic capital). If sociology could explain why you like red wine rather than scotch, or Michael Bay’s Transformers over David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, then it was saying something profound about the world more generally.
Toward the end of his life, Bourdieu was drawn out of the French academic field and into a more global political battle. This was the distinctly late-twentieth-century countermovement against neoliberalism that unfolded during the 1980s and 1990s (Bourdieu 2003). In the United States and United Kingdom, political leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher spearheaded an attack on public assistance for the poor and all those who were not explicitly contributing to the market. For Bourdieu, who had spent decades researching and writing about long-standing inequalities in French society, this stimulated a new genre of writing and led him to create a new publishing house, Raisons d’agir Editions.
The writings from this phase of his career Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (1999) and its sequel, Firing Back (2003), are perfect examples were less academic, more polemical, and more pointed than the works that preceded them. Here Bourdieu moved beyond the cold valueneutrality of the Weberian tradition by staking out a series of fundamental principles that should ground sociology as a vocation (see, in particular, his 2000 statement, “For a Scholarship with Commitment”). As he experienced the world shifting around him, he decided that he could not be neutral on a moving train. He joined in a movement of prominent late-twentieth-century scholars among them Jurgen Habermas, Mahmood Mamdani, Dorothy Smith, Noam Chomsky, and Ulrich Bech to defend the idea, rapidly receding, that states have an obligation to protect their citizens from the market, including from the indignities of commodifying oneself.
Bourdieu’s life, we have argued, can be read as a twentieth-century one. Our purpose in this Handbook is to reflect on his legacy from the perspective of the early twenty-first. To this end, we have brought together multiple
essays from contributors who have spent a good deal of time thinking about, working with, and carrying on the Bourdieuian tradition. We have organized these contributions into five parts: regional patterns of appropriation, attempts to use his work to capture emergent global-level phenomena, how Bourdieu has been used in various discipline and subfields, the embeddedness of his concepts, and their generativity for building research programs.
PART I: REGIONAL PATTERNS OF APPROPRIATION
We begin this volume with a series of chapters that point to some general patterns in the way Bourdieu’s ideas have circulated to, and developed within, new regional settings and disciplinary frameworks. Broadly speaking, the process tends to be driven not by abstract intellectual affinities, but by the concrete efforts of scholars to address problems and questions current in their research environments. The search for useful analytic tools, in other words, underpins Bourdieu’s appropriation in new settings. It follows that selective and purposeful readings of Bourdieu tend to predominate over wholesale appropriations of his ideas.
In Chapter 2, “Bourdieu’s International Circulation: An Exercise in Intellectual Mapping,” Marco Santoro, Andrea Gallelli, and Barbara Grüning paint a broad portrait of how Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus developed in each of the world’s regions, and how this development tended to reflect the initial circumstances of his arrival. In the United States, for instance, where many scholars first encountered Bourdieu through the myriad references to Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) that pervaded the education debates of the 1980s, the French sociologist came to be known as a “reproduction theorist,” even if this label would have been nonsensical to those familiar with his earlier writings on Algeria, which thematized rupture and transformation. Several of the other chapters in this volume also offer a sense of how scholars in other settings arrived at their own pictures of Bourdieu. They show that the effort to bring Bourdieu to specific new regions of the world has yielded valuable tests of his theory.
As Johs Hjellbrekke and Annick Prieur show in Chapter 3, “On the Reception of Bourdieu’s Sociology in the World’s Most Equal Societies,” Bourdieu’s work found “several distinct lines of reception” in the
Scandinavian countries starting in the 1970s. But the encounter also posed certain challenges to Bourdieu’s theory. With their strong traditions of equal opportunity to higher education, the Scandinavian countries seemed to refute any idea that schools function principally as tools of stratification. Furthermore, because the opposition between economic and cultural capital was not as stark in Scandinavia as in much of the West, the region resisted the conventional structuralist mapping associated with his approach. “The question of whether cultural capital exists, and, if yes, what it looks like, have guided much of the Bourdieu-inspired research in Scandinavia,” Hjellbrekke and Prieur report. And yet, the authors argue, Scandinavian scholars have found considerable utility in the notion of social space, which, against “onedimensional hierarchies” of traditional class analysis, offers a useful tool for capturing the distinctiveness of the Scandinavian class structure.
In Chapter 4, “Bourdieu’s Uneven Influence on Anglophone Canadian Sociology,” John McLevey, Allyson Stokes, and Amelia Howard show that the reception of Bourdieu’s work followed a parallel pattern in the Great White North. There Bourdieu’s ideas were filtered first through the lens of political economy, then cultural sociology. The intra-disciplinary split created a tale of “two Bourdieus”: among political economists, he became known as a neo-Marxist, whereas in cultural sociology a subfield preoccupied with the relationship between consumption and inequality he became known specifically as the theorist of cultural capital.
Whereas Hjellbrekke and Prieur, and McLevey, Stokes, and Howard consider how Bourdieu’s ideas have been transplanted to some of the world’s most equal societies, Karl von Holdt in Chapter 5 takes up the challenge of “Reading Bourdieu in South Africa,” one of the world’s most unequal societies. If one common criticism of Bourdieu is that he is a theorist of how structures of power and domination reproduce themselves, then South Africa constitutes a key test for his theory. Here is a country that, after centuries of minority (white) rule, underwent a successful (and for the most part peaceful) transfer of power in the mid-1990s. But despite the formal institution of democracy in the country, inequality, violence, and crime remain extremely high. Von Holdt advances the provocative thesis that it is precisely because Bourdieu articulated a sophisticated theory of how power perpetuates itself that we can develop his ideas to produce theoretical tools for understanding resistance to power even violent, physical power. To quote von Holdt: “Bourdieu’s focus on the mechanisms of order and the concepts he finds it
necessary to elaborate in order to explore this—field, habitus, classification, symbolic power and symbolic violence may point us toward exactly the sites that must be examined if we are to think about the limits of order. Symbolic violence may help us to think about physical violence; habitus may help us to think about resistance.” In particular, von Holdt describes in rich detail the symbolic transgressions and covert mobilizations of workers and students against the apartheid regime, and suggests that they represented “a new habitus . . . composed of dispositions to resistance, bravery and defiance.” Von Holdt’s chapter, we think, represents a model for using Bourdieu to study particular sorts of non-Western societies.
So, too, does Liliana Pop’s Chapter 6, “Bourdieu in the Post-Communist World,” which surveys the varied literature that draws on Bourdieu to make sense of the dramatic transformations following the collapse of Soviet rule. While “the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was initially interpreted through Cold War lenses, as a victory for liberalism,” subsequent market and political dislocations have necessitated a more nuanced view. It is in this context, Pop argues, that “Bourdieu’s concepts have proved deeply generative” and are suited to capturing the “complex interplay between continuity and change, agency and structure, symbolic and material power” that marks the post-communist experience. Furthermore, in its concern with the forces and directions of systemic change, Bourdieu’s work “might even foreshadow ways of responding to coming challenges to the social sciences, as we confront the consequences of a new industrial revolution and planetary climate threats.”
As these chapters suggest, the most fruitful engagements with Bourdieu have generally been those that treat his concepts as flexible heuristic tools rather than rigid operational devices. By the same token, narrow interpretations of Bourdieu have often led to misreadings and reductive uses of his work. As McLevey, Stokes, and Howard show in Chapter 4, the concept of cultural capital was initially understood in Canadian scholarship in narrow (or as Bourdieu might put it, substantialist) terms, as referring specifically to the objects of cultural consumption and accumulation rather than the manner thereof, or, better still, the cultural competence being demonstrated through the choice of such objects. Put differently, Canadian scholars tended to equate cultural capital with the appreciation of specifically highbrow goods, notwithstanding Bourdieu’s own wish to abolish the notion that highbrow taste occupies a realm separate from vulgar or lowbrow
judgment. In its “fundamental state,” Bourdieu (1984: 243–245) insisted, cultural capital consists of “dispositions of the mind and body” capable of signaling cultural competence, not a fixed category of goods. This misreading led to a somewhat confused debate in Canada in which scholars tried to position themselves “against” Bourdieu by showing that the relevant mode of symbolic distinction namely, cultural “omnivorousness” (Peterson and Kern 1996) was different from the sort of cultural competence Bourdieu found in France.
At the frontier of research carried out in Bourdieu’s wake is the growing effort to use the French sociologist’s ideas to illuminate emergent phenomena at the global level. Three chapters in this volume take up this task by tracing the growing use made by scholars, in separate arenas, of the concept of transnational fields. As Gisèle Sapiro observes in Chapter 7, “Field Theory from a Transnational Perspective,” Bourdieu himself generally used the field concept in specifically national contexts, by referring, for example, to the French literary field, the American field of higher education, and so forth. This tendency sometimes led to charges of “methodological nationalism.” And yet, Sapiro points out, “nowhere in his work does Pierre Bourdieu say that fields are necessarily limited to the perimeters of the nation-state.” Focusing on the literary field, she argues that strategies of transnationalization have become increasingly pivotal to the dynamics of literary production in the twenty-first century. In a similar vein, Niilo Kauppi in Chapter 8, “Transnational Social Fields,” considers transnationalization in the realm of formal politics through a case study of the European Parliament. Kauppi’s aim is to “develop a political sociology approach to the study of the evolving relationship between the redistribution of resources and the structuration of social spaces beyond the nation-state.” Key to understanding emergent transnational fields, he argues, is the idea of a “state nobility,” or a bureaucratic elite whose members are trained at top institutions and, despite differences in their political views, share a common habitus. The fields they build may be “less structured than fields at national . . . levels. But they are not necessarily weak fields.” Finally, Antonin Cohen’s Chapter 9, “Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations,” considers Bourdieu’s influence on a discipline to which the French sociologist paid little regard in his lifetime. As Cohen shows, international relations scholars have employed the notion of transnational fields as an alternative to concepts like epistemic community and advocacy network often to favorable effect, albeit “sometimes at the
risk of inconsistency with the theory of Pierre Bourdieu.”
Bourdieu was highly critical of traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, which he believed served professional rather than intellectual ends. Consequently, his work often defies easy classification. Several of the contributors to this volume look at how Bourdieu’s work has diffused to, and made an impact on, specific disciplines and subfields. Weininger and Lareau discuss the legacy of Bourdieu’s work for the study of education and inequality in Chapter 11. Early studies such as The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture (published in 1964 with Jean-Claude Passeron) and Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (published in 1970, also with Passeron) argued that schools function as machines for reproducing inequality, by valuing the cultural capital upper-class students inherit from their families. Weininger and Lareau describe the impact of these studies on the sociology of education in the United States, but they also put the argument in the context of the French education system of the 1960s. “The phenomenon of ‘democratizing’ access to higher education understood as a central element of societal ‘rationalization’ is centrally implicated in [Bourdieu and Passeron’s] problematization of the traditionalistic, heavily ritualized ‘misunderstanding’ which binds teachers and students.” Weininger and Lareau then describe how Bourdieu’s understanding of the relationship between education and inequality evolved. In his later work, he conceptualized this relationship quite differently. “Bourdieu’s view of the relation between education and mobility during this [latter] period crystallizes into a view considerably more complex than the one apparent in his early work.” Specifically, he describes a school-mediated mode of reproduction, which entails permitting some degree of class mobility in return for greater legitimacy of the system as a whole. Certainly, Weininger and Lareau imply, this evolution of Bourdieu’s thinking lays to rest the notion that his theory of education was one of direct and seamless reproduction.
Tim Hallett and Matthew Gougherty take up a similar task in Chapter 12, “Bourdieu and Organizations: Hidden Traces, Macro Influence, and Micro Potential.” Many scholars have noted that organizations entities like firms, schools, churches, social movements, and trade unions were rarely treated as independent units of analysis in Bourdieu’s sociological studies. As Hallet and Gougherty summarize the paradox, “Although Bourdieu was a premier scholar of social organization, formal organizations were rarely the primary
focus of his sociology.” It did not help that Bourdieu did not engage with the field of organizational studies as it developed in Europe through the work of thinkers such as Michel Crozier or Erhard Friedberrg, or with organizational theorists in the United States such as James Thompson or Rosabeth Kanter. Part of the issue had to do with how organizational studies in France was harnessed to public administration, a field that Bourdieu was deeply critical of. But there was also an ontological issue: it is not readily apparent where organizations fit within the famous triumvirate of habitus, capital, and field. In his work on the academic system, for instance, Bourdieu referred to schools as classification machines functioning to transform informal cultural capital (such as a classed accent) into formal cultural capital (grades and degrees). In works such as The State Nobility, he would treat specific organizations such as government ministries as member elements of the larger field of the state. And in his work on the economy, he would argue that firms themselves can be conceptualized as fields. Hallet and Gougherty offer a novel and important argument as to how Bourdieu’s work has been and is being used in organizational theory. They argue that this is taking place at both the macro and micro ends of the organizational studies world, and furthermore that the work of Erving Goffman offers a means to facilitate this diffusion: “we bridge the ideas of Goffman and Bourdieu in order to strengthen research on the microfoundations of institutions while recognizing the dynamic nature of organizational life.”
Another substantive domain into which Bourdieu’s theory has diffused is the study of religion. This diffusion is recounted by Terry Rey in Chapter 13, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion: Recent Developments, Directions, and Departures.” Rey argues that scholars of religion were slow to take seriously Bourdieu’s contributions (even though religion was a central theme in Bourdieu’s own work, so much so that his essay on the “Structure and Genesis of the Religious Field” is the theoretical template for his other field analyses). Like Durkheim, Bourdieu recognized the existence of religion as a “social fact,” an aspect of humanity that we externalize and use so as to provide us with a mission in life and an existential comfort. Such an argument did not sit well with many traditional religious scholars. As Rey writes, however, “the number of incisive commentaries, germane translations, and illuminating Bourdieu-oriented anthropological, historical, sociological, and theological studies of religion has grown considerably in recent years.” Rey expertly catalogues which of Bourdieu’s concepts have been
appropriated by scholars of the religious world. For instance, many scholars now argue that “one’s religious habitus is one’s habitus as manifest, perceptive, and operative in the religious field.” Rey here acknowledges Bourdieu’s debt to Weber’s idea of Heilsguten, or “goods of spiritual salvation,” that function as capital within the religious field and are associated with different players in the field (such as priests, prophets, and sorcerers). Finally, Rey provides extensive summaries of the key monographs that have come out in recent years using Bourdieu to analyze various religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He ultimately concludes that “there is a notable enthusiasm among scholars of religion that is by now quite international, aided in part by significant translations of relevant texts.”
In a similar vein, Christophe Charle a historian who worked with Bourdieu for more than 30 years considers how Bourdieu has revitalized the study of intellectuals in Chapter 14, “The Transdisciplinary Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the Study of the Academic Field and Intellectuals.” Noting Bourdieu’s adamant “refusal of official barriers between disciplines,” Charle shows how the French sociologist drew variously on history, philosophy, sociology, literature, and art history in carving out a novel perspective on the subject one capable of avoiding the traps to which earlier approaches fall prey. Charle identifies the three most vital precepts or “methodological rules” guiding Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectuals: the use of a historical method; the insistence on cross-national, particularly intraEuropean, comparisons; and the emphasis on demonstrating an “organic link between the study of the intellectual field and the study of the field of power.” As Charle shows, understanding the world of academics and intellectuals was a central task in Bourdieu’s sociology, and a prerequisite for the sort of “scholarship with commitment” that he considered the scholar’s vocational calling.
THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF BOURDIEU’S CONCEPTS
One theme that emerges clearly from the chapters in this volume is that Bourdieu’s concepts are highly distinctive. Not only what they refer to, but also the way these concepts function semantically, sets them apart from their counterparts in other theories. Two aspects of this distinctiveness deserve particular attention: namely, the embeddedness of Bourdieu’s concepts and
their generativity. First, Bourdieu’s concepts show an unusual concern with the task of embedding themselves in past theories so as to correct errors and false assumptions inherited from the past. Following Bachelard, he insists that sociology must begin by establishing an “epistemological break” from everyday folk knowledge and commonsense understandings. This precept echoes Durkheim’s classic dictate that the sociologist effect a break with “prenotions” before embarking on an investigation. But Bourdieu takes this point a step further by warning also against scholastic common sense, or unexamined orthodoxies built into scholarly doctrine and discourse. The latter, Bourdieu says, tend to foreclose rather than encourage truly scientific inquiry. Throughout his work, Bourdieu was also deeply concerned with combating the reifying effects of language. Like his kindred spirit Wittgenstein, he was keenly aware of the power of naming, and of the ability language has to give a natural or self-evident appearance to historically specific relationships. Racial classifications, for instance, confer the status of nature to a set of divisions rooted in mutable social relationships, just as ideological labels reify often tenuous alliances in the political field. Bourdieu’s concepts are thus geared to the difficult task of undoing language’s “freezing” effects.
The embedded quality of Bourdieu’s concepts becomes apparent in Erik Neveu’s Chapter 15, “Bourdieu’s Capital(s): Sociologizing an Economic Concept,” which gives extended consideration to the multivalent notion of capital. Bourdieu uses the term capital to refer broadly to any socially valued resource any “collection of goods and skills, of knowledge and acknowledgments” that one can “mobilize to develop influence, gain power, or bargain for other” resources. By rendering the concept in such breadth, Bourdieu means to critique the homogenizing tendency of economic thought. As Neveu puts it, “Economic capital is not something natural or selfevident,” since “its power depends on a complex network of institutions, regulations, and cognitive tools.” The term capital thus acquires meaning not only from its positive referentiality that is, in terms of what it refers to but also from its negation of economic reductionism. By positing a multiplicity of capitals, Bourdieu pluralizes both the aims of social action and the sources of social power, even as he pushes against homogeneous conceptions of human interest and rationality.
Several of the contributors to this volume examine the embeddedness of Bourdieu’s concepts by putting him into conversation with select theories or
